This is would usually be a hidden open thread, but I’m promoting it to front page to say a couple of things:
1. Future of Humanity Institute asks me to advertise their free pandemic modeling software for hospitals, policymakers, and anyone who just wants to play around with free pandemic modeling software.
2. People seem to be confused whether my face masks post last week was coming out against or in favor of face masks. Although it’s a complicated issue, I meant for it to conclude that (modulo the importance of reserving them for health care personnel), wearing face masks is probably helpful.
3. On Friday, I stated that people should stop smoking to reduce their risk of serious lung complications of coronavirus. Although that conclusion was supported by one Chinese study and by common sense, a few people have pointed out to me that more recent studies show the opposite. This study of Chinese patients finds that smoking and vaping are not dangerous in coronavirus and may have “a protective role”, possibly due to downregulation of ACE (but note that the lead author has a history of getting funding from e-cigarette companies). This study from China finds that although never-smokers have better survival rates than current-smokers, former-smokers do worse than either, which would argue against quitting right now. And this study confirms that quitting smoking can upregulate expression of coronavirus receptor genes (though it finds that smoking does as well).
I’m pretty suspicious of this research. It’s new, lots of it isn’t yet peer reviewed, and it contradicts itself in places. The former-smokers-do-worse effect is reminiscent of the teetotalers-do-worst effect in alcohol research, which is probably because very sick people get told to stop drinking, and so teetotalers are a disproportionately sickly population. Everything is working off a few heavily-biased mortality numbers in China. And also, even if quitting smoking increases your coronavirus mortality risk it will still be very good for you on net.
Still, the most recent research does apparently show that the advice I gave you yesterday was diametrically wrong and could kill you, so I figured I had better get that out there.
In celebration of being stuck inside as the world burns, I demand your opinions and spicy takes about one of humanity’s old friends: alcoholic beverages.
Fact: Whisk(e)y is the best one.
Scotch is overrated. Americans perfected whiskey (this is the only valid spelling) when we made it out of corn and rye.
Allow me to be confrontational: No. Bourbon can be great, but so much of it is just re-arrangements of the same basic flavor notes. There’s not enough variety. I drink plenty of it, since I’m in the US and its the cheapest way to get something high quality, but scotch has a lot more interesting tastes to explore.
I’ll withhold my opinion on rye, because I’m definitely biased against it. I think it tastes like dust.
Peat, heavy peat, and then smoky peat?
Now this is a vile hot take. Truly offensive.
>Peat, heavy peat, and then smoky peat?
There’s a controlled moorland burn in my mouth and everyone’s invited.
What rye whiskey is good?
Rye is the objectively best grain for bread and it makes good beer but i’ve never tried its whiskey. Not easy stuff to find in the UK but i’ve seen bulleit rye on shelves from time to time.
Bulleit is a quintessential rye. Good one to begin with.
Rye is spicier and drier than bourbon.
It’s a misconception that all scotch is smokey. Almost all scotch from the islay region is very smoked, but there are a handful of other regional styles, all of which are either not smoked at all, or only slightly sometimes. The problem is that the islay scotches are quite famous, so a lot of people get exposed to very intense and weird tasting scotch before they ought to. In contrast, a Glenfiddich, Glenlivet or Glenmorangie (yes, all “glen-“) would be sweet and smokeless and easy to drink for most anyone who doesn’t just have a hatred of strong liquor.
Peat, heavy peat, and then smoky peat?
Tsk, tsk, tsk! You’re forgetting the seaweed notes!
@Beans
I have had many scotches. The only unique flavor they have that bourbon and rye don’t is peat was my point.
This isn’t quite true, of course, and I do genuinely enjoy a smooth scotch.
My wife likes her scotch almost offensively smokey (Laphroaig), whereas my favorite scotch is Glenlivet.
Of course, we’re at the point where if you want a single-malt, Japan does it better than Scotland does anyway. It’s hard to find a scotch as good as Yamazaki at the same age.
Rye seems to be a hell of an acquired taste. I’m working through my first bottle of American Rye and the spice surprised me after the first Manhattan.
Definitely prefer my bourbons
Highland Scotches have a great maltiness that I really enjoy. In most cases I’ll take one of those over any other Scotch. Though, Scapa is a personal favorite and it isn’t a Highland.
I am not a big fan of Bulleit Rye. It’s fine and it is cheap, so if you don’t want to spend a ton to try rye it’s fine, but it is not very balanced, and it’s quite harsh. Michter’s Rye is usually my suggestion.
Japanese whiskey is by far the most overrated in my experience. Overhyped and overpriced for what it is. When I’ve had expensive, award winning Japan malts I haven’t thought much of them, about on the level of a standard Glenlivet 12 yo or Glenmorangie 10 yo. Far from unpleasant, but hardly the paradigm shift ‘better than Scotland’ it was billed as.
@Desrbwb
That’s interesting. I haven’t had the big ticket and award winning stuff, just basic Yamazaki 12 and Hakushu 12. It’s really solid compared to similarly mid-grade scotch.
I’m not a big spender that gets top ticket stuff from either country, but I see reviewers are on board with Japan, so I assume that the difference runs to the top.
Again, rye is my preferred whiskey and nobody makes rye like Americans, so I get to be patriotic and have the best drink anyway.
Allow me to be more confrontational : whatever flavor notes bourbon can’t give you, you don’t need them.
You don’t need your steak to taste like a pork chop. You don’t need your laptop to make julienne fries. You don’t need your bourbon to taste like anything but bourbon.
Or just light a Lucky Strike and stir your whiskey with it, I can’t help you.
My maiden post on SSC is on a topic where I have some professional expertise. How nice!
Putting aside aesthetic preference, I find scotch a more diverse beverage than bourbon. Primarily due to the variation in oak used and the amount of peatiness in the malt. Bourbon is dominated by Whiskey Lactone and Vanillin coming from the use on new white oak on one axis and and the amount of corn in the mash on the other, so it’s a 2 dimensional spirit. Scotch has the added dimension of the amount of peat (smokiness) used in kilning the malt. Some like Islay are very smokey but I find blended scotch to be more subtle and frankly mostly prefer it to single malts. Scotch is 3 dimensional in that you have the malt, the peatiness and the wood all in balance, plus you can use wood from different sources (e.g. sherry barrels) where bourbon is mandated to be aged new American white oak.
That’s true, and of course white oak is the superior wood in all cases 🙂
Seriously, that’s one advantage American ryes have over bourbons, which is their diverse casking.
I don’t think it really even makes sense to compare bourbon vs “scotch”. That would be like saying seafood has more variety than beef. Well, yeah, because you are comparing many different things to one thing. The better comparison would be to either compare Scotch whisky vs American whiskey, or something like Islay scotch vs Bourbon.
This is the best I’ve found so far.
Not only is the world not burning, I am sure that the air round here is fresher than ever, due to less driving around going on, and I imagine most of the non-human life is loving it. What is burning is only a temporary epiphenomenon which I am secretly enjoying seeing creaking, whether I owe it my existence or not.
Luckily, it was just a metaphor.
No it wasn’t, it was a metaphor and a synecdoche, and I took exception to the latter. Goodness me, being a nerd used to mean something.
Allow me to commit sudoku as penance.
Málà Jiǔ
Vodka infused with Sichuan peppercorns, taking on their particular combination of sour, spicy, and floral flavors – as well as the tingly mouth-numbing effect for which they are known. The name comes from Google Translate but I am the first person to use these terms together (thanks, Google!) and so I claim the name.
It’s actually really tasty. I make this every year and give it away for Christmas. It stays at peak flavor for at least a few months.
What can you do with it, you might ask?
– Sip it cold, straight out of the freezer
– Spike an American barleywine. This is genuinely delicious
– Get your wife to try it blind, you bastard
– Mix it. And when you are drinking something as weird as málà jiǔ, you aren’t going to drink much of it, so anything goes! The combination of málà jiǔ, pecan liqueur, and St. Germain is enticingly aggressive and arrestingly cromulent
– Fill a squirt gun so you can drive away raccoons from your garbage cans
– Bloody Mary’s or something? Ugh, whatever, that’s so not creative, you’re better than that. Mix it with raccoon liqueur and make your wife try it blind, straight out of the freezer.
You’ll be glad you did.
Recipe
1 : 1 :: cups of vodka : tbsp whole Sichuan peppercorns
or, 236 : 15 :: mL of vodka : mL whole Sichuan peppercorns
Add both ingredients to a glass container and stir to combine. Leave at room temperature for 24 hours, then remove and discard the peppercorns. Take that,
Saddamraccoons.—
Spicy take : the Imperial system is clearly superior to the metric system, because of the ease of making this absurd concoction
I actually made a homebrew wheat beer with Sichuan peppercorns. It works really well with the clean, hoppy, yeasty flavor of a good beer, especially paired with some spicy food.
The American system of units for fluid volume measure has the advantage of being mostly binary, once you’ve made the jump from teaspoons to tablespoons, until you get past gallons. If you used drams, it’s 4 to a tablespoon, though I’m not sure there’s any getting around 63 gallons to a hogshead.
And in US units (but not Imperial!), the gallon is a nice convenient 231 cubic inches.
Not sure how hot a take this is: you will almost always do much better buying liquor from one of the big guys than from “microdistillers”. Sometimes people assume the same dynamics are at work as in beer brewing, where generally you’re better off with the small guys, but it’s almost the complete opposite in liquor.
This applies in the US at least; I’m not as familiar with the ownership structures of e.g. Scotch distilleries.
Aging is part of it, so this may start to change as more microdistillers start to have been around for a long enough time. There’s also an experience thing, personal and organizational. Microbreweries often grow out of home brewing, while home distilling tends to be discouraged. The scale issue that waters down (metaphorically, though perhaps literally too) mass-market beers seems to be less of an issue in liquor, and the resulting economies of scale mean that even when a micro distillery product is good, there will be mass distilled products equally as good, for cheaper.
If this is true at all, it would be only for the very highest end pricey liquor (which I don’t buy, so advice in that range doesn’t matter to me). I can get Knob Creek/Makers Mark level whiskey from a distillery in my state for $10-$20 less.
Whoa, whoa, whoa there. Those are not the same level.
That was intentional, I was trying to indicate a range between the two, but maybe I didn’t do that very clearly. Was not trying to say they’re the same, but that I can find something in the range between one and the other cheaper from a local distillery.
Such a huge range though…like, I’d say that’s as big a range as is meaningful to most liquor drinkers.
I don’t consider the differences to be that large between Maker’s Mark and Knob Creek. Price wise they are only like $5-$10 difference, and quality wise I’ve always enjoyed both. I would think most bourbon drinkers would consider them somewhere between “interchangeable” or “Knob Creek is a slight upgrade”. Why do you think there is such a big difference? I would think the big jump most drinkers would notice is the difference between something like Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark.
Maybe I’m weird? If Black Velvet or Jim Beam are a 1 and, say, Gentleman Jack is a 10, I’d put Knob Creek at least at 7, maybe 8. Makers Mark would be a 2. Seagrams is a preferable 3 or 4.
I don’t think that is the general consensus, but I could be wrong. I don’t read whiskey reviews. I think you’re the first person I’ve ever seen rank Maker’s behind Seagrams.
For me the ratings would be something like
1-2: Old Grandad, Black Velvet, etc. I don’t drink these.
3-5: Jim Beam, Evan Williams, Jack Daniels*, Wild Turkey. I’ll drink it with soda if that’s all that’s available.
6-8: Maker’s Mark, Buillet, Buffalo Trace, Four Roses Single Batch. This is where the best values are. I have my preferences, but I wouldn’t turn any of these down.
9-10: Knob Creek, Michters, Basil Hayden. These are the ones I’ll reach for if I want to go up a notch.
For me, I don’t think Maker’s can be beat on value, at least where I live. I can get a bottle for $22, when something like Jim Beam or Jack are around $18. It’s a no-brainer for me. Bulliet is close in price, but I prefer Maker’s, so the extra dollar or two usually isn’t worth it, unless I’m just feeling like a change. Though, in that case I’ll usually grab a rye.
* I know Jack isn’t a Bourbon, but it basically fills the same place as a bourbon for most people.
Gentleman Jack is your 10? I think you just have a unique palate.
Knob (the regular kind) and Makers are both middle shelf bourbons. They do have different flavor profiles but are of similar “quality”.
JayT’s list is a decent ranking of perceived quality, although I’d say his list stops somewhere around 6 or 7… your 10s are William Larue Weller and Pappy 15, 7-9 are gonna be a personal preference ranking of all the great $50-100 bourbons out there. Personally I really like Booker’s, Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit, store picks of Four Roses Single Barrel.
Also, Wild Turkey 101 is an underrated value, regular Four Roses Single Barrel is the best bourbon readily available under $50, and Basil Hayden is watered down and bland (nice package though).
I don’t mean Gentleman Jack is the best possible whiskey, just that it’s the best whiskey I might plausibly buy for myself. That’s why I put it at 10.
Four Roses is my least favorite of the ones I mentioned in that range. I haven’t had Wild Turkey 101 since I was in college, so maybe it’s worth revisiting.
There are some very expensive whiskeys that are nice, but I’ve always felt there are some pretty quickly diminishing returns on expensive bourbon. I’ve tasted $10 bottles that I wouldn’t choose over Maker’s if both were offered to me for free. So that’s why my 9-10 ends at fairly cheap whiskeys. I just don’t buy bottles that cost more than $50 with any regularity.
Where do you live that your local distilleries are selling ~$10 bottles of whiskey?
> the ownership structures of e.g. Scotch distilleries.
Mostly Diageo. 🙁
Beer, obviously. It’s incredibly broad and no matter the season nor the occasion, there’s a beer that goes with it. They are also easy to drink, compared to the fiddling I tend to do with spirits.
Within that…stouts, porters, and trappist. In the summer, marzens and pilsners. Not really a fan of hop-forward American beers.
For spirits, bourbon is the fall-spring drink of choice, and rum for mojitos in the summer, with some gin martinis here or there.
Wine is only for table drinking, and vodka is for clubs and yuppie women.
I think liquor is easier but that’s because I only ever drink it straight — don’t even need to refrigerate it. Any smooth reposado tequila is my drink of choice.
I like beer though, and I agree with you about the hop-forward beers. I wish that fad would end.
Opinions: Positive, basically.
Hot take: Beer and wine snobs are equally annoying. Liquor snobs less so.
Spicy take: If wine is the blood of Christ what does that make grappa? I for one smell heresy.
I kinda like cognac. Last booze that’s left in the house is a bottle of homemade limonchello that I forgot about for a while.
Prohibition didn’t work for alcohol, but “no smoking” ad campaigns seem to have worked pretty well for smoking. (https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco-trends-brief/overall-tobacco-trends shows a drop from 42% smokers to 14% smokers, with young people down to 8.8%.)
Why haven’t we started a “no drinking” ad campaign for alcohol? It could save a lot of lives.
It also would make me personally happier. Many drunk people are loud and obnoxious and I don’t like being around them; if drunkenness decreased, then the number of social events I could attend would increase.
I would never attend social events without alcohol. I assume the large and immediately obvious benefits from alcohol(for some), make it harder to attack than smoking, which has more mild and slower burn medicinal effects, although I think smokeless tobacco alternatives are also helping, I used to vape as a sort of diet aid/anti anxiety treatment and it was very pleasant, I wish I could still do it where I live now.
I would mildly prefer social events without alcohol.
The problem with alcohol, from my standpoint, is that I get into a conversation with someone, am offering an argument or explaining something, he doesn’t seem to understand it, which is frustrating. After several rounds of this I eventually realize that he is part drunk — not drunk enough to be obvious but drunk enough so that he cannot follow what I am saying.
Liking alcohol, and preferring to socialize in places with a lot of noise, are features of many other people’s behavior that I find it hard to understand.
I think it depends a lot on the context of the social interaction and what you are trying to get out of it. For example when I am playing D&D I think being buzzed is better in every possible way, overly analytical siege mindset D&D planning is tedious i’ll gladly take a hammer to my higher brain functions if it prevents that kind of play, and being just a little too shy to do voices or RP all detract from the experience. I assume that most of the difference in people who do or don’t like alcohol though actually just comes from how they experience it. For me, alcohol is amazing, it instantly makes me feel relaxed and happy and outgoing, silencing all my little anxieties. This is not the universal reaction to being tipsy, my friend just gets mean, he also does not like drinking. I can’t imagine anyone who feels the way I feel after a couple shots thinking that alcohol makes anything worse, because it just makes everything so much better(I might be worse at arguing, if that is a core function of my social interactions, but i’ll still be having more fun doing it).
The big advantage alcohol has over smoking in terms of public perception is that with alcohol you might be killing yourself, but with smoking you’re killing yourself and everyone in the same room (or at least that’s the perception, I have no idea how much harm second hand smoke actual caused).
That said, I have seen the effects of prolonged alcohol abuse up close and it is not pretty, both for the in question and for their loved ones. So I might be biased here, but I wouldn’t mind alcohol going the same direction as smoking. Also:
Yeah, same here.
> Why haven’t we started a “no drinking” ad campaign for alcohol? It could save a lot of lives.
Not a given.
First off there are significant beneficial benefits from a very moderate level of consumption. This seems to hold true across beer, wine and liquor with the mechanism being as yet unclear.
Secondly there is a drive in some people to get Fucked Up. Many of those who drink to excess on a regular basis *might* switch to other things–we’re finding Marijuana isn’t as safe as some thought, Cocaine and Opioids are probably worse, and things like huffing are DECIDEDLY more problematic.
The campaign against smoking is working *mainly* by preventing new smokers from entering the system. This works because smoking smells bad if you’re not a smoker, and the first couple cigarettes *taste* bad, so there has to be some compelling reason to get over the hump. The effect you get from cigarettes isn’t as compelling to most people as the effect from alcohol, which doesn’t always have a hump to get over.
Alcohol is a social lubricant for a lot of people. A drink or three (depending on body mass) and they’re a little more outgoing, a little happier and etc.
So you’re just NOT going to get a lot of traction with that.
Latest large scale study, I think last year, finally put it to rest: alcohol is toxic regardless of quantity. Of course you get carbs from beer and, as my dad keeps telling everybody that drinks his, red wine is full of good stuff, but as far as strictly alcohol is concerned it seems the old myth of a drink a day is better than none doesn’t really hold up.
I still drink though – but it did affect my habits. For example I stopped trying to cultivate my taste in whiskey – I don’t enjoy it much now, and getting to that point would be a strict negative. Good wine is just tasty as fuck especially with the right food, and beer is chill and a social lubricant. So I’m generally more aware of tradeoffs.
Sorry for not looking up a source, it’s about time I get to work 😐
Because smoking is provably bad for you, and the fumes are bad for everyone around? The first is debatable with respect to alcohol, except in massive excess – and the second is definitely untrue.
I think the most likely thing is that in the past there were very few “social smokers”. Smoking was something that a huge number of people did all day, every day. Drinking on the other hand, has a dominant culture around it that you drink at parties, on weekends, or on special occasions.
If you’re going to drink, you’re probably going out to do just that, or you’re going to be doing it with food. If there were more people that started drinking Winner’s Cup vodka at 8:00 am, and continued throughout the day, then I think an anti-drinking campaign would work. As it is though, the vast majority of people that drink, don’t drink a particularly unhealthy amount.
Civilization was built on alcohol. The world would be worse without it.
Except that your animal friends run away from you if you drink and have sex with Shamhat.
But Enlightenment was build on coffee.
Hmm. Maybe we should all drink more Irish?
Just found some 2017 vintage Chateau de Lambert’s crappy dorm room cider in the back of a cupboard. Time has rounded the edges off nicely. Now it only tastes like rocket fuel.
Might have to stock up on dark rum, since it’s decent both for drinking and marinating/deglazing salmon.
And the local microbrewery remains open. And the farm shop next door that has damn near the only eggs or flour left in the country.
I’ve ceased drinking at home in support of my pregnant wife, but this thread, plus an afternoon of yard work, has got my mouth watering for a tall Miller Lite. I wonder if I could sneak out…
My new favorite drink, having discovered amaretto a week before shit hit the fan and immediately becoming obsessed:
1.5 oz Amaretto
1 oz Gin (I use bombay sapphire)
1 oz lemon juice
1/3 oz campari
1/3 oz grenadine (original recipe called for passionfruit syrup, which I still haven’t tried but I bet it’s good)
The Best Amaretto Sour in the World: https://www.jeffreymorgenthaler.com/i-make-the-best-amaretto-sour-in-the-world/
sweet, thanks!
That’s an interesting sounding mix. I’ve made brandy gumps (like a boozy cranberry pomegranate juice) and jasmines (like a dark, boozy grapefruit juice), but this is sort of a combo of them, slammed with a huge helping of amaretto. Most of this comment is simply to recommend the other two cocktails, and also to say that if you’re into amaretto, you can try one of the simplest drinks, that I find is also a very good digestif – the French connection. It’s like the brandy version of a rusty nail. Start with equal parts brandy/cognac and amaretto. Can adjust from there (usually to make it drier). Simple enough to order at a bar and not have it screwed up (if we ever get another chance to do this); tasty enough to come back to time and time again.
If you like bourbon barrel-aged beer, but don’t feel like going the standard “heavy stout aged in bourbon barrels with 15% alcohol content” route: https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/430/18698/.
I have a strong preference for tequila, specifically tequila shots. Part of it is probably just that I am Mexican and my family drinks it all the time, but with drinking I am not particularly impressed by the flavor of any hard liquor(except baijiu which is impressively horrible, far and away the worst liquor). Although I do enjoy drinking liquor, it is mostly about the aesthetic and wanting to be drunk/tipsy. Whisky neat is my go to ‘classy+manly’ drink, but if I want ‘manly’ by itself, then simple tequila shots (no salt and lime dressing) are my go to, and generally what I drink at bars between beers(this all might be heavily biased by the time I walked up to a bar ordered two tequila shots, downed them right there, and someone instantly started flirting with me).
As someone currently drinking a manhattan with Knob Creek bourbon, I strongly recommend…manhattans with Knob Creek bourbon.
Despite bad-mouthing bourbon up above, I’ll say that Knob Creek is very good for the price. Also since “knob” means “penis” in the UK it’s just a little better still.
Counterfact: Beer is an acquired taste. Neat vodka is an acquired taste. Sticky little drinks with names thought up by people with a poor sense of humour are an acquired taste.
Whisky is Stockholm Syndrome.
If it’s Stockholm Syndrome then it’s the Beauty and the Beast version. Put me in a yellow ball gown and let me waltz the night away with that hairy bastard.
Enough of it will do that to you. I’ve seen the bars on Fleet Week.
Like I said…
I think that all alcoholic drinks taste worse than any non alcoholic drink, and I can’t imagine touching the stuff unless you’re actively trying to get drunk. The only booze I’ve ever even considered drinking for taste rather than intoxication was a daiquiri I got in Cuba, and I can’t find anyone who makes them to that quality anywhere else.
It’s pretty hard to disentangle motivations, but “really craving a beer” is a very common feeling.
A light wheat beer is a carbonated but not sweat or overly flavorful drink that doesn’t taste like someone put rocks in my water, and cuts through grease, a cold modelo especial is the perfect pair to any greasy dish IMO.
Some wine is pretty good in a way that grape juice isn’t, but it’s possible I’ve just never tried artisan grape juice with a fancy meal.
Straight grape juice will always be too sweet… all that alcohol in wine used to be sugar.
My big motivation for alcoholic drinks is that they are not (by themselves) sweet. Almost all common, non-alcoholic, cold drinks are sweet, and I just am not a huge fan of sweet drinks. If there were no health concerns I would drink nothing but black coffee and bourbon 99% of the time. As it is, those are really the only flavored drinks I drink, I just force myself to also drink water, which I don’t enjoy. If I could replace it with coffee and bourbon with no downsides, I would in a heartbeat.
What I don’t get is people who do drink soda or fruit juice, but turn up their noses at sweet alcoholic drinks.
Whether or not it’s true is debatable, but the main reason I’ve always heard was that people thought sweet alcoholic drinks gave them a worse hangover.
Tea? You can drink only tea, coffee and bourbon and be fine.
I do drink tea fairly regularly in the afternoon, when I want less caffeine than coffee has. I like it, but it’s definitely inferior to my tastebuds than coffee.
As Nietsche said that time when a viral outbreak compelled him to move to a cabin in the forest with a few crates of beer: “When you gaze long into the stockpile, the stockpile will gaze back at you.”
We can all agree that vodka snobbery makes no damn sense, right?
Eastern Europe makes some very good vodka, much better than what I’ve tasted in the Occident. That said, in this case quality just kind of comes down to degrees of “tastes like nothing” so I don’t see the point of getting to worked up about it.
Higher quality vodka is just a question of how long did you distill this, right?
Also how good quality the leftover water is.
The tastiness and quality of the water they use apparently matters a lot for good vodka. The best vodkas are made with water from specific aquifers.
Right you can sneak flavoring in through the water. Vodka producers also use additives, usually sugars.
I don’t have a problem with flavored liquor—that’s every liquor—but vodka marketing likes to pretend it isn’t.
We know how to make the “perfect” vodka, it’s not even terribly difficult. It turns out that people don’t actually want that. Instead of yammering on about triple distillation producers should talk about their additives, like gin producers.
@brad
But vodka marketers have figured out that people want to be told that they have “perfect” vodka when they’re being served flavored liquor.
Which is why we get what we deserve.
I mostly just use Sobieski because the rye flavor is wonderful, but I don’t exactly have illusions about it.
I like Grey Goose because I think the bottles look pretty. But when I’m drinking vodka I’m drinking a dirty martini (Goose, shaken, extra dirt, hold the vermouth) so all that really matters is the brine.
I think the sane thing to do is to find a vodka whose glass bottle you like best, and if it’s expensive when it runs out refill it with whatever’s cheap and available.
The only reason to specify glass is pure classism – it looks better on a bar or frosted with ice from the freezer.
Best for sipping plain: scotch
Best in an old-fashioned: bourbon
Best for a Manhattan: rye
Best for not waking up with a headache: gin
+1 on the first 3
My opinion is that it’s very expensive to try to be interested in liquor! I like watching videos about whiskey, but can’t buy a wide variety of anything. Luckily, beer exists. I love every stout I’ve ever tried, and `Guinness is cheap and delicious. IPAs are incredibly overrated, especially microbrewery IPAs, which taste just as bad as mass-produced IPAs but at twice the price.
I kinda like rye and dislike bourbon; apparently it’s usually the other way around for non-experienced drinkers.
But my actual hot take is that the ideal drink is tea: being a tea snob is fun, social, delicious, and relatively doable on a student salary. Yunnan and Fujian discovered the epitome of the human drinking experience. We can be done coming up with drinks now.
Tea snobbery is cheap till you start looking at 10 year old 7542 and the like.
Good-quality coffee isn’t ruinously expensive, either.
These hobbies also combine well with liquour, so long as you don’t mind the caffiene once the sun’s over the yard-arm.
Rum with breakfast (Assam, low-altitude Ceylon etc.) tea, fairly light scotch with earl grey, something smoky with lapsang souchong or Russian caravan, peat with pu-errh, bourbon with rooibos. Not sure about green, white or afternoon (Darjeeling, Nilgiri etc.)
It ain’t cheap. But it’s a lot cheaper if you roast your own.
Gin is the most vile drink mankind has come up with. The quintessential gin cocktail was originally medicinal, and gin only comes out as the better half of it because the mixer has a literal flavor profile of “bitter”. Why anyone not warding off malaria would choose to drink this is beyond me.
The only good gin is a gin that’s been mixed (or “infused”) with so much else that you can’t taste the gin bit.
It depends on the gin! Granted, I’m a sucker for juniper so hit that heavily and I’m happy, but everyone and his dog is making gin nowadays so (over the last summer anyway) I was trying a few different ones.
One surprisingly nice one is the Beefeater Pink Gin which I expected to be sickly and awful because they use “natural strawberry flavouring” but no, it wasn’t (unlike a different distillery’s pink gin which was watery and flavourless). I never thought I’d be the gin-drinking auntie but heck, this is what middle age is for, I suppose 🙂
I also have a terrible partiality for sherry and port, and no sophisticated palate to go with it (sigh). I like rum too, generally rum and coke. The one thing I can’t understand is vodka – maybe I haven’t had a good one, or one sufficiently cold, but apart from its use as antifreeze in Russian winter conditions where it keeps people from dying of cold, why else drink the stuff?
Sour beer is the best kind of beer.
We’re having a polite discussion and you bring profanity into it. Rude.
Short story by D. Brin about #virus #altruism (and a tiny touch of Camus).
Software for Virtual Meetups
I’ve been thinking about how one could do something like a meetup, or an SF convention, or the Students for Liberty LiberCon, all of which are things that have been being cancelled, online. Some of those events include talks with an audience, which are easily enough replaced by a speaker in front of his computer speaking to an audience in front of theirs, ideally with the speaker able to see many members of the audience. But a large part of such an event, almost all of it in the case of the SSC meetups we host in the South Bay, is casual conversation, small groups of people talking with each other, with individuals free to wander around listening for interesting conversations to join. How do you replicate that?
You do it by having a virtual building, size depending on the number of participants — our first floor would do for up to forty, since it has in realspace. Each individual has a location in that building and is free to move around. A fancy version would look like WoW, perhaps with individual figures based on photographs of the actual person. A simpler version would be a top down map showing where everyone is, with everyone labeled by what he would put on his name tap — real name for most of us.
The software allows speech, as do various WoW addons. But instead of having a fixed group of people who can all hear each other equally well, how well you could hear someone would depend on how close to him you were. So you could have a cluster of people in one conversation, other people wandering around looking for conversations to join. A feature you don’t get in realspace that might be useful would be the option for a pair of people to link so that they could hear each other but not be heard by anyone else.
A higher tech version would permit VR headpieces. One couldn’t expect everyone to have them, but it should be possible to let those with the technology see an illusion of a realspace meetup while those without see the less immersive version on their screens.
One problem with doing it in immersive VR is that if you tried to walk very far you would bump into something. The solution would be to have a way of moving your position in the virtual world without moving your realspace location.
All of this pretty clearly could be done. Is there currently available software that could be configured to do it, at least in one of the simpler versions?
VRChat?
But I don’t think tracking physical space is either necessary or sufficient. Something like a Discord with many different chats might work better.
I wonder whether we, as a society should think more about the nature of derailed threads. On a forum with a big thread title specifying the topic, it’s frowned upon. But meatspace conversations are expected to wander.
Mozilla Hubs does basically what you are describing. You can use a computer or VR headset.
I’ve attended fandom online “conventions” that were just a series of IRC rooms for various topics. I could be in as many IRC rooms as I wanted at any time, so long as I had the monitor space. And you could start a PM with anyone at any time for a one-on-one conversation.
Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams allow you to make new groups of any size, and Discord allows access to multiple servers, but for any of these, you can only look at one “room” at a time.
Seconding VRChat. It’s full room-scale VR with spatial audio and lip sync, and you can move around with your controller if you’re playing in less than a warehouse-sized space. Also free and accommodates non-VR users. You can get 40+ people into an instance, though framerate starts to drop if people aren’t using aggressively optimized avatars.
I’ve spent most of my Saturday nights for the last two years in VRChat, and it definitely occupies the same headspace as a realspace meetup. One of my friends pointed out that her memories of events in VRChat are of being in a place with other people, as opposed to sitting at a screen playing a videogame. You just have to allow for the adjustment to ~90% of your attendees being anime girls.
I recently encountered a problem on which I would appreciate comments;
There is evidence that SARS-CoV-2 can spread via fomites (i.e., virus particles sitting on things) and some reasonable-seeming papers quantifying how long fomites last on various surfaces and circumstances *. On the face of it, this seems like immediately actionable data for the broad public, letting people know the basic outline of how they should be thinking about infection risk from doorknobs, takeout food, etc, but I haven’t seen any materials out there translating this research for a broad audience. It occurred to me that I (with the help of some artistic friends) could put together a nice infographic or similar to summarize those results in a form conducive to broad understanding and general social-media-sharing.
All well and good. But getting deeper into this, I’m getting hung up on some of the (for lack of a better word) ethical aspects of the project. For instance:
– Researchers seem pretty sure that fomite transmission is possible, but it’s not known if it’s important. Presenting data on fomites is liable to make a “possibly existant” problem seem more important, giving people something new to worry about and thereby making their lives worse (especially, e.g., people with OCD.)
– Additionally, aside from uncertainties about fomite transmission, there’s the quality of the particular research on coronavirus fomites. I, doing the research, see “a couple of pre-prints by unremarkable research institutions” and roughly understand how seriously I should take them. It’s not at all clear how (or whether) I could convey that level of confidence in broader-public-targetting media. Lack of this might be more misleading than useful (especially if the research happens to have been wrong somehow.)
– I don’t think recommendations on how/whether to disinfect takeout containers counts as “medical advice” enough to worry about lawsuits, but it’s close enough that I, a mere software engineer, might just be out of line by presuming to give it (especially in a “real”-looking form such as a well-produced infographic.)
Am I overthinking this? I mean, since the particular subject is producing a pretty graphic and putting it on Twitter, I’m very plausibly overthinking this particular case, but more in general- how much (and how in general) should we worry about adverse impacts of efforts to “communicate scientific opinion” about things like COVID19?
(* For the curious, the key papers are at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v2.full.pdf and https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2020/03/18/2020.03.15.20036673.full.pdf .)
I think John Schilling pointed out that estimated R0 and the observed spread of this disease don’t support the idea that the “possible” vectors of transmission are particularly virulent. The likely transmission route of direct contact with recently exhaled droplets is sufficient to explain the existing spread, so … that’s probably the vast bulk of the cases.
If someone coughing/breathing on a surface could easily infect those who contacted the surface later, we’d be looking at much faster spread. Nor would the kind of social distancing measures which are producing results be very effective.
Grain of salt, I’m not an epidemiologist nor is John, etc. Definitely engage in due diligence, wash your hands, etc.
“If someone coughing/breathing on a surface could easily infect those who contacted the surface later, we’d be looking at much faster spread. Nor would the kind of social distancing measures which are producing results be very effective.”
I thought that a decent amount of spread was from “superspreader” events. A famous superspreader event during the first SARS involved a doctor staying on the ninth floor of a hotel, where a dozen or more other guests contracted it, which suggests a mechanism like leaving virus particles on the surface of the 9 button in the elevator. If most people never leave any contagious particles on surfaces, and a few people occasionally do, wouldn’t we get patterns like what we see? And wouldn’t the measures currently being taken help check that, since people aren’t handling office and shop doors?
I think your first link was also printed as a letter in the NEJM–I’ve linked to it on the face mask thread. The second one was nice for telling us something about temperatures. I’m curious whether raising a surgical or N95 mask to 140 F/ 60 C for 30 minutes would do any damage to the mask. I assume not (while it would probably inactivate any virus on the mask), but it would be nice to find out.
If the main source of transmission is close contact (I find a sick person and give them a wet, sloppy kiss, or at least sit close to them during a conversation and get splattered with/inhale occasional droplets from their mouth into my lungs), then keeping a 2m distance from everyone and making people wear makeshift masks is probably enough to get R_0<1.
If the main source of transmission is surfaces (You cover a sneeze with your hands, open the door with the doorknob, and an hour later I use the same doorknob and then touch my eyes), then everyone using hand sanitizer all the time, not touching their faces, and having people spray disinfectants on high-touch surfaces a lot can reduce R_0. Add in getting people to wear masks so their sneezes don't go into their hands, or at least getting them to cough/sneeze into an elbow, and maybe we drop R_0 below 1.
If the main source is airborne (You cough in the middle of the grocery store, tiny droplets hang in the air for 20 minutes until I come along and inhale them), then we need N95/P100 masks, HEPA filters, or to do all our interaction in the outdoors with lots of sunlight. Measles apparently transmits this way, and it has some obscenely high R_0 and spreads *way* more quickly than SARS2. But I think it matters a lot how long infectious droplets hang around, and that can be different for different viruses–we might have airborne transmission but the virus in the droplets decays after a few minutes or something.
People need to wear masks!
I think you — and the blogosphere in general — should be signal-boosting “everybody wear masks all the time” a lot harder than you are right now.
Common sense suggests this is a really good idea. Coronavirus severity by country suggests this is a really good idea. Studies suggest this is at least a pretty good idea for individual healthy people, and a really good idea for sick people (who often think they’re healthy!). And it’s very easy for almost everybody to get into a makeshift mask.
This message needs to be amplified much, much more than it is right now. The upside seems enormous, and the purported downside seems tenuous or outright fictitious. (Why should we be worried about a run on surgical masks when it’s already impossible for regular people to buy surgical masks?)
And yet nobody seems willing to push this much at all.
>Why should we be worried about a run on surgical masks when it’s already impossible for regular people to buy surgical masks?
Doesn’t this argument also imply that there’s no use in convincing regular people to wear masks since they can’t buy them anyway?
They can wear makeshift or cloth masks.
In the short run, people need to make their own masks. In the medium run, if the government doesn’t try too hard to stop it, industry could make tons of masks that aren’t certified for health care use.
This. It’s not about making masks that can function as well as a properly worn N95 – just stuff to keep people from coughing and sneezing into the common air in groups, and to keep them from touching their faces before washing their hands (although if you touch the mask to remove it without washing your hands first, you’ve just undone all the protective value of it unless you can clean it).
I think Briefling and actinide have found the solution: homemade masks for everyone.
I think that the opposition to masks was 2-fold: individually, people thought it was unusual/foreign, and they resist doing it, just like the lockdowns. At the higher level, officials looked at supplies and realized if they told people to get masks, the hyper-efficient market would manage to create a critical shortage for health workers (just when they are most vulnerable with new cases arriving) before production could ramp up.
The first can be overcome if there is a bit of peer pressure and it’s seen as the right thing to do for America. The second is a continuing problem, but that can be overcome if the crafty people start sewing face masks for everyone. They are already making them for first-responders (firemen, police, etc.) who didn’t get them from their government employers, so they should just keep making them for everyone. It should be seen as patriotic and community-minded to wear a homemade mask whenever you’re outside the house.
Jeremy Howard wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post on this subject.
I believe that masks offer some value to the uninfected. I do not believe that this value is sufficient to justify a major and probably futile effort to try and convince the whole of western civilization (or whatever) to adopt a norm of absolute mask-wearing. I think you have latched on to a marginal good with fanatic intensity.
Differences in COVID spread within countries suggest that masks are a major, not minor, factor. And a priori, it is completely plausible to me that getting everybody into masks could reduce R0 by a factor of 3+.
What makes you think it’s a marginal good?
Czechia will be the best country to watch for clarity on this point.
I agree with wearing masks. But it could be (and I think so) that wearing masks is part of a cultural complex that on the whole helps fight the epidemic. Not merely conformism, as tend to see it in the west, but a mix of better adherence to one’s duty, being more considerate of others and at the same time much more social distance by default. I doubt you’ll see many people kissing on the cheek in Japan.
Perhaps the Czech Republic will provide a data point in this area. What happens if a Western country forces everyone to wear masks?
This is nonsense. Many measures were introduced in Czechia in addition to compulsory mask wearing, and they were introduced in an early stage of the outbreak. If Czech example will prove to be succesful you should NOT take from it that masks are some kind of a silver bullet.
Which measures?
@Evan Þ
Normal stuff like in many other countries. Only essential stores remain open, external borders closed for people but not for goods, closing of all restaurants and schools etc.
Of course mandatory wearing of masks is to a certain extent distinguishing factor, but on the other hand, whole package of those measures came into effect on 16 March (except actually mandatory mask-wearing outdoors; that came I think two days later, before that they were mandatory only in public transport), when there were 300 confirmed cases and zero deaths in the country; first death occured on 22 March. And some measures were adopted even earlier than that.
So if Czech approach will turn out to be sucessful compared to, like, Italy, it will not be clear whether it is because of mask wearing or because standard lockdown measures were introduced here (as you might guess from increased frequency of my comments, I am under lockdown in Prague) early in the outbreak. See also Saint Louis and Spanish flu.
Germany introduced the same measures, minus the masks, on the same day. Czechia seems to be doing better.
@Robin
That seems wrong, according to my sources. Wikipedia claims that German federal level lockdown started on 22 March. In Bavaria on 20 March. As I said, in Czechia what you might call full lockdown (although it is less severe than in Wuhan and probably than many other places like Italy in last few days), started on 16 March, and very significant measures like closing schools, borders, shopping centers and pubs started few days earlier.
Also, even if German lockdown would have started on 16 March, that would mean that it would be later in the progression of an outbreak than Czech lockdown, since according to worldometers, Germany had 13 dead by that date compared to zero in Czechia.
Also, it is not at all obvious to me that Czechia is currently doing better than Germany. By number of dead people compared to population, Czechia so far looks better (7 per million in Germany, 2 in Czechia), but given that there is significant number of critical cases in Czechia and fewer in Germany, that might quickly change; and by numbers of recovered compared to dead, Germany is doing way better.
I do not put much stock in comparing numbers of detected cases between countries, since those are mainly a function testing, and Germans are testing a lot, for a long time. Czechia ramped up testing in a last few days, but before that testing was grossly insufficient, so Czech cases are certainly way undercounted.
There are also factors outside of post-outbreak measures that matter. For example, it seems that The Netherlands had an undetected outbreak in Catholic territory shortly before Carnival, resulting in a major spread during that feast.
A different country that had taken the same measures after having the same apparent outbreak (with the true level of infection becoming clear with a delay) would have been much better off, if that outbreak had spread with a relatively low R affair aside from the measures.
Anyone else’s social fabric starting to fray at the edges?
The Nextdoor app is usually a good proxy for my suburban neighborhood. Mostly yard sales, restaurant recommendations, high-school kids looking for work. Now we have:
–Hysterical leftist ninnies posting stuff like “I saw three teenage girls walking down the sidewalk less than three feet from each other, someone should talk to them! Don’t they know this is serious?”
–Angry Trump supporters (a minority in this nabe) lashing out at people who “get all their news from CNN” and deliberately trolling otherwise helpful quarantine threads because they are bored
–Snotty gen-Z’ers taking advantage of the general breakdown of civilization to post “OK, Boomer” when someone asks them to, say, drive slowly in neighborhoods with kids
One guy (one of the red-state trolls mentioned above) started a thread warning that soon he expected people to start knocking on doors asking for money, the implication being that he had his gun loaded and ready and wouldn’t be afraid to use it. I can imagine an innocent neighbor kid asking for a couple of eggs and getting her head blown off.
We are not quite at Mad Max levels of civilizational disintegration, but the early returns are worrisome.
The most recent posts on my local Nextdoor are a neighbor complaining about dog poop, a neighbor complaining she can’t get groceries delivered until April 1st, and a neighbor offering Free Masks. Basically, the usual.
I will say re: congregating, we got a message from our mayor that was very clear that you should call 911 if you see more than a few people hanging out with each other, and also call 911 if you see anyone playing in the parks because all the parks are closed.
I find this astonishing, since the local governments keep sending me emails telling me *not* to call 911 to report suspected shelter in place violations. There’s a different number for that. It doesn’t make any sense to overload 911 for non-emergency situations.
Different communities have different policies and attitudes about 911.
In some places, you are encouraged to call 911 even for basic things, because they built a huge routing capacity into 911.
On further reflection, it may be that my neighborhood is pretty much normal, except for a couple of people who are deliberately trolling Nextdoor and raising everyone’s hackles. My wife wonders if they signed in from Russia.
So I just checked, and our neighborhood Nextdoor seems really reasonable. There are a couple of questions about the best ways to help small businesses, someone looking for cheap/free craft supplies for their kids, and someone else looking for a lost cat. (Update: they found it, Toby had accidentally gotten locked in a neighbor’s garage.) Also there are the usual buy/sell/trade posts, and people looking for a place to rent.
Not Mad Max-like at all, not even the first one when things were still relatively tame.
If you’re upset about people being close in public, just assume they live together, or are otherwise already sharing microbes.
This seems to be an American thing. As a Dutchman living in Norway I see a lot of videos of people applauding emergency services personnel, singing songs together and generally trying to make passing time in lockdown a little less dull. Here in the North of Europe we still get to go out for walks, and while there is some minor annoyance at people not keeping distance, overall the atmosphere is as amicable as ever.
Any other Europeans or Americans having similar observations?
I sometimes see couples or families out walking, but I haven’t seen any cases of groups of people who obviously don’t live together.
Last week, I saw people playing tennis at the nearby park, but the local government has since shut down all the tennis courts, (as well as playgrounds and public restrooms).
And the gun owner’s fantasy of getting to shoot people consequence free continues on to another crisis…
This sounds like approximately what Nextdoor has always been.
Anecdotally, Nextdoor in my town (Bryan/College Station, Texas) had a few days with some of the “Don’t Tread On Me” types accusing the governor and mayor of being commies for issuing orders closing down bars and restaurants, but now it’s mostly concerned PTA moms either offering to sew masks for hospitals or suggesting putting teddy bears in the window for kids to look at while they go for socially distant walks through the neighborhood with family.
Just linking a few ideas:
*Food-based transmission isn’t worrying the experts, for reasons not obvious when you think about it
*Variolation (inoculation with a small dose of virus) can be useful
*Iran (still licking those sacred stones) had their infection die down fast
*This is a respiratory virus
*There may well be no vaccine
What if the best public health outcomes are if the virus is around but we get acquainted with it via our digestive systems, which are poor hosts for the virus but maybe give the immune system a heads-up?
Maybe this *is* what we mean by ‘herd immunity’ for coronaviruses.
Touch your mouth, not your eyes?
Did you mean to include links?
No, he means to link together the 5 ideas, and is suggesting that maybe we’re all eating coronavirus that’s in our food, and becoming immune without it getting into our lungs.
Precisely. Maybe the places with the worst outcomes are the ones doing that the least.
Very few people were licking sacred stones, that’s basically a racist meme in the same vein as “Chinese people eat bats”. Like, yeah, some people do that, but it’s really not widespread.
In the past I’ve read an argument that getting a normal cold virus in your mouth (by kissing your partner who has it) makes you less likely to get sick from it, because of basically variolation. So hypothetically, if that wasn’t bs to begin with, it might apply to Covid as well.
But it’s not what we mean by herd immunity, although herd immunity is expected to include a lot of asymptomatic infections. But so far we’re expecting that to happen through the usual paths of transmission.
I can see the danger of generalising about culture when that culture is primarily made up of a different race, but must the term “racist” really be used here?
People are hypothesising different countries’ experiences with COVID-19 with a host of cultural explanations. “Americans are too obstinately freedom-loving”, “Germans like order”, “East Asians wear a lot of masks”, “Japanese bow instead of shake hands”.
Very few people think that this has much to do with race. Of course there are some. And there may be some who subconsciously correlate the two.
But in general, the actual same mechanism is taking place. When Germans are judging American cultural norms, nobody thinks it’s racist, but when white people are judging Iranian or Chinese cultural norms, it apparently is. Why?
Especially since Iranians are also Caucasians. It’s literally where the term “Aryan” is from.
So it is racist to be against nazis now? 🙂
Eating bats and licking shrines are not “cultural norms” in China or Iran. For better or worse, Americans and Germans are rarely racist against each other, but there’s certainly racism against Iranians (that they’re “Aryans” has nothing to do with it) and Chinese people.
I think “racist” is a reasonably good description for “making a demeaning generalization about an ethnic group based on questionable evidence and using that to explain misfortunes that befall them”. Whether they’re “actually” a different race is irrelevant because race is a fiction in every case and the borders of a race can change at any moment.
The other reason to call it a racist meme, of course, is because it’s spread by racists to support their feelings of superiority over Iranians, although I’m not accusing the person who referenced it here of that motivation.
Your claim that Americans are racist against Iranians doesn’t ring true. There’s a lot of animosity towards the country of Iran, mostly dating back to 1979, but not towards Iranians. There is also animosity towards Islam and Muslims, but Islam’s not a race.
The reason licking shrines became a meme is because the shrine-licking Iranians made it such, by making and distributing videos of just that. It has nothing to do with racism.
“There’s a lot of animosity towards the country of Iran, mostly dating back to 1979, but not towards Iranians.”
It is very rare for me to see any evidence of this sort of subtlety in people’s distrust of other nations. Only a very tiny fraction of people distinguishes between a country and the citizens of that country in any meaningful way. Even their own country, at times.
I could go back to the Cold War and show you East Germany, Cuba, and even Russia as other examples. But even today there’s the obvious example of North Korea. It’s very much an American thing to hate a country while not hating the people thereof.
In the particular case of Iran, it helps that a large fraction of the Iranian-American population that Americans are in a position to actually interact with are the ones who fled Iran in response to the 1979 revolution. And then settled in relatively cosmopolitian urban areas, where even the conservative subset of the local population wasn’t seeing them as flag-burning terrorists or Islamic fundamentalists.
Think Cuban-Americans in Miami, where basically nobody was saying “Born in Havana, eh? Must be a Castro-loving commie!”
I know it’s not what we usually *mean* by herd immunity. But maybe it’s what herd immunity actually consists of. As distinct from some possibly over-simplistic model of long term immune memory. That was my point.
As for Iranians licking sacred stones, somebody mentioned it, and I have no reason to believe that it isn’t a thing there. Seems pretty harmless – I am Irish and we have some unhygienic habits too. I was going to riff on Iranians being Aryan, but someone got there first. I have nothing against Iranians, in fact I think they are pretty cool.
A few years ago I read a piece in Salon by an Iranian woman. She was way racist against Arabs and implied that that’s how her whole culture feels. And nobody there gave a hoot, because not white, male, cis, whatever.
China and Japan are also horribly racist by Western standards. But that doesn’t mean we should attempt to become them (especially since we already have a highly ethnically heterogeneous population)
But have you noticed that the policy of continually beating yourself up about it has started to lose ground at the polls?
About “catch a cold by kissing”:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6088645
One of thirteen (not a lot of test persons, is it?) is infected with rhinovirus by kissing.
https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/kissing-and-your-health
Yes, colds can be transmitted by kissing
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/feb/15/health.medicineandhealth2
No, they can’t
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/16/catch-common-cold-from-kissing-_n_6690852.html
No, they can’t. Holding hands is more dangerous.
I would love to know more about “kissing as a form of oral vaccination”, but all I found was this: https://www.ifbg.eu/detail/10-tipps-zur-staerkung-des-immunsystems/
Tip 4 to improve immune system is kissing, because you exchange 80 million microorganisms which is a form of “mini oral vaccination”.
Unfortunately, I’ve found nothing in English.
Weird fiction review: “Ubbo-Sathla” by Clark Ashton Smith, part of his Hyperborea cycle. First published in Weird Tales, July 1933.
We start with some bad theology from The Book of Eibon: Ubbo-Sathla is praised as “the source and the end” because (she?) is the cause of Earth life’s single-celled prototypes, while Yog-Sothoth “came from the stars.”
In 1932, Paul Tregardis found an interesting crystal in the London curio shop of a Jewish small businessman. Asked about it, the owner “gave the impression of being lost to commercial considerations in some web of cabbalistic revery.” (This is some cute stereotyping – “Running a business is boring, I’d much rather think about the Kabbalah!”) It seems “A geologist found it in Greenland, beneath glacial ice, in the Miocene strata. Who knows? It may have belonged to some sorcerer of primeval Thule.”
Tregardis was startled. Sounds like something he read in The Book of Eibon, “strangest and rarest of occult forgotten volumes, which is said to have come down through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea.” (How would one know that a book being the rarest or most obscure has any correlation to truth value? Hipster epistemology?) Tregardis is the sort of guy who owns a medieval French manuscript of it and has collated passages with the Necronomicon. There was a reference to the cloudy scrying crystal of the wizard Zon Mezzamalech, in Mhu Thulan. Dealer, I’ll take it!
At home, he checked the one brief reference in The Book of Eibon: “he could behold many visions of the terrene past, even to the Earth’s beginning, when Ubbo-Sathla, the unbegotten source, lay vast and swollen and yeasty amid the vaporing slime…” but Zon vanished, and the crystal was lost. He stared into the crystal, which glowed with an inner light, and it hypnotized him into a sense of dreamlike duality where Paul Tregardis was also Zon Mezzamalech, who sought the crystal because all past years can be seen in it.
When Paul regained consciousness as himself, he resolved never to to gaze into the magic crystal again. So of course, the next day, he gazed in!
Zon grew annoyed that he “beheld nothing more than a few fragments of the years of Mhu Thulan immediately posterior to the present-the years of his own life-time;” – time to disregard all dangers of magic and go diving into Deep Time! The orb past-life regresses him through Hyperborea’s rise from savagery to high civilization, then a man-like beast, a pterodactyl, an ichthyosaur, then a serpent-man who “bowed with hissing litanies to great serpent-idols”, then a crawling thing too primitive to build or dream. At last he becomes an amoeba-like thing in the shallows of landless primal Earth, somehow sensing Ubbo-Sathla and tilted in the mire the tablets of “the pre-mundane gods.” But a single cell has no eyes, and will only crawl mindlessly on the tablets, never read them.
Of Paul’s vanishing, there was a curt notice in several of the London papers. No one seems to have known anything about him.
This is a simple short story, condensing the meditation on Deep Time Lovecraft used as an element in several much longer tales. And as short story, its genre seems to be moral fable. Don’t be an occultist or you could die/vanish from what you mess with.
Thoughts?
Isn’t that at least half the reason to be an occultist in the first place?
I guess that depends on the value you place on staying alive.
(Paging David Friedman on individual freedom in cosmic horror…)
CAS is a lot of fun to read if only for the chance to expand one’s vocabulary.
As Lovecraftian explanations for Earthly life go, I prefer “cast-off detritus of shoggothic experimentation by the Elder Things” to this.
The twist is a classic “deal with the Devil/genie” trope – you get what you asked for, but not in a way that benefits you at all: casting your consciousness back through time by re-visiting all your past lives is an old notion, but the price of that is that you don’t retain your evolved intelligence – if you’re going back to the primordial past via race-memory or whatever genetic linkage, then you’re going back to the same level as that past being.
And as you point out, a single-celled organism can’t read. So even if you manage to get back to the time when the lost knowledge of the gods is accessible, unless you’ve got a working time machine to physically transfer your modern-day self to that place, it won’t do you any good at all.
It’s a classic “deal with the Devil/genie” story of a type that could only be written post-Darwin.
Without that seismic shift in people’s beliefs, it would have been hard to write a horror story that doesn’t presume Christianity is true (maybe Islam if it’s a literal genie?), except for the crime type of horror where the monster is a perfectly natural serial killer.
“How would one know that a book being the rarest or most obscure has any correlation to truth value? Hipster epistemology?”
If your world suppresses arguments, and filters Chulthu adherents as trolls, it makes a lot of sense.
Good point.
Lock downs should get more effective with time, right? The way I figure, at the start of the lock down there’s still new hosts in unaffected family members / other close contacts, but a couple of transmission generations in those should start getting saturated and the rate of spread should slow.
I mention it because I’ve seen referenced a number of times that the lock downs applied in most of the West won’t be effective because in Wuhan they did a lock down like that for a week and it only dropped R0 to 1.3 (so still exponentially increasing) and it was only after they started e.g. welding the apartment doors closed and housing infected in special quarantine facilities that they got R0 < 1 (to 0.3) and that various stronger measures will be needed in the West. I've seen those exact number repeated a number of times, but ignoring other differences (Wuhan being dense relative to a lot of Western cities, prevalence of multi-generational households etc.) this doesn't seem to take lock down effectiveness over time into account.
It all presumes that lock-downs are evenly respected over time, and I could see lock down fatigue or the like playing a role (but also people getting better at being lock downed as well), but my theory is it's more a function of how overwhelmed the local hospitals are the any particular time window.
Yes. This is also one reason why the idea of turning lockdown on and off repeatedly isn’t ideal.
About “reopening” after “lockdown”: Scott Gottlieb and AEI have just now put out a “Roadmap to Reopening” in the U.S.
It’s based around when localities have met certain trigger conditions. So for instance:
“Trigger to Move to Phase II. To guard against the risk that large outbreaks or epidemic spread could reignite once we lift our initial efforts to “slow the spread,” the trigger for a move to Phase II should be when a state reports a sustained reduction in cases for at least 14 days (i.e., one incubation period); and local hospitals are safely able to treat all patients requiring hospitalization without resorting to crisis standards of care4; and the capacity exists in the state to test all people with COVID-19 symptoms, along with state capacity to conduct active monitoring of all confirmed cases and their contacts.”
I imagine there will be critique and commentary about this document in the coming day. Andy Slavitt seems to be generally supportive.
So…like 3 years from now?
What makes you think it’ll take that long?
My concern with getting everyone tested and tracked is not the number of tests. It is actually doing the testing and tracking (and doing it thoroughly/accurately).
I meant to edit this into my original response, but got distracted and didn’t save the addition for 15 minutes and figured I should just make a new post at that point, but treat this as an extension of my first comment:
Why would we think this is sufficient. Unless the virus is totaly eliminated (it wouldn’t be) the spread will just start ramping up again when things open back up, right?
That’s why you need Phase II (rather than immediately switching from lockdown to doing nothing). Phase II is how we try to keep things in check at a manageable level without continuing a full lockdown.
Burying “active monitoring of all confirmed cases and their contacts” at the bottom of the executive summary and in the fine print of the full text, without the sort of quantitative definition used for e.g. “sustained reduction”, is practically an invitation for this part to be ignored. Which is likely to mean that the lockdowns will be lifted prematurely and so do no good in the long run, but that’s OK because nobody is planning the follow-up work that would make this round of lockdowns useful in the first place so we might as well get it over with.
Or not, but if so it will take someone better than Scott Gottlieb and the AEI to get us on track for a true recovery. If it takes a premature lifting of the lockdowns and a massive rebound to do that, it’s going to be ugly in both the death toll and civil-liberties aspect.
Agreed. Producing lots and lots of tests is the sort of thing that America is really good at once the government gets out of the way. The tracking and monitoring is the sort of thing that America seems likely to be bad at relative to other countries.
OTOH America’s strengths can compensate for its weaknesses in that truly *massive* testing would simplify things – if everyone is getting tested regularly then there’s no need to trace contacts since the contacts are all getting tested anyway. But ubiquitous testing runs into its own set of cultural problems here.
Gowron holding out a dagger.
I confess I’m not enough of a Star Trek fan to understand this reference.
Blood test to find out if you are a changeling? (Slice yourself, blood leaks out, it means you are a solid, ironically.)
Specifically that during the height of the dominion conflict the Klingons become obsessed with blood testing.
Apples are supposed to be a very satiating food, but in my experience, the opposite is true. When I eat an apple, I often end up hungrier than before! Has anyone else noticed this?
I’ve never heard that they’re supposed to be satiating.
Yeah agreed, never heard that as a selling point for apples.
The only food that seems to makes
me hungrier is delicious food that’s awful for you, because I don’t get tired of it. I get tired of eating steak or fruit or vegetables, but I could eat Doritos or ice cream or chicken nuggets all day (and have).
Maybe that’s the fundamental problem with this stuff?
Re apples: yeah they can help out if you need a pulse of blood sugar and your liver and pancreas aren’t yet on the job. But they are not satiating. If you have no other food for a week, they will deliver some sugar and fibre.
Yes, fruit in general makes me hungrier than if I had eaten nothing.
Diabetics know that there isn’t any difference between fruit and a candy bar, as far as sugar content. The fruit gives you a little bit more, most especially the fiber, maybe some vitamins, if you even need them. Not super surprising.
Today, I didn’t eat until midafternoon, at which point I ate half an apple. Afterwards I was still hungry and found myself compelled to eat more food.
I interpret this as evidence in support of your hypothesis.
One apple also has very low cals, so it’s more like “I ate 100 cals and I’m still hungry”. A meal would be around 4 apples.
But yeah, fruits are hit and miss. Still very worth it to experiment, IMO. The combo I reached (before the fresh fruit shops around me all closed down) was one banana and one orange. Somehow the combination manage to satisfy more than any one kind of fruit could.
Don’t supermarkets sell fruit where you live?
Fruit gives you fibre and sugar, If it’s fresh it gives you more vitamins, but the other things are unaffected.
I used to think that it’s insane to fret about the freshness of meat, because the things you need it for – proteins, minerals, fat-soluble vitamins – are unaffected by age, But honestly, it’s true for fruit and veg too, unless you are deficient in the water-soluble vitamins. Really stopped caring about whether food is fresh over the last few years.
Supermarket fruit is shit here, no idea why. I have yet to buy oranges what didn’t spoil in 3 days. Not subtly either.
Not a subjective opinion, common knowledge. Tried several. Very willing to pay extra.
Anyways, ordered online from a specialty shop, will receive good oranges tomorrow.
Makes no sense,from the supermarket’s point of view!
I keep fruit and veg in separate cupboards, they last for ages and if something goes mouldy (I hate that, but it happens occasionally) it doesn’t affect stuff outside its packet (I open packets). Some things last for months. It is just ordinary food from Aldi. I buy extra when they have a special.
I have oranges in there that are a fortnight old, right now. Oranges can sometimes give you a nasty green smelly surprise, even if they seemed fine before. Still, they should last a while. If you have an issue with oranges, maybe put them in the fridge.
[I have an apple that is six months old. I ate its partner a couple of days ago, and it was fine, albeit a little chewy.]
In my experience apples last a long time — until one of them turns, which makes the whole bunch go bad, and any produce near them, too.
I had two bags of apples in the house shortly before the coronavirus mass-buying began, and one of them had the apples start to be soft. So I emptied out the bag onto a big platter and ate them at 2x normal rate.
@Gerry Quinn
Yeah, can’t explain it either. Since I started using the street corner fruit shop, oranges last… no idea how long, never spoiled yet. On the other, tried using the fridge and it adds a few days, but makes it more inconvenient to eat.
Not sure why it’s so bad at supermarkets. They also have peaches made of cardboard, and most apple is… just not tasty.
Rest of the merchandise is pretty much on. Not France levels of food quality, but still very much ok.
Re: stopping smoking. I’m going to rant and rave, so anyone who wants can skip this.
First, about “a few people have pointed out to me that more recent studies show the opposite” – fuck you all who did this.
Why Deiseach! How very intemperate! These are plainly only honest persons who are purely impartially interested in the science of it!
Yeah, and fuck them doubly.
I’ve had a close family member who died of lung cancer due to smoking. This person tried and failed to give up smoking over a period of decades. When they did temporarily stop smoking, they were miserable and angry and so unable to deal with quitting their addiction they started smoking again. Eventually it killed them.
And if you’ve never seen anyone dying from lung cancer, it is HORRIBLE. IT IS TERRIBLE. IT IS AWFUL. THROW YOURSELF UNDER A TRAIN FIRST BEFORE DYING LIKE THIS.
So anyone who wants to stay smoking, okay! But be honest! Say “I prefer my addiction to nicotine to the side-effects up to and including dying a horribly painful death, so I would rather die than quit”. But don’t fuck around with “studies say that smoking has nothing to do with how bad you may get a respiratory infection”. Come out and say “yeah well I don’t care what you think, I prefer getting my fix”.
Thank you and good night.
I would add that COPD is also horrifying, and way more common. It’s basically slow-cook nuclear death asthma. Your lungs become crappier and crappier and it takes forever to kill you; you just get weaker and more pathetic, starting in your forties or so. I remember a clinical where I came into the room to give a neb treatment and the COPD patient said he was out of breath because he just got dressed.
Want to get out of breath putting your clothes on every morning? Smoke!
Indeed, my father had that. He died at 52.
I’m 60 and I drink a lot of beer. Much, much more than doctors recommend. At least since Edwardian times. But I don’t smoke.
I deal with a lot of COPD patients. It’s absolutely terrible. I suspect that having kids interacting with them would reduce smoking rates.
(Then you get the special cases who alternate between using their oxygen mask and puffing on a cigarette).
And if you don’t get lung cancer or COPD, you might get esophageal cancer or pancreatic cancer — also horrific ways to die. Quit if it is at all possible for you.
On the subject of smoking, Scott mentioned the atypical antidepressant bupropion as being a highly effective aid for quitting. One alternative is varenicline (Chantix), but there was previously concern that varenicline might lead to increased suicide and other psychiatric problems. However, a recent study in The Lancet suggests that this concern is unfounded, with patients in the varenicline arm showing slightly lower complications than the other treatment arms (bupropion or nicotine patch) or placebo. This study also showed that the varenicline treatment had a significantly higher rate of abstinence than any other group. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)30272-0/fulltext
Something to think about for those who want to quit! Also, for those who have tried to quit/have quit smoking, what method(s) did you use? Which ones were effective?
I quit smoking 16 years ago, at the beginning of 2004, by switching to nicotine gum. Had smoked for about 20 years previous to that (mostly Camel Filters, then Pall Mall unfiltered for the last 4 or 5 years). Tried & failed to quit cold turkey several times. I don’t even miss cigarettes anymore – the smoke smells bad to me, not tempting. But I am still chewing the gum, and god forbid I run out of that! I chew about a dozen pieces of the 2mg-nicotine version over the course of a day, every day. It’s a lot cheaper than cigarettes these days, and you can do it inside without bothering anyone.
You either live somewhere with unusually high tobacco taxes (NY, Chicago, etc) or you are getting a killer deal on the gum. That stuff is not cheap (or at least it wasn’t the last time I bought some, which was admittedly 5-6 years ago).
I quit about 15 years ago, almost accidentally, with a combination of bupropion and nicotine gum. I had started the bupropion for depression, and around the same time my living situation changed such that smoking frequently was less feasible. I figured I would substitute the gum for smoking, and ended up quitting. I think I chewed the gum for about a month.
Supposedly simply reading the book “Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Smoking” is an effective method of quitting. I read a bit out of curiosity, and it was sort of a guided meditation on how smoking actually feels that tries to get you to realize it isn’t enjoyable. This matches my experience – smoking would relieve my cravings but was not pleasurable beyond the initial few weeks.
I know two people who quit through that book — and both did it decades ago when smoking was common and temptation everywhere.
Presumably others I know tried the book and failed and I never heard about it, but given how famously difficult it is to quit smoking, two successes from a book impressed me.
Seconding that recommendation. I read it once out of pure curiosity after hearing a friend rave about it (I’ve never been a smoker), and part of me almost wanted to start smoking so I could quit.
Some more Dutch fixed expressions:
‘Nu komt de aap uit de mouw’ = Now the monkey comes out of the sleeve
This means that a rather obvious deception is exposed and your initial suspicion is proved right. For example, when you get a compliment from someone that doesn’t like you, as a lead in to criticism. This expression probably derives from jesters who would carry a monkey under their cloak to surprise people.
‘Broodje aap (verhaal)’ = Monkey sandwich (story)
An urban legend. Refers to a story about restaurants selling monkey meat sandwiches.
‘Uit de mouw schudden’ = Shake out of the sleeve
Doing something effortlessly.
‘Ik snap er de ballen van’ = I understand the balls of it
I don’t understand it at all.
‘Achter het net vissen’ = Fishing behind the (standing) net
Being too late for something, because others beat you to it. For example, can be used when the supermarket ran out of toilet paper.
‘Met de deur in huis vallen’ = falling into the house with the door
Getting straight to the point. Refers to not waiting until getting invited in, but stepping inside while the door is still opening.
‘Alsof er een engeltje over je tong piest’ = As if an angel pees on your tongue
Very tasty.
‘Het regent pijpenstelen’ = It’s raining pipe-stems
It rains cats and dogs.
‘boter op zijn hoofd’ = butter on his head
He is himself to blame, but blames others.
‘Met je neus in de boter vallen’ = Falling with your nose in the butter
Turning up at an opportune moment (without having planned it), when you can share in something nice.
I love these! English expressions aren’t so hard to understand are they, or am I just used to them?
As a non-native speaker, there are lots of English expressions whose etymology is not obvious, and as such they can’t be understood from the words that make them up. Some of the first that come to my mind come from sports I’m not familiar with (par for the course, off the bat).
‘Par for the course’ is completely straightforward if you understand golf, though.
A cultural-level knowledge of golf may be misleading in the sense of a “false cognate”. “Par for the course” as an English expression means something close to “the outcome you would expect”, with the implication that it’s not a surprise. Whereas the average golfer probably won’t ever come close to shooting par on a 18-hold course in entire life spent playing, and only about 1% of golfers break par regularly: https://www.underpargoals.com/percentage-golfers-break-par/.
So rather than being “straightforward”, I’d guess that English learners who play golf probably get the connotation wrong much of the time, and non-golfing English-speaking natives probably have misconceptions about average golf scores. On a deeper level, though, it may make an interesting statement about overconfidence: most golfers do “expect” to shoot par on every individual hole, even if it rarely happens in practice.
Golf treats par as the default, with any better or worse scores being described relative to par. Going par for the course literally means that there was no hole where one did better or worse than the benchmark.
I agree that the shift to regard this benchmark as easy is misleading/incorrect.
How are par scores assigned and how regularly are they re-thought? Possibly the golfers of yesteryear were greater than those of the present, such that no two current golfers could lift one.
Par scores are calculated essentially this way: How many strokes does it take to move the ball the basic distance from the tee (where you start) to the hole? Add two to that. The idea is, you take those strokes to get to the vicinity of the hole, one to get practically next to the hole, and one to finish.
Right. Par assumes that you successfully execute each shot very well, but does not require any particularly absurd amount of luck.
Covid came off the bat, dude. Too soon!
𝄞 ♪ Like a bat out of hell ♪ …
They seem more straightforward on the whole.
PS. I’ve got a bunch more prepared that I will release in installments, to dilute the corona comments a bit. There are so many Dutch expressions that I can keep going to ‘sint-juttemis*’ anyway.
* A fictitious Catholic saint and holiday, used to indicate that something will never happen (first known use in 1577). In old Dutch, ‘jut’ means fool. There is even a statue for this fictitious saint.
I’m enjoying these – keep ‘em coming..
There’s definitely non-obvious English expressions, thought they tend to be less bizarre than the dutch ones.
For instance, would you be able to tell what any of the following meant if you didn’t already know or were able to infer the meaning from context:
– Spilling the beans
– Breaking the ice
– Biting the bullet
– Being over the moon or under the weather
– Getting the short end of the stick
I’m not convinced English expressions like this are any more inherently reasonable. For example:
“Let the cat out of the bag” = let some secret slip out
“on the take” = corrupt, being bribed
“on the make” = ambitious and on the way up in the world
“on the rag” = a woman having her period
“on the lam” = a fugitive from justice
“fat chance” = not gonna happen
“slim chance” = same thing but used a little differently
“lost his head,” “lost his temper” = got really out-of-control mad
“blew his top,” “blew his stack” = same thing
“pulled his chestnuts out of the fire” = saved him from a bad outcome of some kind
“saved his ass,” “saved his bacon” = same thing
“X goes pear-shaped” = X goes badly wrong
“the wheels come off” = things go badly wrong
“wrapped around the axle” = screwed up, confused
“blowing smoke” = trying to deceive you
“little pitchers have big ears”, “little pitchers” = the kids are listening
“speak of the devil” = something you say when the person you were talking about shows up
“until the cows come home” = never or not for a very long time
“when hell freezes over” = never
“a snowball’s chance in hell” = no chance
“bright eyed and bushy tailed” = eager and ready, how you show up to work in the morning if you’re enthusiastic.
“burning the midnight oil” = staying up all night/very late working
“elbow grease” = hard work (approximately)
“like a chicken with its head cut off” = acting crazy, running around in chaos
“Chinese fire drill” = a bunch of people running around in disorder, probably too politically incorrect to be used much today
“more fun than a barrel of monkeys” = a lot of fun
“madder than a hornet” = really mad
“seeing red” = really mad
“blue” (as an emotion) = sad, depressed
“to have a big head” = to be conceited
“to piss something away” = to waste something
“pissed off” = angry
“saved his ass” is just standard synecdoche.
I’m familiar with all of those, with one exception: I never heard “Chinese Fire Drill” in my life. And I’m 60.
I always thought a Chinese fire drill was when the car is stopped at a red light and everyone gets out and changes seats real fast.
To me “Chinese fire drill” is specifically a road trip game where at a stoplight if someone shouts Chinese fire drill everyone gets out of the car and quickly moves to another seat I don’t know why that’s specifically a game but I assume the name comes from the idiom?
Little pitchers have big ears is completely new to me and thus clearly a wicked gaslighting attempt and I will have no part of it.
Edit: Ninja’d
I’ve never heard “on the make”, “on the rag”, “the wheels come off”, “wrapped around the axle”, “little pitchers have big ears”, or “Chinese fire drill”.
Another idiom suggestion: “That time of the month” – menstruation. Speaking of which, it just occurred to me that “having her period” is itself an idiom!
Some of these seem straightforward to me:
“slim chance”
“the wheels come off”
“when hell freezes over”
“a snowball’s chance in hell”
I think “wrapped around the axle” was the only one entirely unfamiliar to me.
“Shanhaied” = sent off to some faraway unwanted location. (Probably also a little politically incorrect by now, who knows?)
“Shanghaied” refers to getting pressed into involuntary labor, but for once there’s nothing particularly politically incorrect about the backstory — it happened to sailors of all ethnicities and nationalities, and the etymology has more to do with Shanghai being a major shipping destination than with anything you’d expect to happen there.
Of course, when “niggardly” is too politically incorrect to say because of a phonetic coincidence, maybe that’s too thin a reed.
Hey a Dutch person, time to collect my 8th and I am surly at least slightly different explanation for what exactly gezellig means!
A pleasant and warm atmosphere of togetherness in a cosy setting.
Related to the German word for comrade?
It’s from the Dutch word for Journeyman (Gezel), presumably the same etymological source as the German word.
Genosse? No.
It comes from the guild system. In the guild system, someone started as an apprentice, learning basic skills. Once proven skilled and talented enough, he would graduate to journeyman (‘gezel’ in Dutch and ‘geselle’ in German). At this point the student would get more advanced training, in closer contact with the master and hopefully graduate to master himself one day.
This is a bit akin to the bachelor/master distinction in college.
The journeyman/gezel would live in a hall (‘zaal’ in Dutch, ‘saal’ in German) with the others, in contrast to the student, who would live at home. So they might enjoy a lot of ‘gezelligheid,’ being in a big hall with people of a similar age. So gezel refers to the hall these people would live in, which most clearly distinguished them from apprentices and masters.
Fun fact: ‘vrijgezel’ (= free journeyman) is Dutch for an unmarried/single person. A requirement to become a master was typically to be married, while an apprentice was typically too young, poor, etc to marry. So the important distinction for the lady folk was between the journeymen that were married and those that were still single.
PS. Freemasons still use the apprentice/journeyman/master model.
The German word I was thinking of was Geselle. Wiktionary gives “Journeyman” as the first meaning. I’m familiar with it from a Heine poem where the meaning is closer to “comrade.”
I wonder whether the concepts of a Batchelor and a Batchelor’s Degree are the same thing.
@Lambert
According to https://www.etymonline.com/word/bachelor , yes. They both derive from a root meaning “young man”.
In Dutch, you also have ‘metgezel,’ which means companion (first known use in 1477). ‘Met’ = (together) with.
It was common for masters to take a journeyman along with them on trips, but not all of them, so the metgezel was the gezel that was with the master on a trip.
German doesn’t seem to have a similar construct.
Gezellig is easy, try finding a decent English translation for nuchter.
To make that a little more clear. It’s the Dutch word for sober (in the not-drunk sense), but it also means something like being down to earth, having a good graps of reality or being smart in a simple, common sense-ey way.
It’s not nearly as ill defined as gezellig, but it really feels like it should have a nice, clean, one word translation and it doesn’t. So if you ask people to translate it on the spot you mostly get stumbled half-explanations.
I think the English word “sober” is used this way too, though. Consider the phrase “a sober analysis.” This isn’t meant to describe any analysis performed by a non-intoxicated person. It implies the analysis is calm, objective, and rational (as compared to other analyses).
But sober means that in English as well.
Edit: Ninjaed by @Matt M
@Matt M, EchoChaos: Really? I’ve never heard it used in that context.
Well, in that case I look like an idiot.
Edit: Google agrees, though it gives the meaning as: “serious, sensible, and solemn”, which sounds a lot more high-status than what I would use the Dutch word for.
@silver_swift
Not at all. That’s how we learn things, especially about foreign languages. I appreciated your discussion of it.
These are fun.
These are always fun to read. The Scandinavian languages have some great ones. For example “let me show you where a chicken pees from” (Swedish) which means let me show you how it’s done.
More here
That’s a dark one :O
Some of them work in German, too. Some are slightly different:
I would rather show somebody “where the frog has the locks” (wo der Frosch die Locken hat).
And instead of stepping into the spinach, I would step into the little fat bowl (Fettnäpfchen).
And instead of taking off my clogs, I would give away the spoon (den Löffel abgeben) or go across the Wupper (the river through Wuppertal).
My favourite is the one about the horse’s birthday, I have to remember that!
In Spanish, they call a very thin slice of bread “lengua de gato” (cat’s tongue), and by contrast, my wife and I are wont to call a thick slice a rhinoceros tongue. Well, this is not so important in countries of presliced very soft bread.
Speaking of bread: In the Netherlands they call “eekhoorntjesbrood” (squirrel bread) what in Germany is a boring “stone mushroom”. Dutch language, gotta love it!
Many thanks from me, too!
Some of these are known in German, too:
“Aus dem Ärmel schütteln” = “shake out of the sleeve”
“Mit der Tür ins Haus fallen”
I can offer a few more:
“Das war des Pudels Kern” = “This was the kernel of the poodle”
A secret is finally revealed. This is from Goethe’s Faust. Plenty of these come from high literature, particularly Goethe.
“Sturm im Wasserglas” = “storm in the glass of water”
A big fuss about nothing
“Ein Engel geht durchs Zimmer” = “An angel walks through the room”
A sudden silence in conversation.
“Alles ist in Butter” = “All is in butter”
All is well.
“Ach du grüne Neune!” = “Oh you green nine!”
Oh dear! (Probably comes from the nine of spades; spades is sometimes called “green”).
There are plenty of these, such as “Ach du heiliges Kanonenrohr” (holy cannon tube), “Ach du dicker Fisch” (fat fish), and so on.
“übers Ohr hauen” = “hit over the ear”
defraud
“Butter bei die Fische!” = “butter with the fish!”
This comes from the North, so might be known in the Netherlands similarly? It means: No half-measures!
“Ich bin schwer auf Draht” = “I am heavy on wire”
I am very agile.
OK, the eighties called, they want their joke books back. Back then, people would translate such phrases literally to English and say English sentences like “I understand only railway station”, “I think I spider”, “My dear mister singing club”, “With me is not good cherry-eating”, “Me stand the hairs to the mountain”. We used to find it funny.
“Ein Engel geht durchs Zimmer” = “An angel walks through the room”
A sudden silence in conversation.
In GDR it was also “A Stasi man is born” (hearsay, never heard it myself).
“Alles ist in Butter” = “All is in butter”
All is well.
From the transportation method of Venetian glass across the alps. It was submerged in molten butter to prevent shocks and vibrations.
In English, “a tempest in a teapot”
I think that’s a fancied-up American variation of the English “storm in a teacup”.
Maybe so, but I think ours sounds better — it’s got the alliteration going for it.
I tried guessing what they meant before reading further. I got the first two and none of the rest.
Now try this slang quiz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUNR_FTiC_E
@Robin
We have the exact same one in Dutch (‘storm in een glas water’).
We also have this one. It comes from a Latin saying from medieval times: Cum dominis edere debes omnino carere cerusa, peiora dant et comedunt meliora. This means: you shouldn’t eat cherries with the higher placed, they will eat the nice ones and give the bad ones to you.
One of the main Dutch writers of the Dutch Golden Age, Jacob Cats, wrote a poem about it in 1632, titled: It serves you poorly to eat cherries with the high lords, they pick the biggest ones and shoot the stones (= pits) at you. In the poem, he explains that they will shoot the pits in your nice beard or on your round cheeks, while you can’t complain, but have to bear it in silence. The poem ends with the advice to leave the lords to deal with the council and the kings to deal with their kingdoms, and to keeps yourself to dealing with your peers as much as possible.
Oh, and I have thought some more about why Germans find Dutch funny.
Sometimes it’s that they use words in normal language whose German counterpart would be rather colloquial. I hear on Radio Twee Limburg that a motorway is “dicht” (tight), which over here could only be heard on the young people’s radio, on their neverending quest to sound cool.
Okay, consider the most serious situation, a situation were humour is absolutely not called for. Say, you are the prime minister, and a far-right politician is murdered. Deep, deep inside you might be relieved that this terrible person is no longer around, but civilization and decency demand that you say you are shocked. What was the last sentence of Wim Kok’s press statement? “Ik ben er kapot van.”
In German, “kaputt” is a colloquial word, often used in humourous circumstances. It means that an object is broken, that a person is very tired or neurotically crazy.
Another example is recounted by the German columnist Harry Rowohlt, who was in Belgium and saw an English detective story on TV. The English detective says: “Quite frankly, I’ve got to admit, I am finding it increasingly difficult to get a grasp on all this.” The Dutch subtitle reads: “Ik pak dat niet!”
Here is another comedian saying he finds the Dutch cigarette packs saying “Roken is dodelijk” (although it is dead serious) “cute and funny”, but he gives no reason, a pity because German cigarette packs (“Rauchen is tödlich”) are identical, just with a couple more consonant shifts. Is it the reminescence of some dialects or the Low German language? Or is it just the “ij” that makes it funny? But do Britons laugh at äöüß? Well yes, kind of: When Mötley Crüe were in Germany, they were weirded out by the funny way the fans chanted their name. Turns out it makes a change if you sprinkle dots on your words. But that’s a different story.
Really, is there anything English-speakers find funny about Dutch or German or any other language?
“Kaput” is used the same in English as in German.
The word “gesundheit” is customarily used in English as a response to a sneeze (“bless you” is the other alternative). This makes German words and phrases using it simply to mean “health”, like “Gesundheitsminister”, sound funny.
Is “coronavirus” or some derivative a Dutch swear word yet?
“Kaput” with one t looks rather Russian to me.
Good one about Gesundheit, of course we say that too, but would never associate that with Gesundheitsminister Jens Spahn. Of course, there are fun words like “Fahrt” (driving), “womit” (with what), “damit” (with that), “Muckefuck” (malt coffee). Laurel and Hardy are well known as “Dick und Doof” (fat and stupid).
Which leads us to “Fuzzi” (rhymes with Tutsi, the people in Rwanda), meaning “a funny guy acting important”, also in compositions like “Militärfuzzi”. This comes from “Fuzzy”, Fuzzy Q Jones, portrayed by Al St John in tons of cheap western movies. Is he even remembered in the US?
Wikipedia says it is, but I’m not buying it.
The list of diseases that are swear words is actually fairly limited and doesn’t really change. Of the top of my head I only got ‘kanker’, ‘tyfus’, ‘tering’, ‘pokken’ and ‘pest’ (ie. cancer, typhoid, tuberculosis, small pox and the plague), though that wikipedia article also lists ‘klere’ and ‘takke’ as originally being slang for cholera and a stroke.
Too bad that Gayle Tufts’ Dictionary of delight is (apparently) not free on the web.
“Who put the dick in the Diktiergerät?”
“Wie kommt das him in himmlisch?”
In case you don’t know- they weren’t saying that the motorway was busy or congested, but that it was closed.
@Robin
This actually doesn’t have the connotation that he was relieved, but rather, that he was genuinely upset.
That’s Flemish dialect, not Dutch. In Dutch, you would say something ‘Ik heb moeite om er vat op te krijgen.’
‘Handvat’ is handle, so it this is almost the same as: I have difficulty getting a handle on it.
Sorry if I was unclear. Yes, he said that he was shocked, I would not insinuate that he was secretly happy, in contrast he had to avoid the slightest doubt that he could be. All that indicates how normal a word “kapot” is in Dutch.
On the other hand, I’m fascinated that the Belgians subtitle films in their dialect. Maybe the translator was just being lazy. I couldn’t imagine that e.g. in Austria, apart from slightly regional words, like “Jänner” for “Januar”.
And here’s another Dutch fixed expression: difficulty to open a barrel! Jolly good. Much better than literally translating: “Ik vind het moeilijk om al dat te begrijpen” or so.
Dutch and Flemish seem to be diverging. One piece of evidence for this is that Dutch and Flemish TV is increasingly subtitling Flemish and Dutch, respectively.
If only I could find some face masks. I think I actually have a mask left over from an open pack of 3 that I might use (I bought them for when I was ripping up my bathroom tile). It’s not perfect for keeping any virus in the air away from me, but it doesn’t need to be perfect. Maybe I could wear it with some cleaned leather work gloves outside.
Iceland came up in the last one, and it was pointed out that they have a rather low hospitalization and death rate for the estimated number of cases. This study indicates that that might not be too surprising – on average it takes 5 days for someone to show symptoms after they’re infected, ten days after symptoms to be admitted to the ICU, and total estimated time between symptoms and death from Covid-19 is 2-8 weeks. This pre-release paper on the CDC site is a bit narrower – 5 days from infection to symptom onset, then 11 days to ICU hospitalization.
So if most of the cases in Iceland happened in the past two weeks, it really wouldn’t be strange for there not to be a ton of hospitalizations yet. It would be strange if we see a massive spike in positive cases and very few hospitalizations after 2 weeks, though – if Iceland still has the same low numbers of hospitalizations and ICU cases two weeks from now, then it would be unexpected.
A tea towel is likely to be about as good as a mask, if you can get it securely strapped onto your face.
I made a quick, no-sewing-skill-required makeshift mask by cutting up an old t-shirt into strips, pinning two strips together with safety pins to make a pouch where it goes over my nose and mouth, and tucking an unfolded facial tissue in the pouch. Breathability wasn’t great, and it smooshed my nose when I tied it on tightly enough, but it was tolerable enough for a quick grocery run.
I had tried just wrapping a tissue over my face with a single strip of fabric, but direct contact with my mouth caused the tissue to start falling apart after a few minutes. Likewise, pinning the tissue itself to the fabric didn’t work because the tissue didn’t stretch with the fabric and just came loose when I tried to put it on.
Also underpants, at least for community contacts
https://youtu.be/gLuEE7nF9CA
Can confirm: wearing underpants on my head makes people stay 6 feet away.
Comment of the week, right here
Turns out I do have a spare N95 mask from an open pack! Got it right in front of me now.
I read that you can sterilize them with 70 degree C heat for 30 minutes, as long as it doesn’t touch any metal surface directly that might damage it. Although this seems to indicate that at 70 degrees Celsius, the virus becomes undetectable in more than 1 minute but less than 5 minutes – seems like that would be promising information for anyone who has a convection oven and wants to get take-out food.
I read that you can sterilize them with 70 degree C heat for 30 minutes,
Could have been my comment, and I emphasized that 70°C/30min is not sterilization (killing/incapacitating/de-harming all life and adjacent thingies but is merely sufficient to “kill” (yes, I know, I know, it’s not ‘living’) the SARS-2 virus.
What about spraying with Windex? Windex is cheap and available and kills the coronavirus. Would a spray on the front and back, and then several hours to air out, suffice? Or does the Windex need to be “wiped” across the surface?
I’d stick with good old soap or washing powder, and have the mask thoroughly soaked for a while. And at a higher temperature — hand washing is 20…35?°C, machine washing was recommended at 60°C.
I’m sure going through the washing machine is best.
But even with our accelerated washing schedule from all the dishtowels I go through now, that still means people in our household don’t have fresh masks all the time.
How about folding it in half as a triangle and wearing it like a cowboy bandanna,
(on the dusty trail or when robbing the bank) across the nose, tied in back and end tucked into your shirt. Since the primary function of the mask (AIUI) is to keep your germs away from others, the triangle tucked into your shirt would perhaps do a good job. And we Americans love playing cowboy, so it might become popular.
This one is easy to make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNjpH5lBZ8w
Kitchen paper and Kleenex.
Here are the blueprints.
Open-ended question, but- what’s the status of these ‘hyped as game changing technologies’ that don’t seem to have broken through to ‘changing the world status’ yet?:
3D printing- Seems to be on the ‘slow & steady improvement’ track? Several years ago there was talk of how 3D printing would enable a transition where eventually factories don’t exist, because consumers print anything that they need at home. We’re obviously not there yet, but I seem to hear about a more gradual spread to into every industry (not just physical goods manufacturing but also possible organ replacement?) Seems like it is slowly moving into traditional manufacturing as I do hear about SpaceX, ULA, Boeing etc. making more parts via 3D printing. Would be interesting if anyone has a high-level overview of the technology to date.
Prediction markets- Is the failure of these to take off just a regulatory one? I’d imagine you’d ultimately need a trusted, major institutional/Wall Street-type player as a market maker, and also arbiter of ‘was this condition really fulfilled yes or no’ for all the weird edge cases. I really haven’t heard of any finance industry enthusiasm for this though, which seems unusual/telling.
I can’t even with blockchain/crypto. From what I’ve heard all of the Wall Street firms that experimented with either basically gave up & lost interest. Blockchain in particular seems like a solution in search of a problem, it really adds nothing of value vs. having trusted centralized parties
The Wall Street use case was so obviously nonsensical that any bank that I lost all respect for any institutions that announced blockchain anything. Inasmuch as it is ever useful for anything it’s open networks of untrusted counterparties, not a closed universe of institutions that are all very capable of suing each other to enforce agreements.
In most cases seemed to be obvious “lets jump on new buzzword attracting people willing to give us their money”.
Are there cases where serious institutions actually seemed to believe in crypto, rather than attract people that could be drained from their money?
Overstock’s CEO seemed to be a true believer.
Mainly for ideological reasons, I’d guess. That guy has long been a pretty hardcore libertarian who travels in some pretty extreme circles.
The banks are switching to blockchain for certain transactions, such as settlement amongst themselves. DTCC is one of the leaders here. I’m a little skeptical, but if you don’t know who DTCC are, you aren’t really qualified to criticize.
There have been lots of headlines about banks using “blockchain”, but few proofs of concept and zero real world usage (as far as I know).
Anyway, there’s also a bit of a motte and bailey, since taken literally, “blockchain” just means “merkle trees”, and we’ve been Using Blockchain Technology To Secure Our Source Code since at least the introduction of git in 2005.
The actual innovation of Bitcoin was the proof of work to avoid double spends, and that’s also exactly what makes it uselessly inefficient for any scenario where trust exists.
Dryads that look like Angela Merkel are a trendy technology?
In terms of industrial usage, 3D printers are on a continuum with programmable machine tools. I’m pretty sure there’s been significant movement towards more things getting made in machine shops or small-batch factories rather than traditional mass production.
Sometimes I think it is more appropriate to put 3D printing on a continuum with casting, and argue about whether CNC machining belongs on the same continuum afterwards.
It introduced relatively simple and relatively cheap way to move digital objects into low quality plastic objects. Depending on a situation it can be extremely useful, interesting or useless.
3D printing is very useful for rapid prototyping, and small batches of products. Especially useful in cases of “I just designed it and I plan to make less than 100 items”. Or “this item is impossible to buy an I am fine with plastic in almost this shape”.
Main limitation is that 3D printers require plenty of babysitting. Are not worth using if you can buy product from an actual factory.
“factories don’t exist, because consumers print anything that they need at home” is SF, requiring technologies unavailable today. For example it requires weird production tools nearly without economies of scale.
This ignores that metal sintering 3D printers are by far the more interesting area of development.
I admit that my knowledge is from low-end hobbyist position.
What metal sintering 3D printers change? Would it add anything more than change the first line to “move digital objects into low quality plastic or metal objects.”?
They allow making structures that are impossible to make with standard cutting methods (mostly weird holes inside) so you can make a part that’s just as sturdy but lighter and thus *better* for some purposes than a “traditional” part.
You’ll see better quality than you’re going to get out of a hobbyist printer making plastic. For example, you don’t have to worry about the parts sagging under their own weight during printing because the part is supported by unsintered material.
You can also sinter
metalsmaterials that are not practical to machine because they are too brittle, flow under the tool, have chemical compatibility problems, whatever. Or can’t be practically cast because the melting point to higher than your chemically compatible refractory material options or whatever.This is where the casting comparison comes in: you get a good enough quality part that you only have to machine in a few high precision fixtures on.
“Blockchain in particular seems like a solution in search of a problem, it really adds nothing of value vs. having trusted centralized parties”
Blockchain is nowadays sign of gambling pretending to be investing, scam or at least solution in search of a problem.
But it is actually useful in cases where trusted centralized party does not exist. For example criminals have trouble with using banking system for obvious reasons.
But it turns out that in most cases trusted central parties are superior to blockchains. For example in case of currency blockchain is slower, riskier and inability to revert transactions makes it perfect for scammers.
For other uses it is even more pointless.
My impression of 3D printing is that there are two reasons to be excited:
1. It’s made a variety of very complex parts possible (or at least not prohibitively expensive). For example, SpaceX is 3D printing the Super Draco engine bell, and IIRC parts for their turbopumps. I think Space Labs is 3D printing their engines. I’ve seen pictures of 3D printed R&D scale aerospike engines. I’ve hear rumblings of 3D printed turbine parts. These parts are all made out of high strength high temperature alloys that are a real sonofabitch to work with with complex geometries that would be a real sonofabitch to make using traditional techniques.
2. It has made some simple, low volume parts pretty easy to make. Because for most 3D printing, the object is effectively sliced into layers and each layer is just traced out and then scribbled inside the lines, this is really easy to do programmatically. Compared with having to have a machinist or a couple tool and die makers decide how to make it. Or carving up a wax master to make a mold to cast wax blanks to cast the part. All so you can make a handful of copies. The barriers to making simple, low volume parts is a lot lower.
If you are somewhere in the middle——making medium complexity or high volume parts using regular materials——you’re probably not going to see much impact, but you may end up with a couple of them in your factory in order to fab any of your tooling that fits into those categories.
Anybody that was saying that it would make factories, much less all professionally manufactured parts, obsolete was a moron. About as much of a moron as Long Blockchain Iced Tea was.
“SpaceX is 3D printing the Super Draco engine bell” – thanks for that info, I was unaware that 3D metal printing is actually useful for such tasks!
3-D printing is making big strides in industrial applications. And the hobbyist machines are following along fairly well within a niche community. The idea that they were going to go mainstream and that everyone was going to have their own “replicator” turned out to be (reasonably predictable) nonsense because,
A: 3-D printers capable of making even something as basic as e.g. a lawn sprinkler head are actually quite expensive, and most people don’t have much demand for pure plastic, and
B: Most people aren’t nerds, and
C: Amazon et al are really good at quickly delivering a broader diversity of professional-quality manufactured goods than most people can sort through, so “you can have something even more personally specialized than the most you-compatible thingamajig Amazon has to offer” isn’t really a selling point.
I have worked with a professional 3D printing shop that contracts for people that need custom parts in small batches. That people just want one of these things in their house isn’t really that likely. They are still pretty wasteful when it comes to resin or beads (whichever you are using) and a lot of the time you still need finishing on the product which is kinda annoying, and also they make a smell.
3d printers are just stupidly important for prototyping currently. Genuine world change already happened, you just did not notice because you are not a design engineer. They are not on track for replacing conventional manufacturing for anything we want more than about a hundred of, and I do not see that happening, pretty much ever.
3D printing seems to me to be in a similar place to computing in the 70s/80s. It’s a relatively mature technology which is used widely within specific industries to great effect, but it has yet to reach a point where it is cheep and accessible enough to be a product used by anything more than professionals and hobbyists.
status of these ‘hyped as game changing technologies’
The Weinersmiths have compiled a good overview.
Prediction markets just turned out to be much more complicated than anticipated. Here is a pretty in depth analysis by Zvi.
Having an arbiter for weird corner cases isn’t enough. Any time a dispute comes up that requires the arbiter you are going to have one side that becomes frustrated and is probably going to stop using your prediction market. If that happens enough, people are going to walk away preemptively.
What you need is someone that is responsible for figuring out every conceivable corner case beforehand and who pays out both parties if an undefined corner case does come up (as you can imagine this is a really tall order for most real world scenarios).
The other big stumbling block is that the domain for your prediction market needs to allow people with better insights to earn money from people with worse insights, but in a way that does not chase the latter group away from your market. This is, I think, one of the main reason prediction markets in sports and politics (and economics, but that one has a lot of other things going for it) work when those in other domains haven’t really taken of.
I don’t think 3D printers are ever going to achieve anything like what you describe here. They’re extremely useful for cases when you need to make one-offs or small-volume parts, and they’ve added a new tool to the arsenal of design engineers, allowing them to fabricate parts that were previously impossible to make. The latter is going to be mostly confined to the aerospace and biomedical industries for the foreseeable future. It’s just too expensive relative to other methods to see wide use.
It was at least 12 years ago that I heard people confidently predicting that 3D printing was about to take off as a home technology. That was stupid then and it remains stupid now: there will never be a widespread “everyone has a 3D printer at home” deal until and unless we’re in a crazy far-away situation where basically everything is unrecognizable. There’s just no reason to need to print your own stuff instead of buy higher-quality manufactured goods for the overwhelming majority of people. Home 3D printing is not fast, it’s not easy, it’s pretty much necessarily lower-quality than actual industrial processes, and it’s very limited in what it can make. Most people will always find that the flexibility that it provides is essentially useless, but the limitations it comes with are quite onerous.
Those are technological limitations that could well be resolved long before we’re in a crazy far-away situation where basically everything is unrecognizable.
If home 3d printers do ever get to the point where they are as easy to set up and use as a current day 2d printer I’d expect we’re going to see a lot of the current niche-ish uses become much more prevalent. Think custom cases for phones and other electronics, toys, improved/customized board game components, custom eating utensils and mugs (if the materials become food safe at some point), custom jewelry, etc.
At the moment all of that is limited by the materials being shitty, the printers needing a significant amount of tech-savyness and domain knowledge to operate and 3d models being limited by the material shittyness and by being designed only by people that have a lot of tech-savyness and domain knowledge. If we can take away those limitations (and, yes, that is very big if), there is no reason we can’t have 3d printers be as ubiquitous as their 2d counterparts (which of course still isn’t quite “everyone has a 3D printer at home”).
Incidentally, what fraction of households have a 2d printer any more? I feel like 15-20 years ago, most middle-class homes had a 2d printer, but these days they’re pretty uncommon. It’s possible that this is just an effect of my own stage of life, where I used to lack an office printer but now have one for the rare occasions when I need to print. But it feels like paper copies of things are much less useful than they used to be, so that many people might have gone through this transition.
We’ve got three, including a 24″ one. But that’s probably unusual.
We have a combination printer/scanner/copier.
This matches my observations as well. I think digital information became so much more easy to access and share that the need for having it on paper became much less.
I suppose they could become fast — but probably not as fast as delivery can become, and it’s a lot harder to make a home 3d printer that’s fast (without sacrificing other elements of it) than it is to scale up delivery.
They won’t become easy, especially to the extent that they’re fast and/or versatile. That’s a virtue that is strongly in tension with all other vectors they could possibly improve on.
They won’t become versatile, honestly first, because this is just hard enough that getting there necessarily means crazy advanced tech, but second because the fact that home “print anything” 3D printers are such an obviously bad product right now means that nobody who is really good at 3D printing is investing in home “print anything” printers — they’re investing in industrial specialist tools, which don’t need to print anything.
3D Printing: make whatever you want, so long as you are fine with things that are made out of shit.
Prediction Markets: stock exchanges do what they do, faster.
Blockchains: Eliminate some scams, facilitate others.
Verdict: one of these hyped technologies is marginally useful. Seriously, that’s a win!
When Robin Hanson invented prediction markets, the idea was to do the same thing stock exchanges do but set it up to generate information that stock exchanges were not generating.
A rare case where the “you will never find a $20 dollar bill on the pavement” adage actually applies.
I appreciate the replies, but I think people in this thread are being a little too bearish on 3D printers, and specifically are just overgeneralizing from the home ones they may know of. 3D printing is being actively used in advanced manufacturing- SpaceX not only built a rocket engine with one, but has successfully flown it into orbit! I think ‘printing is just for cheap quality plastic stuff’ is being a bit overdone.
https://www.3dprintingmedia.network/spacexs-dragon-spacecraft-with-3d-printed-superdraco-engines-will-take-astronauts-around-moon-in-2018/
For the next dramatic escalation in the US culture wars (wait can we talk about culture war in this thread? I’m terrible at knowing which is which)- I predict people will start printing guns at home, or at least in a regional illegal factory. (Like, ‘this is the Northern Illinois militia chapter underground armory, we print all the guns for the resistance to the AOC administration in this sector’, etc.) Yes I know it’s already a thing with cheap, one-shot plastic guns, but we all know how technology advances…. (Also, imagine if you could print your own ammo- would be a game changer as well, don’t need centralized supply chains to stay armed & ready to fight)
I actually saw some stuff recently about a very clever way of using 3D printing to make a rifled barrel, as part of a way of making a semi-auto carbine (FGC-9) using no parts that are classified in Europe as gun parts.
The barrel itself isn’t 3d printed, of course. What is printed is a plastic rod with a spiral groove around it. Wind a wire in the groove, drill out the barrel, insert the rod, use electrochemical machining to cut the rifling grooves.
Everyone else is well aware of that stuff. I toured SpaceX’s facility a couple years ago, and got to hold one of those parts. It was seriously impressive, because I knew they couldn’t have made it any other way. But that is why they made it using 3D printing, and the aerospace industry is at a way different spot on the price-performance curve than basically everyone else. $1000 bolts aren’t uncommon on airplanes, but you never see them anywhere else, except medical equipment (another market for 3D printing). Metal 3D printers are and will remain expensive, because metal is a lot harder to work than plastic. And it’s always going to be cheaper to produce bulk metal goods with conventional means, even at home. There are a reasonable number of home machinists capable of making guns themselves. It’s just that nobody talks about them, and their equipment is certainly cheaper than a good 3D printer.
The project I described was claimed to cost $300, including the cost of the printer.
The problem there is that you need time and skills that go a long way to putting it in the same “serious hobbyist” category that conventional homemade guns fall into. It sounds like a cool technical exercise, but it’s a long way from the “everyone can print guns in their basement” dreams of a lot of gun/3D printing enthusiasts.
I think that 3D printers will continue to increase in use and importance in industrial settings, and I think they will eventually become a big part of manufacturing as well. I don’t think that they will move much beyond the hobbyist market for home use though. The issue is that when you look around your house at the consumer goods that you have, most are made up of a bunch of different pieces, and have a bunch of different materials. So, you will either have to make all the parts separately and assemble it yourself (which I don’t see getting widespread use), or you will need a 3d printer that can print multiple different types of materials with enough accuracy to be able to make something like an integrated circuit (which I assume we are many years away from being able to do). There just aren’t that many finished items that you could make with a 3D printer that will make owning one a necessity.
3D printing is a useful industrial tool (in specific areas of industry). It’s a terrible home technology.
Ankle replacement surgery has become much more widespread & successful lately with the use of 3D printed parts. Although partial ankle replacements have been possible since the 70s, they weren’t often done due to high failure rates and difficulty fitting the implants (there’s ahigh degree of individual variation in all of those fiddly little ankle bones). I know this because my father recently got one. It went great and he’s looking forward to getting his second one as soon as the plague has settled down.
AUIU from Hanson a couple of years back, prediction markets require subsidies (or some equivalent).
Welcome the grand opening of Chang & Watson Enterprises, purveyors of exotic wonders from ancient Atlantis to near-future Japan for the discerning customer. Today’s auction consists of a single item. Here we have, quite simply, an off-switch for the libido. Imagine the serenity of simply turning off the howl of countless generations clamoring for descendants. Imagine how much you’ll get done without constantly thinking about sex. And of course this off-switch is also an on-switch, when you are ready to get back in the pool.
Let’s start the bidding at 1000 euro, or 1100 American dollars. Who will give me 1000 euro for this wonder?
I’ll give you 1000 euro to receive this device, attach it to someone else, test its function on this person, and make detailed observations. I expect to document clear evidence of Ironic Plot-Driving Consequences within a week.
Yes, you could definitely hang a mid-budget sex comedy off this device.
Did Shakespeare by any chance get there before us? Does anyone in the plays ever give anyone an anti-love-potion?
Meh, I’m old.
I’ll happily give you several thousand for this thing, because there’s a billionaire somewhere who really wants it.
I see your bid, sir. Thank you.
We have a bid of several thousand euro. Who will give me five thousand, to make the dangly bits shut up for once?
Just to clarify, is this a personal-use device, or does it have an AoE radius (and if so, what’s the radius) ?
It’s an implanted device, sort of like a tiny pacemaker. There’s an external control pad that can communicate with it to receive status information and turn the device on and off. The control pad is applied to the skin just above the device.
Well then, I bid $10,000, because I believe that, given enough time and money, I can reverse-engineer this thing; mass-produce it; sell it for $100/unit; and retire a millionaire.
Damn. I would have gladly bid 1000, was considering 5000, but I’m still making money in Easter European currency and 10k is out of my range. For the record, I just want it because it’s damn useful – for both settings.
For his wife?
Seems the opposite. Billionaires start taking testosterone.
I’ve had this “power”, and you’re telling me that I was supposed to use it for something productive, and not just spending more time playing video games?
Well, I’d guess you were supposed to use it for something other than getting married…
The quest to find the switch for it was interesting, to say the least…
I predict the on-switch would never be used.
My husband had a friend who was prescribed testosterone orally because of bits removed on account of cancer. Apparently he *did* choose to abstain because he preferred the calm.
Why can’t the United States simply outsource the CDC/FDA pandemic response to actually competent countries like Taiwan?
We spend about $12 billion per year in non emergency situations on the CDC. This bought us….nothing..charitably. More realistically the CDC has been an actual net value add for pandemic response. Same with the FDA. Threatening Dr Helen Chu, shutting down PCR testing, etc etc.
No masks, no ventilators, no respirators, no gowns, and apparently no pandemic plan even though it’s basically a more virulent but less lethal reboot of the SARS epidemic from 16 years ago.
Taiwan spends about $200 million per year for their CDC, about 1/60th of our negative value add CDC. Apparently that enables them to have a strategic reserve of PPE, an aggressive pandemic response plan to include “test and trace”, and fact based decision making in real time from their CDC and FDA bureaucrats.
Why can’t we simply pay them an extra $4 billion per year and have our policy outsourced to a non banana republic government ??
For the same reason we don’t outsource the rest of our government to Taiwan.
Also, the CDC does a lot more than just pandemic response. Ever wonder whether screening newborns for PKU is cost effective? Probably not, but people at the CDC did.
Just maybe,it matters to these kinds of things how well the executive branch is functioning as whole.
And all this worked so well that the 2009 pandemic H1N1 “swine” flu was not at all stopped, and in fact the prevalent strain of flu circulating RIGHT NOW is “influenza A(H1N1)pdm09”.
Well functioning is blowing through the entire strategic stockpile of PPE set up in 2006 and refusing to restock it for 11 consecutive years (2009-2020?) But regardless..
It looks much more like the Swine flu was simply much less virulent and therefore less dangerous, rather than the exact same career bureaucrats in the Executive branch becoming magically less competent.
That’s not logical.
To Loriot: how do the CDC guidelines compare to a real country? Does the ROC CDC not recommend screening? Or is this simply an overlap with the NIH conducting clinical research?
I’m focused on pandemic response, that’s the priority mission of the CDC. And if it’s not, it’s one more reason to outsource the entire thing to a competent government.
The CDC is a large agency, with a broad mandate. You can see just how broad from this org chart:
https://www.cdc.gov/about/organization/cio-orgcharts/cdc.html
The CDC has a substantial office that deals with birth defects. There’s another that deals with workplace accidents.
The official mission statement names but does not prioritize various goals. If we are inclined to judge priorities by placement, pandemic response comes at the start of paragraph three (“CDC is responsible for controlling the introduction and spread of infectious diseases”), after five named priorities in paragraph two.
https://www.cdc.gov/about/organization/cio-orgcharts/pdfs/CDCfs-508.pdf
Judging by these documents, pandemic response is one of the priorities of the CDC, but not the main one.
Remember that the CDC is part of the New World Order of the Illuminati!
https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/no-slug/dba38425ffa36acc1961663de8af5fd5.jpg
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.
What?
@Le Maistre Chat
>> UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.
> What?
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Samples of McElwaine’s writings are here:
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Yeah, but that is a problem in itself. It’s one classical failure mode for bureaucracies – get big, get fuzzy, get inefficient, get in the way.
Yeah, I know two employees that got prestigious jobs at the CDC, and when I ask about pandemic preparedness, it became clear they didn’t want to go anywhere near that department. They had the attitude that it sat around twiddling it’s thumbs to prepare for a boogeyman that would never come. I think the CDC has a culture in general that funnels it’s best and brightest into the departments that make headline news, now. I’m sure the best and brightest are now detailed to pandemic preparedness, but it’s too little too late. At least this crisis is bad enough, I expect there to be a CDC culture shift that will allow them to be ready for the next one.
…which will turn out to be unimpressive and then people will leave again for more prestigious postings.
There’s another that deals with workplace accidents.
OSHA isn’t enough?
The whitewashing of that incident continues apace.
In many ways Obama was a master politician. He was not a great leader of the executive in any fashion. His greatest skill in that role was eluding culpability for things he clearly wanted done but had not issued any direct order to do. This skill, of course, is only available to people who’s views generally align with the majority of the civil service, and his did.
Regan had it, and his views weren’t all that closely aligned with the civil service. You’re generalizing far too much from one data point.
How long does it take to restock a supply of PPE? This is a genuine question because I don’t know the answer.
Maybe Obama fucked up on this. Or maybe he counted on competent successors who, when their own head of HHS asks for $2 billion to be spent to build up supplies on February 5th, doesn’t have their request delayed by the White House for weeks and made much smaller.
The US has the ability to bring tremendous capacity online quickly, but there are lead times.
Regan’s errors were, indeed, located in the part of the service that aligned with him. Or do you think Ollie has been faking it for 4 decades?
Now, the CIA and Pentagon has swung left pretty hard in recent times, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t conservative in the 80s.
Does that include the air traffic controllers?
Reagan was, broadly and generally, good at this. The claim that Republicans cannot be good at this because the Deep State(tm) won’t let them, is not supported by the evidence. You all just chose the wrong Republican this time – assuming the guy you chose is a Republican in anything but name.
Didn’t he have to fire the air traffic controllers? But I have no solid evidence about the politics of air traffic controllers.
Regan was a good manager at some things, and I am too young to actually have been alive when he was actually bungling things or executing them perfectly. I know there is that hilarious SNL skit which seems to imply that the left thought he was horribly incompetent (the joke of the skit is that he is a master manager on top of everything).
But when I look at the historic record, Regan appears to me not very good at getting away with things.
Are you people referring to Don Regan or Ronald Reagan?
Ronald of course, who I was coying John’s spelling of because I have extremely low confidence in my spelling prowess.
I probably could have been Valedictorian in HS if I was a good speller.
If executive competency was a deciding factor wouldn’t all the countries run by the technocratic heroes like Macron, Merkel, Sanchez, all have similar and very low crises levels?
Seems to me as evidence rolls in, the government appears to be less and less likely to be a strong factor of severity, and the country’s culture gaining lots of ground. This is even showing up in the inter-state stats in the US.
Does SF vs NYC count as a culture difference or a difference in government competence?
Anyway, the fact that none of the Western European countries seem to have gotten a lid on things definitely makes me more pessimistic. Maybe it is ubiquitous mask wearing, previous experience with SARS, and a complete disregard for privacy that really mattered.
If you are like me, and think politics is downstream of culture, you would expect it to be culture 1, and the response 2. And I think that is true with SF-NY. SF’s greatest risk was from the West and that got locked down earlier. Plus they have a high asian population that actually has strong influence (silicone valley in particular) while NY is much more old school. IN addition SF’s tech influence meant that most people already were advocating for telework (or doing it) last year, whereas NY is at its heart a smush people together city. This reflects in their leaders. DeBlasio is a smusher and also an agitator (which doesn’t help at a time like this), Breed talk the talk, but at heart is kind of a Guliani. Before becoming mayor she worked to increase police and the like.
All that said, the west coast is lucky it isn’t NYC, but all the small things seem to affect C-19
Don’t read too much into it. Decisions made by one person are hardly statistically relevant.
Maybe what makes someone a technocratic hero in the west has very literal to do with actual competence.
When I hear technocratic competence I think Lee Kuan Yew not Angela Merkel.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t make his argument at all. If all the politicians in the West aren’t very good at technocracy, that means its an unworkable political model, not that if only Hillary had won we would have a clean disease free nation.
It looks to me like the response to COVID-19 is about the same as H1N1. We declared a public health emergency on January 31. The FDA approved the CDC test for Coronavirus on Feb 4, and by Feb 8, people had the test.
Just like H1N1, no private labs were able to develop their own tests, because (a) you need FDA approval and (b) a public health emergency actually makes it harder for labs to perform their own tests.
The H1N1 response didn’t stop community spread, and this time, the CDC playbook was disastrously worse because the CDC test didn’t work and US law, operating as designed, prevents private testing during a public health emergency.
I think it makes a lot of sense to look at our pandemic response and change it. Trump certainly hasn’t been a help (other than the China travel ban), but the biggest problem is that our pandemic response, as designed, just isn’t as good as many South Asian countries.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-testing-specialrep/special-report-how-korea-trounced-u-s-in-race-to-test-people-for-coronavirus-idUSKBN2153BW
If we get it under control in the US, but it’s still out of control elsewhere, we’re going to need to end up with much more stringent border controls and restrictions on coming to the US. This will look a lot like Trump winning, and that will have all the political consequences that follow.
Are you for real? Things just don’t work this way. There is no way the American government would tolerate having a foreign government operating on American soil and directly serving the American people. Put that out of your mind.
The options here, the real options, are having the CDC do it, having some other part of the federal government do it, leaving it to states or municipalities, having some sort of major NGO like the Red Cross do it, or not having it done at all.
For that matter, if you do outsource it to a foreign government they will predictably – and properly – spend most of your money on stuff that’s more beneficial to their people than your own. And if you give them any sort of regulatory or enforcement power over Americans, they will be incentivized to apply it approximately 100% towards “won’t be blamed for failing to carry out their core mission” and 0% “respect silly American ideas of due process and civil liberties”.
If you have American bureaucrats watching over their shoulder to make them not do that, congratulations, you’ve just reduced the problem to one previously abandoned as insolvable, but with an extra layer of middlemen before you get results.
The exact same argument applies against outsourcing your needs to your own government. For example, if you give your government any sort of regulatory or enforcement power over you, they will be incentivized to apply it approximately 100% towards “won’t be blamed for failing to carry out their core mission” and 0% “respect your silly ideas of due process and civil liberties”. And this is exactly what’s happening.
Hold on now, the democratic process counts for something. Agencies are accountable to the elected representatives, and the citizenry can and does change who it elects.
Isn’t that opposed by the whole concept of
the deep statepermanent government?@johan_larson
So who do you need to vote for in order to abolish the FDA? the Fed? to stop the spying on the citizens? to end the bombing of [insert a country]?
If enough people cared about those issues above all else, there would be candidates advocating those positions.
My hope is that this whole situation is teaching Trump (and future aspiring Presidents) that they need to pay a whole lot more attention to the entrenched bureaucracy than they previously might have, because failing to reign it in will result in horrible outcomes that the elected leader will be blamed for.
Voting for the Libertarian candidate, whoever he is, won’t get him elected and do all those things, but if a noticeable number of people vote for him that will signal politicians in the major parties that they might get votes by shifting their position a little in the direction of the LP policies.
There are individual Republican and Democratic politicians you could vote for to send a similar message.
Do you think Trump or his appointees think the FDA should STILL be forbidding people from making effective hand sanitizer because they can’t denude it?
What steps are they taking?
Trump is in charge of a big machine and maybe he doesn’t know the right levers to pull. Maybe he needs Congress’s help. Is he trying to get it? Has he asked his Cabinet how to change this?
The czar can exile any one bureaucrat to Siberia, but he can’t govern Russia without the bureaucracy.
Yeah. It’s kind of tricky here. Can Trump fire the head of the FDA? Sure. Can he find someone any time soon to replace them who is both plausibly qualified and won’t make the exact same sort of decisions the last guy did?
Probably not.
This has been a continuous struggle throughout the Trump administration at all levels. It’s basically impossible to find anyone “qualified” (typically defined as experienced) who also agrees with Trump on much of anything at all. So he has to choose between leaving positions vacant, filling them with people who don’t seem qualified (which entails a PR hit as the press jumps all over it), or filling them with the next swamp creature in line (who will proceed to do the exact same crap the last guy was doing).
@Matt M
This is kind of the same problem I believe I’ve read that Jimmy Carter had.
It would have been a heck of a lot easier for a conventional Republican to replace the high-level bureaucrats with conservatives, but Trump isn’t a conservative, and is effectively as much a Republican as Bernie Sanders is a Democrat.
The more I look at politics the more I like the idea of multi-party election systems. In those the more minor parties have developed networks of “experts” (not talking heads, but subject-matter experts) who also have managerial experience.
@DavidFriedman
This model assumes that votes are all a politician wants. But what if a politician wants to get corrupted instead? If a politician knows that becoming a libertarian will increase his chance to get elected 5% but decrease his income from “lobbying” by 10%, then it’s not worth it for him. And if the libertarians would put a lot of effort to increase that 5% to 6%, the outcome will still be the same.
Thus I believe that geographical concentration (as in New Hampshire) is necessary to get a nonzero result.
Plus, even if Trump orders a change, the FDA can delay compliance for quite a while.
That’s what I don’t believe.
In normal times, yes, the permanent government can resist a lot of change. And if the FDA was simply ordered to stop enforcing this rule, pushback from the rank-and-file would be expected and possibly even good, because Chesterson.
But if the FDA were refusing to allow people to make hand sanitizer the easy way, and Trump said “let them do it,” would anyone, in this time when National Emergency is part of the Common Knowledge, really refuse just because?
I can see someone further down the hierarchy saying “wait, hol up, I know that sounds like a good idea, but it’s not because REASON, let’s talk” and maybe we need some moderate solution instead of either complete BaU or complete open season.
So it kind of matters exactly what regulation on business Trump is trying to disable, and what steps he is taking to try to disable it. It’s why I wondered what a specific case was.
@Edward
What country have you been in since November 2016? There have been many instances of exactly that in other agencies. And its not like the media would just stop celebrating resistance actors because corona. It would be the same story as the fish cleaner drinkers, just with an FDA employee as the anti-Trump hero.
It’s why I wondered what a specific case was, because it matters what regulation he’s trying to get rid of, and what problems he’s having getting rid of it.
I would expect one or two iterations of “boss says do X, subject-matter-expert employee says we can’t do X because Y” and then a resolution.
The more common scenario is:
Boss Says do X.
Person says, can’t because (reason).
Boss says do it anyway.
Person says, “sure boss”. Proceeds to do not X.
Boss asks when it will be done, some time in the vague future is stated. Repeat until person finally does it, or is fired and become a media hero.
I am going to ask in bold because I’m not getting an answer otherwise.
What is the specific case we’re talking about? What red tape is Trump trying to get rid of currently?
We’re talking about policy, right? I don’t think this is that farfetched at all. There’s a large arbitrage opportunity due to our government’s complete incompetence.
How is this fundamentally different from banana republics’ use of the American dollar?
They’re too incompetent to have a functioning monetary policy so instead they outsource it to the United States Federal Reserve.
At the minimum our pandemic policy could be outsourced to a functioning government like Taiwan’s CDC.
Just mirroring the decisions they have made so far vis-à-vis stockpiling, advising all citizens to wear masks, closing the borders and “track and trace” would have saved thousands of lives.
Using dollars in your economy just requires one person who has dollars and another person willing to accept them. It doesn’t even necessarily need government involvement, just an individual deciding that they’d rather carry around a wallet full of USD instead of a wheelbarrow full of Zimbabwean dollars.
Giving another country the authority to write your health care policy (and possibly police policy, as pandemic response usually needs some teeth behind it) is considerably more complicated.
What beleester said. Go ahead and copy-paste the Taiwanese policies. If you’re really lazy, don’t bother copy-pasting them and just say “The Taiwanese anti-pandemic policies are valid here; please find-replace their agencies XYZ with our agencies ABC.” That would be equivalent to other countries’ using the US Dollar.
(In fact, please do that. Or just abolish the CDC and arrest all its chain of command for 2,510 counts of negligent homicide.)
Actually inviting in Taiwanese bureaucrats is far more invasive. Maybe it’d be a good thing if our CDC is really that incompetent, but it’s even less likely to happen.
The only people who actually know what the Taiwanese policies are, are the Taiwanese bureaucrats. And that’s not unique to Taiwan; no bureaucracy actually writes down all or even most of its policies, and some of the things they write down under “these are our policies” are tacitly not their policies.
It’s also the only way to implement Taiwanese policies in the United States in less than a decade. If you just tell American bureaucrats to implement Taiwanese policies, you get something very different. And, I suspect, the worst of both worlds.
I suppose this leaves out the obvious solution of not being banana republic level corrupt in the first place. Or perhaps maybe the right walking back some of their overblown self-justifying rhetoric about governments never being able to do anything right. Underfund and appoint unqualified cronies is a great way to watch anything fail.
I expect some sort of review and restructuring of the CDC and pandemic response systems in general after the dust settles. There was, to say the least, room to do better.
This isn’t logical.
Taiwan’s CDC budget is about $200 million. The US CDC budget is $12 billion. So it’s not an issue of funds. In fact its funding has increased YoY for…quite a few years.
It’s also not “under qualified cronies” making the decisions that will soon inevitably lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans.
Threatening Dr. Helen Chu, this was career bureaucrats. Botching the test kits, this was career bureaucrats. Not recommending immediate shut down of flights, this was career bureaucrats. Not recommending mandatory quarantine of travelers, this was career bureaucrats. Recommending people to not wear masks or N95 respirators, this was career bureaucrats.
Sure, the thought experiment of outsourcing pandemic decision making to a competent country is extreme, that’s the entire point of the thought experiment.
Is it policies on a page?
Is it wargaming?
Is it strategy?
Is it a culture of accountability for both action and inaction?
Is it a lack of pervasive rent seeking?
ummm…
User_Riott, the year-to-year operating budget simply does not reflect this: https://mises.org/wire/cdcs-budget-larger-now-under-obama
(Yes the source I’m using is probably biased, no, that doesn’t matter because they cite their numbers).
Do you happen to know what fraction of current CDC employees were hired after Trump became president? Your argument appears to assume that it was large. My guess, from the general pattern of government employment, would be that most of them were hired under previous administrations.
I assumed they are not speaking to the organization being full of unqualified cronies, simply that they are lead by appointees who are unqualified cronies. Cutting the head off the snake speaks to the importance of leaders, but maybe you can’t easily cut the head off the CDC snake, so instead you…transplant..its head…with a mongoose? Sorry that metaphor really got away from me.
This assumes that the previous appointees were not also unqualified cronies. Anyone have data either way?
I’m not sure how many appointees would be left from four years ago. My guess is that the bulk of the CDC is career technocrats, with a few political appointees at the top that change with every administration.
In general I was referring to the guy who wanted to solve AIDS in Africa with Abstinence only, who leads the org now under Trump. I do remember reading somewhere that conflicts with him forced lots of long timers out, and he was just sitting on something like 700 open job listings when the virus hit.
You say this as if a low % of people there hired by Trump exonarated him, instead of showing he removed people and left a disorganized unit?
I think it would be tough to translate what they did to the US, no matter what their competence level is.
Governments dont run on money. They run on idealism. – that is, you get competent bureaucrats because someone who could make a pile in industry or trade decided making a difference was more important than making more money.
The US has a really unfortunate idea that the government is inherently incompetent, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy to a scary extent because it cuts way down on the number of such idealists the US governments gets.
That said, the CDC is a small enough, and keystone enough agency that it really should attract enough of them, even taking into account the previous paragraph. So… maybe review hiring protocols?
if this was a unique US problem shouldn’t all of Europe, or at least a majority, be covering itself in glory right now? Its not, they all appear to be doing as bad or worse than us.
Do you think this is the view of the class of 2018 Harvard graduates?
Those here who are believers frequently object to what they think are unfair characterizations of theists, especially Christians.
I think perhaps you are either unexposed to the broad charismatic movements (possibly semi-willfully unaware), or think that these believers are somehow irrelevant to any discussion.
But Charismatics make up about 36% of American Christians, Catholics and Protestants alike.
And this is the kind of messaging coming out of many of those ministries. Ministers claiming to have ended the current pandemic.
Evaporative effect? Regardless…
Your stats define “charismatics” as Pentecostals + others. Neat trick, but you’ve defined the entirety of the African American community as “charismatics.”
If conservatively 20% of the Christian community is African American you’ve solved your own statistics puzzle.
Again, 36% of American Catholics are charismatics. This isn’t simply limited to the African American Churches.
And it’s not a “statistical puzzle”, it’s simply a statement that these believers exist, and in great numbers. No true Scotsman doesn’t cut it.
This doesn’t imply, in any way, that one can assume The Christian Faith impales charismatic beliefs. But neither can you dismiss the existence of the charismatics.
HBC:
Are there people with silly, counterproductive beliefs among my religion (Catholicism)? Yep, absolutely. Also among people in my state and country, my social class, and my racial group. I’m not really clear what I’m supposed to learn about that, though.
FWIW, the Church hierarchy where I live, including my own parish, has taken the pandemic very seriously, including shutting down Masses and all other Church gatherings and giving everyone a dispensation to just watch Mass on TV every Sunday. We did that about the same time as the local governments shut down the schools; earlier, we’d started altering our normal practices to decrease risk of spreading the disease.
I know that’s not as much fun as finding someone being an idiot on TV and laughing at him, but it’s probably relevant to understanding how Catholics in Maryland are responding to the crisis.
We’ve also prayed for a quick end to the pandemic. I guess if you’re looking for something to point and laugh at, that’ll work. But I’ll admit, I don’t get the point.
I’m not looking to “point and laugh” at anyone. A good chunk of one side of my family are charismatic Catholics.
What I’m simply saying is, when it comes to questions like “ Does the kind of belief have impact on things like public policy”, you can’t simply deny the existence of these beliefs. That denial, frequently in a high state of outrage, is not an uncommon tactic here.
Again, it in no way implies that churches can’t or don’t take differing views.
This is simply one opportunity to establish that these beliefs exist (and are in fact mainstream in many communities.)
That might be true, but a single example of one preacher does not establish it.
How many examples do you need? References?
You are taking quite a tone for someone who isn’t familiar with the religious tradition referenced.
Now you’ve switched from “some Christians believe nutty things” which I’ll grant you, to “the nutty things Christians believe impact policy,” for which you’ve provided no evidence.
Who’s denying it? Were people in past threads denying it? No one here is. You speak with such vagueness about past discussions that I don’t know who you’re trying to contradict.
Are we prentending America’s huge fight against abortion isn’t driven largely by christians?
@JPNunez: It being nutty to save the lives of the most vulnerable H. sapiens around us seems like a very subjective value judgment.
Opposition to abortion is correlated strongly with Christianity, but it’s far from a fringe position, and AFAIK has hovered around 50% agreement for a long time (if you allow for the way Americans answer very differently depending on how you phrase the poll question). As the country grew less religious, public opinion shifted on gay marriage, contraception, etc. It doesn’t seem to have moved very far on abortion.
Regardless of how you feel about abortion, pretending that christians don’t impact policy is at best, naive.
America is still largely christian; call me back in a few years when christianity has fallen below 40% to see what’s the overall position on abortion then.
Gay marriage is another (prolly better) example.
A high percentage of self-identified American Christians are largely nominal–cultural Catholics, for example–and go to church twice a year if at all. The rise of the “nones” in the last decade or so was due to larger numbers of people dropping the pretense, but some of them are still hanging on as non-affiliated, spiritual-but-not-religious, etc. These are the people who are going to be perfectly okay with abandoning basically all aspects of traditional sexual morality in spite of scripture and tradition being quite clear on the matter. But the average American is still queasy at best about abortion. That means something.
Thinking extramarital sex is immoral is now a fringe position–and it does not drive public policy in any significant way. Nobody really bats an eye at teenage girls buying contraceptives now, and if they do they’re cranks. Thinking abortion is immoral, while not exactly a majority view, is not at all a fringe position, and public policy reflects that; if it weren’t for Roe v. Wade, abortion would be illegal or very harshly restricted in half the country right now. As it is, it’s increasingly frustrating and difficult to access in those states–and that’s not driven purely by a relatively small fraction of fringe zealots.
100% of American citizens are human. You linked to a video of a human pronouncing a magic spell against Covid. So you cannot object that it is unfair to describe Americans as crazy.
You have offered evidence that one charismatic Christian said something crazy. That does not tell us whether 36% of Christians are crazy, or 1%, or .000001%
I would say way more than .000001% of poor Christians are vulnerable to this sort of crazy, though I’m agnostic (hur hur) on what percect are crazy not just in potentiality.
And some Muslims lick the tombs or relics of holy Muslims when they think medical science is failing them. It’s not a particularly Christian kind of crazy.
I very specifically did not describe Christian’s as crazy. I didn’t even describe Charismatics as “crazy”.
On the other hand, Charismatic Christian beliefs can be characterized as follows:
Do you know anything, anything at all, about the tradition of faith healing in the US?
I would say it’s not a particularly religious kind of crazy. There are a lot of people out there thinking that any number of strange things will cure their diseases, religion not needed.
Yes.
But not a lot.
Well then, maybe you shouldn’t so impugn me, by accusing me of unwarranted statements, as your knowledge is lacking.
Do you know anything, anything at all, about the tradition of faith healing in the US?
Not for the US as such, but I do know a metric crapton about the mix of folk religion and relicts of pre-Christian practices handed down as charms in Irish Catholicism.
While it’s true that the location of fairy bushes can divert the course of roads, I can’t say that public health (or other) policy is being created under the pressure of “use the Brat Bríde in hospitals”, (I was told my maternal grandfather had great faith in the Brat Bríde), indeed it seems that by the most recent speech from the Taoiseach, it’s The Terminator that’s the big influence.
There were also the beliefs in the powers of the seventh son of a seventh son, such as Finbar Nolan. Or hanging bits of cloth on a sceách, which is a tradition that also gets entangled with holy wells.
And all this is long, long before we get to official and sanctioned Church prayers for healing or relief from disasters.
On the other hand, how many of those charismatics practice the pseudomagical “name-it-and-claim-it” heresy you’re talking about? Some years back, I visited for several weeks a very large Pentacostal church in North Carolina which didn’t do anything like that but preached from the Bible very much like any other church I’ve been to. I have friends who went there longer, and they back up this description. They did talk about speaking in tongues and expecting the possibility of miracles. But when I asked for prayer for my broken foot, the minister just prayed with me like at any other church. (And my foot healed on the normal schedule several weeks later.)
I agreed and still agree with every word that church said. For theological reasons, I believe miraculous healings happen. I’ve heard a few stories about healings that sound plausible to me, but nothing that’d satisfy a skeptic. We can ask God for them, but we can’t make demands that He show up on schedule for our experiment. But if a pollster or pastor asks me, I’ll answer “yes, they happen.”
I don’t disagree; the heresy you’re talking about is out there. I’ve never personally encountered it save a couple online posts. Maybe it’s really popular and the way I find churches and make friends filters it out like dark matter. But maybe it isn’t. What I know is, if surveys want to ask about things like it, they need to use some better questions than “are you a Pentacostal? Do you believe miracles occasionally happen today?”
Okay, why the hell not? Since we’re already bored of The Plague, let’s re-fight the Wars of Religion!
Now, for one thing, the Charismatic movement within Catholicism is something slightly different to its Protestant inspirations. For another, we’re now into third-wave Charismatic movements, of which the televangelist in the linked clip is one example. For a third, Pentecostalism and its ilk and Charismatic Movement of the 60s are slightly different in important ways.
I’d say that the peak of Charismatic movment (the second wave) within global Catholicism hit in the 80s and in the West then declined throughout the 90s. I can’t speak for the Global South but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was thriving (and cross-fertilising with Pentecostalism) in Latin America and Africa, given the huge inroads that various Evangelical Protestant movements are making in those places, as is the Prosperity Gospel and wilder and weirder syncreticism.
For a fourth thing, the American versions of Christianity always tend to the extremes of both liberalism and extreme Sola Scriptura ‘our denomination split and split and split until anyway today our church is six persons and a dog’ churches/non-denominational faith communities.
Anyways, our pal in the linked clip – whom I had to look up, not being familiar with every single American preacher – is linked to both the third wave Neo-Charismatics and the Word of Faith/Prosperity Gospel movement.
The Prosperity Gospel stuff is controversial and problematic, and the extremes of both have always claimed faith healing and personal struggles with demons and devils. So casting out the demon of COVID-19 or otherwise declaring victory over it is nothing novel.
For a fifth thing, the popular theological language developed in such non-denominational small-r “reformed” churches and their derivatives is extremely extravagant and unless you are versed in such speech it does sound – even to other Christians not of the same tradition, much less to secular outsiders – like shamans invoking magic spells. GetReligion has a very helpful article on this, from a story about Hobby Lobby in the current time, where the reporter from outside presents the story in a particular way but, once you know the code of the language, is much less “This nutcase thinks God is personally talking to him and/or his wife”( And Hobby Lobby people use evangelical insider language (“prayer warrior”) that turns some (repeat “some”) journalists into pillars of salt.). Myself, I think it’s a case of the ripples still spreading throughout time from the Reformation; once a lot of the priestly powers had been stripped away (because “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” and no mortals may interpose themselves), yet over time it all crept back in so that ministers and pastors and leaders of churches put new names on it and cast it in new language but abrogated the same powers to themselves for blessings and cursings (I am constantly amused every single time by the African-American pastor who set up his own non-denominational church and decided to call himself “Bishop” on the grounds that it’s Scriptural language – see “overseer” – and of course, it’s a very impressive title, much more impressive and important than simply being yet another “Reverend” or “Pastor”. Never mind that the denominations that were the ancestors of his strain of ministry resoundingly rejected such titles on theological grounds about ‘no priests, every believer approaches God directly’ or that he’s in no way a bishop by any measure of apostolic succession – you can’t just decide “I’m a bishop!” any more than you can decide “I’m a cardinal!” or “I’m Pope!” – it sure sounds good doesn’t it?).
So what you’re doing is the equivalent of “A bishop said this!” “Bishop who?” “Bishop Jakes!” “Yeah, he’s not a bishop” “But he’s a Christian minister and he says he’s a bishop, so you guys have to believe the same things as he does!” “What part of ‘he’s not a bishop and I’m not Protestant’ don’t you understand?”
For sixthly, heresy is also a thing, you know? “Wow guys, get a load of this thing those weirdo Christians just said!” may only apply to “a small percentage of global and historic Christianity from an exclusively American setting where many more traditional Christians would call this improper theology at best and heresy at worst”.
If anybody puts together a “congratulations on becoming an American citizen” grab bag, I’m convinced it should have a “found your own religion” starter-pack.
“that turns some (repeat “some”) journalists into pillars of salt.”
This would be a useful technology.
I’m a Christian, but I’ll take that ball and run with it.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/03/27/pastor-im-holding-services-because-i-have-machines-that-shoot-down-viruses/
UV lamps? Would fit. Though from what I understand those that would actually kill viruses are also harmful to human skin. But that would just make him uninformed, not crazy.
222nm UV light (as produced by Kr-Cl excimer lamps) is very effective at killing viruses, but appears to have very little effect on human skin or eyes (it is absorbed so well that it can’t make it through the outer dead layer of skin, or even all the way from the outside of a eukaryotic cell to the nucleus where the vulnerable nucleic acids are). There are a couple of companies making these in small quantities, but they are not actually FDA approved for use around humans.
Most infection is believed to be caused by droplets. 222 nm presumably wouldn’t affect a virus in a droplet, because the surrounding water would shield the virus.
Light at these wavelengths has been demonstrated to inactivate viruses in ~1 micron (“aerosol”) droplets. I don’t know about 5-50 micron “large droplets” – you might be right that absorption would be a problem. In any case I don’t actually think it’s realistic that a UV light is going to protect you much if someone coughs directly in your face – even without absorption how much of a dose is there going to be in the very short interval the droplet is in the air? That’s what masks are for. But if these lights are safe they could realistically inactivate fomites and aerosols (and there is some evidence that aerosol transmission is an issue outside of hospital procedures – it’s hard for example to explain the choir superspreading event any other way).
Oh, and that guy was in the Oval Office at some point during the Trump administration.
They’re not irrelevant, but what do you want? The charismatic movement is a Christianity of global poverty.
Back when the Episcopalian vs. Third World Culture War broke out in the Anglican Communion, Philip Jenkins did some interesting journalism talking about how the typical African Anglican identifies as Charismatic and Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical.
At least in the Catholic Church, claims of healing miracles are tightly regulated by the episcopate and Roman curia, so you don’t get ministries like this authoritatively expressing or exploiting the thoughts and fears of poor theists toward disease.
You still have plenty of lay Catholic speaking in tongues and praying for direct intercession. Plus, since you brought up the link between poverty and charismatics, I’d guess that “poor Catholic” is sort of the evergreen of fastest growing segment of the US Catholic population. It’s not like the Irish or the Poles came in straight to the middle class. I’m not actually sure, but I would guess that the only growing demo of US Catholicism today is newly immigrant Hispanics.
Yeah, that’s definitely a thing.
When I went to the Grotto in Portland, both Hispanics and Asians were over-represented and black people about tracked their low numbers in the general population. In Kentucky, white people are still a shrinking demo and blacks are under-represented (black Protestantism is historically more of a thing).
The Hispanic church goers may have more kids though, which would make a difference in what demographic is actually growing.
Are you actually saying that 1 in every 8 people there was black? Unless these were Africans of recent immigrant status, that would be exceedingly surprising to me. I’m not familiar with the Grotto, so I don’t know what kind of gathering this was.
Er, no, like 1 in 20. That’s the local general population.
The Grotto is a popular Portland church run by the Servite friars. Sunday Mass will often have many tourists as well as local Catholics.
Glossolalia is supposed to be under special circumstances, but yeah – a lot of poorly informed and ill taught laity just take the ball and run with it.
I don’t believe all that much in private revelations either, things such as this, or the trendy Celtic Spirituality crap of Anam Cara (“soul friend” my arse, a concept invented out of whole cloth for the ‘philosophy’ behind this ramp) or the Eat Pray Love secular cherry-picking crap either.
Folk religion has been around as long as regular religion. It’s the wheat and the tares all over again.
With respect, you’ve mistaken a small, loony fraction of the group ‘charismatic’ with the rest of the membership.
As sometime who grew up in that tradition, I know that some preachers would (and did, at the church that I attended via internet love-stream) fervently pray for Divine power to bring health to the sick, and end the disease.
I know that a few preachers would love the spectacle of declaring that not only could God stop the disease, but He would…if the preacher and congregation spoke the right incantation, and appended the phrase “in the Name of Jesus.”
It’s my impression that this second group is small, but gets a lot of attention. I’m willing to take correction on this one; but I’ll also say that I’m speaking from the experience of growing up in such a group.
There’s a distinction between treating prayer/proclamation as a form of magic, and treating prayer as a way of requesting Divine help. Some people lose track of that distinction, or never learned it.
Most faith traditions have some form of intercessionary prayers. It’s the belief in the miraculous as part of everyday life, directly related to appeals to God, that is part of the charismatic tradition.
What church did you grow up in? And where?
@HeelBearCub,
with apologies for the late reply: when I was a child, my parents attended a church that was part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. (Geographically and culturally, in the suburbs of a major industrial city in the MidWestern US.) The local leadership had some differences of opinion with the CMA hierarchary. Before I attained the age of six, the local leadership was invited to go create their own, non-CMA church.
Reviewing the data provided by Deiseach, I think the groups qualifies as second-wave Charismatic. I can’t remember whether CMA was officially Charismatic or not.
The “movement history” that was told inside the church made lots of references to the pre-first-wave Holiness movement, the first wave Pentecostal movement, and the second-wave Charismatic movement.
Since the church was (and still is) no longer a member of any larger denominational structure, it’s a little hard to nail them down. As time went on, I began hearing more and more about the teaching and example of Forerunner Christian Fellowship in Missouri, and their House of Prayer initiative. (Indeed, one or two people who are now part of that ministry grew up in the same church that I did…)
I gathered that the local church had swept in more than a few people who had at one time been part of the Catholic-Charismatic (or a similar, Lutheran-Charismatic) movement in regional churches.
One thing that I learned: most branches of Christianity have some sort of “Tradition of the Church” about what makes for a valid expectation of a result from prayer, and what expectations are invalid. The more sola scriptura that a church gets, and the more that they question the “Tradition of the Church” and compare to the examples seen in the scripture, the more likely that the believers of that church are to say that miraculous interactions with God are a part of everyday life.
In reviewing the stories people tell, I realize that a lot of the ‘interactions’ that they speak of seem to be in their own perception of what is supernatural, and what is natural. But there are a few stories that are in the gray zone: a doctor said that cancer/brain-injury/etc had very low odds of recovery, but the person recovered after the church prayed over them regularly for a long time. Or a construction worker has a section of concrete fall off the wall he is working on, knocking both himself and the scaffolding down…and he says a quick prayer, checks his limbs, and finds that none of them are broken. Or a married couple that has been childless for a decade, but felt that they had a promise from God for children; after a decade of prayer, the wife is unexpectedly pregnant. Are these low-probability-but-still-presumably-natural events, or were they Divine intervention?
I don’t know which they are, myself. But I think it is arrogance to claim that there is no possibility of the miraculous being shown in the everyday life of the believer. I think it is a inverse image of the arrogance shown by Kenneth Copeland above.
I have to note that by your definition, Mormons qualify as “charismatics” (I admit I’ve never heard the term before, so I’ll stick with your definition here). As close to 100% of them as it doesn’t matter who have heard of Kenneth Copeland think he’s wrong and evil in general (they have this doctrine of priestcraft which applies and they don’t pay their ministers).
They’re an interesting case study for your point in that they are organized internationally and have very public pronouncements. Their initial response was to close church down worldwide weeks ago and encourage social distancing. Sure, they asked their members to hold a one-day fast and prayer yesterday about the issue, but they’re also distributing literally tons of food and PPE around the world, ready to take care of not only their church members, but millions of others. They were shipping N95 masks to China back in January.
So it’s also easy to argue that at least one “charismatic” church community is the most prepared in the United States for this pandemic.
My sense of the Latter Day Saints is that they wouldn’t be characterized today as charismatic, although it seems they have charismatic traditions. The bulk of the church have de-emphasized their charismatic beliefs in current teaching.
Where, or if, they are counted in the article I referenced earlier, I don’t know.
By your earlier link, they’d be counted if they used the word “charismatic” to describe themselves:
Like I said in my earlier comment, I think this definition is way over-inclusive for how you’re using it. I know a number of self-identified “charismatic” Christians who maybe pray in tongues every few weeks (if that) and admit in theory that God sometimes does miracles these days. I might occasionally describe myself that way if I want to make a theological point, and I wouldn’t even meet that first criterion.
Yeah, I don’t think the mainstream of LDS folks would describe themselves as charismatic, but that’s just my impression and I can’t say I have data to back it up (other than Wikipedia saying it has been de-emphasized in the modern LDS church).
As to your statement, obviously this, like anything else, exists on a continuum, and binary designations only loosely capture the reality.
So looking at that definition, I’m a charismatic Christian, AMA. My current church, and my old, very charismatic, Assemblies of God Church, has shut down service and broadcasting them on the internet. There are constant prayers for God to protect the world from Coronavirus, and prayers to heal specific members and loved one. Everyone is encouraged to practice social distancing. I would argue this is mostly typical for Charismatic Christians, and even is you do not believe any of it, I do not see where this would be a net harm. Any questions for one of this 36%?
Effective immediately and forever, HeelBearCub gets to be mocked and then ignored whenever he complains about someone calling attention to some singular example of nuttiness and ascribing it to liberals/progressives/SJWs generally. Mark his words.
His words are indeed marked.
Ehhh, it’s not like those of us on the right are significantly less guilty of this here. I don’t see any reason to throw rocks at @HeelBearCub specifically on this issue.
I should have been more polite in my challenge here, and unfortunately only recognized the better path after the edit window had closed. But when “those of us on the right” do this, HBC is the one most likely to call them out on it. So the hypocrisy here is blatant and notable.
Again, I’ve linked you quite a few examples, ones with ties to, and even one with a position in, the Trump administration. The guy in the original video is part of the faith leadership courted by Trump, has been invited to DC, has been in the Oval Office with Trump.
This is not just a single rando I plucked from nowhere.
@HBC
Trump’s alignment with the prosperity gospel people would be disturbing if I’d thought him anything more than a nominal Christian. I’m much more bothered by the non-prosperity gospel people who have publicly aligned with him as a good choice, instead of “slightly better for us than Hilary”. (There was a recent kerfluffle over the Southern Baptist’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, whose head has been critical of Trump, and who various pro-Trump elements keep trying to shut down.)
@bean:
Can you be more specific about who you mean? Pat Robertson? Folks like Falwell, Jr and Graham? It’s not just prosperity gospel folks that I find disturbing.
There certainly are conservative Christian leaders who have rejected Trump, fwiw. But, I guess I just don’t view it as surprising that they broadly have accepted him. The decision to firmly link to the GOP was made long ago. There isn’t really an a means to undo that. Not in the current landscape.
Graham springs most prominently to mind. Again, though, he’s not Copeland and while I’m sure he’s calling on people to pray about coronavirus, and praying himself, he’s not saying “I rebuked it in the Name of Jesus, and thus it is over”, which seems to be the heart of your criticism.
One thing I hope comes out of the Trump administration is a greater skepticism in the church about linking ourselves to the GOP. I heard several complains about people who went to the Southern Baptist Convention where Pence spoke (I think 2 years ago) that it was more focused on America than on God.
To steelman what I think HeelBearCub is trying to say:
(1) There’s a very large proportion of the American population which is religious (around 71% of the population are some flavour of Christian)
(2) The dominant religion is Christianity and the dominant strain of Christianity is (American) Protestantism – the largest single denomination is the Roman Catholics (21%), but the largest grouping is Evangelical Protestants (25%)
(3) As with any large special-interest group, they have an influence on politics both directly – by voting – and indirectly – by politicians being canny about which way they’ll jump on an issue as to whether it will appeal or not to this group (this goes both “for” the group and “against” the group, depending where our politico is based – we all expect Senator Cluckhorn in the Bible Belt to adopt one set of policies while Senator Slicker on the coasts will carefully avoid anything that smacks of “would go down well in the flyover states”). We even see it in the most extreme form where the Vice President is one of the literalist believers
(4) A proportion of those Christians, allegedly a small but not insignificant proportion, have nutty beliefs
(5) These beliefs inform their voting patterns and in turn this influences the politicians
(6) Hence, the levers of power when it comes to making public policy and policy decisions for the entire nation can be influenced by people who believe in a form of magic (see the Vice President and, presumably, the beliefs influencing him as one of the literalist believer types even if he’s not this particular flavour of third wave Word of Faith Charismatic)
I don’t necessarily agree with all of this, but I think that’s the best case for what he’s trying to say.
(Side note: I would object to the characterizations of the beliefs as nutty. They are beliefs, taught, frequently from childhood, and mostly honestly held.)
That was actually all downstream (or maybe upstream) of my point.
In the past (and I would predict in the future) when the argument you laid out has been made, the first/most likely criticism has been some form of “these people don’t exist, have no standing, don’t affect anything. How dare you mock Christians beliefs.”
Evangelical/born-again Christians form perhaps the most important primary voting blocks for Republicans. Half of them are charismatics. Some further portion may not identify as charismatic, but do identify as Biblical literalists.
But then the major primary voting block for Democrats also falls under the exact same rubric.
So is it impacting actual policy or not? I doubt it.
Just as an explanation of how misinformed the tenor of this stuff generally is (not at HBC in particular) The biggest adherence to prosperity gospel in the US is African American Pentecostalism and then Judaism, in that order.
Evangelicals are a distant third.
@skeptic:
The impact that African Americans make to Democratic policy platforms isn’t particularly religious in nature, and where there is intersection, it’s primarily around the ideas of civil rights and social justice flowing from MLK’s style of combining politics and religion
Whereas Paula White has a position in the Trump admin.
I provided a single example, along with references to the general beliefs.
But the charismatic promotion of directly tying outcomes to spiritual beliefs and actions is hardly limited to one single faith leader.
Heck, even the Governor of Mississippi is citing his willingness to pray as somehow material to whether criticism of his failure to institute stricter measures in response to Covid-19 is relevant.
And it’s not as if televangelism doesn’t have a long history in the US. Jim and Tammy Faye and Jimmy Swaggart are still doing their thing.
Heck, even the Governor of Mississippi is citing his willingness to pray as somehow material to whether criticism of his failure to institute stricter measures in response to Covid-19 is relevant.
See point (3) above about tailoring your public image to your constituency; I’m sure a lot of voters and citizens of Mississippi pray themselves, believe in the efficacy of prayer, and would feel more sympathetic towards someone in authority who has the humility (if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made!) to acknowledge that the fate of nations is at the disposition of a Higher Power.
If I look up Governor Reeves, the controversy seems to be about not imposing stay-at-home regulations earlier and exempting a large number of businesses as “essential” in order to stay open. I don’t think that his religiosity has much to do with that, it seems to be controversial whether governments clamp down early or not, and when they should/shouldn’t relax such strictures. If the guy is using the appearance of devoutness to deflect criticism, I’m sure he’d do the same if he were a more secular politician in a more secular state and find some other means of finding a shield in public opinion – maybe he’d claim “but at least I made the gun stores shut down!” or the likes.
Jim and Tammy Faye and Jimmy Swaggart are still doing their thing.
Yes, but in much reduced circumstances from the apex of their influence and power. HBC, I’m not at all sure what point exactly you are trying to make; you claim you don’t think it’s fair to call such beliefs nutty but at the same time you seem to be extremely concerned that religious principles are affecting public decision making, and the religious examples you choose to use are ones that are not mainstream and do seem to be ones you consider irrational or magical or something.
Can you clarify what you mean? Because to me it does look like you mean “Nutty magical thinking is rotting the brains of an awful lot of susceptible people and they tend to vote Republican and the Republicans are in power and that is why Trump is messing up with how he’s handling the COVID-19 emergency and this is why there aren’t enough masks and respirators and stringent measures because politicians are dancing to the tune of people who think you can cast out the Demon of Coronavirus instead of using scientific medicine”.
@Deiseach:
I’m saying beliefs affect decisions and policy.
I happen to think those beliefs are incorrect, and lead to some bad outcomes, but I don’t think they are nutty. As I said, I have family members who have charismatic beliefs. I have some understanding of why these beliefs make sense to them. My mother, one of the very best people in the world, although not charismatic, has what I would describe as unshakeable belief.
I also spent most of my formative years in the Bible Belt, albeit in a college town. My wife’s family has deep, deep small town Southern farm roots, going back all the way to the earliest colonization. Mocking religious belief just isn’t done.
Here is something of an illustrative anecdote that’s not nearly so topical. My wife had a coworker with poorly managed type-2 diabetes. Mind you, these are coworkers in healthcare. One night she passed away in her sleep.
She most likely died of diabetic ketoacidosis. Her husband was unconcerned that the previous night she had been speaking incoherently, and simply said she had been speaking in tongues. Confusion is one the warning signs of diabetic crisis.
I’m saying beliefs affect decisions and policy.
Agreed.
And I grew up exposed to a section of people who fervently believed in Garabandal and later Medjugore and who were pious, sincere, and deeply believed the message of private revelations and ‘end of the world warnings’ they were sharing with us all. That still did not make them more than a fringe, and not official doctrine, or make them more influential than the kind of polite treatment of “you don’t mock religion” that your wife grew up with. If you want to argue that our Department of Health is basing its recommendations on the Third Secret of Fatima because look, there were people driving around Cork publicly reciting the rosary, go right ahead, but you’re deeply mistaken.
I happen to think those beliefs are incorrect, and lead to some bad outcomes, but I don’t think they are nutty
So what is your problem with them? There’s a gap between “incorrect” and “crazy”, but the particular example you linked to was treated by the person who posted it, and the people who commented on it, as nutty and not simply “Some denominations of Christianity believe this about divorce, I disagree” level of doctrinal difference.
Your concern, if I take what you are saying, is that people of this stripe will treat disease symptoms as something that can be prayed away and that medical intervention or treatment is not necessary, and furthermore that their influence due to their beliefs is not alone courted but shared by Trump’s administration, hence the reason Trump is so bad at handling the crisis is because he or his cabinet are brainwashed by “just pray and God will make it all better”.
As evidence for this, you adduce that this particular purveyor of the Word of Faith movement has been in the Oval Office and you intimate that he has been personally and deliberately invited in by Trump/members of Trump’s administration (oh hell, let’s just go ahead and say “Mike Pence”) not just because he represents a special interest voting bloc but because of shared beliefs in magical healing.
I’m not going to change your mind on this, so I’m not even going to bother arguing about all the ministers and pastors and similar groups that both Democratic and Republican presidents and politicians have invited in for photo-ops. You’re not even arguing that Trump was cynically using the guy and whomever else was in the group of ministers to appeal to the voters who would be influenced by seeing “Oh look, there’s Pastor Jones! Trump must be one of us!”, you’re arguing Trump/his administration share these beliefs and are allowing them to dictate public policy.
You want to quote Revelation as to how this is all coded therein and we’re in the End Times while you’re at it? Because that is the level of rigid religiosity you’re exhibiting on this – “No, all you believers who say this is fringe heresy are lying! You all really believe this stuff! And the President believes it too, that’s why he fired the CDC and is instead relying on God to cure the plague!!!”
I think it’s more fun to fall back on tribal conflicts than to think about reality. That’s why CW clickbait works.
It’s not always pointed at HBC, but this is a (sometimes multiple times) daily occurrence around here.
I agree these people are nutty heretics. But putting them to the thumb screws is “frowned upon” these days.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! (They’re all locked down at home due to coronavirus.)
No. Just no. I’ve been in and out of Charismatic churches throughout my life (currently out, not over theology) and Kenneth Copeland is not typical of the group. The prosperity gospel/God-as-vending-machine/magic stuff he peddles is definitely closer to Charismatism than to other branches of Christianity, but it’s definitely not the whole of that tradition.
You should be better than this.
Not christian, but the religious leaders in my religion generally seems to be contributing to the message of staying at home.
The biggest figure in the more extreme stream (which was more difficult for the government to corral than the average citizens, which is saying something in my country) recently said that ignoring the health guidelines is endangering others’ lives, and if someone dies because of an individual’s flouting of the rules, that individual is a murderer.
The guidelines are very quickly being adapted in that stream now
I think you would be surprised how large percentage of, for a lack of a better term, nontheists, believes in various sorts of wacky “esoteric” magic. I know what I am talking about since I live in a country where Christians are a minority. Belief in magic is deeply ingrained in human psyche as a sort of default state.
No, I very well would not be surprised. Crystals, auras, superstitions, lucky socks …
I’ve consistently maintained that these kinds of beliefs are simply human.
Yeah, but then I feel it is unfair to pick specifically on self-identified Christians for believing that.
No, I specifically said was responding to those who have said that these beliefs don’t exist in the Christian faith.
@HeelBearCub
Ups, perhaps it is because I am failing my English comprehension test (I am not a native speaker, so it would not be surprising), but rereading your initial comment it is not at all clear to me.
@AlesZiegler
That is what this sentence is intended to convey.
Those here who are believers frequently object to what they think are unfair characterizations of theists, especially Christians.
I still do think it’s an unfair characterisation of Christians and Christian beliefs. You’re taking one particular strand of what orthodox belief would consider dangerously near to heresy if not outright sliding right into it, claiming it’s representative of what theists/Christians believe, that it is much larger than it is, much more influential, and everyone who says “Well, in my denomination we don’t believe that” is just making up excuses.
It reminds me of nothing so much as The Rapture, which American secularists/non-Christians/atheists seem to think is a central dogma of Christianity and looms large in the spiritual life of all believers, but which is something I never heard of until I started hanging around American discussions of religion. It may be big in certain parts of America, but America is not the world! This argument you are making is like someone arguing “But the Left Behind series sold 80 million copies, therefore the Pope must believe in the Rapture!” Uh, no?
This is as fair-minded as condemning geology because crystal healers invoke “science” with “vibrational levels at the sub-atomic scale” to explain their convictions. They’re talking about science and rocks, they must be representative of what geologists believe, and any geologists who say otherwise are just trying to excuse away the craziness of their school of thought!
This is where I bring up that an X-Men writer wanted to have Nightcrawler on the team but a previous writer had “ruined” him by making him become a Catholic priest. So Nightcrawler was revealed to have accidentally joined a fake seminary that was planning to infiltrate the Roman Catholic Church with exploding Communion wafers to simulate the Rapture, somehow allowing their conspiracy to take over the world when everyone saw on the news that Catholics had been Raptured and updated their beliefs.
“Oops, my ordination was never valid! Guess I shouldn’t have blundered into the evil fake seminary!”
Yes, but that doesn’t matter if we are not talking about “the world” (where the world is your very European, Catholic view of what religion is). If we are talking about charismatic, literalist YEC Evangelicals, whether they exists, and how their beliefs affect US politics, it doesn’t really matter what Christianity looks like to a Catholic in Ireland.
I freely admit that Catholicism in Europe is in many way dissimilar to Anglicans in the UK, who are both quite dissimilar to Seventh Day Adventists in America. Indeed, that’s my point.
This.
If you want to stop people believing in healing magic, you basically need Lenin/Stalin level state atheism.
Or you could accept belief in supernatural healing that doesn’t contradict medical science, which is where the Catholic Church is at. Someone elsethread brought up burning Kenneth Copeland at the stake.
Or take no extreme measures because risky levels of belief in supernatural healing aren’t common enough to be a big deal.
Did that even work?
The resurgence of the Orthodox church following the fall of the USSR would seem to imply that they didn’t really successfully convince people not to have religious beliefs, just scared them into not practicing or professing such beliefs in public.
Very good point.
People as high-status in Soviet times as Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Putin apparently remained Orthodox, just scared subtle.
But more importantly…does the Orthodox Church promote magical healing?
Genuinely don’t know.
Suppose Alice prays for an end to COVID-19, and Bob fervently hopes for an end to COVID-19 in public.
Suppose Carol organizes a mass prayer for and end to COVID-19, and Dave organizes a mass online rally for an end to COVID-19.
What’s the difference, in practical terms, to an atheist?
ISTM that the relevant question isn’t whether you pray, rub a rabbit’s foot, or go dance naked in the woods–it’s whether or not you take the available actions to make things better. If you’re praying *instead of* social distancing, you’re very likely making the world a worse place. If you’re praying *alongside* social distancing, then ISTM the worst an atheist should have to say about that is that you’re wasting your time talking to nobody.
Similarly, if the COVID-19 taskforce opens with a prayer that the virus will be defeated, or if they open with everyone expressing a fervent hope that it will be defeated, or if they open up with everyone pouring a drink and having a toast to defeating the virus, what’s the difference to a nonbeliever? The thing that matters is what they do after they’re done praying, right?
+1
Now, I’d bet Mr. “IN THE NAME OF JESUS!” probably isn’t practicing social distancing. But we ought to shame him for his ignorance of medical science and failure to take effective anti-COVID measures, not just mock him for saying funny things.
And when we do criticize Mr. “GET OUT, SATAN!”, we absolutely should not extend that criticism and shaming to the Christians who do practice social distancing, and are praying for an end to the pandemic in addition to following the recommendations of medical science.
Reposting since it got eaten by the spam filter.
According to Worldometer, San Marino has 648 (!) deaths per million people. Might we use this as a method to calculate a lower bound on the true COVID-19 fatality rate? The herd immunity rate for COVID-19 may be around 60%. The percent of people who have the disease is almost certainly lower than that, and most likely significantly lower. If we divide those two numbers, we get a true fatality rate lower bound of .1%. This is lower than many estimations I’ve seen, but not lower than all of them.
Some potential concerns:
1. The sample size is small. However it’s big enough to make inferences like this.
2. San Marino is unrepresentative of the world population. I could believe this is true, although the one thing I checked shows 15% of people are 65+ as of 2000, which does not seem especially unusual.
Could San Marino be accepting patients from nearby towns as well? Also, Diamond Princess gives a better lower bound. They’ve had 3711 passengers and 10 people are dead as of this moment. Presuming that all 3711 were actually infected, this gives us a lower bound of 0.26%.
I think there was an age bias on Diamond Princess.
Most passengers on the Diamond Princess were old. All or most of them were eventually tested, and according to Wikipedia, 712 were positive and 11 have died, giving a mortality rate of approx. 1.5% among them (or 1.8% if we only count those who have recovered or died).
Up to 3.5% if we count the serious cases that haven’t recovered yet together with the deaths.
Nearly a third of the people on the Diamond Princess were crew, median age 36. The median age of the passengers was 69. Cruise ship crew seem to have been responsible for much of the spread from one ship to another; I’m not sure if they actually changed stations or just visited each other in port.
I don’t see anything in the CDC report to indicate that testing levels or protocols were different for passengers than crew.
> The sample size is small. However it’s big enough to make inferences like this.
What makes you think this? San Marino seems to have a population of about 33,000. Your numbers imply that about 25 have died (33000 * .0007 = 23.1). Deaths from contagious diseases frequently occur in clusters. If (hypothetically) one outbreak in a nursing home caused the majority of these deaths, what reliable inference can we possibly make about “the lower bound on the true COVID-19 fatality rate” in the world at large? What if it was two independent outbreaks? Three? How would you know, and how does this affect your calculation?
Came here to say exactly this.
@SCC:
1. When you say “Orange Man Bad” are you referring to Donald Trump or Homer Simpson?
2. I never complained that FTD (Florists’ Transworld Delivery) is incompetent.
Thanks for the humor.
I gave up on the internet when almost nobody said anything about the spectacularly evil bigotry driven killing of all the hogs in Egypt. I remember. I am almost certain that you do not remember.
I don’t expect, when reading comments on the internet, to find more than one in a thousand people who are not being “satirical” or “ironic” or who are not trying to sound smarter than they are.
Thousands of people are dead, and billions of people are living in fear, because, apparently, a few people foolishly and in an evil hour decided it is ok to kill and eat flying chihuahuas.
Kudos on your attempt at humor – reread the last books of the Odyssey, the ones who pretended they were just kidding were let off easy by the gods. As they should have been, but that being said ….
This is serious stuff. There are five billion or so people in the world who know what is going on, in a small way, and I am one of the few out of the billions – my guess is one of a few ten thousand out of those billions – who are truthfully saying we are going through this apocalyptic secular hell because bad people liked to eat flying chihuahuas. AND THAT CULTURAL PRACTICE OF EATING STILL LIVING FLYING CHIHUAHUAS IS STILL GOING ON WHILE YOU ARE MAKING STUPID JOKES ABOUT ME, but hey, it is more important to mock me than to address the real issues facing the world..
I get it, it is IMPORTANT THAT YOU MAKE A FTD joke, because this is the internet, dude.
Don’t ever respond to one of my comments again unless you first apologize.
and for the record, I used the wrong acronym to draw out loser comments. I am not as stupid as you think, Monsieur VENTRUE
You haven’t been here very long if you think no one here is interested in discussing animal cruelty. But you’re mixing up different issues here. Insofar as the pandemic is a reason to ban wet markets, it’s because they’re unsanitary and spread disease, not because they’re cruel to the animals. Veal is also cruel, but it doesn’t cause pandemics.
I have been here longer than you think. You do not want to know how many thousands of hours I have spent trying to communicate with people who think they are smarter than they are.
Part of that includes reading literally tens of thousands of comments here.
And I am not mixing up issues.
The FLYING CHIHUAHUAS are just as much the issue here as the RNA specifics of our little sort of alive not sort of alive frenemy ( a friend, inasmuch as it is a fellow creature of God, an enemy inasmuch as it needs to be defeated if we care, with love for others, about God’s creation). THE FLYING CHIHUAHUAS are just as much the issue as the PREVALENT COMMENTS EXPRESSING panicked hatred for authority figures or the even more PREVALENT COMMENTS EXPRESSING panicked desire to submit to authority figures, and yes there are many people on this website saying important non-panicked things, and I am happy to see that, but I guarantee you that if you deny that THE FLYING CHIHUAHUAS WHO WERE EATEN AND WHOSE DEATH AS A MATTER OF CUISINE RESULTED IN ALL THIS ARE THE MOST PRIMARY ISSUE then you are missing the point of all this
cor ad cor loquitur
I always stick up for my friends and trust me I love bats, every one of whom is basically either a flying chihuahua or a flying miniature chihuahua ….
if you did not know that before tonight, well, that is sad.
Love for humble animals is not only a staple trope in all religions it is what people who care about other people feel
and, no, Homer Simpson with his disgusting MMMM BACON is not a real person
that is a diminished version of a human being
SAD !
and, as we now know, DANGEROUS BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE DYING AND GOVERNMENTS ARE SEIZING POWER because of Homer and his MMMM BACON foolishness.
Some good news from the UK:
I mean, this is the country that gave us Dunkirk.
And something about the attitude to ‘our beloved NHS, envy of the world’.
I’m not the biggest fan of the NHS, but I recognize the widespread and sincere devotion to it.
Yes. It is weird, but it is real.
I don’t think it’s weird. Say you’re in good health, you’re not that well off, it’s nice to know that if you do fall ill, there’s a safety net that will look after you reasonably well. You don’t care that it’s not gold-plated – in fact you probably don’t want it to be.
Nothing wrong with having a good civic religion.
Academia and the media generally regard car culture and suburbia as bad. The argument generally is that cars are bad because they produce co2 emissions and pollution, prevent people from getting exercise, and produce communities that are somehow worse than dense cities.
Now that COVID-19 is here, we can see that dense urban areas are ideal for spreading the virus, and suburbs slow down the virus. For example, NYC is the densest place in the country, and the epidemic seems at least an order of magnitude worse there than here in the SF Bay area.
Has anyone updated their opinion of car culture vs. public transit culture? I haven’t seen any blog posts or thinkpieces on this at all. I do see a lot of people pushing the idea of universal health care, despite the fact that it doesn’t seem to have helped in Italy (to be clear, I’m not saying it doesn’t help with anything, but just that government-run healthcare doesn’t seem to provide a big advantage in the fight against COVID-19).
I’m a very anti car person. During this crisis, I have wished that I had a car: I could buy more groceries at the same time (though I have worked out a decent system of using my rolling suitcase for transport). I could bring groceries to my elderly mom or drive out to a remote area for walking, instead of my only options being a couple of relatively crowded parks. If I lived in a detached house, everything I need to touch in my daily life (trash can lid, front door, letter box) would belong only to me.
Now, a car would always have been convenient, but usually I don’t miss it. However, this crisis has not changed my view of car policy in general. It will hopefully take decades before the next epidemic of this kind, and we don’t really have to design our public life around this rare situation.
Living in a dense city also has some advantages: the hospitals are better than countryside ones, and I’m closer to them if I were to need help. All other services including doctors, pharmacies and grocery stores are conveniently available, unlike in “non dense” areas. And when I step on my balcony, I see some activity outside, which probably makes life easier compared to being quarantined in a small town.
So all in all, my position on transport has not changed.
Of course, suburbs are the epitome of car culture and are not dense. Yet, they don’t share any of the downsides of country living that you mention, but they do have all the benefits. It’s almost as if there was a reason most people want to live in suburban areas!
For what it’s worth, I would personally rather live in an urban area, but I do I understand the appeal of suburban living.
I rather die a slow, painful, corona-death than have to live in a suburb ever again. Wretched places.
I can only assume when you say “suburb”, you are thinking of soulless cookie-cutter housing subdivisions, strip malls, chain restaurants, and big box stores. That is not always the case, and that flavor of suburb is the exception rather than the norm here in New England.
Defining “suburb” is a bit tricky. As with many other things, there isn’t really a bright line division.
Legally speaking, I live in San Jose, a city of about a million. Our house is on the south side of Williams Rd. South of Williams, almost everyone lives in a single family house with a lawn and a back yard, although both houses and yards are small by U.S. standards and there are some apartment buildings. North of Williams there are some single family homes but, at least near us, it seems to be mostly apartment buildings.
We so almost all of our shopping by car, but there is a small strip mall with a 7-11 and a liquor store a block or so away. I doubt there is any significant amount of employment within half a mile of us, but a bit beyond that is a commercial street with restaurants, dentists, … . By casual observation, on our side of Williams there must be at least one car per house, more often two.
It’s suburban enough so that I have a yard full of fruit trees — admittedly on a bigger lot than most of our neighbors, but quite a lot of houses have a few. But both of my adult kids occasionally get dim sum or groceries from places a mile or so away that they walk to.
Pretty clearly car culture, whether it should count as suburban is less clear.
“I can only assume when you say “suburb”, you are thinking of soulless cookie-cutter housing subdivisions, strip malls, chain restaurants, and big box stores. That is not always the case, and that flavor of suburb is the exception rather than the norm here in New England.”
Maybe they come in nicer flavors elsewhere. I mostly mean houses with no walls/fences, no sidewalks on the roads, nothing close enough so that you have to drive everywhere, and neighbors that don’t understand the concept of minding their own business.
Maybe I live in a special suburb bubble, but this sounds like the opposite of a suburb. I can’t think of any suburbs around here that don’t have an extensive network of sidewalks (and usually greenways). Nearby stores probably aren’t walkable in most cases (although they can be depending on where exactly you live) so I’ll grant you that part.
I feel like fences and sidewalks are near ubiquitous in suburbs.
San Jose is definitely suburban, and not the good kind. Urban is when you can buy warm croissants for breakfast at the boulangerie on the ground floor of your building. Walking a mile on a 6-lane arterial road to get decent food does not sound like the Wikipedia article: “San Jose is a global city, notable as a center of innovation, for its affluence, Mediterranean climate, and extremely high cost of living.”
In the suburbs I grew up in, some streets had sidewalks, but the majority didn’t.
San Jose is a city of over a million people, the third largest in California. It’s not a suburb, even if many of the residential neighborhoods are pretty much indistinguishable from suburbs.
While San Jose has a definite city center, there are definitely parts that I would classify as suburban. Downtown is urban, but something like this has to be classified as suburban.
The suburb I grew up in had zero sidewalks, and no place within walking distance but other suburban houses. Butt everybody had friends in those houses, and nobody thought twice about walking over to visit them.
I don’t know whether sidewalks are the norm or the exception in modern suburbs, but I don’t think I have yet seen a suburb that wasn’t safely and comfortably walkable by anyone inclined to walk. They may exist, but I’m skeptical they are the norm.
I’m not sure if this is responding to me or someone else. Walking about a mile, most of it on a sidewalk along the local road our house is on (Williams), some of it on a sidewalk along Saratoga Avenue, which is four lanes but I think more commercial than arterial, will get you to your choice of Iranian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or fast food.
“San Jose” means almost nothing other than “the east half of the south bay.” It’s a legal entity that kept expanding until it couldn’t any more, absorbing a lot of very different areas. There is a dense downtown area with skyscrapers, weird one-way streets, and row houses that are kind of like SF, as well as public transit that is probably at least as good as SF’s. There is Willow Glen, which is basically Campbell if it had gotten Borg’ed. There are really exurban areas where the complaints about no sidewalks, no walkable neighborhoods are really true.
Never been to San Jose. Would Pasadena count as a suburb of LA? If it does, then that is one type of suburb I would gladly live in, and not at all what I was thinking of.
Pasadena is definitely a suburb of LA.
Then I think that I need a new definition. I think I have heard “exurb” before, but not too sure that is tightly defined either.
Exurb is definitely a thing, but it describes basically the next layer/ring of residential areas that are even farther away from the urban core than the suburbs are.
Pasadena is way too close to LA to be anything but a suburb. Places like Oxnard or Mission Viejo are closer to my understanding of an exurb.
I think there are ~three kinds of suburbs.
1: Suburbs proper; alia ‘streetcar suburbs,’ ‘inner-ring suburbs,’ etc. These were real self-contained towns at some point before automobiles were universal and so are laid out such that you can do a lot of things within a couple of miles and walk there without risking your life. Single-family homes on smallish lots around a core of mid-rise shops, restaurants, and apartments. There are local theaters and/or music venues.
2: Suburbs colloquial; these were designed on the assumption that everyone owns a car. Large single-family homes on large lots arranged in cul-de-sacs, themselves feeding into large arterial roads with shops and restaurants. Sidewalks are not universal, and functional walkability is accidental or low-priority (distinct from pleasant parks/bike trails; I mean you can’t walk to a grocery store, pharmacist, or bar except by chance). Completely dependent on the local city for culture/entertainment. This is where the Desperate Housewives live and what most people mean by ‘suburb’ in the US.
3: Exurbs, alias ‘small towns,’ etc. These were never envisioned as dependent on either cars or the local city except in the complicated economic sense, but now are. Single-family homes on large lots again. Sometimes there’s a few blocks of two- or three-story buildings, more often just the same homes, smaller lots. There are probably farms right outside, and lots of people commute 1+ hour into the local city for work.
Have you tried grocery delivery? Have you tried renting a car? In normal times, you can get pretty good deals, though perhaps at the moment demand has increased.
I can’t drive, so I haven’t checked if renting a car is possible. I’ve considered delivery, but the normal supermarkets are all booked out, so in the end on balance it’s probably better if I leave the delivery spots to vulnerable people and go do my own groceries by foot as always. I think my personal hygiene and ability to keep my distance from people is above average, and anyway as a healthy non-old person I’ll probably have to get Corona at some point in the name of herd immunity.
I rented a car. They’re *much* cheaper than usual, at least at my location.
Available grocery delivery dates in my area (Northern New Jersey) are weeks out. I believe rental car agencies are closed by decree. In general if some service will collapse under a sharp increase in demand, it’ll become unavailable exactly when you want it most.
Rare but disastrous situations, yeah, you kind of do. Like, if your country gets invaded by would-be conquerors every couple decades, you probably have to make a civic virtue of military service rather than just expect the mercenaries to handle it.
And private cars (and boats, and airplanes) aren’t just useful for pandemics; pretty much every crisis, they patch up a whole lot of gaps that the crisis planners didn’t adequately plan for. So, yeah, your society should probably encourage people to have more than they optimally “need” under normal circumstances, and you should probably have and know how to drive one if it’s at all practical.
Also, high population density makes a whole lot of crises worse, so your society should encourage people to spread out more than would be “ideal” under normal circumstances.
I don’t agree with this at all, and I think this may be an underlying values difference. Maybe you put a high value on ideas of self-sufficiency and “being prepared”, which I see many Americans expressing when it comes to questions like owning a gun.
Meanwhile I’m a soft city dweller who wants cars to go away because they’re stinky and noisy and bad for the birds. I like high density living and the many opportunities it brings. Yes I’m more likely to die of plague, but I think it’s worth.
+1
Sometimes I dream about retiring to the country and being able to go out and walk in nature and all that. And then I remember that it’s also nice to be close to an international airport and have a variety of restaurants available and easily find groups of people with similar interests to me and all that. And the two goals are largely incompatible.
It reminds me of arguments over the optimal size for a company. There are advantages and disadvantages to both small and large companies, but the most successful companies tend to be very large.
I also like the car-free dense-city life, and I intend to continue it, but that doesn’t mean I can’t ever admit that it has a drawback.
One further advantage of non-dense living is that you can grow some of your own food. A single full sized apple or peach tree produces quite a lot of fruit. Tomatoes can be managed in a city yard or even a window box, but are easier if lots are a sizable fraction of an acre or more. Part of our plan, if the present emergency lasts more than another month or two, is to rely on our own sources for fresh fruit and vegetables, which don’t store without refrigeration.
There are at least three kinds of edible plants in the yard that we didn’t plant.
Population density must have some effect, but some dense places (South Korea, Singapore, Chinese cities) have managed to control breakouts. For the Spanish Flu, there is apparently debate over the effect of pop. density. This study (link) found that a density threshold of 175/sq mile was significant.
Without suppression measures, I suspect the disease would move through suburbs nearly as quickly as cities. Schools, restaurants, mass transit, and workplaces are probably the biggest hot beds of disease transmission. Mass transit is the only one unique to dense cities.
Just for the sheer danger of driving, this hasn’t changed my mind about cars. I think in general, Americans are so car-reliant that it’s easy for us to forget how dangerous cars are. (In 2018, the NSC gave a 1-in-106 chance of dying in a car crash and a 1-in-541 chance of dying in a “pedestrian incident”, ie you get hit by a car. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/)
There are reasons you might prefer cars over transit and suburban life over city life, but the travel risks (including the risk of getting sick) associated with each type of density wouldn’t be on my list.
I appreciate that you didn’t mean it that way, but I read “In 2018” to imply those were annual rates of death, which made my eyes pop out of my head.
To clarify for anyone else who made that error, the National Safety Council was trying to calculate lifetime death risks – i.e., given that you’re going to die of something. what is it likely to be. The chances you’ll die of heart disease based on 2018 death rates are 1 in 6, motor vehicle accident is 1 in 106 (pretty close to the chance you’ll die from a fall at 1 in 111), and the lowest listed chance is lighting, at 1 in 180,000.
The comparison between LA and NYC is confounded by NYC locking down a week later.
If you’re looking at the death rate, lock downs in the last two weeks will have had zero effect, as it generally takes that long to die.
Actual numbers for time from infection to death? I haven’t seen anything solid, so I go with 1-3 weeks. Likely, there’s some minimum incubation, and a long tail.
The suggestion is that in most cases there is an indeterminate number of days, but probably about 5, from infection until the disease becomes obvious. Then you spend a week coughing at home. Then you get better or you go to hospital, after which in some cases you die.
The thing everyone is missing in the debate in this thread is why people move to suburbia in the first place. Overwhelmingly, they do it for schools, see e.g. the review of the Two Income Trap on this very blog. And as some have pointed out, the modern service economy has made a lot of the gains of city life moot: you can effectively carpool groceries and restaurant food by using delivery, more workers than ever are working remote (I’m 70% remote, my wife is 100%), etc.
In terms of motivation, it’s actually even more subtle than that. My wife and I didn’t just move out to the burbs to have good schools, we moved out to be around the kind of people who would move someplace inconvenient because of their kids.
So until/unless you fix the schools problem (which I admit is fueled in no small part by selection bias) that is going to be the determining factor for suburbanites, and it’s going to trump any consideration of car safety or pandemic planning.
I love NYC, but I wouldn’t want to try to raise a family there unless I was wealthy enough to both live in a safer part and send the munchkins to private school (or lucked in to a lottery school).
Schools and space. You can improve the schools, but you can’t do much about space in the city, because lack of space goes right along with density.
Grocery shopping, even without delivery, in the NYC suburbs is generally easier than in NYC. Sure, you need a car… but you don’t need to walk to a tiny and crowded grocery store to pick up only that which you can carry in your arms or collapsible cart.
Is that such a hardship? My husband and I go grocery shopping once a week and we usually have about 2 backpacks (regular-size ones, not hiking) and 2 plastic totes full of food. We usually bike, but walking would be just as easy.
And that’s for 3 people who always cook at home from scratch.
Apparently you buy much more compact food than my wife and I.
Huh, guess so.
I also walk to the grocery store, but being limited in carrying capacity is annoying sometimes. For example, on my last trip, I finally managed to get some toilet paper and oatmeal, but since they’re bulky, I couldn’t get much else that trip.
It doesn’t help that my good tote bags broke, so I’ve been making do with much smaller bags.
In the steady state, it doesn’t matter much, but it makes it much harder to stock up on things should the need arise, or if you run out of a bunch of things at once. I usually go to the store once a week, but perhaps I’d go less often if I had a car. On the other hand, refrigerator space is also a huge limitation.
There’s also living space. I have a 2,500 sq. ft. house in the ‘burbs. It is really nice for my kids to have their own rooms, me to have a game room, my wife to have her own office, and for the family to share a big kitchen. I could never afford anything like this in a city, and my day-to-day quality of life would suffer drastically.
Edit: ninj’erd by Nybbler.
Lots of people want a yard and a single-family house, which are very expensive or unavailable in the middle of a city, but pretty affordable if you’re willing to move further out.
Depending on cars for your transport has another advantage: you aren’t so susceptible to local government mismanagement/ineptitude as someone who relies on public transit and then has something like the disasters that befell the DC Metro system a few years back. (Years of mismanagement and deferred maintenance came home to roost, and they’re still untangling the mess.)
Also, if we are being honest, there are big problems with city life without a car because its impossible to build public transit in a way that serves a purpose other than shuttling people in/out of a central location that isn’t wasting 90% of its seats. My girlfriend’s brother lives a 10 minute drive from us. That is a 1 hour 2 train distance, or longer and 2 buses.
No it’s not.
This is a response to what assertion?
@Clutzy
Presumably, to “its impossible to build public transit in a way that serves a purpose other than shuttling people in/out of a central location that isn’t wasting 90% of its seats.” Though I think I agree with you on that point, at least when applied to systems that intend to span more than a single urban area.
It might impossible in the US, where we routinely build half of a functional city in one place and the other half twenty miles away. It’s absolutely possible to build a city such that public transportation is efficient and convenient, but you can’t do it on an evenly-spaced rectangular grid and you can’t do it de novo up to the modern building code.
Those aren’t cities in the modern metro sense. That is WrathofGnon style “Good Urbanism” which is wholly unrelated to the modern city.
Also public transit is mostly not involved because its walkable.
Another failing of public transit is that in a city where it could potentially work, its easily outcompeted by bicycles.
It’s not clear to me what you’re talking about. Cities with extensive and extensively-used public transit systems are an a priori fact; c.f. NYC, D.C., Paris, London, etc. Bikes are great and should be better-integrated into transit plans, but if you’re anywhere that doesn’t have San Francisco’s weather and Nebraska’s geography they’re really unpleasant about a third of the year and for some appreciable fraction of possible routes. Plus they’re only an option for the basically healthy, anyway.
You may certainly say that modern metropolitan areas aren’t designed such that you could put in a comprehensive public transit net even if you wanted to, but the modern MSA is the result of particular policy choices made quite recently, especially in the US. We could have made different ones, with a correspondingly different resulting urban planning paradigm.
Of those cities I am most familiar with DC’s public transit. That transit is good for getting into DC, and particularly at getting you into the heart of the city. For navigating within the city it is not that good.
I live in Chicago, another large metro. Public transit here is good at getting you into the loop, and that is about it. And that is how it has to work, there are like 2 riders an hour that actually want to go from Englewood to Logan square.
1) The main problem with cars is traffic congestion, which makes them unsustainable as a mean of transport as population level increases. Suburbia don’t really solve this problem (in particular, they don’t even remove the need for urban centres) – they simply transfer it away from places of human habitation, and probably exacerbate its overall severity in the process. Yet another is energy inefficiency, again exacerbated by the very existence of suburbs. Yet another is the sheer danger they pose to humans (for comparison – over 100 thousand people die worldwide from traffic accidents every month, more than the coronavirus has killed so far, and even more are left disabled and disfigured). On a personal level, a car is costly and driving one takes time and energy that, in public transport, can often be spent more productively.
2) The epidemic solves the congestion problem by reducing ALL travel. It makes cars vastly more efficient as means of transport (no traffic congestion, cheaper energy), but the question of whether this is a good change that we should hope to retain after the epidemic is over is probably outside the scope of this discussion.
3) I live in a small (note: European) city with bad traffic congestion AND bad public transport, meaning I’m unlikely to choose either (and makes me accustomed to traveling by foot or bike instead). This makes me essentially resistant to pro-car arguments whether or not I update my opinion about public transit.
4) I believe that the problems with cars are systemic and unsolvable, while problems of public transit are a matter of policy. Poor hygienic standards and overcrowded vehicles (as well as other factors making public transit a less viable choice) are bad whether we have an epidemic or not, and could (and should) be addressed at a fraction of the cost of car infrastructure for the same level of demand.
5) What might make me revise my opinion of cars is technological progress. Provably safe self-driving personal vehicles provided as a service and powered by electricity or other non-polluting energy source would be a vast improvement over the cars of today. Still, traffic congestion and energy requirements alone should still make them an inferior choice compared to (well-run) public transit, at least in densely populated areas (which humanity is unlikely to move away from, unless, of course, the threat of epidemics becomes constant).
For what it’s worth, city driving in the US is significantly easier than in Europe, even when there is a lot of traffic. I live in one of the areas with the worst traffic in the US, and it rarely affects my day to day life. My fairly ample experience of driving in European cities is that it is always difficult to get around and, especially, find parking.
I’ve generally been in favor of *other people* taking mass-transit. And it’s nice to have available for the rare cases when taking a vehicle just won’t work, such as having to drop my car off for service a long ways away from my home. That having been said, as long as employers (and public accommodations) can prohibit employees from carrying firearms and aren’t required to provide lockers for safe storage, I’ll *always* take my car just about everywhere. I hadn’t really considered the pandemic risk before, but I’ll add that to my list of reasons to dislike taking public transit.
In theory, the economic benefits of density should more than make up for increased risk of disease.
I think this might be a case of bubble bias. I can believe that maybe academics in major urban centers aren’t a fan of car culture (although I’m not even sure that is true), but outside of that I doubt academics have any more against car culture than the general public (where some have an issue, but most don’t). A lot of professors live in suburbia, and drive cars.
I don’t think the media takes a stance on this at all, though I’m sure you can find individual writers that are against it.
No, but I’m reveling in my confirmation bias.
Except that the least dense borough of NYC, Staten Island, has 419 cases per 100k population, while Manhattan has 341/100k. (As of 4:15pm 29-Mar-2020). Nassau county, less dense than Staten Island, has 473/100k, and Westchester, still less dense, has 872/100k. Queens and Bronx have the highest rates in NYC (462, 435), Brooklyn has the lowest (339). If anything, in downstate NY, the COVID-19 rate is inversely correlated with density.
Interesting. I wonder if longer commute times via public transit for the less dense areas explains some of the difference.
I haven’t updated my opinion really because my concern isn’t with shoveling more people into cities as an end unto itself, but that people are moving to cities whether I like it or not so I’d prefer if cities could be, you know, nice. Also the urbanization of the past decade hasn’t strictly been people moving into supertall arcologies in Neo-Honghatten – it’s been an explosion in the smaller cities and an expansion of their suburbs as well.
So it seems to me if we want to resuburbanize we never really de-suburbanized, and doubling down (tripling down? perhaps, at this point) on cars will cause the problems cars always cause.
Will fear of viruses change the economic incentive for the last decade of urbanization? I feel like a lot of economic incentives are churned up at the moment, but have the fundamentals changed? I truly have no idea.
My expectation is that remote work will permanently become much more popular, lessening some of the impact, but overall, dense areas will still be the economic powerhouses where all the jobs are.
I really hope that’s true. But I’m biased, as I “did my time” in New York before moving to working remotely from a smaller more affordable city last year.
I almost put that decision off a year too. Now instead of suffering through whatever I’d be suffering through I just deal with the empathetic shame of being possibly the happiest I’ve ever been in my life while people everywhere suffer.
Could we please cut down on blanket generalizations like “Academia and the media generally regard car culture and suburbia as bad”? It decreases the quality of a discussion.
Otherwise I agree that relative desirability of living in urban vs suburban areas changes during a pandemic in favour of the latter.
Since I’ve been seeing this sort of thing from academia and the media for literally decades… no.
Perhaps the term you’re looking for is “blue tribe”?
As much as I don’t like the terms blue tribe and red tribe, they were pretty much defined by the stereotypes you’re trying to describe.
Lots of suburbs are blue tribe. It’s only a certain part of Blue Tribe which dislikes the suburbs.
Well Scott’s original definition of Blue Tribe was basically “like the hip coastal liberals I know”
In practice, it tends to be used as an inaccurate standin for “Democrats” by people who like to feel pretentious, but that wasn’t how it was defined.
FWIW I know plenty of people in the suburbs of Dallas who I culturally associate with hip coastal liberals, I agree blue tribe is not a proxy for Democrat but I don’t think it is as region coded as you imply.
Well what you’ve been seeing is not relevant to the question whether this sort of generalizations decreases the quality of a discussion here or not.
@The Nybbler
Read your own response further down this thread (quoted below) and consider applying it to this comment and your original comment.
Nope, as far as I can tell it’s _consensus_ among the part of the media and academia that pays attention to such things. You almost never see pro-suburb articles or studies.
@The Nybbler
I’m almost certain that the majority of the blue tribe (like a slim majority of all Americans, and a much less slim majority of non-rural Americans) lives in suburbs.
I am curious if you know of any academics who have had positive things to say about suburbia. That would be an interesting topic.
Only very slightly.
I think that you are correct that in this particular situation the former has advantages over the latter, but that in many situations those are still massively outweighed by the disadvantages (more pollution and less efficient use of space in cities, more accidents per mile travelled), and in the long term America should be working towards more public transport use and less car use, not vice versa (in the short term America should focus on panicking about coronavirus, not about whether people should stay at home and refrain from travelling by car or whether they should stay at home and refrain from travelling by subway).
I’ve slightly moved my opinion towards car use (instead of bus/train) and car ownership (instead of ride-sharing).
Personally, I don’t consider myself generally pro-“car culture” or pro-“public transit culture”. I think that in most situations, one or the other is the clear superior method of transportation. Namely: Public transit for getting around a reasonably dense city with a decent public transit system, and cars for getting just about anywhere else. If you’re driving around Boston, have fun trying to find your way to anywhere and have fun trying to park there. If you’re trying to take public transit to the movie theater across town and the bus lines (if they exist) don’t go there directly, have fun sitting on busses for an hour to get somewhere only 5 miles away.
Or am I missing your point, and the argument is over whether we should all live in mega-cities with giant spiderwebs of bus lines and subways somehow connecting everything? Cause that might be kinda cool, I guess.
Saw an interesting post on Linkedin which dives deep into the knowns and unknowns of the current epidemic: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/coronavirus-statistical-classification-schema-ken-standfield/. IMO a big problem with the current data analytics/visualizations/discussions is the fact that none of the numbers portray a true picture:
1. Testing doesn’t cover 100% of the population in any country (nor could it?)
2. The one scenario where 100% were tested (Diamond Princess ship) suffers from an unknown number of false positive/negatives potentially skewing the picture. Plus they’ve only used PCR-based testing while some people might’ve already recovered from the disease by the time they’ve received a test.
3. As shown by the current debacle in Lombardy, the current number of deaths is potentially inaccurate as not every death is properly attributed to COVID-19. The opposite is also true – not every patient WITH COVID-19 should be counted as dying BECAUSE of COVID-19. Only accurate data that we have is from Diamond Princess – deaths were impossible to miscount on a confined ship.
4. Total number of hospitalized patients is accurate, but we’re not sure what % of all cases require hospitalization due to the number of cases being unknown.
However all the news outlets treat the published figures as a holy grail, rather than adding margins of error for every graph that they publish. Understandable given our obsession with statistics, but IMO creates an inaccurate perception of the true picture.
My understanding is that newspapers and other general-interest mass-media is written to a 6th grade reading level. Statistics and margins of error weren’t introduced to me until at least high school.
Hey, does anyone know where one can find more data on COVID-19 patient outcomes. There is a often quoted comorbidity of COVID-19 for patients of hypertension and diabetes but no attempt to adjust that for obvious confounders like age of the subgroup with hypertension. There is also speculation that it is the ACE inhibitor medicines often prescribed for hypertension that increase susceptibility to COVID-19 but again no data to try to tease out whether it is the medicine of the condition, or a correlation with advanced age or another factor that causes the higher mortality. Thanks!
Do more patients with comorbidities die because they’re more likely to be old, or do more old people die because they’re more likely to have comorbidities?
From what I’ve read it seems that both age and comorbidities increase the risk independently, but obviously they very often occur together.
I don’t know about outcome data (HIPAA may make this hard), but the hospital system at my work is reporting large numbers of cardiovascular outcomes for patients. Quoting from my boss’s terse summary:
This is beyond my work area so I have no direct knowledge of this, but I think it makes it likely that hypertension is a real risk.
Anyone out there thought seriously about Cirillo-Taleb’s papers on the tail risk of war and on infection disease? (The tail risk of war is the subject about which Taleb attacked Pinker.) What are your thoughts?
Very roughly, their claim is that the historical data suggests the number of events with casualties above some threshold looks like it obeys a power law, and so very roughly we might expect to be hit by the “big one” someday. (“Very roughly”, because a war or pandemic can’t kill more than the entire population; they correct for this.)
The two papers are
https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04722 (war)
and
https://www.researchers.one/article/2020-03-17 (infection disease)
I think you don’t need any generalizing arguments to make this case: if we say that the Cold War had a 10% chance of going hot (which seems conservative) then war has killed in expectation at least a hundred million people since the 50s and we’re not getting safer, just lucky.
This is a good point, but right now, I’m more interested in the technique of analysis, and the example of infectious disease.
Though I do live near the road servicing the Moscow missile shield, so the risk of war is never far from my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-135_anti-ballistic_missile_system
What is going on with the USA’s coronavirus death rate? Why is it so low compared to everyone else?
As of writing this on worldometers, to put into perspective, we have twice the UK’s deaths with seven times the cases. We have slightly fewer deaths than France despite three times the cases.
Only Germany seems to be doing somewhat close to as well as we are, and they’re early enough in their outbreak that it’s tough to tell.
To be clear, I understand that some of these people will still die, because they are unresolved cases, but that’s true of France, the UK, Italy, etc. as well.
I can think of two immediate explanations, and I’m curious if people here think of others. The first is that we’re testing way more aggressively than anyone else, so approximately the same percentage are dying, but we’re seeing more minor cases.
The second is that American health care is way better at keeping people from dying, so we have some marginal people recover who would’ve died elsewhere (this would especially be compared to Italy and Spain where they are actually overwhelmed).
Are there any other reasons that can be thought of?
My vote is for one, you seem to be testing a huge number of people. But I don’t know how that compares to other countries. Two to some extent, US healthcare is surely good, but probably not better than other modern nations, with possible exceptions for Italy or elsewhere where hospitals are overcrowded.
And three: you came late to the game, and are not yet seeing the full effect? With 2500 deaths now, a 1% death rate would mean 250 000 infected 1-3 weeks ago. And four: big population, even with exponential growth, it still takes longer to spread through it all.
No to your first point, as tests performed per capita in the US is still quite a lot lower than that of most of the other countries EchoChaos is interested in (scroll down to the last figure).
That was data as of March 19 (103,000 tests performed). The COVID Tracking Project has the US having completed 850,000 tests by now – I think the assumption is that the US is now bringing capacity on line faster than anywhere else.
You are right, my apologies.
Quick search comes up with this more up-to-date Wikipedia page. Of the countries EchoChaos mentioned, in per capita tests, the US is behind Italy, Germany, and Spain, and ahead of France and the UK.
So it remains true that if the US death rate is low it is unlikely to be due to the US having exceptionally high testing rates.
Now there’s a sentence you wouldn’t necessarily have expected to be said in March just a couple of weeks ago. Really underscores how different things might have been if the FDA had just gotten out of the way a few weeks earlier.
Starts late, but output is tremendous once they get going–sounds like the US, all right. That was the pattern in both World Wars.
You can count on the United States to do the right thing, after it has exhausted all other options.
Yeah, there’s a pretty strong historical pattern of the U.S. public needing to see the hard reality with their own eyes, at which point they rise to the challenge. It’s not a modern or partisan thing. I assume this is an aspect of human nature that pops up other places, but our history and size/norms/decentralized structure has made it very manifest. If people can hope that sacrifices won’t be demanded, especially universally, they will spend their time bickering on what is “worthwhile” and who “should” bear the cost of any sacrifice. Once it is clear this isn’t something one can theorize away and that the world doesn’t neatly distribute consequences according to what people deserve, people get on board pretty quickly. Can’t say whether it would be effective, but this is why I support using a blunter way of explaining things to the public, that begins preparing people to sacrifice and accept uncertainty and a hard time ahead, but one in which they can take effective action.
And here’s the ramp-up in US testing between March 15 (6172 tests) and March 28 (109071 tests) from the COVID tracking site:
6172
14399
13204
20628
26883
34342
43926
46236
54131
65239
76820
97806
107295
109071
The death rate should be compared to the number of cases around one to four weeks ago, not today.
That is true of all of these countries, is it not?
The US case number is increasing slightly faster as we do catch-up testing, but we are not seeing anything that shows that there was a massive pool of unknown cases that are causing our deaths to not be on a similar curve to others.
I am not saying that we will level off yet, obviously, and our raw death numbers will be really high.
Fast growth and poor early testing in the US means that our case trajectory isn’t easily comparable to other nations.
Our death growth rate is on a very similar trajectory.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1244368708249817091
I don’ think that’s easily converted into an absolute Infection Fatality Rate.
Edit: One is a time series, the other is a population series independent of time.
@broblawsky
That would mean that our growth in the last ~2 weeks has been substantially faster than anyone else’s. Not impossible, but would have to be explained, since that’s after pretty much everyone started locking down.
Or that our growth is more staggered – New York is saturating, but now the rest of the country is starting to undergo serious exponential growth.
Is it meaningful to compare countries? The outbreak in Italy was basically Lombard plus some other places for a long time.
NYC vs London vs Milan vs Wuhan seems like a more meaningful comparison.
This chart compares cities:
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1244368888680329218
@Ragged Clown
Yeah, comparing cities might make sense. Despite catastrophically bad handling (holding Mardi Gras in the middle of a pandemic), New Orleans is on a pretty average trend, New York is horrifying, California and Washington seem to be handling it well.
That may be an argument for climate, especially if FL and LA’s curves turn over quickly and easily.
The US had a huge increase in testing roughly a week ago, while countries like the UK and France have been testing at a more consistent rate. My first guess would be that that change in testing protocol skews the data somehow, causing the US stats to contain disproportionately many cases that haven’t yet run their course. Admittedly I can’t come up with a compelling story of why that would be the case, but it feels like the spike in testing needs to be accounted for in any explanation somehow.
The US is not the anomaly. There are heterogeneities all over the place.
Testing is definitely non-uniform, so that’s one factor. But the US (at least NY and NJ, and NY dominates the US numbers) is still testing only symptomatic people, so it shouldn’t weigh strongly for fewer deaths per case in the US.
Age of those affected clearly matters. In the NYC area, it’s clear from the pattern of infection that the outbreak has been spread by commuters, who are relatively healthy and young compared to the Italian populations most affected.
After that, you get more into speculative factors. Are Northern Italians genetically susceptible (I think probably not; they’re not so different from Germans, ask any Sicilian). Does length of initial exposure matter — that is, are you better off getting hit by a passing cough in the subway than living with your infected children? This seems likely; it’s true for measles, for instance. What about total exposure? Does being around other sick people make your own infection worse, potentially? Are there other demographic factors (smoking, drinking, weight… hard to believe anyone’s fatter than Americans though)?
Remember when everyone was reporting that South Korea’s death rate was only 0.6%? We are (or at least were a couple weeks ago, which is relevant for today’s reported deaths) still in a rapid exponential growth phase where our deaths are very much a lagging indicator.
NYC seems to have significantly quicker spread than most areas, so this is more true there than in most places (and they are a significant fraction of our overall cases).
Italy and Spain have anomalously high death rates and I suspect below-average testing relative to the size of their infected populations (as well as other factors like older infected populations).
Patterns of spread may be involved. None of the US outbreaks (excepting the nursing home in WA, which notable had a very high death rate) seem to be predominately driven via the medical system (based on the age, local geographic, etc.) whereas that’s a plausibly the case in at least Italy (where the cases skew old and sick pretty strongly). The most common explanation for the case skew in Italy is under-testing the young and less sick which is certainly part of it, but it could also be that the infection was spreading a lot through the medical system which would then lead to an over representation of older and sicker people in the cases and thus higher death rate. Not sure if something similar would apply to Spain or France.
A few possible reasons this might be the case. I think private hospital rooms are much more common in the US then in many other countries and also shorter stays and more out patient procedures (yay ruthless efficiency?). My impression (no data) is also the providers and facilities are a lot more fragmented and non-overlapping in the US with it’s different networks etc. which could slow spread.
Prob. most controversially, I wonder if there’s better hospital / care hygenic practices in the US on average then in the fully socialized medicine countries (incentives from liability, secondary infections being more commonly used to compare facilities / doctors, even the way medicare / medicaid funding is structured). Similar incentives could apply for Germany, with it’s largely privatized delivery of healthcare. I can see a compelling story there, but no idea if it’s true (prob. could look at rates of hospital acquired infections across countries).
Of course higher / lower percentages of inter-generational family households could have a similar effect. Likely there are many factors at play.
If US hospitals are better at infection control, that should be visible in some other data.
If this is mainly spread by close contact, then the US’ car culture and much lower density probably means it will spread more slowly than in many other countries.
The car culture certainly could explain slower spread (though spread seems pretty fast in the U.S.; pretty comparable trajectories in the cases / deaths etc.), but by itself shouldn’t impact death rates. If anything slower spread should imply a higher observed death rate since there’s fewer fresh cases that haven’t died yet relative to older cases that have progressed.
With respect to infection control in medical settings, the first thing that popped up on google for me on cross country comparisons is this 2010 WHO flyer and the US does have a notably lower rate of hospital acquired infections per that then the European countries in question (in that source something like >40% less then Italy). I’m sure there’s lots of issues measuring this sort of thing, but does suggest there might be something to it.
It is. Look at charts comparing survival rates for individual diseases by country. The US consistently ranks much higher in them then they do in “quality of medical system” tables. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them is certainly that those broader tables (which seem to drive a lot of reporting and common intuition about how US medical care compares to what’s available elsewhere) tend to include automotive accidents and homicides.
It should not be surprising that Italian Covid-19 patients die more often than US Covid-19 patients because Italian patients die more often than US patients for every other disease I’ve seen numbers for.
One of the things that makes the US expensive is having private rooms be the default, something that is usually an expensive luxury, but looks like a genius move right now.
The US has semi-private rooms as a default — 2 to a room. This is likely better than an open ward but not as good as actually private rooms.
As far as my worthless anecedata goes, my stay in the ICU involved what appeared to be a star shaped arrangement with beds around the perimeter, but curtains and dividers around each bed, so I never got to see any of the other patients, but doctors and nurses presumably had better access. Once I left the ICU, I was moved to a private hospital room (with its own bathroom even).
From what little I’ve seen, all new construction is private rooms. I’m not certain about the motivation, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that HIPAA privacy concerns are driving some of this. There’s also Patient Satisfaction Scores to consider. And actual medical reasons, including cutting down on the extra noise and wake-ups which occur when you have patients sharing rooms.
There’s also the possibility of systemic errors in attributing deaths. I’ve heard claims that Italy over-reports Covid-19 associated deaths and Germany under-reports just based on how death reports etc. are filled out and filled (though that doesn’t comport well with the reports that all-cause mortality in certain regions of Italy spiked beyond just what the excess Covid-19 deaths would suggest). See also the spike in pneumonia deaths in Russia.
Certainly some Covid-19 deaths are being missed in the US and also some deaths are probably attributed to Covid-19 that died of other causes while having Covid-19 or were dying in the next week or two anyways (I’ve read that a large number cases in the nursing home in WA had DNRs suggesting they weren’t in good shape to start with). It’s hard to say which effect dominates, or if they have any measurable impact, or any impact relative to how other countries report. But it is a possible source of discrepancy.
+1
Spread is faster in america, so death rates lag more
I’ll vote for the second. While the US has relatively few *hospital* beds per capita, it has one of the highest rates of *ICU* beds per capita, about equal (or more than) Germany, which also has a pretty low death rate last I heard.
Germany is one of those “every First World country but the US has universal health care!” countries where the universal is not a government-run health service like Britain or Italy. Something to consider when we join every other country.
To clarify, so far as I understood the German system when I lived there, there are a handful of health insurance companies in Germany, most of which seem to offer essentially identical plans, and you and your employer are obligated to split the cost of a plan at one of them. I never actually used the plan while there, but it was a huge hassle getting my wife added to it, since I had a designated person at the insurance company who was supposed to handle my account, this person was frequently on holiday or on sick leave, and no one else at the company wanted to talk to me. At least as a youngish and mostly healthy person I much preferred my experience with the NHS in the UK (show up with your passport and visa, and you are in). Maybe I would feel differently in different circumstances.
Numerous people tell me that fully socialized health care is way more convenient at point-of-use, yes. This is going to be a big win for things like preventative medicine in normal times.
OTOH, the NHS and Italy may be revealing that, like socialized agriculture, it produces a lot less stuff.
Le Maistre Chat –
Kaiser is definitely more convenient at point-of-use than other plans available in California. While they push preventive medicine a lot, their own research shows it doesn’t actually make things measurably better.
Part of Germany’s low death rate is due to early massive testing, which caught many low severity cases that never counted as deaths. Testing will probably decrease and the relative death count in DE will rise.
Someone please decode this for me. Apparently, Anthony Fauci is now saying that 100,000-200,000 Americans might die of Coronavirus, which is an order of magnitude less than the most dire predictions that have been floating around for the last couple of weeks. It seems like a big number without any context, but in context, not so much.
Given this prediction, are we still looking at another two months of social distancing, or might things actually return to normal by, say, May?
The most dire predictions have always been lousy. They depend on making assumptions for mortality and spread that can’t be true together, and/or on models that aren’t accurate for other epidemics. However, the whole “social distancing” thing is political, and so the actual number of deaths has only a tenuous relationship to when it ends. The state governors have tasted absolute power, and they are not going to give it up easily. The media will continue to whip up fear to keep the very idea of letting things open up again outside the Overton Window; this will continue until November if they can manage it.
“the actual number of deaths has only a tenuous relationship to when it ends”
That is exactly what I’m worried about. My job (and sanity) are relatively intact, but like many other people, I’m worried about the long-term economic, social and psychological effects of a six-month stay-at-home order.
Much of America has been sheltering in place for a couple weeks now. The rest will be sheltering in place one disease levels get as bad there as they are on the coasts. THAT is why there will be 100,000-200,000 deaths and not an order of magnitude higher (to use numbers from the above comment). The predictions were valid, and they motivated us to take action to avoid the predictions.
Yes, probably. As far as I can tell, the most hardcore promoters of the social distancing stuff has been under the “if it saves just one life” or “who cares about your stupid 401K” style of argument. Those will both still apply if the number is over 100K deaths. Or even 10K for that matter. Backing down from it now requires a significant philosophical change in which one embraces the logic of “yes, there is such a thing as too high a cost to preserve human life.”
The problem is that the US (and, well, all the west) already bungled the initial response. If you want to go back to normalcy and thus bring back the vibrant economy, the best path is always using the strongest measures right now, and the US (and a bunch of the west) is _not_ doing that.
Oh, something else that occurs to me is that the cost to save lifes may not be linear with the amount of lives saved.
If there’s (say) 1% of the population in danger of dying, and it will take $50,000 per person saved to do this, you will probably want to take that deal, even if normally you put a limit of, say, $30,000 to save a handful of kids of dying of some random obscure disease.
In most mainstream circles you can’t even have this conversation. Stipulating that any cost might not be worth it to save any amount of lives is considered morally unacceptable.
I mean, sure.
But gotta also recognize that looking at this as a regular sickness makes no sense. If it was a sickness that had the potential to kill 100% of the population, you’d obviously devote all the economy to it, so it follows that just using the same $number as the maximum cost allowed in normal circumstances is also wrong.
There’s also the problem that wanting to save on investment upfront won’t work either now, so it’s better to eat the cost right now than trying to optimize.
I would describe e.g. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-should-the-government-spend-to-save-a-life/, which discusses precisely that, and https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/2020/3/31/21199721/coronavirus-covid-19-hospitals-triage-rationing-italy-new-york, which touches on it in passing, as pretty mainstream.
In my experience this is exactly backwards. If you try to impose any restriction on automobiles, to save lives either from traffic fatalities or particulate pollution, people very quickly fight back that the economic costs are far too great for something that only kills a few tens of thousands of people a year anyway.
Well, looking at the Future of Humanity simulators, it says July for the return to normality, worse case.
Which also is in line with Fauci; worst case they say 14M of people simultaneously ill; let’s assume 1% of those die (v bad approximation), that goes to 140K deaths at the peak. Total deaths will probably be a multiplier of that, doubt it will be 10x, more like 5x. That’s worst case, let’s say 140K * 10 = 1.4M deaths, which is _only_ one order of magnitude above Fauci. Fauci will prolly be _around_ right
I don’t see how a “return to normalcy” makes sense before there is either a vaccine or 50% of the population has been infected. (There certainly won’t ever be a “return to normalcy” in the sense of us doing everything the way we did before, but I’ll accept that “return to normalcy” means “all temporary measures in place for the emergency have been lifted”.)
By this summer I expect that many of the most extreme temporary measures will be relaxed, but we’ll still have moderate restrictions to prevent new outbreaks from getting out of control, and localities will sometimes reinstate the most extreme measures if a new outbreak does appear to be emerging there. But it’ll be at least a year and a half before all temporary measures are ended.
There are two different types of predictions you can make:
1) What will happen if we change nothing.
2) What will happen if things change in the way that I expect them to change.
It’s much simpler to model (1). Based on what was generally believed 1 month ago e.g. R0 > 2 and mortality rate of 1% of infected, then it’s pretty straightforward to predict that if we changed nothing the total deaths would be in the millions in the US.
(2) is trickier since it’s harder to predict the policy responses that will happen than it is to do a simple epi model of a pandemic. Type (2) predictions also will keep changing as policy responses change. The new 100-200k predictions are based on updating what our current responses have been (e.g. social distancing and lockdowns in affected areas) and based on assumptions of how long those policies are likely to continue. The update is primarily due to a reduction in the total number predicted to be infected rather than a reduction in the estimated mortality rate.
My prediction is that by May we can end some of the restrictions but will still keep many policies that restrict large gatherings. e.g. dinner with friends and non-crowded restaurants allowed. Giant music festivals and packed bars still forbidden and my guess is that will continue for many more months.
We can hope that in the next few weeks with more testing and more data we will have a better sense of the disease and what the ideal course of action will be. It’s possible that this data will suggest that we can end social distancing sooner than I would otherwise predict based on current data.
TLDR The lower number is partly BECAUSE we are doing more social distancing, so one needs to be careful about using the lower estimate as a reason to end social distancing earlier.
The context that most folks seem to be missing is that this is the number of deaths predicted if we maintain our current social distancing practices; the model where we stop is much higher.
From the Washington Post this morning: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/03/30/coronavirus-latest-news/
Also, I have been pretty negative about Trump through this whole thing, but fair credit to him if that is an accurate description of the reaction.
I still don’t understand how we plan to keep the death toll down to 100k-200k without containment. Stay-at-home orders have to be lifted eventually, and then we get Wave Two. Influenza 1918 took three waves to burn out, and Wave Two was the deadliest.
Part of the answer may be that, in a month or two, we will know a good deal more about treatment. There are a variety of existing drugs that people think might be effective, and we should shortly know which are. That could easily reduce mortality by a factor of several.
Several months of building up medical infrastructure could also presumably help a lot. A huge percentage of deaths come from the fact that many of these deaths are preventable if treatment is available, but the hospitals can’t handle everyone who needs treatment.
If we can handle much larger numbers of people, the mortality rate presumably drops – but you need to stall enough to build up that infrastructure.
@DavidFriedman: Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping. If our government is idiots in a crisis but can work together with the private sector to save 90% of crisis victims given 8 weeks to prepare, we could go from 1.25 million American COVID deaths to 125,000.
[Disclaimer: I’m an interested amateur. People who know better please correct me.]
Also, if we understand transmission better, we can take measures short of total shutdown to push R_0 below 1. That depends on knowing better how the virus spreads. We have some good lab data about airborne and surface persistence, which tells us what to do given various routes of infection, but not which routes of infection are the most important.
I think the available contact tracing information suggests mostly personal contact, but that might be a matter of looking for the lost keys under the streetlamp–it’s hard to determine everyone who coughed in the store an hour before you went shopping, so that kind of contact might not be discovered. (In much the same way, murder statistics probably overstate the fraction of murders done by husbands/ex-husbands/coworkers/roommates, because those are *way* more likely to be solved by the police than murder by a stranger.) The places where nobody’s sure how the thing got transmitted could be airborne or touch. However, it’s not as fast-spreading as it would be if airborne transmission was easy and common–if everyone sick with this stuff left clouds of infection everywhere they went, then a few weeks of community spread would have infected half of Seattle and San Francisco by now.
It’s pretty clear that there’s hospital spread by aerosol (tiny droplets that stay aloft and infectious for hours). But it may be that you only get that with really sick people using pressurized breathing equipment, or when you have a dense concentration of sick people each adding virus to the air.
I think there’s evidence from the (closely-related) SARS outbreak that surface transmission probably matters, and researchers are able to find high titers of infectious virus in droplets deposited on surfaces for (depending on the surface) up to a few days.
What are the cheap ways to limit each mode of transmission?
Close contact
To limit close contact transmission, making everyone keep 2m away from other people as much as possible, spacing out people at restaurants/meetings/workplaces, etc., is a win, and it’s usually pretty cheap. Getting everyone to stop hugging, kissing, shaking hands, etc., similarly will help a lot.
Surface
To limit surface transmission, everyone regularly washing or santiizing hands plus people putting disinfectant on high-touch surfaces several times a day seem like low-cost ways to lower transmission. Give everyone bottles of hand sanitizer to carry around!
Airborne
To limit airborne transmission, moving meetings outside and spacing people out probably helps some. Opening windows in offices/buildings, closing doors between offices, running an air filter, or cranking up the HVAC system to do more changes of air/hour also might help. This seems the hardest to address cheaply, though. We surely don’t have enough HEPA air filters to put one in every office, and I’m not sure how much they’d help anyway.
For all modes:
Obviously, keeping sick people home will help with all of them, because it’s almost certain that as you get sicker, you’re also shedding more virus, and also coughing/sneezing is the best way to spread droplets full of virus. You can’t test everyone for the virus, but you can do fever checks and send people home if they have a fever or obvious symptoms, and that probably helps a lot with avoiding all the forms of transmission. Do this check intelligently–ideally outside or in a separate, separately-ventilated area, where the checker is wearing a mask and gloves. This could be a requirement for reopening a business, or a requirement imposed by the local health department for restaurants to keep working.
Getting everyone to wear a mask seems like a cheap way to lower R_0 for all these, if we had enough masks. (But everyone rushing out to buy an N95 mask and then ER nurses not having any masks because they were all bought already is a pretty horrible outcome.) I think masks are likely to lower direct contact and surface transmission the most, and probably airborne transmission not very much.
Keeping large, dense gatherings shut down is a pretty big win for all three, but it’s maybe not so low-cost. Keeping schools closed down is great for limiting spread of virus but expensive in a bunch of ways.
@albatross11
If what I’m reading about a super-spreader event in Washington – the choir practice – is accurate, airborne is more of an issue than we have been accounting for. No known cases in the town (they were about an hour from Seattle, which had quite a lot, though), no one felt sick, they held choir practice in early March with 60 people, using hand sanitizer at the door, sitting far apart, refraining from hugs and so on. Two of them are now dead; over half the practice came down with distinctly symptomatic covid. Many of them were elderly, but still: really nasty asymptomatic transmission, and it seems to have been purely or almost purely airborn. Singing is an activity that could believably increase airborn transmission.
I’m more optimistic about masks than you are, largely from things I’ve read on SSC. I think they may do quite a lot about airborn transmission. I hope I’m right. I can’t think of a lot of other interventions that seem likely to affect it (though note I’m not an expert), and I think we need something that does.
, sitting far apart
Everything else is right, I think, except this. From the LA Times story:
A foot between chairs isn’t right up, but it’s pretty close, especially if people are sitting in adjacent seats. And sitting there for 2.5 hours singing is a lot.
A lot of what people think of as prudent risks aren’t.
Fair enough. I was assuming the only people sitting adjacent were those from the same household, as I think in the example, but that was entirely my assumption and you’re right; we don’t have evidence of that.
Everyone keeps saying this like it is obviously true, but I am not totally convinced. If in June, the question “How many people die if we end the stay-at-home order now?” is still “Millions of people”, it seems quite plausible that they just extend the order again.
“But it will destroy the economy!” Yes, but a pandemic that is killing millions will also destroy the economy – everyone with the means to do so will continue staying at home and not engaging in all that economy-fueling activity once it becomes clear how bad it is, and now you’ve got the economic devastation of the millions dead on top of it.
Someone is going to need to come up with a good idea for actually controlling the pandemic before anything starts really functioning again.
I would suggest that this particular level of “soft” quarantine is unsustainable. People who live in places where the medical situation is anything less than obviously terrible are going to have enough of it. At which point, one of two things happen. Either the stay at home order gets lifted, and people try and get back to normal. Or the enforcement ratchets up and we move from “if caught outdoors, the police will politely ask you to go home” to “if caught outdoors, you will be forcibly detained and move to an unsanitary prison where you will probably catch the virus.”
Oh, I think you’re right, I just think that all this will accomplish is allowing the spread in those areas to get to whatever value of ‘obviously terrible’ will force their local governor to change their mind and lock down again.
See: DeSantis in Florida, who went from LARPing as the Mayor from Jaws into actually starting to clamp down as it became clear that refusing to shut down isn’t actually an option for Florida.
Basically, “Stay at home order gets lifted, and people try to get back to normal” will be tried a few times, sure – and when it does, that locality will see overwhelmed hospitals, surging case counts, and death rates, and they will lock down again.
After that happens a couple times, I think other locales may stop trying it.
You need the populace’s buy-in for the quarantine to work.
Even China, with no lack of collectivism and police powers and social control, had to resort to welding some people in their homes.
I recognize this strategy. “The alternative is too bad to even consider, so we will make sure not to have any back-up plan. That way we are forced to stay the course!” It’s usually shitty leadership. And when it fails, it fails hard.
Not having a plan besides “everyone stays home” doesn’t mean we stick to that plan.
They have to be lifted eventually because if we all obey the Cuomo Plan, we’ll be locked down with no hope to eradicate the virus within US borders, taking our turns getting sick at a rate that matches hospital capacity until 40-80% of us have been infected. That’s a slow way to get the same herd immunity we got to Model 1918 flu.
JNJ has announced plans to test a vaccine in September 2020. Unless the biology of this virus is like Common Cold-level resistant to vaccine technology, odds are that after Winter 2021 the authorities should have no reason to maintain stay-at-home orders.
Also, more people could start dying from the effects of the stay-at-home orders than from COVID, which would change expert calculations.
I mean, sure, but what’s the better plan? So far Plan B seems to be ‘Let everyone go back to work and let’s all pretend millions aren’t going to die in a month if we do this.’
I mean, I am really hoping that smarter people than me are coming up with a better plan than that, but if so, it isn’t really being talked about on the news.
Gradually open up restaurants, with half-capacity, but have dedicated staff doing temperature checks of both workers and customers, on entry and exit.
This business clearly has enough demand that they could pay for it out-of-pocket and still have people sitting down:
https://ny.eater.com/2020/3/23/21190803/carbone-crowds-nyc-delivery-takeout-coronavirus
We will learn things as we proceed. Where are people cheating? Can I slip $10 to the maitre d’ to be let in without a check?
https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/national-coronavirus-response-a-road-map-to-reopening/ has made an attempt at discussing what Phase II will be like. I’m sure that they have missed some things, and someone reading this comment from 5 years in the future will laugh at something that’s obvious to them. But it’s something to discuss and start debating now.
(One thing I really like is “free facilities for people with COVID-19.” If one of my parents gets it, I want one of them to be able to move out.)
We don’t know the answer to that question now, and we won’t know the answer to that question then. What we do know is, lacking a vaccine or total eradication worldwide, we cannot both return to the status quo ante and reduce total infections to below whatever the true herd-immunity threshold is. So if millions are going to die if we lift the orders now, millions will die if we lift the orders in June. Maybe slightly fewer millions, maybe not.
And the argument from the “skeptics” goes something like “If millions are going to die eventually anyway, why are we shutting the economy down for three months exactly?”
That is indeed the argument. The response tends to be something like “overwhelming the hospitals”. At which point my response is
1) Under any realistic timescale, they’re going to be overwhelmed anyway and
2) Hospital care probably isn’t doing much good.
The answer to this is “YOU MONSTER!”
@The Nybbler
A counter argument is that hospital care does quite a lot of good for people suffering from non-COVID causes.
If we get there, I argue for triage, and the next response is “YOU MONSTER”.
Exactly. If June 1 the expert epidemiologists are solemnly telling us we must not re-open the economy or the same millions will die, what did shutting it down for 10 weeks get us?
This is where it comes back to the idea that we can’t keep everything shut down until the vaccine.
It’s only inevitable that millions will die eventually if we are going to do this for a few months, and then say to hell with it and open everything again. But why would we do that? It won’t actually save the economy. So no, I suspect we actually will keep everything shut down until someone offers an alternative that isn’t just letting the pandemic run wild.
Many businesses can’t go to shift work (e.g. the “essential businesses”), but I for one am hoping for it at my workplace.
Additionally the vast majority of HR and administrative work can be done remotely, and I would like to see it remain remote for a while.
If we can hold out until masks, gloves, and disinfectant aren’t in so short supply, this may help slow and prevent infection as well.
And once the shortages in the grocery stores are dealt with it will be less necessary to shop as frequently or make it so people are able to shop at fewer stores (potentially spreading contagion around).
Stay-at-home orders could destroy more of the economy than just people’s 401Ks. I’m still not sure if I’ll be able to replenish beans, brown rice and toilet paper.
The point of the shutdowns to buy time to ramp up testing and institute some kind of contact tracing and monitoring program (and get the numbers of cases down to the kind of level where the program is feasible to run).
The first part seems to be going okay so far, the second part I’ve seen no evidence for as yet (which is not a great sign).
I think hospital care is doing some good–the problem is, at that point, saving the patient’s life is very expensive even if it works. And while the hospital is overflowing with COVID-19 patients, people who should normally be getting surgeries or being treated for heart attacks are probably not getting great care, which also increases the number of dead people.
If you keep stay at home orders that long enough you have millions dead because of stay at home orders. Also, there is perverse incentive for Mayors and Governors who are getting the feds to foot the bill for their choices regarding stay at home.
Also, there’s a decent chance we’ll have better treatments by June. Vaccines won’t be ready, but we’ll have good evidence on the efficacy of several drugs by then.
“Millions of dead Americans” assumed no attempt to contain the epidemic. “Hundreds of thousands of dead Americans” assumes attempts that are about as successful as we can reasonable expect, given that the attempts have been left so late.
If America was as successful at containing the epidemic as Taiwan or South Korea, it would be “a hundred or two” dead Americans. But that ship has long sailed.
Back in the 90’s I had mono. I ran a high fever for about four weeks, then it went down. I don’t think that happens because your immune system thinks it has won. I think it happens because your immune system realises it can’t win.
If the cure turns out to be worse than the disease, we’ll learn to live with the disease. Right now, we’re mostly hoping that the cure is better.
In “Is it possible to get more American than this?” news, gun stores are listed as essential by the Department of Homeland Security.
https://crimeresearch.org/2020/03/us-department-of-homeland-security-declares-that-firearms-related-workers-are-essential/
Yep. Every time a municipality closes a gun store as part of their quarantine/stay at home ordinances, they get sued. Makes sense to just stop the municipalities doing that so the stay at home orders don’t get challenged as quickly.
If the residual police power under conditions of pandemic is sufficient to overcome the liberty interest in not being confined to one’s home it surely sufficient to overcome the second.
The second amendment has a more effective and well-organized lobbyist organization than basically any other.
There is no well-oiled-machine who has decades of experience fighting “no you cannot confine someone to their house just because you have a vague suspicion they might contract a disease if they leave” cases in court.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the abortion rights lobby is able to be as effective as the gun rights lobby in resisting the use of these shelter-in-place orders to fight the culture war:
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/03/23/texas-stops-most-abortions-during-coronavirus-outbreak/
Seems like they’re winning a lot faster and more decisively than the NRA is…
@Matt M
That has been overturned.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/490415-appeals-court-allows-texas-to-implement-ban-on-abortion-during-pandemic
Liquor stores, too, at least where I live. Maybe someone will complete the trifecta and mandate the 24-hour operation of pawn shops.
For Liquor stores at least the usual argument seems to be around alcohol withdrawal syndrome. There are a lot of closet alcoholics out there. The estimates I’ve seen suggest that magically eliminating all alcohol in the US would probably send > 500,000 people to the emergency room and probably kill > 100,000. Not exactly what you want when the hospitals are overloaded.
I wouldn’t die if my alcohol supply were withdrawn – but trust me, it wouldn’t put me in a better mood.
Also, wouldn’t I need to go to the supermarket more to replace lost beer calories? What is to gain by shutting down supplies of this mental and physical nutrient?
[/tldr] Will riot.
What’s the steelman argument for why gun stores aren’t essential? (Especially one that addresses anticipated objections…)
Why would they be essential? Do people eat guns? Are they required for healthcare?
The experience of countries that aren’t the US is pretty compelling evidence that gun stores are not in fact essential.
People use guns for hunting and they eat the game.
They are essential for the same reason the press is (and the press has been excluded from the lockdown orders) — the right to keep and bear arms is specifically guaranteed in the US Constitution. The press isn’t essential either; you could get all your information from the government.
Also governments have been releasing criminals so jails don’t fill up with coronavirus cases.
Freedom of assembly is also guaranteed by the constitution. That seems like a silly argument to me.
So far no lawsuits on the freedom of assembly front, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some as this goes on. Some of them may even succeed. Note that Rhode Island tried to quarantine New Yorkers and backed down at the threat of a lawsuit (from NY); “public health” turns out not to override everything.
As commonly and legally understood in the US, they are required for the “security of a free state”. You can personally disagree with this consensus, but that is the consensus.
A cursory search suggests that there is no consensus about whether gun stores should be considered essential businesses or not, with some places closing them and others leaving them open.
Unsurprisingly, opinions on the matter mostly seem to mostly reflect pre-existing views on gun ownership.
Insert joke about red onions… [EDIT: Dang, you fixed the typo.]
But anyway, I was answering the question about why gun stores would be considered essential: because Americans generally consider being able to buy and own guns a fundamental right without which we don’t have a free state. A steelman argument for why gun stores aren’t essential should address that.
How about “American exceptionalism won’t save you from a trip to the hospital” then?
This thread has been pretty eye opening, since it never even occurred to me that people would consider gun stores to be an essential business, let alone be so convinced of that fact and its universal obviousness that they are surprised at encountering any disagreement on that front to the point of asking for a “steelman” of what seems to me like basic common sense.
It feels like being asked to steelman the position that fish isn’t a vegetable.
I don’t think this has anything to do with American exceptionalism. It’s about a foundational American value, one that is also embedded the most protected of our laws. I’m sure plenty of Americans would say supporting that is worth risking a trip to the hospital.
I asked for a steelman argument because I figured the above would be pretty obvious, even to people who personally disagree with the value and the law. (Thus why I specified arguments that anticipate objections.) But maybe some people’s bubble walls are thicker than I imagined.
I think it’s pretty clear, if you look at the list of “essential” services in a state, that “essential” doesn’t really mean what it says. It’s a bright line category for a very fuzzy classification.
There are people, although not very many, for whom firearms are an important part of food production, whether hunting or killing varmints. There are other people, probably more, for whom they are an important tool for protection against crime.
And, theoretically at least, against tyranny.
I’m still boggled by this “asking other people for a steel man”. It seems to me that the steel man is a personal piece of mental calisthenics, the exercise of not harboring straw men or by omission allowing your men to be straw.
I feel like I’m in a gym being asked to lift other people’s weights. Boy are you gonna be buff when I’m done.
Because police response has been cut down due to coronavirus, meaning that the populace must protect themselves, which is eased by a gun, especially for women and the physically impaired.
This is at least plausible, though you could certainly make the case for gun stores being nonessential in the same way as book stores, which are also closed during a lockdown. My guess is that in many states, people don’t trust the governor/legislature to treat gun stores fairly, in much the same way that in other states, people don’t trust the governor/legislature to treat abortion clinics fairly. The CA governor, given the power to close fun stores on public health grounds, might just do so indefinitely; the same is true for the AL governor w.r.t. abortion clinics.
@albatross11, you can order books online or through the mail or any number of other ways. You used to be able to order a gun through the mail, but that’s now illegal. The law against it passes Constitutional muster because you can easily go to your local gun store to buy one, so if now the state’s trying to close local gun stores…
One key point on the argument about gun stores being essential: under the US regulatory system, guns cannot be purchased except in-person (and generally in your state of residence). So banning gun stores doesn’t allow (buy them online) as it does for almost every other non-perishable.
> Why would they be essential?
There’s a difference between the Platonic ideal of essential, and then there’s the relevant operative legal definition.
In this case, there’s a law/regulation which allows the closing of “non-essential businesses”. Given that the 2nd Amendment means *something* and some places like Chicago have been beaten over the head with it repeatedly, it’s just easier for the relevant authorities to add gun stores to the list of essential businesses rather than to try and come up with a list of constitutionally-protected categories which are exempt.
Things other than food and “healthcare” are often considered essential.
Firearms are in many areas necessary for food production, either for direct meat acquisition or for vermin/predator control. Firearms are in many other areas essential for self-defense, which may be of enhanced importance in an environment of perceived hoarding/scarcity of critical goods, of reduced police protection and partial emptying of prisons, of increased psychiatric illness due to cabin fever, and yes of petty tyrants like Orban deciding that this is their day.
Firearms are explicitly and legally deemed necessary for the security of a free state, in the United States. Yes, that means privately-owned firearms.
Access to privately-owned firearms, under existing US federal law, requires brick-and-mortar gun stores; this is one place where Amazon won’t help you.
And, unlike many other essential things that may be quietly banned by the petty tyrants who think this is their day, firearms ownership in the United States comes with an already-existing lobbying infrastructure that will predictably and effectively resist any attempt to shutter the gun stores.
If you want a moderate, effective, reasonable shelter-in-place regime to endure, this isn’t a fight you want to take on. People visiting their local gun store are a very minor delta on the risk level we are already choosing to accept, but a not-so-minor risk factor on courts being forced to take official notice that a whole lot of what we are tacitly expecting people to go along with isn’t entirely legal.
I propose a compromise: shut down gun stores, while also shutting down abortion clinics. That should make everybody happy. (ducks)
But not humans.
In some sense, states are already trying to shut down abortion clinics.
(There’s a case to be made that the medical professionals/resources could be better applied to combating COVID cases, but then surely so could neonatal staff!)
And states, or at least cities, are already trying to prevent gun ownership. In both cases it’s done not by making a law against it, which would be inconsistent with current constitutional law, but by making regulations designed to make it more difficult.
I’m talking specifically in the context of COVID-19. Are you referring to examples whether they tried to “prevent gun ownership” (as opposed to “gun sales”; those are different things) in response to COVID?
I’m not talking in the context of Covid — I was thinking specifically of legislation in my city a year or two back.
I attended the city council meeting where it was discussed, and spoke briefly. Most of the people speaking were in favor of the legislation, which would require guns to have trigger locks on them, I think whenever the owner was out of the house (but I’m no longer sure of the details). Supporters listed various bad effects of firearms ownership, such as suicide, none of which would be directly affected by the proposed legislation.
I pointed that out, as did one speaker who was arguing in favor of stronger restrictions on gun ownership. My conclusion was that the objective was to make gun ownership a little more costly and less convenient, so that fewer people would own guns. It struck me then that it was the same tactic being used on the other side against abortion.
More recently, there was a proposal to require all gun owners to have insurance against the risk that their guns might harm someone. Again, it seemed pretty clear that the motive was the same.
It’s more complicated. In general, medical facilities are being asked to postpone all elective procedures. This is partly because of the concerns about staffing, but also because it consumed PPE which could be used by front-line providers, and because it adds additional social connections which might otherwise be avoided.
The trick is that a lot more than what most people think of as elective is actually elective. And most abortions are not medically necessary (a quick search shows numbers in the low single-digit range).
So as it pertains to surgical (rather then pharmaceutical) abortions, shutting them down is following the same guidance as the rest of the medical establishment.
I would have thought that “elective” would be related to “non-time-sensitive”. Whether or not abortions are “elective” in some other sense, they are very much time-sensitive (in that a delay of several months on a first-trimester abortion creates a second- or third-trimester abortion).
What I’ve learned from most of the shelter-in-place orders is that actually a lot more than what people think of as “essential” is actually essential. The order for my county specifically includes all businesses needed to keep households habitable, which includes plumbing, window-repair, tree-pruning, laundromats, and lots of other non-obvious things.
I would have thought the same is true of medical services. The main classification for many of them would be whether they are time-sensitive (for instance, maybe it’s not too much of a difficulty to delay a knee-replacement surgery by a year, even if it’s essential to eventually get it – I don’t know if this is a good example).
Can we have an occasional non-COVID open thread? Maybe every 4 weeks? If you try it and the first attempt flops, I guess you can scrap the idea.
+1
My personal preference would be to have both the open thread and the non-virus open thread running side by side. Unless that’s too complicated for some reason, it should suit most people.
I’m reminded of pubs in England (long ago..) where there was a lounge bar for people who wanted a comfy leather armchair and a pint of real ale, and a public bar for people who preferred a game of pool, a pint of lager and an optional (..sometimes non-optional) fight thrown in.
+1
I have no objections to this suggestion, but how many of those threads do you anticipate we’re likely to have before the end of the epidemic? The epidemicforecasting thing Scott linked to has the peak of the pandemic at the end of April/start of May.
At one COVID-free thread per month we’d get maybe two of them before everyone stops talking about it naturally.
I would suggest making every .75 COVID-free. This will give us the next one, then a CW-free .0, then two unrestricted OTs. (I’d propose .5, but we have one now, so it would be a while until the next one)
No opinion on your timeline, but I +1ed on impulse when I read “non-COVID open thread”. My actual preference would be for all, or at least 3 of every 4 OTs (maybe all incremental ones?), to be non-COVID, with discussion directly* related to C19 relegated to OTs dedicated to that purpose. This is my preference regardless whether that means C19 discussion naturally dies down in a month or in a year.
Here are my reasons in case you’re curious (also so others can chime in about theirs):
– C19 discussion gets tiresome (to me, at least; I’m not really all that interested)
– It might be more helpful to those who want to read it if we keep all C19 discussion in one place
– I use these OTs as sort of a rough substitute for part of my social life, which normally wouldn’t be (and isn’t) inundated with C19 discussion even now
*I don’t mind discussion about tangentially-related things, like “what kinds of foods are you cooking while you’re on lockdown” etc.
Even if it goes on and on it will soon be in the background for many of us.
+1, but more frequently.
There will be the demand to get off the bad news for a while, for a while.
I’m feeling like those governors whose early responses were ignored or criticized while praise is now lavished on Cuomo.
(Granted, my first suggestion was 1 COVID thread to 3 non-COVID. But an hour later I suggested 1 non-COVID to 3 COVID.)
Me a few weeks ago: “We need a special place to discuss CV.”
Me today: “We need a special place to discuss anything that isn’t CV.”
CW-free open thread.
CV-free OT.
Maybe CA-free OT next?
I think Scott should just make a normal post, like any other one, saying “normal OT rules apply except don’t talk about That One Big Thing,” and we’ll see how popular it is.
@Le Maistre Chat
How about a calorie-free open thread?
I don’t really want a non-COVID parallel set of open threads, but I’d take it if it got me a parallel set of non-US-elections open threads starting in August or so.
The eventual logical outcome of moving in this direction would be one OT for each major topic of the moment, which I think would be a decrease in quality from the current system, so I’ll oppose it with “the argument from the slippery slope.”
There’s that, and there’s also the fact that trying to have a thread where you’re not allowed to talk about the main thing on everyone’s mind is doomed to failure. Either you’re going to need super strong moderation to make sure people don’t start talking about it, or it’s just going to turn into another COVID thread.
I say people should just collapse the threads they don’t want to read and start threads about things they want to talk about.
Seconded.
Everyone talking about the same thing gets old fast, whether it’s Kevenaugh or Flores or COVID-19.
+1
A question for the economics gurus among is: can there ever actually be such a thing as wages below cost of living?
My mental model says that as wages for a job increase, the number of people willing to do it also increase. Thus wages for a given job will be determined by the people willing to do it for the least amount of money. If someone is willing to do a job for literally not enough money to live on, that person will eventually starve to death, and they’ll have to be replaced by someone who demands a higher wage.
Am I right here or am I confused?
Theoretically, in the long term, with a lot of caveats. But in the long term, we’re all dead.
Someone who is desperate might be forced to take a job for below the cost of living, even if it means starving eventually, since it beats starving today.
It’s also common for people to work multiple jobs to make ends meet.
And of course, there’s all the caveats about subsidies and external sources of support. People working at low wage jobs may be relying on food stamps, subsidized housing, and other public or private assistance programs.
There’s also the issue that “the cost of living” is not static. If you are sufficiently desperate, you can save money in a lot of ways, but they aren’t good for anyone long term. For example, people living packed together in buildings that have never seen a fire marshall and then die in a preventable fire.
I think this entire model is wrong. It assumes way too much – mainly that people have one job with a set wage that is entirely inflexible.
Like, there are calculations which suggest that being an Uber driver is not economical – that it doesn’t pay enough for someone to “make a living.” And yet, there are tons of uber drivers. Mainly because for most of them, it isn’t their sole means of earning a living.
People volunteer to work for 0 wages in many contexts. 0 is presumably below the cost of living. Reasons why this is possible also apply to positive wages below the cost of living.
Wages can and frequently have dipped below the cost of living. It rarely happens in a modern society but in essence this is what happens when a famine occurs, either the materials for living are in too short supply or people have no worthwhile work to do, leading to mass die-offs. Generally this is a short-term occurrence, although, that’s short-term at the level of an economy so can last for decades and persist long after an unconscionably large number of people have starved to death.
In more modern senses, people can easily find themselves working jobs that pay wages less than what they need to live. There’s a number of reasons this situation persists, number one is savings. If you need $100 a week to live and the only job you can find pays $80 then working the job makes sense as long as you have savings to fall back on. The other is credit both fiscal and social. As many teenagers prove you can flourish on a less than starvation wage as long as your parents are willing to feed and clothe you in the meantime. This extends through to adulthood, if you can’t make rent you might be able to couch surf until something better comes along.
At a societal level, it is rare that wages dip below starvation levels and generally happens due to external factor. The time when a cabal of railroad companies conspired to reduce wages below starvation levels in the US almost sparked a second revolution, so no one is too keen to see it happen on a regular basis. One of the reasons unemployment is a thing is not kindness but as a sop to stop unemployed revolutionaries rioting.
The biggest thing you are missing is that some people don’t need a living wage, so some jobs can be permanently filled with those people. At the low end, typical “teenager jobs” can be filled by 14-16 year olds: they generally don’t pay enough to live independently, but 14 year olds aren’t generally trying to earn enough to live independently. At the high end, some jobs are functionally volunteer work with incidental pay–and tend to be taken by wealthy people with other sources of income: think of some museum docent roles, or directorships of some charities.
This was a live issue two hundred years ago. The “iron law of wages” held that wages would, in the long term, be at the level at which the working class just reproduced itself — not literal subsistence, since that meant enough so a couple could raise kids. Ricardo, who was the best early theorist, recognized that “would” was not the same as “could,” that what the equilibrium wage was would depend in part on the tastes of workers. If they had relatively luxurious tastes, that would make the wage level at which they were willing to devote resources to producing and rearing children higher, hence make the equilibrium wage higher. He concluded that the friends of mankind should wish that workers would have luxurious tastes, since workers were most of the population and that gave an equilibrium at which they were better off.
Current real wages in the U.S. are about thirty times what the global average was through most of history, so wages literally below the cost of living are not a real issue — people who talk in such terms are implicitly assuming “living at what modern people would regard as an acceptable level.” But so far as your question is concerned, one could imagine a situation in which wages for a while were below the level at which an individual could support himself, with individuals either living off savings or charity or gradually starving to death.
The cost-of-living cliff is an issue, though, especially for housing. If you make below a certain amount that is still 10 times the global average through most of history, then you can’t afford to live in any of the housing available, and then the systems that make it hard to get a stable job without stable housing kick in, as well.
See also the above thread about how inequality is exacerbated through access to technology. Some places literally do not allow someone to apply for a job by walking or phoning in, so despite the internet being a luxury by some measures, it’s also a very real gate by others. (Or see how this already assumes that one must have a phone.)
When the intermediate between “have home, phone, and internet” and “homeless, no phone, no internet” does not exist due to modern regulations, the argument that “wages literally below the cost of living are not a real issue” is far from a sure thing.
Part of the problem is that 19th and 20th century anti-poverty reformers succeeded in passing a great many rules the regulate provision of poverty-level essential goods and services out of existence, leaving something like “lower-middle-class” as the bottom rung of available lifestyles, at least short of the proverbial “living in a van down by the river”. The intent was to induce slum landlords and the like to provide lower-middle-class options instead, based on a theory that the fundamental problem was a lack of bargaining power by people living in poverty.
They probably did succeed to an extent, and they no doubt appear to have succeeded more than they actually did because of the enormous overall standard-of-living improvements generated by real economic growth. But there’s also been a cost of leaving no good options (other than relying on alms, public or private, when they’re available) for people who can’t afford the new minimum.
Flophouse > sleeping in your car > sleeping in a cardboard box
It depends on what fraction of the population has a spouse/parent/adult child/welfare check that helps pay some of their cost of living but won’t pay all of it.
Yes, there can be wages below the cost of living, if the worker has some means to bridge the gap. The restaurant owner can pay a waitress less than a living wage, if she can make up the difference from tips. Farm labourers could be paid below subsistence, if they could subsist on the products of common land. British PM Gordon Brown made it possible to pay inadequate wages by instituting a negative income tax paid through the same channels from which a positive income tax would be taken. No subsequent government has dared reverse this as it would cause outrage. A UBI could function as a partial instead of complete subsistence income, allowing workers to accept wages below subsistence and so compete with the rest of the world.
Unfortunately all of these represent sources of wealth that could otherwise be appropriated, so there are always rich people seeking to get their hands on it. The Enclosure of the Commons is one example. “What’s ours is ours and what’s yours is ours too” is snarkily attributed to socialists; ironically it’s been the philosophy of rich people for ten thousand years.
I imagine people are cooking more than before – what are some decent and easy recipes maximizing nonperishable foodstuffs?
For me, all I have is Chili:
Can thaw frozen ground beef
Canned beans and canned diced tomatoes
Chili spices good to go
Onions and peppers…I guess you can grow and last ok? Can we freeze these?
So far, the only new recipe I’ve experimented with is roast potatoes.
1. Cut a potato into small chunks.
2. Put them in a bowl, drizzle oil over it, and mix it around until they’re approximately covered
3. Put it in the toaster over at 400-425 for 35-40 minutes. Optionally turn them over halfway through.
It doesn’t taste particularly good, but it’s cheap and easy to make. I typically eat some fruit with it so it’s not so bland.
Try roasting potatoes at 450, then pulling them out and letting them cool for ~10-15 minutes while your oven heats up to 500, then putting them back in for ~10 minutes. This duplicates the double-frying process that makes McDonald’s french fries as good as they are.
Edit: Also, it doesn’t sound like you’re adding salt?
I have tried adding salt, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. I do still sprinkle salt on them, but it’s easier to just add blueberries to mitigate the taste and provide more calories.
Salt is much more effective when it has had a chance to diffuse throughout whatever you’re cooking. To improve flavor, you could modify your approach:
1. cut potatoes
2. in a bowl, coat potatoes in oil and a reasonable amount of salt
3. let sit for several hours – the larger the pieces, the longer diffusion will take
4. bake
Alternatively, you can boil the potatoes part-way before you bake them, and use an unreasonable amount of salt. You’re pouring the water out, so any extra salt goes away. The objective is to create a lot of diffusion in a short period of time.
Most things that you add salt to benefit from giving time for the salt to diffuse. How much time varies by material: red meats can take a day or two, chicken a day, beans a couple of hours, vegetables 15-30 min, fish 15 min. Even stuff you’re going to blend up where you can add salt later in the process, e.g. mashed potatoes, needs *some* time for the salt to spread itself evenly throughout the medium.
Related to this: I highly recommend “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat”. There’s some fluff there, but it gives you a really helpful framework for thinking about the components of tasty food. Nothing has improved my culinary life like getting a copy of that book, and… sharing it with my girlfriend who does most of my cooking.
Oh, additional thought, also straight out of Salt Fat Acid Heat – you say that blueberries improve the flavor. I google it, and blueberries are a very acidic fruit! Often sour cream (or salsa) will serve the function of making potatoes more acidic, and therefore more delicious. Blueberries should have the same effect, but with the downside of adding sweetness and some weird flavors/textures.
Instead of blueberries, you could experiment with adding just a couple of drops vinegar to a potato chunk, post-cooking, and see what that does to the flavor. You don’t want to add so much that it tastes like vinegar, you just want to add enough that it tastes… richer and better. You can try a couple of times to see what the goldilocks quantity is.
It’s possible that adding vinegar before baking will help (again, diffusion!), but it’s unclear to me how a higher pH will interact with trying to brown the stuff when baking, or if all of the vinegar will just evaporate off, or if vinegar will somehow mess up the structural integrity of the starches, but it seems ripe for some experimentation.
Vinegar like any acid causes potatoes to stay more rigid and brown less. Adding baking soda to boiling water alkalizes it, increasing browning and causing them to cook more on the outside than the inside – used to great effect by the Best Crispy Roast Potatoes recipe.
Definitely hold off on vinegar until after the potatoes are cooked, though I do advocate more acid is more better for most everything.
I do a variation of this that looks like:
Cut potatoes into pieces and throw into a bowl with:
Olive oil
Tons of salt and pepper
Garlic (fresh, powdered, whatever)
Thinly sliced onions
And then any one of these:
Smoked paprika, chili powder, cayenne powder, thyme, rosemary, curry powder
Stir it all around and then spread onto sheet pan.
You can fling grated cheese of any kind over the top of it in the last five minutes of baking.
+1 on FrankistGeorgist’s recipe link plus post-cooking vinegar suggestion. If you have it/can eat it, bacon fat will keep the potatoes from sticking to the pan, too.
Instead of blueberries, you could experiment with adding just a couple of drops vinegar to a potato chunk, post-cooking, and see what that does to the flavor.
This is why over here we put vinegar on chips 🙂 (Oh gosh, proper chip shop chips in the brown paper bag with the tang of vinegar rising off them – now I’m hungry…)
I’ve never tried it with roast potatoes, but it seems to me you could do something with one of those fancy balsamic vinegars (or even a cheap one) as a glaze – and looking around online, yes indeed you can!
We roast vegetables all the time in our house. For root vegetables (potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, maybe an onion cut into 1/8ths) we cut them into pieces (maybe 2cm on a side,), coat them with a mix of olive oil and spices (I use about 1/3 cup olive oil to a tsp each of salt, garlic salt, paprika, italian seasoning + about 1/4 tsp of pepper)–that gets 40-45 minutes or so in a 350 degree oven. They’re done when the potatoes are tender all the way through and don’t have any chewy bits on the inside. If you don’t mind scrubbing with a brush, leaving the peels on the potatoes seems to add something nice; the sweet potatoes get peeled and diced.
Other vegetables get the same coating, but go in a little later–about 30 minutes. That’s stuff like broccoli, brussels sprouts, mushrooms, and squash. (Roasting eggplant didn’t work out at all for us–it’s too watery. But most vegetables do great this way!).
A typical meal I’ll make is to make roasted vegetables (the potatoes provide the starch, the rest provides the vegetables) and oven-fried pork chops or chicken. That is:
a. Coat the pork or chicken in a “glue” made from a couple beaten eggs.
b. Then coat it in bread crumbs, ideally italian seasoned panko bread crumbs. (We just buy those from the store, but you can also coat with flour, instant mashed potato flakes, crushed crackers or potato chips, etc.)
c. Put it on a metal pan that’s been sprayed with Pam.
d. Drizzle some melted butter or olive oil over it.
e. Bake in the same 350 F oven until its internal temperature is good (145F for pork, 165F for chicken).
You want to flip it once, using a metal spatula so the coating browns a little on both sides. Typically, I’d put the root vegetables in first, then the meat and other vegetables, and it would all be done about 30-35 minutes after I put the meat in. But that depends on the thickness and type of the meat, so check.
Yes, roasted veggies can be delicious, and the seasoning you mentioned is key (the OP didn’t seem to be using any). I would add asparagus as another vegetable that comes out really well when roasted (my favorites are sweet potatoes, broccoli, and asparagus…potatoes are good but nothing terribly exciting).
I would want to eat at Albatross’s house.
Not only are roast beets delicious, but you can freeze them, too! So you can roast those in bulk.
Do you parboil your potatoes first before roasting them? Also, use lots of fat – ideally something with a flavour like fat from the roast meat – and season them well. Use all kinds of seasonings and let them get crispy, fatty and delicious (but not an everyday thing else you’ll be the size of a Zeppelin once the lockdown is over).
Eating half-raw spuds on their own or with fruit is not the ideal way to do it. As part of a full dinner, or as leftovers from ‘I cooked so many the day before’ yes (with maybe some of the left-over meat from the dinner fried up with some onions, a bit of garlic, whatever seasoning herbs you fancy, heck throw the left-over veggies into that frying pan with ’em all – have you any of the gravy you made with the meat juices and vegetable water as well to pour over the resulting delicous ‘clog your arteries but what a way to go’?).
Half-hearted “I drizzled a sad dollop of vegetable oil over these forlorn spuds, stuck them in a mini-oven for thirty minutes, and am now eating them plain with a side of grapes” – no. Here’s a recipe that calls for duck fat, rosemary and garlic. This one uses flour and salt.
Meat fats are the best, but you can use vegetable oils -just remember: parboil the spuds first, use loads of oil and really hot, coat them in salt, pepper, garlic powder, herbs to season, and roast them till they’re crispy and golden and sinfully gorgeous.
EDIT: To add to what albatross11 is saying, traditionally if you’re roasting a joint of beef or a chicken/other poultry (duck just runs with fat), once the fats start collecting in the bottom of the roasting tin is when you’d throw in the spuds to roast; that way they soak up all the fatty flavourful goodness.
You can see from the above why I struggle with my weight 🙂
Get some aromatic spices, cook them with the oil, THEN toss the potatoes with the oil. Throw them right in the saucepan, cover the lid, shake em all around.
Also, bacon fat is better than oil, if you have it.
I’m just using cheap vegetable oil because that’s what I have on hand and I’m not enough of a cooking expert to understand the differences anyway.
Olive oil adds a nice flavor that you don’t get from canola oil/rapeseed oil (probably what you’ve got in your cheap vegetable oil). OTOH, olive oil starts smoking at a lower temperature than canola oil.
Cheap vegetable oil is okay for preventing stuff sticking to the pan or roasting tray, but it has little to no flavour (and you don’t really want it to have).
Olive oil and meat fats have a lot more flavour and when roasting spuds (or vegetables) you want them to soak up all that delicious fatty goodness but not go soggy – thus the high temperature to heat the oil and cook the spuds, and why you have the spuds parboiled (or if you have leftover boiled spuds from the day before) so that they’re already cooked; trying to cook raw potatoes by roasting them just means they’re tough on the outside and soggy inside with the trapped steam.
Basically it all comes down to what you think will taste the best for seasoning etc. I’m not a cooking expert by any means, it’s all trial and error!
I feel really smart for having saved up bacon fat over the past few months!
I started saving it and using it to cook liver (based on advice here at SSC) and saitan.
Huh, that reminds me: I should probably prepare some saitan next weekend, and fry it up in bacon grease.
This is why people had dripping mugs! Or at least how it was done when I was a child; the big earthenware mug that your mother used to pour off the fat from the roasting tray into, then put into the fridge to cool and keep.
Layer of fat on the top and the jelly (aspic) underneath, use the fat for cooking and the aspic for making stock or gravy.
Everything old is new again 😉
Cut them into slices about a quarter in thick. Cover the pan with foil and oil the pan a bit, and you can spray some oil on top of the slices too. Shake on some salt, pepper, and cumin. Bake until they start looking good (browning and bubbling on top).
But while I don’t hate mixing sweet and savory, mixing potatoes and blueberries seems like a bad idea to my tastebuds, so your mileage may vary.
Shaggy potatoes:
Peel potatoes and cut into 2-3 inch chunks
Boil for 5 minutes (not cooked through)
Drain the water, then shake the potatoes in the pot (with a lid on) for a few seconds. Your potato chunks should now be “shaggy” looking
Preheat some oil or rendered fat in a roasting pan in an oven at 400 deg, enough to leave a decent layer in the pan
Arrange your tater chunks in a single layer in the hot oil
Bake for an hour, turning every 15 min, until brown and crispy on the outside
Remove from oil and sprinkle with plenty of salt and seasonings while still hot
The “shaggy” step creates a layer of mushed up potato on the outside that the oil penetrates creating an ultra crunchy layer.
Onions and dry beans / lentils / peas last a long time. You can make various things with them:
– Dal or chili to eat with rice
– lentil Bolognese to eat with noodles
– noodle soup with lentils
– fried rice with beans (and other vegetables)
You can also buy UHT milk and make milk rice.
Most vegetables can freeze, but it’s better to buy them frozen, because your home freezer is likely to make them unpleasantly change texture. Onions and garlic, potatoes and apples should be fine unrefrigerated for weeks or months.
We generally cook noodles with vegetable or lentil sauce, some of the rice dishes listed above, or frozen pree cooked meals. It’s not exactly gourmet, but it is enough variety to get through the quarantine without getting bored.
Where do you find UHT milk? (In the USA). I haven’t seen it in any grocery stores in my area and ordering online doesn’t seem economical.
Whole foods has it. I’ve seen it in other stores too. It is not refrigerated, so find it where the oat and almond milks are located.
I’m not in the USA, but certainly grocery stores must have it? If they don’t, you might be able to use milk powder, or use soy / almond milk which is usually shelf stable. Or figure out something with condensed milk or coconut milk, though these are quite different from normal milk.
I’m really surprised that UHT milk isn’t prevalent in the US. I would have thought it would be even more common than where I live (France) where it’s just as common as fresh milk.
There actually are UHT milk brands commonly available at American supermarkets, particularly organic milk, the funny thing though is that they’re refrigerated in America anyway, just because that’s how Americans feel milk should be.
I was surprised when I read about UHT milk the other day, since I had basically never heard of it.
Apparently, people tried to introduce it to the US back in 1993, but it failed because customers were suspicious of any milk that wasn’t refrigerated. It could probably still take off as long as you market it right.
I suppose it’s just one of those weird cultural quirks. Sort of like how Americans think Europeans are irrationally afraid of food coloring and GM crops, among other things.
I was amused when I first visited Germany and discovered that the orange Fanta there is colored like orange juice rather than being literally orange colored like it is in the US.
UHT half-and-half in single-serving containers has found a niche in the US, at diners, hotels, and lower-end coffee places, because it lets them leave the stuff out without getting dinged by the Food Police.
Also, people are used to putting small plastic containers of stuff in their drinks, so they probably don’t think about it the way they think about a jug of milk at the grocery store.
If you had asked me before, I would have assumed those little plastic things were just fake milk if I thought about it at all.
I thought they were some kind of fake milk, too. The UHT market should change the labelling on them to tell people “this is real, honest-to-God milk from a cow.”
P.S. What really boggled my mind was learning that Canadians buy milk in bags. I’ve seen giant bags of milk loaded into dispensers at cafeterias before, but the idea of people buying bags of milk at the supermarket just seems completely alien to me.
I’d love that, actually; milk bottles taking up too much space in the bin is a recurring minor annoyance.
UHT milk was a thing for a while decades ago. Nowadays ordinary milk lasts for ages and has no separate cream, so I assume they are doing it to all milk.
You can buy shelf-stable milk (Parmalat) here, too. Probably not so easy to get *now*, but a month ago, you could get it in any grocery store around here.
@FrankistGeorgist:
> the funny thing though is that they’re refrigerated in America anyway
I don’t think that’s a sufficient summary. While it’s true that the major national brands of organic milks (like Horizon) sold in rectangular half-gallon containers and gallon plastic jugs are UHT pasteurized, and have two to three-month long expiration dates, most are _not_ aseptically packaged. You are right that you can probably get away with not refrigerating them for short periods, but they are not designed to be shelf stable. The claimed expiration dates are only valid if they are kept refrigerated.
By contrast, there are also 1L “bricks” of milk (and smaller single serve boxes targeted at children) that actually are shelf-stable. These generally have no twist-off spout, and have a six-month or longer expiration. While they are occasionally sold refrigerated, they are more typically sold non-refrigerated. The difference is that these are aseptically packaged, so that they remain are truly sterile.
This Cornell “Dairy Food Science” note is not particularly clear, but it’s the best resource I can find: https://foodsafety.foodscience.cornell.edu/sites/foodsafety.foodscience.cornell.edu/files/shared/documents/CU-DFScience-Notes-Milk-Pasteurization-UltraP-10-10.pdf
Pay particular attention to the tables on the 2nd page, specifically the boxed region in the right hand column of the lower table.
(Please correct me if I’m wrong about this. I looked into it closely several years ago, and it’s possible that things have changed since then.)
Walmart apparently carries it, although most of the stores in our area are out of stock at the moment and I don’t think they deliver it. At the moment, milk is one of things we expect to run out of in the next month, due to limited refrigerator space, and the rest of my family is very negative on using powdered milk, which makes UHT milk interesting to me.
It might be worth distinguishing two different types of dried milk. Most milk powder sold in the US is nonfat dried milk (NFDM), and while it works in cooking and is very shelf stable, most people find it doesn’t taste very good when reconstituted as fluid milk.
But there here is also whole-fat (or full cream) dried milk, which is relatively common in areas where refrigeration is scarce or milk is less commonly consumed. Because of the fat, it has a shorter shelf life (a year or two unopened as opposed to decades). And it’s harder to mix. But unlike the nonfat dry milk most people revile, it can actually taste good!
Peak and Nido are decent brands, and available (although currently expensive) on Amazon. They are also often available in Asian or Mexican grocery stores. The best I found, though, was the WFDM made by Humboldt Creamery. It’s actually good! They don’t sell it directly to the public (I was using it commercially). But at one point it was being sold bulk at Rainbow Foods in San Francisco, and it’s quite possible there are other resellers if you search around.
I got in some green tea. I need my tea, and I will drink black tea without milk if I have to. But while I much prefer black tea and milk to green tea, the latter doesn’t need milk.
@nurkz
Thank you!
We drink skim milk at home, though. To me, the nonfat dried milk tastes a little off – rather as whole milk does. So I think that would introduce a new problem!
Thought appreciated, though!
A simple curry is always a can of coconut milk and some pantry spices away, and great refrigerator velcro. Likewise paprikash and Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce are great for making assorted stuff feel like a dish. I’ve always been a huge fan of sardines which are shelf-stable protein, albeit divisive. Canned salmon is basically only good for salmon cakes, but there are worse things to have in an evening.
I keep quite a lot of panko breadcrumbs around, which is a nice way to add textural contrast to basically anything. I’ve even just toasted some with oil and garlic and dumped it unceremoniously on things, still does the job.
I’m actually eating less canned food and beans than ever, due to an Amish hookup and a congenial butcher. The biggest change is that local stores are out of butter, but chock full of ghee. I cook everything in it now which is delightful, and a habit I’ll likely keep up.
Edit: Also buttermilk! I can never believe how long it lasts and is lovely for baking and marinades.
Water + cashews in a blender makes cashew cream, which can be used as a dairy substitute or substitute for the coconut milk in curries.
The obvious one is homemade bread. The main ingredients are flour, water, and yeast, and you can use sourdough if you run out of yeast. Fresh bread is a luxury food, it’s reasonably nutritious, and flour is cheap and keeps without refrigeration. Butter to go with it requires refrigeration, but olive oil doesn’t.
Lentils are a little easier to cook than most other beans. We have a medieval lentil dish that’s easy and good, basically lentils, onions, and eggs poached on top. If anyone is curious the recipe is webbed in some of what Betty and I have published.
You can get dried onions and peppers.
Co-signed on baking/steaming your own bread.
Porridge oats, yogurt and baking powder make a good bread too.
Butter requires refrigeration? Granted butter in Ireland is salted, but I keep it in the cupboard for months. (The block stays in the fridge.)
Could you elaborate on porridge oats, yogurt, and baking powder making bread? That sounds good.
Also, please explain “the block stays in the fridge” — what block?
My people came from Ireland a long time ago and it sounds like I need to learn some things about butter and bread from them.
It’s super simple: mix up one volume (500g) of Greek-style yogurt with two volumes of porridge oats and a teaspoon of baking powder. You can put in raisins, pumpkin seeds, whatever.
Here’s a more official recipe: https://glenisk.com/recipes/porridge-bread
You’ll find a lot of variants on the internet, but basically a recipe is just a guideline, and anything adjacent will work.
By “the block” I meant the block of butter. I keep butter I’m using on a dish in a kitchen cupboard because it will be too hard to spread straight from the fridge. (TBH, it can be hard to spread anyway…)
“Porridge oats” is a new term to me. Does that mean what we call rolled oats? Steel cut oats? Something else?
I think they are just rolled oats. Porridge oats is what they are called here. Porridge disgusts me, but I have nothing against oats.
Rolled oats or sometimes rolled oats that have been further shredded/chopped/disintegrated so you can make the porrige faster.
Anyone got some advice on how to deal with a strong white shortage?
It seems that everyone else had the same idea and has cleared the shelves of flour.
I have limited quantities of strong white, soft white, rye, spelt and cornmeal.
There’s still strong wholemeal around, as well as mealy potatoes.
And I panic bought a *lot* of rolled oats (may have to live off flapjack for a while).
I’m guessing sourdough is more versatile than S. cerevisae for weird grains. My plan is to mix strong white or brown with the other grains/starches to make vaguely rustic breads. Anyone know how to get a good crumb under these conditions?
Another linguistic novelty —”strong white” is an unfamiliar term to me. Does that mean what we would call hard wheat flour? Is “strong wholemeal” what we would call whole wheat flour made from hard rather than soft wheat?
Or is the “strong” a marker for something else?
Yeah, hard. i.e. lots of gluten.
Usually >=12% protein by weight. (for white flour)
A make granola in bulk about once every other week (I have a large family to feed). You could use up some of your rolled oats that way. Here’s the basic recipe:
42 oz rolled oats (this is a standard large container in the US)
12 oz chopped nuts
8 oz coconut
10 oz chopped dates (or raisins or other dried fruit or berries)
—–Put these in a very large pan roasting pan and mix them together. (I use an aluminum one that’s intended to be disposable, but I reuse it over and over.)
Then make a sweetener/flavor mix:
2 cups of sweetener (honey or maple syrup or (2 cups some sort of sugar combined with 1/2 cup water) or whatever)
2/3 cup neutral oil (canola or whatever)
1 Tablespoon salt
——-Put these in a saucepan and stir and heat over medium heat until it simmers for a bit. Depending on what you use, it may foam up, so use a largish saucepan and keep an eye on it. You can add other flavors if you want: 1/2 cup of cocoa powder; or 2 Tablespoons of cinnamon; or 2 Tablespoons of vanilla extract (add extracts after you take it off the heat).
———Pour the liquid over the dry ingredients in the roasting pan, and stir it. Keep stirring it until all the oats and stuff are evenly coated. Yes, keep going, it’ll take five minutes or so of stirring.
——–Put the pan in a cool oven (I use 250 degrees), and cook for two hours or so, give or take half an hour, taking it out and thoroughly stirring it every 20 minutes or so. This is doing two things: slowly driving off the water that was in the liquid mixture, and roasting the dry ingredients in the oil and sugars. It will be pretty soggy the first few times you stir it, but you’ll notice it gradually getting dry and slowly darkening/browning. You can’t really hurry this: it’s not at all hard, but does take time. After it’s all dry and crunchy and a color you like, take it out and let it cool to room temperature, then store it in closed containers.
My favorite combination is maple syrup with walnuts, but honey/pistachio, vanilla/almond, cinnamon/pecan, cocoa/pecan also work well. I’ve also made the sweetener with a lot of applesauce and got a very good apple flavor; mashed banana also worked really well; as did peanut butter. It’s very versatile, really.
You can get a big sack of King Arthur’s high gluten bread flour off Amazon.
Using an autolyse and a food processor this recipe makes a bread with a light, refined sandwich loaf texture out of only whole wheat flour – but it’s formulated by an American for American style ingredients so results may vary.
If you want to extend bread flour with available whole wheat, this recipe for English muffins is excellent and easy.
As rustic breads go this is a personal favorite, although again relying on a mix of bread and whole wheat flours. And quite a lot at that. Lovely texture though.
Potato bread doesn’t use high gluten flour and is delicate and soft.
An all-cornmeal cornbread is also an option, although not to my yankee tastes. Polenta, once set and crisped is hardly bread but is starchy and delicious and sliceable.
Almost any beans taste good with canned tomato (paste or diced tomatoes in juice). Fry up some onion and/or garlic, add cooked or frozen beans, add tomato and water if needed, season however you’d like, maybe add some lemon juice.
Also, crepes! 1.5 cups milk, 1.5 cups water, 2 cups flour, 2 eggs, pinch of salt, mix everything until batter is smooth and not too thick, fry on a nonstick pan. If you use an egg replacer and plant-based milk then all the ingredients are either nonperishable or can last a long time in the pantry. (This recipe makes a lot of crepes so halve it if you don’t have many people to feed.)
Eggs in the fridge are good for a few months and UHT milk keeps indefinitely.
Are your crepes nominally for sweet purposes, or savory?
Either way works, the crepes are pretty bland-tasting. My family is Polish so for savory crepes we fry up mushrooms + onions as a filling– adding cheese (Swiss or mozarella maybe) would make it less healthy but help the filling stick together better. For sweet, we mix soft white cheese (“Farmer’s cheese” I think?) with sour cream and vanilla sugar and use that as a filling, with jam or confectioner’s sugar on top. But probably any normal filling would taste good. For quarantine I would go with jam or applesauce and eat them for breakfast.
Cottage cheese, maybe?
There are a variety of things that might be called soft white cheese. Cottage cheese is the most common in the U.S. Ricotta is somewhat similar but not the same. Quesa Fresca, which is quite different would fit as well. So would cream cheese, which is something that makes sense in crepes.
I would guess he’s using cottage cheese, because that’s what my Lithuanian grandmother would use.
No, not cottage cheese- too liquidy. It’s similar but drier, that’s why you mix it with sour cream to make a paste. This link describes it well, I’m not sure what could work as a substitute but maybe cream cheese could taste good.
Might be ricotta.
You can drain/press cottage cheese, so that would probably be the closest thing easily available. Normally when I see “farmer’s cheese” it’s at Mexican markets, and the cheese is similar to cotija.
What happens if you substitute Bisquick mix for flour?
Hmm, I haven’t tried it but I don’t know if that’s a great idea. Bisquick has baking powder in it and you don’t want your crepes to rise much, since you want them to be flat and flexible and if they turn out too fluffy they could break apart when you try to fold them or roll them up.
Pasta bake: cook pasta, cook veggies if needed, fry protein if needed (canned fish can be tossed in), mix together, put cheese or breadcrumbs on top, heat in the oven until top is crispy.
Fried rice: basically pasta bake except you put the veggies and protein in a frypan to cook and then add the rice and fry for a few minutes. Start off with cold cooked rice.
Rissotto: look up a recipe but basically you start off with frying uncooked rice, then add liquid to be absorbed. Add veggies during the process as they need cooking, put protein on top at the end (cooked if need be).
All of these can be made with frozen or dehydrated veggies and meats.
Infinite casseroles can be made from combining items from these groups and baking at 350 for 45 min:
1. Carb: cooked pasta, rice, bread crumbs or pieces of bread or crackers, or any other grain, tortillas cut up or tortilla chips, or potatoes
2. Protein: canned tuna, sardines, fresh meat cooked, sausage, eggs, cheese
3. Vegetable: broc, cauliflower, frozen mixed veggies, spinach or other greens, summer or winter squash, canned tomatoes, canned beans
4. Flavor: chicken broth, basil/thyme/oregano, tamari/ginger/garlic, salsa/chili powder/cumin, etc
Yeah, this is pretty much the best answer. Casseroles can be made from exclusively pantry ingredients, are very tasty, are very filling, and are easy as hell as to cook. Also great for leftovers!
I will add that you can also get canned chicken, canned beef, canned any protein. You are not reliant on fresh or frozen meats (I see fresh poultry is becoming scarce).
You’re good for chili con carne anyway!
College dorm dishes are all about this, aren’t they?
Fried rice is rice, canned ham, frozen veggies, and optional eggs.
Instant ramen can be spruced up easily with frozen veggies and meatballs.
For that matter, then most basic Asian and Italian dishes apply so long as there’s no cheese. Pasta/noodles/rice, frozen meat, frozen veggies, and canned/bottled sauce plus dried spices.
If you really have the freezer space, though, go nuts with making and freezing dumplings.
Not non-perishable, but frittatas refrigerate well, so you can buy two week’s worth of eggs, use half fresh as normal, and the other half for the frittata before they go bad. Low-effort recipe is 1/4 dairy of choice (milk or sour cream) to every 6 eggs, add whatever veggies and meat to the mix, slow cooker for 3-4 hours on low, or 1-2 hours on high. Can make for 4-6 servings.
Short version:
You can freeze everything
You can microwave everything
All else is luxury
Things I’ve discovered thanks to being forced to eat every obscure bit of nonperishable food in my house:
1) Buckwheat becomes palatable if honey is mixed into it.
2) Powdered peanut butter can be mixed with simple ingredients to make a tasty and filling noodle sauce: https://parade.com/842362/communitytable/asian-peanut-noodles-using-peanut-butter-powder/
3) Dried beans are more trouble than they’re worth to prepare. Just buy canned beans. They’re already tender and only need to be heated up to eat.
4) Easy recipe: Combine 2 parts water, 1 part dried white rice, 1 part canned beans, and spices of your choice (I used a packet of Ramen noodle seasoning) in a rice cooker, and cook it as normal. The result isn’t the best meal ever, but it’s very cheap and nutritionally balanced.
5) Milk’s importance as an ingredient in even the simplest recipes can’t be overestimated. Evaporated milk should be part of your disaster stockpile.
6) Coffee whole beans need to be pulverized into a powder, made of particles no more than 1 mm in diameter, to make good coffee. A blender isn’t well suited for this, and the chunks will be too large, making the coffee too weak and light-colored. You need a dedicated coffee grinder.
7) Canned ham is different from, and in my opinion, inferior to SPAM.
They should sell it with a label: “WORSE THAN SPAM”. People would buy it, just to see. (You could include a coupon for Pink Slime, I guess.)
A mortar and pestle can grind coffee in a pinch.
But is canned ham different from canned Vienna Sausage?
(Also, you can still use coarsely ground coffee if you cold brew.)
Vienna Sausage is true gutter food.
Wieners from America or Wieners from Wien (or Frankfurt)?
Nutritional studies are generally observational by necessity.
Could lock down / shelter in place orders allow for some good studies?
Is anybody else getting the sense that this current government/social focus on procuring a large number of ventilators is a pointless waste of time?
I was reading some sources the other day and both preprint papers and social media anecdotes seem to confirm that a large majority (>80%) of COVID patients who are ventilated die anyway. It strikes me that, in light of this fact, procuring large numbers of additional ventilators in order to reduce overall COVID fatalities is not the greatest use of scarce resources.
It seems to me kind of like streetlight policymaking. Nobody really knows what to do about COVID infections, beyond ‘quarantine the sick, treat symptoms, and hope for the best”. But that’s not a very inspiring message. On the other hand, vents: they are physical things that we can manufacture, they are a highly visible, easily explained, easily measured variable that can be shown to increase over time. They’re a highly visible symbol of progress against the virus. My only concern is that increasing the number of vents available will not make that much progress on anything that matters
+1
Agree with all of this. Every politician (and many private sector leaders) are optimizing for “what can I do to look like I’m helping in solving this problem.” And “produce more ventilators” is a pretty easy answer to that question.
Not necessarily agreeing, but I remember a news conference in NYC where the doctors said the bottleneck was more staff to run the ventilators.
I’ve sometimes wondered this myself. It seems like focusing on PPE and tests would be a lot more effective. But I suppose the counterargument is “we should do all of those”.
Life-years are worth a lot, so paying $50K for a ventilator that is used on 5 people and saves one is a huge bargain.
One also expects that as ventilators become more scarce the success rate with them will go up, as they are reserved for the most appropriate cases.
I’ve been saying over and over that “Flatten the curve! 40-80% of you will get it, and we’re locking you down so the health care system doesn’t get overwhelmed!” is ridiculous statesmanship.
I’m down in Kentucky, where the Governor has been ahead of others relative to cases. Which is nice, but with no containment it just means our Boomers will get infected later and die at the same rate as New York unless mass testing (buy ABT) and contact tracing are possible before interstate travelers destroy any gains.
I think this is dangerous nonsense.
“Social media anecdote and preprints” is a polite way of saying “zero solid evidence”.
And even if your number was correct (which I don’t think it is), if you put 20 patients onto a ventilator over the course of a year-long outbreak, 4 of them survive, and one would have survived otherwise, you’ve just saved 3 lives.
The first link on the cost of ventilators I’ve found is https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-ventilator-new-york-cases-andrew-cuomo-price-cost-a9431861.html. I don’t vouch for it (I’m don’t think “we shouldn’t bother with ventilators” is a take worth spending much effort refuting, I’m afraid), but it quotes the cost of a ventilator at $45,000. Let’s say it costs as much again to run for a year. You’ve just saved three lives for $30,000 a pop.
For some comparison points, in the UK the NHS will fund treatments that add about /one year/ of life for £30,000. In the US, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-should-the-government-spend-to-save-a-life/ suggests the government should be spending orders of magnitude more than that to save a life.
Approximately 100% of informed opinion is “we desperately need more ventilators”. Challenging that without something far more solid than what you have is massively irresponsible.
It’s not irresponsible to just ask questions here. If he were publishing articles or giving speeches about it, that would be a different story.
Yeah. From my read, eqdw hasn’t proven what they’re arguing. And if eqdw was starting a ventilator truther campaign on this basis, it could qualify as “massively irresponsible.” But they’re not.
The wonderful thing about SSC and adjacent groups is that we get to be utterly wrong about stuff without being told that our misconceptions are somehow a moral harm.
People should *absolutely* be asking if the focus on ventilators is worthwhile. People should *absolutely* be asking if lockdowns are an optimal response in the current situation. Even Robin Hanson out there in the wilderness arguing for variolation is worth considering. I think he hasn’t made a particularly compelling argument yet, but hey. If we reject dissenting perspectives out of hand, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to be correct on the off-chance they’re right. Let’s not lose this norm just because there’s a plague. Being rational matters even more when the stakes are high.
Thanks for standing up for this. It’s easy to forget when arguing with people.
Yes to this.
The variolation stuff seems well worth experimenting on to me. We have the advantage here that we can test it in healthy 18-year-olds with virtually no risk of killing anyone. Use variolation on young healthy people and see if they develop symptoms that are significantly less bad than normal cases, and check them for antibodies. If results are good you can carefully generalize to larger and more at-risk populations.
Reread the post I’m responding to. It isn’t just asking questions. It’s not even “just asking questions”, which I’m sure is a game you know (FWIW, I think that in some ways it’s a point in favour of eqdw that they’re not playing it). It’s actively putting forward opinions.
The only question mark in the post is at the end of a rhetorical question of the form “does anyone else agree with me that X is true?”, not “is X true?”. After that, it’s just straightforwardly stating opinions, with nary a question in sight.
I think this is dangerous nonsense.
eqdw led off with a statement (the one question mark) that clearly established how certain they were of the following statements (not very). Then they proceeded to describe what information sources led them towards that idea. This was clearly an attempt to resolve confusion.
I want this space to remain a place where people can ask for and receive correction, second opinions, and independent analysis. Attacking someone for being confused and asking about the source of that confusion works against that goal. Please stop.
Ventilators are a bargain when they save 1 out of 5 lives attached to them. The big picture question is whether putting 320 million people under house arrest just so there’s always an ICU bed or ventilator for each old person who needs one is worth it. Does everyone getting to live their life and the health care system getting totally slammed only raise COVID deaths by 20%?
You do know that COVID patients consume a vast array of medical resources besides ventilators?
Back-of-the-envelope calculation – let’s say that we expect 50% of Americans to get the virus one way or another, so that there should be about 150 million infections. Let’s assume a 1% mortality rate with the shelter-in-place measures, and 1.2% mortality without them. That’s 300,000 lives saved by the measures. At a rate of $9 million per life (the amount used by the EPA and DOT when assessing environmental regulations and traffic safety construction projects) that’s $2.7 trillion. That’s about 15% of GDP. I’m not sure exactly how to measure the difference between the economic disruption caused by the shelter-in-place measures and the economic disruption that would be caused just by baseline fear of a new virus spreading, but it’s not obvious that it’s much larger than 15%. So even assuming only 20% change in mortality, these measures seem to be at least on the right order of magnitude for the number of lives saved, though the calculation will depend on some details I haven’t worried about yet.
Is there any other medical intervention that has degree of impact? Anywhere close?
Let’s assume 80% of people who die of COVID-19 will be put on a ventilator. Let’s assume there’s an 80% mortality rate for people who get put on ventilators. Gonna just use concrete numbers:
100 people will probably die:
20 die outright.
80 get put on ventilators
64 eventually die.
16 live because of ventilators.
So based on these assumptions, ventilators cause a 16% difference in mortality rates. On its face, it’s definitely not a “pointless waste of time.”
As far as cost benefit – when you say “limited resources”, which limited resources are you referring to? What is the opportunity cost here? To make that case, I think you’d have to show what they should be doing that they’re not doing, and how ventilators is getting in the way of that.
Personally, I’m disturbed by the total lack of evidence that the politicos in the US are setting up infrastructure for contact tracing. But I don’t think that’s a case of opportunity cost: it’s not either/or.
> Is there any other medical intervention that has degree of impact? Anywhere close?
My intuition is that PPE is more effective. Having healthcare workers not get sick and die is really important to saving lives as well, and if we make enough masks to distribute to ordinary people, community transmission goes way down as well. But like you said, it’s not either/or.
That’s absolute true. But irrelevant. I don’t think anyone is saying to hospitals “you can have PPE or ventilators, pick one”.
Then you should say the question is wrong, not the answer. I disagree that the question is wrong, though: Money and public attention can be allocated to PPE or ventilators and some distributions will save more lives than others.
There is no reason not to have both. They are both cheap, relative to their projected benefit and to the sums of money available to the government.
I’ve posted this elsewhere in this OT, but I don’t know how to link to the reply, so I’ll say it here too: the two problems are interlinked. Because of PPE shortage, intermediate options for therapy are being eliminated from consideration for fear that they’ll cause airborne droplets and spread the disease. Everyone who can’t survive on a low-flow nasal cannula gets a full-on intubation. PPE shortage —> (exacerbated) ventilator shortage.
Everybody here stay safe by getting a mild case. 🙁
Right click on the timestamp.
Yeah, I remembered how to do it about five seconds after I posted that. Oh well, I saved some other people the nuisance of clicking on a link. Thanks.
I pulled that number from eqdw: “a large majority (>80%) of COVID patients who are ventilated die anyway.”
You’re right: it doesn’t account for the “needlessly ventilated” category. My priors heavily weigh towards “doctors are not needlessly ventilating people”, so I’m willing to assume it’s somewhere in the single digits, and round it out of my argument.
I probably should’ve been clearer: the numbers I’m using are inaccurate. I think they’re accurate enough for purpose, which is pushing back against the claim that ventilators are a “pointless waste of time.”
If you want a better answer, I imagine you could construct one by looking at the question: what are the clinical indications for mechanical ventilation? https://www.medscape.com/answers/304068-104774/what-are-the-indications-for-mechanical-ventilation and determining what the evidential basis for mechanical ventilation as a medical intervention is. Armed with that, you would have a baseline for reasoning about COVID-19 ventilations.
Looking at that medscape page, it says the indications are “Bradypnea or apnea with respiratory arrest”. Not a doctor and don’t know the survival rate of that without ventilation, but “respiratory arrest” sure sounds like a death sentence.
Well. I started looking a little bit. I was also entirely discounting the percentage of people who die from ventilation who would otherwise not die. I imagine that it’s low, but based on reading further about ventilation, it’s definitely not zero. I’m adjusting that number in my head up from rounding error to… not rounding error.
Mask anecdote:
My wife made me one. I went out to run an errand on Friday and I was the only one wearing one.
I ran an errand to the grocery store today, and there was one other customer in the store wearing one.
It’s spreading! We can flip this social expectation.
I’m possibly late with this, but the medical establishment seems to be flipping as well.
https://medium.com/@Cancerwarrior/covid-19-why-we-should-all-wear-masks-there-is-new-scientific-rationale-280e08ceee71
Tweeted by Dr Gottlieb: https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1244460977615253504
When I went to the store on Sunday, I’d guess that maybe 30% of customers were wearing masks. But I live in an area with a large Asian population as well.
Same here (both for having gone to the store on Sunday and for seeing maybe 30% of people wearing masks) except we have very few Asians and instead a lot of Africans.
Mask-wearing seemed pretty evenly distributed among whites, American blacks, and Africans.
It’s not limited to Asians in my area either (though it is more prevalent), I just thought it might have influenced things.
I went to the store with a legit mask leftover from a home improvement project. I’d say around 10% of people were wearing masks, but around 50% were wearing gloves.
My friend…uhh…yeah, he includes wrap around goggles and earmuffs as well.
I was given gloves before entering a supermarket a few days ago. An unappreciated benefit is that I no longer touched my face, because it felt disgusting to do so on an instinctual level.
Strange. In.Bucharest it’s well over 50%. Not used to being at the forefront of… anything.
This story has me persuaded: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/coronavirus-choir-outbreak?
TLDR: City an hour Seattle, with no confirmed cases in that county. Church choir practice of 60, no one has any symptoms whatever, everyone uses hand sanitizer coming in and leaving, everyone avoids touching each other or each other’s stuff… three weeks later, 2 deaths, 45+ confirmed infected.
Masks were not used. It seems to me that getting back to something like ‘business as usual’ in this country will be a lot more possible if we normalize wearing masks.
Shopping last weekend, I’d say about 10-30% of folks had some type of improvised mouth/nose cover. I’m encouraging family to use them as well.
When I go to the supermarket I now wear a scarf as a mask — not for my own health, b/c I’m a healthy young(ish) person, but for the sake of my parents, whom I’m now shopping for and whose groceries I’m holding in my hand.
My previous sense was that the science said this does nothing. But I couldn’t shake the intuition that it at least helps prevent big droplets from getting on the food in case I do have corona and am asymptomatic, so I kept doing it. Would Dr Gottlieb say that I’m right to wear that scarf?
Make sure you wash that scarf after every time you get back.
I went grocery shopping this morning in Texas (incidentally, it appears that Monday morning a few minutes after opening is a good time to find paper products in the store – we got both paper towels and toilet paper, after several weeks of seeing neither). On previous visits, I’ve only ever seen one or two people wearing masks. Today there were a bunch – somewhere between 10-30% I would guess, with at least two of them being what I assume are N95 masks. I think the only Asian person I saw in the store was one of the mask-wearers, and otherwise it was the same sort of mix of white, black, and hispanic people as the rest of the customers.
I should probably get masks for grocery shopping.
I was in the supermarket this afternoon (Ireland) and nobody was wearing one. I think we ran out.
I went to Costco today, and about 50% of people were wearing one – Bay Area, so we have significant populations of very many ethnicities. I think more of the people wearing masks looked Asian, but obviously discount for result that confirms expectations. Split about 50/50 between surgical masks and rigid-looking masks that Mom said were for home improvement, plus two homemade-looking masks (color-coordinated) and one guy using a scarf.
Nobody on the streets, walking around, had a mask – 0/10. It might be that the grocery store is more crowded, so people are more inclined to assume they need one, but I also wonder if taking walks selects for people who are less worried, and grocery shopping doesn’t – perhaps the kind of person who would wear a mask for a walk isn’t taking very many (or any) walks right now.
I just realized that most women own hooded sweatshirts and at least one kind of tight black pants/bottoms.
If you have to resort to a homemade mask, use black cloth and be a ninja.
The latest executive power grab Orban got his gerrymandered-supermajority party to agree to in Hungary looks really awful from the English language stories available, indeed rather Ermachtigungsgesetzlich:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/30/hungarys-viktor-orban-wins-vote-to-rule-by-decree-155476
Is it in fact as bad as it looks? If not, why not? In particular, if Orban continues this state of emergency past the point where other EU countries return to the normal non-pandemic-time regime, shouldn’t that get Hungary kicked out of the EU?
I’m not sure anything short of literal tanks in the streets could get Orban kicked out of the EU. Breaking up is rather inconvenient.
The Socialist government of Spain has put non-literal tanks in the streets (Centauro tank destroyers, technically) over the virus.
“The shadow of fascism is forever descending on the United States and landing in Europe”
Well who knows what will happen with the EU in a few months. It is not exactly most stable of countries; because it is not really a country.
Welp, here we go. This could be very good or very bad:
FDA authorizes widespread use of unproven drugs to treat coronavirus, saying possible benefit outweighs risk
Couple of things:
1. I hope they’ve made sure production can ramp up to meet the potential demand (the article mentions “millions of doses”, but IDK how many people that actually treats)
2. I hope they’ve made sure folks with on-label needs are going to be taken care of
3. I guess this means the more recent data on this has continued to be positive?
4. If I read the article right, it means broader access to the drug to hospitals (where some docs were already prescribing it off-label) but no updates to prescription guidelines. Which I think means the docs just have more options which I think is probably the right call.
5. I super hope they’ve set up some sort of tracking and reporting infrastructure to rapidly collect and disseminate information on the success (or lack thereof) of treatment and the severity (or lack thereof) of side effects. This is arguably the most important component.
My guess is neither very good nor very bad, although of course I hope for any good – do countries that have these drugs in their treatment regimens have much lower or higher death rates than anyone else? (I know it’s hard getting consistent data, but you would think if these were a miracle drug or a death sentence, we could tell).
If you thought off-label prescribing was generally good/bad three months ago, I see no reason for your mind to have changed in this specific instance/example.
Unless you think individual doctors are now in a state of mass panic and hysteria, nothing has really changed. If you trust doctors to make these types of decisions, this is good. If you don’t, it’s bad.
Doing things a little isn’t the same as doing things a lot. Any negative consequence are now magnified. (As are positive ones!!)
And while I don’t think mass panic and hysteria have hit, I think mild panic and hysteria certainly have in some places. You also have the fact that patients can be very obnoxious when requesting specific drugs that they know the names of even when doctors would rather not prescribe them. (This is one of the reasons why prescription drug advertising works!) Many of the doctors who will be making these decisions are also going to be over-taxed working full-time and own’t have the bandwidth to engage in the most minute findings on the emerging qualities of the treatment. They’ll probably rely on word-of-mouth, personal experience, and any subsequent statements from regulatory bodies. And some will also submit to the will of patients who want the New Miracle Cure just so that they can move on to other cases.
Then there’s the general case that, while off-label prescribing happens in many cases, they’re typically far smaller than “millions of US citizens in the next few months” and they typically have longer track records establishing efficacy.
So I do think it’s fair to view this scenario differently than off-label prescribing in general.
Do we have any numbers on how common off-label prescribing actually is?
My suspicion is that it’s not nearly as rare as you think it is, but I honestly don’t know for sure.
According to the top response on a quick google search, 20% of prescriptions are for off-label use.
Which is why one of the more life-saving things we could do with the FDA is to make the efficacy portion of safety and efficacy testing/certification for new drugs completely optional. Bonus points if a drug in widespread use elsewhere (say, Europe, or Japan) can use those tests/data to quickly satisfy the safety part.
It’s not that off-label prescription is rare, it’s that you don’t this much off-label prescribing of a single medication for a single disease.
Think of it this way: If there are 100 drugs, and each has an off-label use, and you’re 90% sure that each will work well for their respective off-label applications, it’s very useful to prescribe the drugs. Sure, 10% of these off-label uses are pointless, but that’s okay because the other 90% of the time, you do a lot of good. If you have 1 million potential off-label uses, about 900k of those improve things and only 100k make things worse.
On the other hand, if you have one drug that you’re thinking about prescribing off-label, and you’re 90% sure it’ll help, but you’re prescribing it 1 million times, then you either get 1 million people that you help out (90% probability) or you get 1 million people who you make substantially worse off (10% probability). Because it’s a one-off, it’s much riskier.
Off-label use also ranges from “Dr. Oz said taking this drug will re-align my chakras” to “well-tested drug with minimal side-effects being used for the same indication but an unapproved route of administration which has many quality blinded trials in the literature supporting this use”.
@Scott Alexander:
“I’ve been thinking of taking up smokin’, but this clinches it!”
Paging @Le Maistre Chat
When I heard about all the politics in Portland, I thought it was just a crazy city, but it seems the whole state is crazy?
Oregon shutting down all schools, including online charter schools. Discussion at MarginalRevolution seems to agree this is to avoid people enrolling into these schools and thus starving public schools and teacher unions.
Electoral politics in Oregon are such that while the whole state isn’t crazy, the crazies in Portland hold a slight (but consistent) majority and are therefore able to dictate their crazy on the entire rest of the state.
I originally heard the justification for this was that holding school online would “violate the principles of equity and inclusion” (because not every child has a computer and an internet connection, you see) and was therefore unacceptable. Which is 100% believable to me.
It is a valid point.
But there are better remedies. In a well-funded place like Portland, typically there are only a few families without sufficient Internet and the city can buy hotspots for them.
Except that there appears to be a looming laptop shortage.
And for social distancing to make any sense, it should be personal laptops, not communal desktops.
That’s a very zero-sum view of education.
And kids with the right parents would be able to get good online schools anyway. It’s just that online schools increase the number of right parents to potentially everybody with a laptop and home internet.
One of the things I’m finding surprising with this crisis is how many people don’t have internet at home. Or a computer. Seriously – how do they do stuff? For anything more serious than a post on facebook, like online banking, looking for flights, comparison-shopping, and managing my investments, I need a device with a screen >=12 inches, plenty of USB ports, (I’ve tried optical/bluetooth keyboards, they’re too annoying), and more memory than a cheap smartphone.
With great and increasing difficulty.
Bank branches are closing all over the place and it’s causing real problems for the elderly.
When various people bring up the relative economic benefits of X technology, it’s important to recognize the relative economic harm that befalls people without this technology.
I am a bit confused, do you mean the harm of not having it, or that the adoption of new technology causes older methods to be phased out and those reliant on the older methods are harmed?
To the case at hand I thought online banking didn’t actually close many branch offices, it just saw their staff depleted, because people make bank accounts with the closest bank to their home so even if everyone does online banking the banks still want a lot of local branches.
In my country the banks closed nearly all their branch offices.
Indeed. I’m unfortunately already into the age group where “easy, obvious, modern” user interfaces are neither easy nor obvious. Any UI change is a puzzle to be solved, that makes the tool unusable until I’ve solved it. And I’ve been developing software since 1978 – not hiding under a rock, using typewriters and carbon paper;-(
With regard to banking, I’ve mostly stopped trying to deal with ATMs (screen glare, no table space to endorse checks, checks that won’t deposit, random unordered extra cards that then don’t work in the ATM) and go straight in to talk to a person in an office with a desk (no one looks like a classic bank teller), whenever I have anything to deposit. I use online banking still, but I imagine they’ll eventually “improve” it so much that I won’t trust it to do what I actually intend. And as for voice menus – I haven’t yet figured out how to speak such that one of them can understand me.
And I’m not on the wrong side of the digital divide financially – I have decent broadband, and almost all the toys. (We have 5 computers among 2 people, and I have cell phone, tablet, kindle, and used to use activity tracking watches. The only thing I refuse to acquire is a “smart speaker” – and any internet connected applicances.)
The stuff just isn’t designed to be easy to learn to use – or to stay learned. After a certain age, learning to do the same damn thing, for the fortieth time, would be difficult enough if the new interface came with instructions; without them, it’s much worse. The other 39 methods I’ve already learned create interference and confusion. And while I can certainly still learn, I’d much rather spend the effort learning something new, or interesting.
I can’t imagine what it would be like for someone who hadn’t been able to afford most of the toys, and hadn’t been forced to keep up to date, at least somewhat, in order to stay employed.
This reminds me of a time my mom brought me along to try to teach an elderly woman how to use Gmail. It felt like trying to teach someone how to use a doorknob, as in she was failing to understand things so basic that it was difficult for me to even imagine how to explain them. Even my mother privately admitted afterwards that it was a lot more excruciating than she expected.
P.S. Have you tried mobile check deposit? Also, why wouldn’t you endorse your checks *before* going to the ATM?
While I agree learning a new UI is obnoxious I have mostly interacted with that through trying to learn new art software. It took me forever to get a decent handle on Photoshop but my impression is that this has been generally helpful to me when using new art software. Maybe art software is unique though in that everyone wants to be Photoshop so they crib icon design.
Up to 59% of Oregonians live in the Portland metro area (2.479 million out of as free as 4 million). Another 4% each for Salem and Eugene, which have similar demography, housing markets, etc.
So the way representative government works, the crazy Left gets everything by securing more than half the voters in more than half the districts, where 67% of districts are a city/Portland suburb. So optimistically Oregonians could be 100% sane in all rural areas and nearly 25% of urban ones and you’d still see this effect.
Right. This is a very good point in defense of the electoral college system. Because if it weren’t for that, the country would indeed be ruled like Oregon is being ruled.
I kind of thought that US coasts are more densely packed than that, but I guess it’s just the East Coast and California.
This is actually a good point in defense of a triumvirate or a parliament.
In a one-person-wins system that one person will either be elected by a majority, or a minority, and will do things contrary to the stated preferences of the minority/majority regardless.
Yep, lots of free room on the coasts in Washington and Oregon (and North California).
Eh, not really.
Unlike most of the east coast and Southern California, the Pacific Northwest has coasts that are almost immediately bordered by densely-forested mountains. There’s really not much “space” to put a large-sized city in, even if you wanted to (and there’s no real reason to want to).
I wasn’t saying “free room for cities”, but literal elbow room.
I think quite the opposite is the case. If the candidate with the majority of votes is elected that’s exactly what I want out of a voting system. And where those votes are located should be entirely irrelevant.
I see no good reason why my vote should be worth more than somebody elses just because they’re living in a denser area. They’re no more or less a citizen or a human than me, their vote should count as much as mine. Not doing that is what sounds like insanity to me.
That said, I make exceptions where it’s immediately obvious that giving equal voting power leads directly to bad outcomes. Nothing comes to mind right now but if those circumstances exist then this opinion is not the hill I’ll die on.
Seems like the issue here is that our states are just too dang large. Let the metros split off into their own states, which limits their power on some issues over other areas. We can still balance the Senate by letting said metros split into multiple states as well. If Rhode Island can be that small, so can the 3-5 states of NYC!
@AG
All cities larger than population X to be removed from their parent state, and re-admitted as free cities of the republic?
1) What of the suburbs?
2) In particular states, given the demographics of large cities, how do you avoid the various civil rights interpretations of the Constitution?
3) If this gives the residents of D.C. representation and electoral rights it can’t be all bad.
In Portland’s case, the suburbs are integral. “Metro” is an actual level of government, and they’re all connected by mass transit. It doesn’t have “car suburbs.”
@LMC
Portland is on the border of Oregon with Washington. When you talked about the population of the metro, were you including Washington suburbs?
Vancouver, Washington is legally distinct from Metro Portland and light rail doesn’t run over the Interstate bridges. Maybe Tri-Met buses do.
I wasn’t intending to include any Washington suburbs in the 2.479 pop estimate, but I could have accidentally.
Is the reason behind this some philosophical principle that gives 51% of the population a moral right to make decisions for the other 49%, or do you have a political theory implying that simple majority vote produces better outcomes than any of the alternative systems?
Even California’s too big a state to have anything truly comparable to the DC-New York-Boston metropolitan axis going on, where you can drive all day at highway speeds without ever leaving somebody’s city limits. LA and its suburbs are about as close as it gets, but head south from San Clemente or north from Santa Monica and things get sparse real quick; southbound, it only lasts about twenty miles before you hit Camp Pendleton on the outskirts of the San Diego metro area, but heading north along Highway 101 the only thing big enough to call a city before you reach the SF Bay Area is Santa Barbara, at 90,000 people and about 100 miles away.
Bakersfield is only about 100 miles from San Fernando, another LA suburb, and at 400K people it’s much larger, but that’s far inland and not particularly Left Coast culturally. And, really, you don’t want to go to Bakersfield.
“So the way representative government works, the crazy Left gets everything by securing more than half the voters in more than half the districts, where 67% of districts are a city/Portland suburb. So optimistically Oregonians could be 100% sane in all rural areas and nearly 25% of urban ones and you’d still see this effect.”
“This is a very good point in defense of the electoral college system.”
Isn’t this exactly backwards? In an electoral college system, where the overall control is decided by the majority winner in a majority of districts, you should expect to get this kind of thing, where a small minority manages to be concentrated in a way that makes it the majority in enough districts to win out. But in an overall plurality system (or a proportional system, or something else), you can’t get control unless you’re actually a majority overall.
Michael Fortier was an accomplice to the OKC bombing; he helped Timothy McVeigh scout out the Murrah Building. Fortier agreed to testify against McVeigh and Terry Nichols in exchange for a reduced sentence and immunity for his wife, Lisa. She helped make a fake driver’s license for McVeigh.
In 2006 Fortier was released from Federal Prison having served 10.5 years, and entered the Witness Protection Program where he was given a new identity.
My question is: “Protection from whom?”
McVeigh is dead, and Nichols is serving 161 consecutive life terms.
I guess the answer is protection from vengeful relatives of the bombing victims. Has this happened before or since, where the person in the WPP is being hidden not from the people he testified against, or some huge criminal organization , but from average Americans?
One of the most famous criminal cases in Britain had 2 minor defendants enter witness protection after their release to protect them from public vengence. I’d be very surprised if there aren’t a number of similar, less well known, cases in the USA (Minors commiting a heinous crime and being released at a relatively young age)
Whether or not they actually need physical protection, they probably appreciate the formal assistance in hiding their past from their neighbors, acquaintances, and co-workers, and if someone anticipated that when the deal was negotiated it would have helped to sweeten the pot.
On Open Thread 150 there was a discussion about alleged tanks in the streets of Spain due to the coronavirus crisis. I meant to challenge that claim back then, but the forum software ate my post. Since the story has been mentioned again in this thread, I’ll try again.
I have made an honest effort to search recent news about this incident, and found nothing. While it is true that the army has been deployed across Spain (mostly to disinfect areas or to work on field hospitals), I have seen no mention of tank-like vehicles. All pictures or videos I found showed only wheeled military vehicles, some of them somewhat armoured, but with no obvious mounted weapons. This also applies to the links provided by ana53294 in the original thread – the closest one showed an armored truck (no guns) on the streets of Albacete.
The only thing I found related to the story was an article in a supposed fact-checker site I’m not familiar with (so I’m not endorsing it) arguing that this is a false rumor spread over whatsapp: https://www.newtral.es/no-el-ejercito-no-ha-sacado-un-tanque-por-la-calles-de-tudela-para-combatir-el-covid-19/20200324/ . The vehicle in question is a Centauro tank destroyer, the same mentioned in the original story.
Is there any evidence, other than second-hand accounts, backing this story?
No, there isn’t. I’ve been searching and searching, and I haven’t found anything. And yes, that story about the tank destroyers in Tudela was a fake, which is why I didn’t link it.
But I have been told by people who had first-hand experience in seeing the tanks, and social media is getting severely moderated. I’ve got no proof I can offer, but I do believe my sources.
And my sources are not brave enough to take photos.
I see, thank you.
Well, Spain has a particularly bad case of COVID-19. It’s currently at 2052 cases per million. Here’s how that compares with the other larger nations of Western Europe:
Italy 1750
Spain 2052
France 799
Germany 857
UK 370
And elsewhere:
US 570
Canada 228
Australia 191
It sucks that people are getting pushed around by cops and the military. But given the severity of the problem, it makes perfect sense that the government is acting with urgency.
If, like me, you’re curious about “What exactly is so hard about running ventilators?” Physiological Basis of Mechanical Ventilation
This paper upped my concern that we don’t have enough trained technicians to operate ventilators. With a ventilator/hospital bed shortage, it seems like deaths won’t scale linearly: more sick means a higher percentage of deaths. Even with enough ventilators, I now doubt that deaths will scale linearly with illness. A money quote: “Once mechanical inspiratory time becomes less than neural inspiratory time, double triggering is inevitable (4). Protocol enthusiasts believe they are delivering a Vt of 6 ml/kg, but the patient is receiving 12 ml/kg—a setting proven to increase mortality.”
The paper has substantial snark snark about how protocol-based ventilation leads to worse outcomes, so maybe it’s an artifact of some internecine struggle in the respiratory technicians guild, but… even if “protocol enthusiasts” are bad no good people, I still want more of them.
(I’m an RT student, first-year, haven’t gotten into this yet)
Just to start: the term is respiratory therapists, not technicians. This is a sore point. If you call an RT a technician, s/he will knock you down and forcibly intubate you on the spot, with no machine on the other end of the tube. You’ve been warned. The author is a pulmonologist, not an RT, but still.
With that said: yes, vent management is complicated. I don’t totally understand what he’s getting at–I understand about half of it, could probably follow most if I sat down and went line-by-line with references. I gather he’s wary of assist-control, which is (IIUC) the most commonly used ventilator mode. How one syncs it up with the output of the inspiratory control centers way up in the medulla and pons is beyond me, but he’s a pulmonologist.
https://www.amazon.com/Ventilator-Book-William-Owens-ebook-dp-B07D3142ZM/dp/B07D3142ZM/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1585600078 is free to read if you have Amazon Prime and a Kindle; it’s a bit less abstruse. I just got the print version of the first edition in the mail today (meant to get the 2e, oh well). Still meant for physicians to read, not the general public.
Mea culpa. Therapist. FWIW, technician is a word of respect in my vernacular. But I’m a software guy and I cringe when people say I’m in “IT”, so… I get it. Therapist.
Yeah I’m sure I only got a cursory understanding. I had inferred that the machines responded to signals by the “inspiratory control centers” in the form of patients attempting to breath. My high level takeaway was that misconfigured ventilators end up failing to match breathing patterns and cause increases in patient mortality. This explains why the whole “machine pumping a bag of air” thing is less than ideal.
For people reading along: That book is also available on libgen (dot) is. I’m definitely not going to read it, because I’m resolving to do something other than waste all of my time reading about COVID-19.
However, theredsheep – I’m still willing to waste a lot of it. It seems like you’re in an excellent position to go get educated about ventilators and report back. We have all of these questions! How do ventilators work? When are they clinically indicated, and what’s the evidential basis of that? How often do they kill people instead of helping them? Is the lack of respiratory THERAPISTS going to be unfortunate, or catastrophic?
I can already answer the last one, albeit with low confidence: probably worse than “unfortunate,” possibly not as bad as “catastrophic.”
The problem is that we’re also short of PPE (personal protective equipment, like N-95 masks). Without masks and such, hospitals have to act very defensively, which means they’re extremely reluctant to give a COVID patient anything that might aerosolize their secretions. Which, in layman’s terms, means handheld inhalers instead of the easier neb treatments, and if a patient can’t get by on low-flow nasal cannulas (up to 6 liters of O2 per minute) the next effective option is to go all the way up to intubation and a ventilator, which creates a safe closed circuit. So lack of masks and such means a lot more patients on ventilators.
PPE shortage is also a problem because, aerosols or not, it’s hard for RTs to protect themselves. So some of them are going to get sick. Some RTs are elderly, or in poor shape (as are nurses). There’s talk of bringing back retired RTs, which strikes me as a great way to get more patients if we don’t get more of the damned masks.
And of course RTs are feeling quite demoralized by their bosses throwing them into the room with a sick patient when they’re either reusing the same mask all day or else going in with bandannas around their faces. And by “demoralized” I mean “pissed off.” Like Soviet peasants getting ordered to charge German tanks, only in this case Stalin can’t shoot them for retreating so it’s only love of the Motherland and need of a paycheck that keeps them there. And RTs are already kind of grumpy, because respiratory departments are usually understaffed and, as you might have noticed, nobody in the broader world acknowledges that RT exists.
Now, this might not be “catastrophic” in the sense that I don’t know how screwed we would be anyway. I can’t get a solid figure for what percentage of patients on a vent for COVID die. There’s a rumor going around that the worldwide average mortality is around 80% for them, but I’ve never been able to dig up attribution for that. More sober estimates put it around 50%, but I haven’t seen a lot of math for that either. Who knows?
Aww, hell. I’m going to go ahead and make this a separate reply, because it might take more than my remaining thirteen minutes to describe this idiocy. Just read this in an ad from Ford on Facebook:
“Starting in April at our Rawsonville Components Plant in Michigan, we’re producing a ventilator with GE Healthcare leveraging the design of Airon Corporation’s FDA-cleared ventilator with a target production of 50,000 units in the next 100 days. The ventilator is designed to operate on air pressure without electricity, making it a versatile solution to help those fighting COVID-19.”
There’s a picture of an archaic-looking device with dials and such. How do I put this? We already had a device that operated on pure air pressure and could be used as a ventilator in a pinch. It’s called a Bird IPPB machine, first designed in … I don’t even know when. The sixties or thereabouts. They were finicky, confusing contraptions that broke when you looked at them wrong and could only be fixed by a handful of specialized elderly mechanics, but they could be used as ventilators. The last Bird machine at our one local hospital that still used them (at the insistence of a hidebound MD) broke six months ago and was wheeled out to the trash in triumph by a rejoicing RT.
There’s no computer. No versatility, no fine control, just crude mechanical parts. My FB group is torn between screaming and laughing. Ford is going to produce 50K of these pieces of shit?
If you haven’t seen it, here’s a good (if rambling) interview with a CCRN at an academic hospital dealing with this issue right now. It’s a little more focused on the critical-care medicine aspect of it. The main problem seems to be that such high pressures need to be used for ventilation that it impairs blood flow through the lungs. Which then needs to be compensated for with high and carefully monitored levels of pressers, which are themselves almost at the level of killing the patients.
One of the top YouTube comments is: “3rd Year Med Students take note: This is a MasterClass in cardiac care by a Nurse Practitioner at the top of her craft. Close your books. Listen up.”
Oy. Watching it at 1.5x now. The hell of it is, she says they’re getting a lot out of a specialized vent mode (haven’t learned about those yet, but it’s one of the less common ones). Those aren’t remotely possible with these simple pneumatic machines, AFAIK. No computer.
Right. Which is why I suspect that a huge amount of the work being done to create open-source ventilators isn’t going to help. This isn’t a simple case of temporary muscle paralysis where simple air in/out will do.
Sorry, but you just declared yourself to be the sitting expert on the topic.
I heared an interview with an (I think) Italian RT who said, that one of the problems with COVID-19 is in laymens terms that the lungs of ciritcal patients are so full of fluid, that pumping enough oxygen into there lungs to create sufficent saturation in the blood, would need so much preasure that you are in danger to damage the lungs of the patient even further.
That sounds like another case for “we can’t just let an standard process handle this”, or is this wrong?
There are several different ventilator modes and settings to tweak, and if you do it wrong it’s quite easy to seriously injure or kill a patient even if they don’t have COVID. I’m reading The Ventilator Book now (and my classes are back up, we’re learning the basics of intubation). Between that and what I’ve gleaned from RT chat on FB, it seems the easiest way to jack someone up is overdoing it with volume or pressure and damaging the lungs.
This isn’t a matter of blasting in O2 with high-pressure flow, but of maintaining sufficient pressure at the right points in respiration to keep the airways open so they can absorb O2 normally in spite of their excess fluid load. Most of the elastic recoil force of the lungs comes from surface tension under normal circumstances. I would imagine that extra fluid is extra tension.
COVID is, in the ICU, a variant on ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome, which we know how to deal with. https://www.oakesacademy.com/public/Coronavirus-Clinical-Collaboration.cfm is a professional crib sheet by respected authorities in the RT world. They recommend pressure-based settings to guarantee avoidance of barotrauma, and discourage allowing spontaneous breathing–the most commonly used vent mode is assist control, where the patient is free to breathe on their own and the vent is just making sure they do and helping where necessary.
So this is definitely not business as usual. The video in the link above your comment, by Garrett, mentions some success with a less-common mode called APRV (I think, can’t watch it again right now). Proning is also apparently quite important–that’s when you lay the patient face-down, which helps for complicated reasons I don’t really understand yet.
Bottom line, we’re working out ways to treat it, but it’s learn as you go and it’s pretty brutal. Nobody sounds exactly sure what kind of PPE is necessary, and staying in PPE all day is exhausting, especially if you have to code a patient. Chest compressions are very rigorous exercise when you’re all covered up like that.
Thanks for this comprehensice answer.
I’ve been trying to figure out what a ventilator is. I went to Wikipedia, and it appears they can be different things.
Wikipedia
My wife had a ventilator after she had heart surgery a number of years ago, when she was recovering in ICU. It was a terribly invasive thing, and I very much wouldn’t want anyone with minimal training to use it. But the Wikipedia article says what my wife had was for the intubation ventilators. It seems that CBAPs and other ones are non-invasive. Maybe they don’t need so much training. We need to distinguish between the types.
We’re talking about invasive ventilators here. Non-invasive ventilators are a less drastic option not currently in use because of biohazard from aerosolized virus combined with inadequate PPE.
Maybe instead of worrying so much about ramping up production of ventilators, we should be worrying about modifying the non-invasive alternatives (high pressure O2, CPAP, BPAP) to reduce or eliminate the aerosol threat.
As I understand it, the high-end ventilators are only used on very sick people and require constant supervision by an expert RT, of whom we will presumably be short during a flood of COVID-19 cases. Finding a way to get the next tier down of care working in a safe way would IMO be a bigger win than getting more ventilators.
1. Find a large public building that isn’t being used–not difficult at present.
2. Move a bunch of Bipap machines, O2 tanks, etc. in, and assign medical staff there.
3. Blanket the airwaves with “if you think you have COVID, come on down to your local COVID ghetto (formerly Bob’s Gym/New Spirit Megachurch/that creepy old mall where the stores are 75% empty).”
4. Test in the parking lot, throw positives in there where they’re free to spew noxious pathogens everywhere. Keep a couple of vents on hand for crashes, with the intention of moving to the hospital if it gets dire. Now only providers need to worry about PPE most of the time; people with ordinary illness are at a much lower risk.
5. When this is over, Bob’s Gym is remembered for coming forward and donating space in a time of crisis.
It sounds like convention centers are the first choice right now. As General Semonite (the Chief of Engineers) put it, (at 10:00 [ETA and 20:19] in this video) it’s more efficient to work with convention centers as they have experience with reconfiguring spaces quickly, and they can apparently figure out how to isolate between wards properly even with the large spaces.
I suspect it’s probably *way* more dangerous to be a COVID-19 patient in that room than out of it, because you’re exposed to a ton of aerosolized virus. The people on the CPAP machines might not be (I don’t knot if they do some kind of HEPA filtering first), but anyone not on one of those machines is inhaling high doses of virus particles with every breath.
In my very limited understanding, the problem here is that when I provide you with pressurized air/oxygen, I’m also helping spread all the particles in your exhaled breath all around the room. So I think you’d need individual rooms/spaces for each patient, with some kind of continuous air filtering to keep the place from becoming a swamp of viral particles, and a fan pulling air out to keep the room at negative pressure so the viral particles don’t spread out across the building.
Dunno; if you’ve already got it bad enough that you require more than 6 liters of oxygen (roughly equivalent to 45+% of the air you breathe being O2) to stay satted, do a few more germs in the air make a significant difference? I imagine you’d want to segregate mild and moderate cases at a “COVID center,” and have basic partition separations to discourage the spread of opportunistic infections as a matter of basic sanitation. Beyond that, hey, I know how to give neb treatments, set up nasal cannulas, take vital signs, and do chest compressions, and not a lot else. Not an epidemiologist.
Very interesting for me why some things seem uninteresting/unimportant. One such is that Canada and Australia both have experienced corona virus cases and deaths over the last two weeks that are much lower than other western countries despite similarities in culture, travel, urbanization, government measures, testing etc . For example compared to US the death rate/case ratio US/Ca 4.5/2.5. Not easy to spin?
I’m not sure what you mean. Government measures and testing have been vastly different in Canada and the US. Not easy to spin what?
Look at this country comparison https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ and observe the large variation.
Self isolation recommendations are similar but implemented at slightly different times (days) and testing in Canada is similar to EU countries but more than US. Tests can influence the # of reported cases but not the death rate very much.
Spin? Seems there are confident predictions despite the the obvious gaps in information needed to build useful models, confident enough to attack others as incompetent or motivated.
Christopher Balding presented a reasonable but unexciting evaluation, based loosely on reductio ad absurdum. See his Balding’s World blog.
It looks like testing in Canada is keeping up with cases, which would both decrease measured CFR, and increase the (actually infectious + quarantined) / (actually infectious) ratio (which really helps with contagion).
https://files.ontario.ca/moh-covid-19-report-en-2020-03-30.pdf
Canada is actually doing worse than California (more cases and a smaller population). Australia is only doing slightly better. The US looks bad primarily because its cases are dominated by New York, which had the combination of being a major travel destination, and irresponsible delay in locking down. The rest of the US is lacking one of those two factors (except Lousiana and Florida).
Also, most of Australia’s travel is from Asia which has not been hard hit by coronavirus (hahahaha but true).
Has anyone recieved a “letter of safe passage” from their employer indicating they’re an essential worker?
It seems the intent is you are to present this letter to a police officer in the event that you are stopped for violating a shelter in place or curfew order.
But lthis doesn’t have any legal weight, it just indicates your employer considers you essential.
Has there been any cases of people being arrested that a letter from you employer would have circumvented? Or is this just theater?
I’ve got one!
My employer has specifically said “You don’t legally need these yet – but you might later – so keep it around just in case.”
Are any cities/states arresting people for violating the shelter-in-place orders? Generally what I’ve seen is mostly “warnings” or maybe a fine/citation. I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone getting arrested over it.
A pastor in Florida was arrested for defying the order keep his church closed: https://www.fox13news.com/news/tampa-megachurch-pastor-arrested-after-leading-packed-services-despite-safer-at-home-orders
I was talking about individuals being out and about (either for work or for other reasons), not someone holding a large gathering. I don’t think that example is really relevant to the question in the OP.
Fair enough. I included it as the next best thing, but you’re right it isn’t really relevant to the “letters of safe passage” issue.
(PS, Scott, I accidentally the report button while trying to hit the reply button. There’s no reason to report that comment, please ignore. I guess I have tumblr muscle-memory to click on the bottom right of a post rather than the bottom left, sorry).
There was an arrest in Montgomery last night for violation of the curfew that just went into effect.
The curfew seems like it’s just a “stop and frisk” program dressed up as a quarantine measure, though, so no real surprise.
Karley A. Rossell was charged with violating it. Which she did to throw a molotov cocktail at her boyfriend’s residence.
https://www.complex.com/life/2020/03/woman-violated-new-jersey-stay-at-home-order-molotov-cocktail-boyfriend-house
I have friends who are essential workers (mostly health care related), and at least one of them has a letter from her employer. My understanding is that her employer doesn’t expect it to be necessary, but it’s a low-cost precaution that could make her life a bit easier if it is, so they went ahead and did it. Her letter is on her employer’s letterhead, and it states her profession and cites the provision in the local Shelter-in-Place order exempting health care workers from the lockdown.
I’m pretty sure the letters aren’t currently necessary, since the current batch of lockdown orders exempt several activities for non-essential workers. If I get stopped on the road, and I tell the cop I’m going to the grocery store or a doctor’s appointment, how is the cop to know whether I’m telling the truth or not?
I got one. My company makes components for medical devices, including portable ventilators, so I’m pretty sure I could run red lights right now without legal consequences.
I have such a letter, although I’m working from home for now. I’d guess it’s as much about protecting the employer as the employee. If the employee gets into trouble with the cops and just has to go “honest, officer, I’m on my way to work as an essential employee at X”, particularly if X is some generic shipping firm instead of the local hospital, the employee is likely to be somewhat unhappy. In this case, the employer gets to blame the cop.
I received letters. Within the US, there is not yet enforcement on standard travel, but there are restrictions in Spain, Italy, and France from what I understand. Not really sure the US is ever going to go that far. The most I would expect to see in Chicago is some increased police activity around the places where people are likely to congregate.
I have one, I’ve never been stopped while going in to work, and I’d be somewhat surprised if that were ever to happen – to me, or to others in the United States on any significant scale. The police are going to go after the people who are hosting unauthorized large gatherings, including but not limited to non-critical workplaces, rather than try to hunt down unauthorized individual commuters.
But, it cost next to nothing to print the letter, so why not.
Myeah, common sense. Here cops are stopping random people in cars in the city. And there’s intense talk on what exactly means “shopping for necessities around the house” – is it 1 km? 1.5? 0.5? So far seems pretty certain that if you meet the wrong cop you can get a fine for going to a larger supermarket. And the fines are stupid high for Romania – they just upgraded them from 1.5x to 15x minimum wage.
Meanwhile the transport company in Bucharest reduced the number of busses.
Some letters indicate that Federal officials say you’re essential for national security. IDK if they’re any more legally relevant than others, but the signators have nicer titles.
I only mention this because not all letters are necessarily equal.
My employer offered them- I work for a Dutch university which is sufficiently close to the Belgian border that lots of people commute from Belgium, and Belgium has a stricter lockdown in force than the Netherlands. In particular, they have put up police checkpoints at the border. I’m not sure if someone trying to cross without such a letter would be arrested or simply turned back.
(The vast majority of us are working from home, as lab work has been reduced to a minimum and classes have been moved online, but there are still a few people coming in to keep things running and conclude high-priority experiments. I’m not currently one of them, and my commute doesn’t cross the border anyway.)
My full-time employer hasn’t, because I can work from home and neither my employer nor my position are “essential” at this time.
I’ve received an email from one of the ambulance services I volunteer with, thou no formal letter on stationary kind of thing. I find this funny because when I go for a shift I’m in uniform, I have several pieces of issued ID, etc.
I feel like there’s some fundamental thing that is not understood either by me or by the people who are OK with shutting the economy for months.
Even in the EU, Germany banned the export of gloves and medical equipment. So much for the European “Union”. Saying, right, money doesn’t matter, we’ll just print more/get more debt, and put the whole country on welfare. But the thing is, for that money to buy stuff, somebody needs to make that stuff. And it doesn’t seem like a sure thing anymore we’ll be able to buy stuff from other countries anymore, because if they need the stuff, even if your country needs it more and is willing to pay a higher price, they can just ban export.
And giving exceptions to people who produce stuff considered “essential” is not enough, because everything is linked.
The shutdown of hotels and travel means agro workers cannot travel. Agro workers can’t travel, that means that there is not enough workers to collect harvests. And who can guarantee we can buy food from other countries?
The cost of shutting down the economy is not measured just in money. A few points in GDP are not just money. Those are lives destroyed, people malnourished, and enormous reductions in QOL.
It is, of course, extremely irresponsible for governments to leave their citizens without support in these difficult times, but this is unrelated to the shutdown. Our advanced economies produce enough necessities of life for the entire population to thrive on a fraction of its productive output. What’s lacking is a will to help people.
The solution is not to stop the shutdown, which is needed to fight the epidemic, and bound to happen anyway when everyone is either sick or self-isolated at home. The solution is to stop giving primacy to ideology that prevents governments from helping their citizens. Incidentally, it’s the same ideology that now calls for lifting the shutdown.
Hoopdawg:
Since you’re responding to Ana, I guess that would be the Socialist (center left) party, who are running things in Spain? As opposed to, say, the Republican (center right) Trump, who has extended shutdowns for another several weeks?
Not at a time when supply lines are challenged and each country has to fend for themselves. Now is the time when we need people working in factories more than ever, to make sure we do not run out of critical stuff produced in a factory overseas.
And while the US may be able to produce everything they need with the shutdown, that’s partly because the shutdown is not as draconian as in Spain. And the US in huge.
Have you ever attempted to quantify:
1. How much the economy produces, per person?
2. How much, per person, is necessary to “thrive,” in the way you define it?
If not, how sure are you that your statement is true?
It seems pretty clear. Compare the output per person 50 or 100 years ago, when people seemed to be generally happy and thriving, to the output per person now. It is a couple orders of magnitude higher now, I believe.
Maybe one order of magnitude if you go back 100 years, depending on where. Not nearly that if you go back 50 years.
Unless you are thinking of China, and 50 years ago people in China were not thriving.
It’s one order of magnitude at best. Agree that:
1. It considerably above subsistence.
2. People living at subsistence will generally be happy due to hedonic adaption.
But by this standard, America’s poor are far above subsistence already. I presume Hoopdawg would set “thriving” considerably above it as well.
Why would these be independent things?
The choice isn’t between “shutting the economy down” and the status quo. The choice is between shutting the economy down or getting it shut down for you by millions of people dying.
Or, you know, instituting reasonable precautions like asking people to wear masks, checking temperature daily (and asking people who have a fever to stay home), doing extensive weekly testing, and keeping the economy on at least half gear to make sure we can feed the millions we are supposedly saving.
While keepin those who can work from home working from home, that is.
The UK abandoned that strategy for a reason – they reran the numbers and are pretty sure that approach still leads to millions dead (which still winds up shutting down the economy afterward).
At risk of sounding like General Turgidson, even in the worst case scenario I am not saying we would not get our hair mussed but would 1.something percent of the population dying really shut the economy down? It would be spread over a few months as would the much higher number of people with varying degrees of non fatal symptoms. I have hard time imagining that shutting the economy down.
My understanding is that a lot of the problem is that it wouldn’t be spread over a number of months. The models basically say that the type of mitigation efforts you’re talking about still don’t stop the virus from spreading so fast that everyone gets sick at essentially the same time, the hospitals become overwhelmed, and almost everyone who needs intensive care (ie, 1 in 5 infected people even among the young) just dies instead.
So instead of everyone staying home and grinding the economy to a halt because the government said so, now millions of people are dying (which obviously carries its own hefty economic cost) and THEN everyone stays home because they’re actually scared and taking it seriously now that it’s too late, so the economy still grinds to a halt.
Yeah, it’s important to remember that if we actually get our medical system collapsing under the weight of dying pneumonia patients, and 1-2% mortality in the population plus another several percent of people super sick and permanently disabled by the disease, we’ll get the lockdowns anyway–most people will refuse to send their kids to school or go out in public anyway, and politicians who want to still have a political career come the next election will get out in front of that.
Of course, this is completely and entirely speculative.
It’s plausible, but hardly certain. Even if we crank up both our prevalence and fatality estimates to account for a “hospitals overwhelmed” scenario, say we estimate something like 20% prevalence and 2% fatality rate, that still means that the overall fatality rate for society at large is 0.4%. Plenty of people still won’t know a single person killed by this disease.
I don’t know how bad things have to get to start triggering massive “voluntary” quarantines. But the answer would seem to be “worse than Italy” at the very least.
I don’t know how bad things have to get to start triggering massive “voluntary” quarantines. But the answer would seem to be “worse than Italy” at the very least.Yep, at least in Spain, if it weren’t for the fines, people would get out.
And so far, kids don’t seem to be dying from the coronavirus, so unless the parents are vulnerable, why wouldn’t they send the kids to school? If the parents are not locking themselves also, I can’t imagine them wanting to lock the kids.
@MattM
That’s way too optimistic. Italy currently has an 11% case fatality rate due to overwhelmed hospitals. The total population fatality rate in the city of Lombardy is .07% of people having died of COVID 19 already, with hundreds more added every day. And that’s with a lockdown in place.
For a scenario where we aren’t in a lockdown and the pandemic just gets to spread unchecked, increase that number. A lot.
EDIT – Went back and edited the Italy numbers, since the most recent numbers are even worse.
So, still less than 1/10th of 1%.
What’s your estimate of the population fatality rate that would be needed to get significant portions of society to start voluntarily quarantining themselves?
Mine is at least 1%, based on that being a level wherein most people will likely know at least one person who has died. I think that’s the bare minimum required for people to be so afraid of this thing they’ll risk unemployment to protect themselves.
In the first three weeks, with total lockdown in place.
Try not putting in a lockdown, and let it go for months. What do you think it gets up to? I am not sure – nobody has been willing to try it yet – but the general consensus I have seen from every epidemiologist willing to put a number on it looks like 40-80% infection. If you see the same case fatality rate as Italy, that comes out to a 4% general population mortality rate at the low end, 9% at the high end.
And that’s assuming the hospitals are only as overwhelmed as they currently are in Italy, with the lockdown, and that it doesn’t get much, much worse.
Now, I don’t think it would actually get up to those numbers, because like Albatross, I am almost sure that there is no state in the world that won’t lock down in the early stages of something like that. But I don’t really see the wisdom in ending the lockdowns to let it get started before shutting back down in a panic after the inevitable results start.
There are 181 million people over age 35 in the US. If you have a 11% fatality rate, that’s 20 million dead people.
Only if you have a 100% infection rate, right? I mean, you still get quite a lot of deaths if you only have a 60% infection rate, but I’m also not sure why we would expect an 11% fatality rate for the over 35 demographic.
Because that’s what we actually have today in the one place where the hospitals have been totally overwhelmed.
Then using “35 and up” is wildly misleading, because the age distribution is not the same in the US as it is in Italy, and the death rate certainly isn’t the same all the way across that age group in either country.
I see one place reporting a mean age for deaths in Italy at 79.5, so I’m not sure what it could possibly have to do with 35 year olds, or even 50 year olds. It’s simply the wrong place to start if someone wants to do this kind of analysis.
MisterA,
I think you’re forgetting what it is I am actually arguing here.
The assertion from albatross (and he’s hardly alone, it’s a super common belief as far as I can tell) was basically something like: In the absence of a state-enforced lockdown, the disease will run so rampant and cause such devastating consequences that people will end up voluntarily locking themselves down anyway out of fear of the disease.
My only point is that this is entirely speculative, and would probably require basically orders of magnitude worse outcomes than we are currently seeing, even in the worst-hit places.
That’s not to say it’s impossible. It may be true that the measures taken by Italy did, in fact, improve their outcomes by an order of magnitude and that without those actions, it would really be that much worse and would reach levels sufficient to make people that terrified.
I don’t think we’ll get a test case of this in the western, developed world. As you say, no well-functioning state will allow things to get to that point without enforcing draconian lockdown measures.
We may end up with test cases in the third world, or places where the state simply doesn’t have the support and/or resources necessary to enforce such measures. But then there will be plenty of confounders there as well.
@edmundgennings
The epidemiologists are definitely starting to sound like that…
250,000 dead, 10,000,000 dead… I keep expecting to hear
“to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*” in this case post-epidemic…
We will, I think. I hope. The initial quarantine is necessary to stop the exponential. And there’s another catch – if the quarantine is working, the decrease is also very steep, so an extra week of quarantine is pretty valuable in terms of infections extinguished.
So after anything from 4-8 weeks, depending on how well it was implemented, we’ll go back to almost normal and ask people to take precautions.
And here we’ll hit another snag: they won’t. Even I don’t follow a perfect quarantine. But here at least you see older people walking the streets without a care or social distance. We have fines too, pretty big ones. But you can’t really fine people for not keeping minimum distance or not wearing masks – definitely not when you can’t find masks to buy.
Cant ask people to wear masks without any masks available for them to wear. Anyone scaling mask production up in the required manner?
Everybody, probably. In Romania we have a furniture company that switched from making couches to masks. They’re pretty big – can’t remember the name right now, but they’re supposed to make something like a third of european Ikea furniture
The MyPillow guy?
@Conrad Honcho
And Brooks Brothers.
Turns out making clothes and pillows here in the USA gives us the means to rapidly switch to “wartime” production if needed.
Onshoring now.
Or perhaps there is a middle way where we try much harder to produce the necessities of life while avoiding most of the dangers of the pandemic? There seem to be a lot of people that just assume an abundance of necessities and assume that the abundance will continue indefinitely while everyone’s sheltering in place and so respond snarkily to any suggestion that the cost of shutting down so much, so haphazardly may be too high. I am not at all a “the cost is worth it” type of person, but I am continually surprised at how quickly people dismiss the question of “are we going to produce enough stuff?”
I’m not sure I agree with Hoopdawg that advanced economies produce so much. I definitely agree if we define “necessities” to mean technically enough calories and technically clothes and technically four walls and a roof for everyone, but I think there’s a good chance that the aforementioned fraction of our productive output would actually feel like grinding poverty.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting we just open up and try our luck. Korea seems to have demonstrated that you can both contain the virus and mostly continue on with life, provided the will exists. Obviously containing the virus is of primary importance, but it also seems obvious that printing money doesn’t make necessities appear out of thin air.
That’s what I mean, but also pointing out that we need to produce that stuff in places that will sell it to us.
I think that’s a great point as well, that even if things keep running, we’ll still have problems if borders are closed or stockpiles are built up.
Well, we’re doing our best to become South Korea, but it’s going to take a month or two of containment to even have a hope of getting there.
It’s difficult for me to engage with this argument because it’s so hard to tell what you’re actually advocating. It sounds like “implement containment measures like we’re already doing except do it better”. Do you think the particular choices made in particular areas about what to shutdown or not shutdown are incorrect?
South Korea put the djinn back in the bottle. We can’t. We’ve got 160,000+ _confirmed_ infections, most concentrated in the NYC area but the rest widely dispersed. We have basically no idea about low-symptom or no-symptom infections, because we still can’t test fast enough to keep up. There’s no practical way to reduce the number of infections to the point ordinary public health measures can contain them. Even if there were, there’s still the rest of the world; doing so would mean maintaining international travel restrictions indefinitely.
The South Korean way is no longer an option, and probably hasn’t been since January. This epidemic is running to its natural conclusion, one way or another.
The whole South Korea argument seems to ignore the most crucial aspect. If my understanding is correct, South Korea and some other Asian countries who were affected by SARs decided they better be ready for when something like that happened again. They built a strong pandemic-specific response structure with clear protocols, voted into place by their legislature after extensive public discussion. So most people were on board or at least aware that this was in place. Therefore, when the virus hit, it was very easy to shift right into a well-designed response mode.
Culture and government structure and attitudes towards technology most likely contributed to their decision and ability to address the problem and put a good system into place, but the response was good because they were ready. No one who hadn’t planned could just become South Korea if they were starting from scratch when the virus hit. Nearly all the credit is being given to the swiftness of the response, when most of it should be going to having a response ready-made. Our confusion on this issue is obscuring our major failing–most American leaders talk like they didn’t realize pandemics could happen in the modern world, and that they couldn’t have been expected to prepare for this, despite things like SARs. It’s too late now to become like South Korea.
@The Nybbler I expect that two months of Italy or China-style lockdown would reduce the number of cases to near-zero. After that, extensive testing and contract tracing can be used to limit the spread of new infections from foreigners or remaining sporadic cases.
@10240
I don’t believe we can lock down the entire nation, or even the New York City area, for a month, to the extent that Wuhan was (not sure what Italy is like). And we clearly don’t have the ability to test enough; because of that long incubation period we’d have to be testing a whole lot of healthy people, not just sick people.
I’m not even certain Wuhan actually managed to stop the epidemic. There’s rumors that the actual death numbers are much higher — 42,000. If that’s the case, it’s entirely feasible that the epidemic mostly burned itself out, rather than being significantly affected by the lockdown.
The evidence is that South Korea stopped it, but they had a smaller problem than we have now. And apparently an FDA and CDC equivalent that aren’t so hidebound.
Why not? The technology is known, the cost doesn’t seem high relative to the scale of the problem. Why couldn’t we, in the fairly near future, be testing a sizable fraction of the population every month?
Whatever testing problems we had in the past, the US is ramping up testing capabilities like it’s going to war.
Only a war we want to lose. Specimens tested hit a peak on March 17. New Jersey in particular has been getting _more_ picky about who they test, not less.
@DavidFriedman
PCR testing as I understand it requires trained people to do it, which may be the limit there. As for other kinds, I suspect it’s simply that we’ve allowed too much regulation to accumulate, and as a society as a whole we’re too risk-averse to lift enough of it lest something go wrong.
Specimens tested hit a peak on March 17.
Those are CDC tests. There are about 110K new tests happening each day.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/29/open-thread-150-5/#comment-873092
https://covidtracking.com/api/us/daily.csv
New Jersey in particular has been getting _more_ picky about who they test, not less.
Given they are in the middle of a very serious outbreak, even having a lot of tests means they need to use them wisely. They are doing about 5000 tests a day: https://covidtracking.com/data/state/new-jersey/#history
“There’s rumors that the actual death numbers are much higher — 42,000.”
Even according to those numbers, the deaths have STOPPED at a relatively low number. The official death toll in China is 3312. The rumors suggest it was actually 42000. With the infection toll increasing by about 33% per day per lockdown, that implies that China did exactly what they claim they did – they just did it eight days later than claimed. Why exactly would that be important news?
It would be substantial news, it would make it vastly more likely that their infections rate was a lie, and much more likely that they will get a second wave as they end lockdown.
No, they are not CDC tests. CDC tests are the blue bar. The orange bar is public health lab testing. However, they don’t match the covidtracker data, so I’m not sure what the discrepancy is. New Jersey doing 5000 tests a day does not show “ramping up”.
@eric23
If deaths stopped at 42,000 in Wuhan, and the IFR is around 1%, infection rate in Wuhan is about 4.2 million. Wuhan population is about 12 million, so it’s conceivable all the lockdown did essentially nothing and the epidemic burned out on its own. This also implies they won’t see a big second wave in Wuhan.
@Nybbler, The CDC page you linked is only public lab tests, but there are now private labs doing tests as well. Here are the numbers covidtracking.com uses for New Jersey:
https://covid19.nj.gov/#live-updates
About a million people who are 70+ and already sick. Very few who are in the workforce.
No one in America is going to wind up malnourished because the economy shut down bar a few hobos. If anything the health of the people will improve if food became a tiny bit more scarce. I agree that GDP maters, but even with very low values of cost-per-life the quarantines are clearly worth it.
Evidence isn’t in on whether quarantining everyone will increase Gross Domestic Production of babies.
People stuck at home without much to entertain themselves with + hormonal contraception shortage +
condom shortage + no access to abortion + (speculatively) psychological realignment towards r-selection due to perceived crisis = baby boom.
The generation after the zoomers is going to be called the corona babies.
Someone already brought this up in a previous OT, but 3-6 months of births does not make a generation.
No, but a generation can get its name from a singular, brief period within its cohort. “Boomers” and “millenials”, for example.
The baby boom (Boomers) lasted for years, not just a few months. Millennials just means pretty much anyone who was old enough to talk and under 20 at the turn of the century. I stand by the point.
We also haven’t (yet) named a generation after a national disaster, and I wouldn’t expect that to change now.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to re-align to K-selection?
Agreeing with acymetric, the “war babies” are a subset of the silent generation. They did not give their name to that generation, and there’s no reason to believe any smaller event would give a name to a whole generation instead of a subset of that generation.
No, the lower the expected lifespan and the higher its variance the more r-selected you want to be: gonna pass on these genes before Corona-chan gets you.
To be fair, the effect would be stronger with pathogens that increase infant mortality, like malaria, but our pathogen response instincts don’t necessarily perform accurate evolutionary fitness estimates. Whatever behavioral adaptation that evolved to deal with malaria and the plague is going to be triggered now.
The US is a huge country. It may be OK. I any country has a chance, that’s the USA.
But other countries don’t, especially if they* start banning exports.
*Meaning countries en masse.
The EU is a huge economic zone. China, India, Brazil are huge countries. They all have a chance by these standards.
Also, nobody is going to ban imports, the chance of getting infected from an item that’s been shipped across the world is infinitesimal.
Nobody has banned imports. Exports have been banned. The EU is not a single country, and borders have been closed, and critical exports have been banned.
China, yes. But I’ve heard many things about India and Brazil not being very unified countries. There are internal borders, different legal systems, and the roads are terrible.
All economies will need to adapt and do a lot more testing in the workplace. China had this system for a while in Wuhan, where they would check the temperature of workers before the workday started. This kind of thing will need to be enacted for critical activities, soon, if we believe the pandemic may last too much.
That could be a concern only for densely-populated city states like Singapore (which however is probably at low risk because Corona-chan seems mostly under control in East Asia).
In any decently sized European country, like Spain, agricolture produces orders of magnitudes more calories then required to feed the population. Normally, most of these calories are used to feed livestock, which convert them very inefficiently to tastier calories. But even if agricolture is severely disrupted, even after stockpiles are exhausted (which is probably going to take months), even after all the cows, chickens, pigs, sheep,
batshave been eaten, even if only 10% of farmers work, there is going to be enough food not to starve.Obvious solution is to treat food production as an essential industry exempt from the shutdown. And I think most countries are doing exactly that.
I think the OPs contention was that governments would inevitably screw things up and shut down industries which produce things essential for food production. I am unconvinced.
At some point, you get down to the socialist calculation problem. We define healthcare, transortation, and food as critical services, but no person or committee knows everything that goes into those things and can’t be substituted. Maybe there’s a critical role being played by some apparently unimportant thing that you shut down, and you notice the problem only when it turns out that the plastic lid factory you closed down a month ago made a lid for a container that was critical for someone making a part that’s used to maintain ventilators or something.
This is a good reason to be pretty forgiving in what gets considered an essential business/service. OTOH, I hope state/local health departments are putting out guidance for how to run essential services. The feds should be publishing model guidance of this kind, too, as soon as they think they know enough.
The Spanish government tried to shut down the metal working industry. Industry experts had to explain to them that some industrial processes can never stop, without permanently damaging equipment.
Only the industry using lawyers and protecting itself avoids governments screw up. The government had no idea that you can’t just shut down steel mills. There’s a reason why steel mills don’t close even on Christmas day.
And I’m just not sure the next critical industry they try to shut down will be able to make the right arguments to defend themselves. I am pretty sure that at some point some industry that is actually critical will get shut down. I think some things that are quite important have already been shut down.
For example, car repair shops have been closed to the public, only fixing trucks, busses and ambulances. But what about the doctors, nurses, cleaners, and other critical personnel who need to repair their cars?
This doesn’t surprise me upon hearing it, but I had never heard or thought about it before. What kind of processes must run continuously?
This is the Spanish news article I’m roughly translating.
Well, a blast furnace, apparently, requires careful shut down, and constant maintenance* during shut down, and it would take months to put it back on again.
To me, that basically means can’t shut down without consequences.
*Maintenance that requires more workers than just keeping it running, apparently.
EDIT: article that explains difficulty of restarting a blast furnace.
In the US, steel mills are idling, not shutting down. But I guess idling still requires some personnel?
I have no insight on what processes can’t be stopped, but speculation is that oil will go negative in price soon as storage runs out because ramping down oil production is very expensive and difficult.
I suspect there are going to be lots of sectors hit that have perishable items. I know a lot of small scale market gardeners exist by selling very fresh, high quality produce like lettuce to restaurants and these guys are really screwed. Not only are their current crops likely to be worth a fraction of what they hoped, they have no idea if they should be continuing to plant for the next rotation that is 6-8 weeks from harvest. They can’t simply shut down for 3 weeks as that would basically mean no income fro 9-12 weeks and they have no real way to estimate production for 6 weeks from now.
@acymetric
Not an industrial process, but an example of a medical and scientific one: nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers, known in the medical field as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines.
These instruments rely on superconducting magnets, which are held in a bath of liquid helium, which in turn is in a bath of liquid nitrogen. If the helium runs out, there can be serious damage to the instrument, and repair is effectively impossible. If you top up the liquid nitrogen on a weekly basis, you can manage to keep the liquid helium fills to a few times a year.
Shutting an instrument down properly takes weeks (at the least), the presence of manufacturer technicians, and is never a sure thing; the proper shutdown procedure still has risks. Starting the instrument up also has risks of damage, possibly losing field strength (which can be quite detrimental).
Even if a lab shuts down, it’s quite possibly worth keeping up the cryogen infrastructure, as the alternative is risking the loss of millions of dollars worth of equipment. I’m listed as essential personnel in my lab, as I’m one of the people trained for doing these fills (filling four magnets today).
I’ve worked in a steel plant. Where’s the permanently damaging part?
Where have car repair shops been closed to the public? Everywhere that I’m aware of explicitly lists car mechanics as “essential business” (though not all include bike repair shops).
You need food production and distribution. Anything that requires migrant labor is going to be hamstrung by travel restrictions and exempting those workers is problematic. Distribution of food is going to take quite a bit of work, suppliers to tourist areas are going to see a collapse in demand without any obvious new market opening up for them.
I think that those are solvable problems that will be solved. Food prices might increase but I am not worried about mass starvation.
Of course the problems are solvable, but that is true of almost every instance of hunger/starvation/famine, the issue is that these problems are being created and have to be solved while another crisis is being dealt with. A few days ago Vietnam (3rd largest rice exporter in the world) temporarily halted new rice sales for export, and reports are that Venezuela is shipping half their normal soybean crop due to logistical issues with the shut down.
Germany has relaxed the rules for medicinal supplies, for places that have no other possible ports of entry than Germany (i.e. most of the supply we have here is imported from China as well).
The EU is negotiating rules for agricultural workers to travell inside the EU. Also most of the stuff that depends on travelling workers is more luxury food (wine and asparagus) than essentials.
But yes, I find myself qouting The Big Short regularly recently: “Every point unemployment goes up 40.000 people die. Did you know that?”
So the woman whose husband died of chloroquine phosphate poisoning is in fact a prolific Democrat donor and very anti-Trump.
https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/woman-who-ingested-fish-tank-cleaner-was-prolific-donor-to-democratic-causes/
If true (IF), then I expect a solid apology from everyone who blamed Trump for this.
No. Signal-boosting can cross echo chambers, particularly in times of crisis like these. Trump is still responsible for misusing his bully pulpit.
I don’t see how this theory applies.
First there is the problem that Trump said a true thing that this drug may work. That this drug has a name that sounds like other things is not on him. Nitroglycerin is a common drug also, if the president mentions that in a talk about heart disease and a crazy person blows himself up trying to make it himself or eats dynamite that’s not really related.
Second it distances him further, because her priors would be to disbelieve what he said. This plays perfectly into my Drunk Pete Rose analogy from last thread. We can’t demand Ray Fosse stay 10 feet from anything fragile at all times because Pete Rose is always drunk and sneaking around trying to tackle him.
Third, there is actually a more plausible scenario that is quickly accumulating evidence, this was a spousal murder, or murder-suicide where the suicide portion was averted.
Trump is still responsible for misusing his bully pulpit.
Well then, you should be absolutely blasting to hell and damnation the irresponsible person who posted this over on the SSC sub-reddit, because they’re only encouraging more impressionable people who read this kind of “wonder drug to treat the virus!” material to rush out and consume fish tank cleaner. I hope you go straight over to the sub-reddit to tick them off for being so careless!
Or is it different when it comes from Really Smart Person deciding for themselves that they’ll take the risk of taking a drug which they source themselves and dose themselves and are not under medical supervision? Because I didn’t hear anything from Trump about hydroxychloroquine (it doesn’t appear to have been covered in our news) but I have read a couple of similar “I’ve decided for myself that this drug is what I want to take just in case I might get the virus” pieces from Really Smart People on fora for other Really Smart People.
I think that’s every bit as irresponsible, or even worse, because these are people who do consider themselves a cut above the common herd when it comes to Understanding Science, and they would have unwarranted credibility when recommending such ‘miracle cures’ amongst their own circles of family and friends – Jason is so smart, he knows all about this kind of thing, if he recommends it then it must be okay!
Whataboutism is an attempt to blame the person who notices, rather than the one who applies, double standards.
Since the latter is the one in the wrong, it is wrong.
No, whataboutism is an attempt to invalidate an opponents position by charging them with hypocrisy for not criticising some behavior. I don’t believe my position is hypocritical, because I don’t think I’m ethically obligated to criticize every person who promotes pseudoscience, just the most prominent pseudoscience promoters.
Why?
So, this is not my theory, it’s secondhand from a Youtube comments section or something. But… d’ya think maybe this lady intentionally poisioned her husband and knows she can count on the power of the Incredible Human Mindkill to prevent anyone from suspecting her?
Completely unrelated, but I searched for “Incredible Human Mindkill” (without quotes) on Startpage.com and got the PS2 game Drakengard as the “instant answer” Wikipedia link.
Just thought that was amusing.
I think murder-suicide is stretching it, ordinary human gullibility and stupidity (if you’re going to take a drug without consulting a doctor first, why the heck would you not research it more?) is to blame sufficiently. That he died and she didn’t is simply down to dumb luck and however they dosed themselves.
Well, the theory is that it’s not a murder-suicide, she intentionally gave herself a non-lethal dose to allay suspicion.
“The Door to Saturn”, or satirical SF starring sorcerers
Part of Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea cycle, first published in the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror.
Morghi, the high priest of the elk goddess Yhoundeh, came before dawn with underlings to arrest Eibon at his house for heretical wizardry, for he still worshiped the long-discredited god Zhothaqquah (Tsathoggua). They were surprised as well as disappointed to find him absent. His servants are tortured and presumed innocent. They found no secret passage, not even by searching under the idol.
A search of the house turned up no clues, though such suspicious items as “disagreeable and gruesome paintings on rolls of pterodactyl parchment” and totem poles carved with the eldritch abomination along with the seal, the mammoth, the giant tiger, and the aurochs. Then Morghi perceived a hidden door behind one of the paintings… but in the outer wall of an upper floor. This is the title Door to Saturn, which Eibon received as gift from the god “after years of service and burnt offerings” (don’t let a Player Character Plane Shift without them).
Gosh, you don’t say.
Smith’s description of a gas giant’s surface is, well, weird. There’s ashen soil, instead of water “some liquescent metal resembling mercury”, air is breathable although “Eibon did not care for its sulphurescent odor or the odd puckery sensation it left in his nostrils and lungs.” and he walks without mentioning different gravity and air pressure. Also, Saturn’s rings are cyclopean.
There are “a kind of bluish-purple obsidian cacti, with limbs that ended in formidable talon-like spines, and heads that were altogether too elaborate for either fruits or blossoms.” that seem to be alive. After seeing them, Eibon met Hziulquoigmnzhah, a relative of Zhothaqquah, who “drank of the liquid metal in a hearty and copious manner that served to convince Eibom of its godship; for surely no being of an inferior biologic order would quench its thirst with a beverage so extraordinary.”
Hziulquoigmnzhah told Eibon “Iqhui dlosh odhqlonqh,” and then walked away, at which point Morghi came up pronouncing the writ of arrest. Eibon drew his bronze sword and pointed out that no Earthly power mattered when they were alone here with no way back.
Magniloquently!
Morghi grudgingly accepts to stick together until he can find a way home, upon which Eibon will still be tortured by the elk inquisition. Peacefully they ate and drank with frugality, since the supply was limited, and the landscape was… likely not even organic, being described with terms like “sharp metallic foliage”. Eventually they met some indigenous sapient bipeds, whose faces are on their torsos like the legendary Blemmyes. Eibon saying “Hziulquoigmnzhah! Zhothaqquah! Iqhui dlosh odhqlonqh!” makes them bow down and take the pair in as honored guests for several months… during which time they were able to eat the local food. Confusing.
They learn that these people have no idea what “Iqhui dlosh odhqlonqh” means – though the neighboring Ydheems do – and their graditude actually resulting from guiding an animal back to them. They also like the fact that Eibon and Morghi have heads, and want them to mate with the insect queen-like “national mother” because they themselves evolved from ancestors with distinct heads and feel “eugenic sorrow.”
There is also the custom of cooking the national mother’s husbands and feeding them to her when they are too old or worn out to fertilize. So the Earthly pair ran away while everyone else was asleep.
Upon reaching a Ydheem settlement, there’s an avalanche of edible fungi; not fatal but rather inconvenient. They recognized the name Hziulquoigmnzhah and the words “Iqhui dlosh odhqlonqh,” which caused them to carry all their belongings out of the inundated town and build a new one. For those words meant “Be on your way,” and the god had addressed them to Eibon only as a polite dismissal. As honored guests of the Ydheems, life was safe, for they chose to reproduce in the normal way.
Back in Hyperborea, Morghi’s underlings had to wait for a dispensation from his successor to leave the stupid house of the heretic and go back to their normal lives. A general belief spread that Eibon had mystically escaped Mhu Thulan by powerful magic learned from Zhothaqquah and made away with Morghi into the bargain. So Yhoundeh’s cult declined and there was a revival of Zhothaqquah in the last century before the encroaching glaciers ended civilization.
I don’t know what to make of this story. It feels like a rehearsal for the style of Jack Vance (starting circa 1950?), but it’s not proper science fiction, what with humans breathing and eating on the surface of Saturn. Perhaps it was written in the shadow of Voltaire’s Micromegas, where a giant from Saturn with 72 senses meets a space traveler from the Sirius system who has 1,000 senses and is several times his height, and they visit Earth to make fun of philosophies Voltaire didn’t like. But this is also framed as a story set in Earth’s past when magic worked.
Interestingly, Saturn’s “surface” gravity is close enough to Earth’s that you’d probably need measuring instruments to be sure there was a difference. And there i certainly a region where the atmospheric pressure is Earthlike.
The bit where the air is mostly hydrogen and helium would be inconvenient, of course, as is the part where there isn’t a solid surface to walk on, but it’s not clear that those things were well understood when Smith was writing. So I’ll give him the Barsoomian grandfather clause, but if we really want we can put the story on the back of some truly gigantic leviathan blimpoid floating around in the Saturnian atmosphere and maintaining a breathable mix under a translucent membrane on its back. Presumably the leviathan uses the oxygen the way we use e.g. sugar, as something to react with the local atmosphere when it needs energy.
This wouldn’t be the only SF work from that era that was a bit in error about the breathability of Saturn’s atmosphere and the presence of an actual solid planetary surface. Or even the only SF work from that era with that error written by someone named Smith. Recall that other famous Smith-surnamed author, Edward Elmer Smith, had a scene in Spacehounds of IPC where Stevens and Nadia had to go to the surface of Saturn to repair the broadcast power station the Titanians had put there…
lt’s a pity that Gerard Kuiper’s discovery, that Saturn’s moon Titan has an atmosphere of its own, was more than a decade in the future.
I think Vance’s seminal _The Dying Earth_ was published in 1949 – the first book he got published.
It’s definitely influenced by Dunsany, so think of it more like the Dreamlands tales of Lovecraft (also influenced by Dunsany) rather than either horror or science fiction – it’s slightly tongue-in-cheek arch science fantasy, and the setting doesn’t matter too very greatly. It’s certainly not aspiring in any fashion to be anything near realism, so the different gravity etc. isn’t a consideration at all.
Read it for the exotic colour and the deliberately understated prose which again gets the kind of circumlocution in description by way of the influence of the faux-Chinese style of The Wallet of Kai Lung and its successors (which were wildly popular back in the day):
Look I may not be able to articulate how glass is made or the pitfalls of distillation or indeed the deepest intricacies of the class system but I stand by my remark about glass vodka bottles.
You are my favorite commenter EVER!
By the way, my comments have been deleted before, not that I care, that is not how I roll, but I hope you read this first
YOU ARE MY FAVORITE COMMENTER EVER
Maybe someday we shall talk, friend to friend, about what I learned about the class system in its primal state in Kolyma, years before we were born, and about what you know about one of God’s greatest blessings to man ….. vodka in glass vodka bottles
Does anyone actually tell themselves these things, ever? Well, maybe some people do, like fleetingly, almost by accident, between two other thoughts they’re deliberately having. After all, human psychology is a complicated natura–hey wait a minute!
I don’t remember them, but it occurs to me now that if you’d made it up it would be one heck of an April Fool’s prank, and I wish I’d thought of it first.
This has to be a troll job, right?
I was referring to a historical event that touched me profoundly – several years after I fought side by side with Egyptians in a minor forgotten war in the MidEast, a plague of a virus swept through Cairo, and although the plague was not transmissible from our friends the pigs to us humans, the incompetent clowns at WHO or somewhere like that allowed the plague to be called the swine flu, and evil bureaucrats in Cairo ordered every pig to be killed, in their cold-heated ignorance about what should be done at such times. (one or two details are a little off but I always do that, it is a stylistic thing)
And all the pigs were killed, and for weeks the good people of Cairo suffered tremendously from the effects of the over-piled garbage on the street that the pigs used to take care of.
And almost nobody on the internet cared – if I remember right, Jerry Pournelle spoke about it a little, and maybe Matt Drudge had a little side bar on the bad effects of the slaughter of all the swine in Cairo —-
but almost nobody cared. I remember.
That was when I Realized that almost nobody who talks for a living really cares about anything, it is almost always signaling.
One of my missions in life since then has been to point out to people who are wasting their lives talking that they should actually do something.
Forgive me if I was not clear —– almost everyone reading these words has done good and profoundly important things for others.
But I know something about talkers and braggers that you don’t know.
Reread my comment, you are intelligent, and you can figure it out.
Trust me I am nothing remotely like a troll.
I was a bit obsessed with it as I volunteered at a hospital at the time, and actually used pig blood a lot in my research.
While I don’t really remember the suffering of the people, I do recall thinking it was obviously incredibly dumb. First it was wrong, but second even if was a disease carried by pigs where slaughtering them would eliminate a vector, it would probably have had to be an insect based disease like Black Death, and killing the rats during a plague never worked for that.
I share HBC’s skepticism.
Can I take the other tack and skip the rally and Cairo and wallow in my epistemological helplessness in peace.
And in other happy news, the alcohol industry seems to be doing just fine despite the COVID-19 pandemic:
I know a higher-up at one of the big alcohol-distribution companies. He describes as ‘not exactly recession-proof, but definitely recession-resistant’ industry, and apparently the same is true of pandemic.
Just wait a little. In Germany the liqeur producing industry has started to have problems getting their hands on ethanol last week, as all incoming production is to be reserved for disinfectants.
Obviously that won’t hit beer and wine producers.
Well, if you’re making whiskey, you age your stock at least five years and sometimes 8/10/12 years. A six-month problem like COVID-19 should hardly affect you at all. That’s just not the timescale you live in.
I don’t think this is true for American whiskeys/bourbon; my understanding is that the higher grades are only required to age 4 years and the lower ones don’t have specific requirements. Some of that’s because we’re uncultured boors who want instant gratification, some of it’s because Kentucky has way more annual temperature variation than Scotland and we don’t want to give more to the angels than we absolutely have to.
However, I’m not sure how ethanol being used for sanitizer production would really matter, since my understanding is that all the alcohol content in whiskey comes from fermented grain. I could be wrong, of course, and presumably the German spirit producers are making something other than whiskey in the first place.
Does this really help or is this theatre? I’d expect alcohol (not just ethanol) for disinfectants to be produced from petroleum and other fossil feedstock at scales much larger than ethanol produced for drinking from agricultural products.
@The Nybbler
Ethanol is ethanol, isn’t it. As long it is high enough proof, it will do the trick.
And when the ethanol stocks run short, you have to take what you have.
What will be the social and cultural effects of the coronavirus and lockdowns in the west?
Will it change the way people eat?
Socialize?
Will it reduce or increase social trust?
Will it change what people spend their money on and how much they spend?
What good things do you think will come from it? Bad things?
I’ve been eating at home a lot more. I hope that lasts.
Huh. People have obviously started cooking more, so I guess it’s a safe bet that some will continue to do so.
It’s interesting:
Many (most, at least in my area) restaurants remain open, but for take-out/delivery only. Pretty much all of the restaurants I’ve seen have gone out of their way to communicate both 1) how they’ve ramped up their food safety procedures or have always had very robust ones, and 2) how badly they still need business to remain open.
That this virus has nevertheless so drastically reduced people eating out might reveal how much value people placed on the restaurant environment, rather than the food or the convenience. Though, people’s restricted finances is probably also a huge factor.
I think the largest effect right now is that people have more time. The actual financial losses are only just hitting (most people’s pay is 2-4 weeks behind actual employment) and they have been promised to be papered over for the first few weeks as well. The laid off obviously have more free time, but new remote workers have dropped their commutes (plus a lot of the daily preparation for commuting like dressing for work isn’t as complex), and even those still working have less traffic to deal with and everyone basically has fewer out of the house activities and all the time from that.
I think that’s an optimistic assumption.
Here in Poland, schools are closed. We don’t have mandatory work-from-home, yet, but those of my co-workers who have kids pretty much have to.
The net result is that they have less time, especially since the general idea for “how to teach children remotely” seems to be “give ’em a bunch of homework” – that the parent will have to supervise on top of doing their work and managing a family that’s cooped up in a not-so-big space and starting to succumb to cabin fever.
Sure, specific situations where both parents are still working full-time with kids out of school will be tough for them, but outside of that specific subsection overall time is higher for most demographics.
I mean, if you take commuting out of the equation, sure.
However, on the flip side we have things like people losing the ability to eat out, so they must account for longer food preparation times.
Then you have folks like me, who aren’t affected one way or the other. I still commute to work (won’t be working remotely unless they force me) and have pretty much the same amount of time as I had before.
I expect it to be a wash at best, but likely to come out poorly overall. Other than commuting, I can think of precious few places to save time, given that “fewer out of the house activities” generally boils down to “less ability to do the things you want to do”.
You not only gain time with no commute, but you can also get food started while you are still working. I plan on slow cooking some ribs today, and I’ll get them started while I’m still “on the clock” and would normally be at the office. Once I go back to commuting, I’ll go back to only being able to do meals like this on weekends.
Slow cooked ribs are delicious. However, if you’re using a crock pot, be sure to put it on the back porch or in the garage, because it will make your entire house smell like ribs for two days. Ribs smell great when you’re hungry. They smell sickening at 3am when you just want to sleep.
But surely you get acclimated??
My wife and I did not. That was a rough night. Just gross meat smell all through the house all night. First and last time I slow cooked ribs inside the house.
It’ll fade to nigh-undetectability within a year after the lockdown ends. Except that people will be even more willing to accept government-by-decree.
The freaking out about Viktor Orban suggests they won’t accept government-by-decree except from their own half of the political spectrum.
An obvious change is that millions of people are getting accustomed to teleconferences instead of in-person meetings, and to teleworking. A lot of them will want to keep doing that, and a lot of bosses will be more comfortable with it now.
Another change: every state in the US is going to distance learning now for all their students. Why isn’t this always an option for kids who, for whatever reason, are finding that the local public school isn’t working for them? Maybe they get picked on, maybe it’s a 40 mile bus ride away, maybe the local public school doesn’t teach calculus, maybe they’re sick a lot–just let them all do a homeschool-like option where they’re taught remotely online. I suspect this option will be a lot easier to get in the future.
I’ll give you the telework one because computer-savvy grown-ups can shift into that mode pretty easily and find their productivity doesn’t go down. For an awful lot of kids there will be a performance hit doing distance learning under this regime, if not because their household doesn’t have the equipment or expertise to make it work, then because the teachers are scrambling to provide instruction.
My transition to telework has been smooth and painless. My kids’ schools’ transition to distance learning not so much.
I suspect it will get smoother, though. The whole country is gaining a *lot* of experience in distance learning for kids.
In 6 months to a year, maybe. You’re still probably looking at a year of mostly or at least partly lost education for a lot of kids if we don’t start back up in the fall.
On the other hand, teleworking is going to remind them of the days of COVID-19.
I expect there to be some continuation and some rebound effect. Telework will increase in many contexts, because it will have been tried, and discovered to work in some of them. But there will likely be other contexts where telework will be banned, and in-person conferences will be stepped up, as companies recognize just what they were missing during these few weeks or months.
All the restaurants which didn’t have their menu on their websites are now getting punished for it, I hope by the end of the quarantine all of them will have learned the lesson. Somebody on Facebook mentioned that stores suddenly became much more willing to ship items previously available “in store only”. And as albatross11 said, hopefully remote work will be much wider accepted afterwards.
I was thinking it seems reasonable that church attendance in U.S. will not return to previous levels.
It could go the other way, on the “no atheists in foxholes” principle.
There’s going to be a great deal of unemployment, it seems, and churches traditionally form community support centers. They could easily play that role again.
Being the one who doesn’t think anyone really believes in god, I also do not believe that faith changes in foxholes. Everyone knows they cannot rely on god to fix this.
I think you have a poor model of religious people.
Eyeballfrog
Given that I have a degree in religion and was once a preacher, where do you think specifically my model errs?
I believe you have the tense wrong.
@DavidFriedman
+1
Anecdata: I’d been ready to try atheist church (Sunday Assembly), but of course now have to put that off until the dust settles.
I mean, some of the old people who are the most reliable church-goers will die, but everyone else will probably be back in church once the lockdown is lifted, at least to the same degree as any other large gathering.
For many rural people, church is an important center of community life, some churches are really attractive activities, especially for people with children — and obviously some people go because they see it as a religious obligation.
I’m going to guess that the marginal churchgoer is going to be more, not less, likely to attend church regularly when the lockdowns end. Note that the marginal churchgoer, for attendance purposes, is the one who vaguely thinks they should be attending every Sunday but really only makes it once or twice a month because life intervenes. Those are the ones who are likely to see either their religious faith and/or religious community life take on greater meaning. The Easter-and-Christmas nominal Christians may make up a larger fraction of the population, but a smaller fraction of butts in pews on the average Sunday so even if they all stay away over residual coronavirus fear, they won’t change the attendance numbers very much.
I figured that with a few weeks off from church other habits will develop. People will realize how much else can be done with Sunday morning. People will realize that the sky did not fall when they missed church. People will find more ways to rationalize that watching a religious program on TV will count. People will discover better ways to spend more limited funds.
Most people who regularly attend church have family and/or friends at church too, and sometimes non-worship activities. The lazy worshipers you describe have in all likelihood already ditched under less trying circumstances, as social pressure to attend has declined considerably and it’s become decidedly uncool in many circles.
I suspect that the US is pretty far past the point where the people who go to church regularly do so only out of habit, such that merely not going for a while will make them realize there’s other things they could be doing. The people who go to church when they think that they could be doing better things are by and large already not going to church. The people* who do go to church regularly are for the most part fully aware that there other things they could be doing and keep going to church because it serves some purpose for them.
If I had to predict I’d guess that we’d see some people who were on the margin fall off the wagon for a little while, some people who had attended sporadically attend a little less sporadically for a little while, and then a quick return to whatever secular trends were there already.
*Independent adults anyway
Experience is a strong teacher. Until someone experiences not going to church for a while, they do not really know what it is like. It could be better or worse than they think. I am just guessing that some will learn of alternatives they did not know of before. Again, to KNOW from experience is not the same as knowing from talking or thinking about it. IMO there are a lot of people going to church who do not know why they are going…there are a lot of people doing a lot of things who don’t know why. They do what they know they can do and avoid everything else. The virus will force a lot of people to do things differently because they learn what is possible. There will, for instance, be more staying at home than going out in general.
As I said, I think the number of people who will suddenly learn from experience that church wasn’t doing anything for them is very small. Probably roughly the same size as than the number of people who will learn from experience that they really do miss going to church and will start attending more regularly afterwards.
36% of American adults that attends church at least once a week. Imagine asking one of them why they attend church regularly. What reasons do you think they will give?
This is based on interview. Half are lying. In studies where actual attendance in an area was counted, the results are that about half as many attend as say they do.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to prove here. I went to church as often as I could before COVID hit–though I often had to work Sundays–and will be going back when it’s an option again. I get the feeling you’re assuming religious people are largely passive and cowlike, if not outright stupid, but regular church attendance is increasingly countercultural and comes at a cost. We don’t fail to realize that we could be sleeping in on Sundays, nor fail to enjoy the free time we have. We simply feel there are things we value more.
Great, that makes my point even stronger. What percentage of the remaining 18% of people who still go to church regularly are doing so only because they don’t know anything else?
When I think of my congregation I am sure that if you asked regular attendees a large majority would be able to list several specific reasons they go to church instead of doing other things on Sunday. Heck, “why go to church on Sunday” is a fairly regular topic of discussion in Sunday School.
The red sheep
So I’m not talking about you.
I plan on getting Doom Eternal soon, but in lieu of it I’ve been playing the original Doom, Doom II, and Doom 64 on Switch. It’s been quite a while since I really sat down with the intent of a full playthrough. So far I’ve gotten through the first three episodes of Doom, the first 20 maps of Doom II, and about half of Doom 64.
What surprised me is how much less I’m enjoying Doom II than either the original or Doom 64. The original has been amazing, and while Doom 64 is a little odd, I’m enjoying it. But Doom II is just… I don’t know quite how to describe it. My biggest complaints are probably (1) how “open up a wall and unleash a horde of imps/demons” is seems to be a go-to tactic for providing difficulty, and (2) how many of the maps are just straight-up confusing (the worst offender so far for me is probably map 19, “The Citadel,” in two ways: it’s confusing to navigate around in, and also confusing because you actually only need two keys to get to the exit, despite it looking like you need three). And then there are the straight-up troll levels, like 8 (“Tricks and Traps”) and 20 (“Gotcha!”), which are at least properly labelled.
I’ve had to bump the difficulty down a notch for Doom II, which would be fine if the difficulty felt more fair and consistent, but it seems to spike up and down.
I’m still enjoying it and plan to complete the playthrough, just… wanted to whine a bit.
Best way to play Doom 2: start each map with just the pistol. When you do them all, up the difficulty and start again. I don’t think I’ve had so much fun with any other game.
I may give this a try. The Level Select feature on the new ports (I don’t remember this being in the original) seems like it would make it pretty easy to do this.
It was. Not sure how it looks now, but there was a different executable file which allowed you setup a bunch of stuff before launching, among them to warp to a certain level.
Lemme know how it goes. For me it just reinvented the game – blasting everything with a shotgun gets repetitive, not to mention that you can always plasma your way out of trouble. But trying to figure out how to get past a Cyberdemon with a pistol has more of a puzzle feel to it.
I remember playing all three episodes of original Doom with just a pistol. Even after picking up other weapons – still, pistol. Pistoled the entire thing. Took forever to take down Barons, let alone Spiderdemon. But I had fun.
I think I gave up on that when I was facing crap like arcane demons that could respawn everyone in Doom II. At least, that’s my memory.
Meanwhile, have you tried Heretic and Hexen?
Oh, I used other weapons when I found them. That was part of the fun – I was happy again to find them. Just at the end of the level it’s reset.
Yeah, played those too.
I’ll have to give it a try. From what you said, it sounds like I’m through the worst of the maps in terms of quality, but if I need a break at some point I may play through SIGIL.
Part of my goal for this playthrough has been to play the maps in release order: the first three episodes of Doom, then Doom II, then Thy Flesh Consumed, then (maybe) the Master Levels, then Final Doom. The “about halfway through Doom 64” was done before I decided to go that route.
But since SIGIL wasn’t part of the original releases, I guess I can insert it at any point.
Some good has come out of the current situation – from my sister in the Wee North:
😀
That’s the 12th of July (the other Glorious Twelfth), a whole three months away, so you can imagine the relief from the shrill piping of piccolos day in and day out like insects stridulating in your ear!
Though there are downsides, too:
I’m not sure they had Asda in Soviet-era Russia, but oh the humanity!
There does seem to be some reduction in infection rates in the Republic of Ireland thanks to the measures adopted so far, but there’s still a long way to go yet before anything can be definitely said to be over the worst of it. We’re getting PPE supplies in from China, so the manufacturing must be starting up there again and they must consider the worst of the outbreak over if they’re willing and able to export surplus medical equipment.
In most discussions about modelling the disease and when people talk about herd immunity, there always seems to be the assumption that, once one has recovered from Covid-19 one becomes immune to it, and so one can’t get it or transmit it again.
But this is not true for the other four common human coronaviruses. We keep getting them again and again. It’s no big deal, since they only cause common colds, but we’re obviously not immune to them (at least not long term) and certainly do keep spreading them. This is different to most other viruses, such as influenza viruses. We do become permanently immune to those after recovery, but the flu viruses mutate so fast that new strains evolve every year. Coronaviruses, by contrast, seem to be fairly stable.
So here’s a theory: Perhaps SARS-CoV-2 is really not much different to the other four common human coronaviruses, and the properties they have in common are the following:
They cause mild illness when we get them for the first time as children, and once we’ve had them, we can get them again and spread them again, but they only cause mild illness.
The only reason Covid-19 is so dangerous is that most of us are encountering it for the first time as adults. Perhaps the other four would be just as deadly to an old person who has somehow never encountered them before.
If this is true, it would mean that we cannot develop long-term immunity, which is okay for those who have survived it, since any subsequent reinfections will be mild, but there is no long-term protective herd immunity that could protect the vulnerable: eventually, everybody will get it, unless we develop a vaccine in time.
This is only a theory, and hopefully it is wrong. In a few years it will be clear whether or not it is true. in the meantime we might get clues from history. Each of the other four human coronaviruses might have caused a similar pandemic when it first appeared. Is there any historic reference to a plague that mysteriously spared children? What about cases where isolated people were contacted for the first time?
That’s an interesting thought. It seems that the “common cold” corona viruses and SARS both have the property that antibodies for them disappear after some time.
I think the most uncertain part is your assumption about how dangerous the virus is per infection. We do see some people getting chickenpox or EBV as older adults, and they usually have a bad time. So if all corona viruses are only harmless for children, we should also see some older adults who have never had the common cold dying from their first corona virus encounter. I don’t think we do, but maybe it’s rare enough that we don’t notice.
I’ve never heard of a historic plague that would be a good candidate for a corona virus. But there are two complications: if some of the indigenous Americans died of corona in addition to all the other old world diseases, I’m not sure that anybody would have had the opportunity to notice. And the current corona virus seems to most often kill people who were already very unhealthy and may not have lived to that point at all before modern medicine.
On the other hand, it seems that the original SARS was inherently more deadly than Covid-19, it’s also possible that Covid is inherently worse than the common cold coronas, and will not be just a cold if you get it a second time.
IANAD. What you’re saying seems reasonable, and to a point it’s probably true: we’re reacting badly because it’s a new virus, subsequent infections are likely to be easier and so on. But there are a few things that don’t fit: the way it attacks the lungs and the way it targets the weak are quite new, both to respiratory infections and viruses in general. Not “new” as in “out of what you’d expect a virus to do”, but still do not really fit in the “severe common cold” scenario.
If there is no long term immunity, could variolation for most of society at once kill the virus off entirely?
You mean like the campaigns to vaccinate all of humanity against smallpox and polio? Possible but extremely difficult. We haven’t yet managed for polio, where you get vaccinated once and it lasts a lifetime. It would be much harder to get all of humanity variolated *within a few months*.
Interestingly, a big problem with polio is that the best vaccine for it is a live attenuated virus (it gives you immunity but not polio), but very rarely, that virus mutates back to a virulent form, and people shed the virus after immunization. So when you’re vaccinating with the live virus vaccine, you’re causing a few new cases of polio to spontaneously show up in the community every once in awhile. If everyone’s vaccinated, this is acceptable–little kids shed virus that might mutate back to virulent form if it circulated for awhile, but adults are all immune so who cares? But if not, then you can get new outbreaks with paralysis and such due to vaccination. The dead virus vaccine (“inactivated”) is harder to handle and administer and I think isn’t as good, but won’t ever revert to a virulent strain and cause a new outbreak.
Also, polio specifically is way out on the diminishing-returns end of the cost-benefit curve; there are like seventy active cases worldwide and they’re all in rural Pakistan/Africa among groups with really awful sanitation infrastructure and recent proof that the CIA sometimes uses fake vaccination campaigns to spy on them.
If there’s something that’s 10-20x as bad as the flu when you get it and it requires a yearly shot, I think you’ll get much wider compliance on that than on flu shots.
If that’s true then isn’t a vaccine impossible?
If you can vaccinate enough people, the disease will stop spreading, even if they’re only immune for a year or two. You could also use the vaccine in a targeted way: if someone is diagnosed with covid, you vaccinate a few hundred people around him, and it should not spread further.
I guess it’s also not totally unbelievable that a vaccine may be found that causes longer, more reliable immunity than going through the infection. But there’s certainly a middle ground between “lifelong immunity” and “no vaccine”.
Surprisingly, it seems that at least one human coronavirus was likely to have diverged from other coronaviruses some time between 1890 and 1943, if I’m reading this section of Wikipedia right. That puts tight bounds on when the associated plague would have to have been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Evolution
Why aren’t countries experimenting with variolation?
Probably because if it goes wrong whoever does it will look really, really bad.
I doubt we’re ready for it now.
But after we get over the coronavirus, and the epidemiologists and economists study all our efforts, I hope that governments announce that deliberate infection — with low doses of viruses, of low-risk populations, who are then held in quarantine and given the best care possible, before our health care systems are overwhelmed — is one of the methods we should have on the table. Not necessarily that it’s the right one to use for any particular virus, but when you are facing 100K-200K deaths, we are discussing how to save the most lives, so it should not be verboten to offer it.
Fear of legal liability. And negative public relations.
They aren’t even testing antibodies to see which people are already immune. Would be useful for health workers.
They’ve not developed the tests yet. But it seems to be a high priority.
I’m really really curious.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-51959558/coronavirus-sir-patrick-vallance-on-potential-for-antibody-testing
I read another piece from BBC News about it but I can’t find it now.
Chinese are producing antibody tests. Czech government bought over hundred thousand of them, and other countries as well, I think.
Apparently many of the Chinese ones (in particular those exported to Spain) didn’t work. However, companies in Singapore and South Korea both produce them.
@The Nybbler
Here in Czechia it was also initialy reported that they don´t work, but then it emerged that they were used improperly (instruction manual was probably in Chinese; at least that was the case with respirators bought from the same country). I wonder whether something similar happened in Spain.
The Dutch blood bank is going to do antibody tests in April.
They are in SOME countries. The US FDA is making it as hard as possible, limiting quantities of tests and requiring the testing be done in a clinical setting.
According to my local paper, this is being developed. But it will need to be rolled to lots of folks to get a good benefit. Maybe start with health workers as you say.
Because that’s the worst immunisation method avalaible. There’s a reason variolation was quickly phased out as soon as smallpox vaccine was avalaible.
Given what we know of coronaviruses, it’s not even clear that variolation would have any positive effect in this case.
Why wouldn’t there at least be experiments checking if it works? What we basically need right now is a stop gap measure that doesn’t wreck the economy, variolation seems to be a good candidate .
Smallpox was very different from covid19, the death rates from smallpox variolation were apparently similar to the normal death rates from covid19.
It was still used before vaccines were available, there is no vaccine available for covid19 currently, why is variolation a worse idea now?
Variolation probably worked in the case of smallpox largely because of variola minor. The most successful variolation was done by people who selected those with mild cases of the disease as the source for the variolation material, many of which were likely due to that less-lethal virus.
As far as I know, there is no SARS-CoV-2 “minor”. If SARS-CoV had not died out, SARS-CoV-2 would BE the minor.
@The Nybbler good point, thanks.
There may be a parrallel here to smallpox, if higher initial exposure and/or having the lower respiratory tract exposed intially raises dearth rates by a significant amount (and at least one of these things being true seems likely, and both are plausible)
This really bothers me, mostly because herd immunity through letting all the healthy young people get it naturally is being discussed (recently in my country too), without talk of strategy how to try lowering the death rate.
Variolation seems like a ‘cheap’ way to try to improve the strategy and is being ignored.
The issue is that nobody knows if variolation would actually help with that and has a high risk of making things worse.
I think variolation is simply an instance of vaccination. We have a pretty well-developed science of making vaccines now, with existing techniques for designing them and testing them and such, and it’s hard to imagine that variolation would be better than that. The only time it could have any place, IMO, would be something where you isolated a few hundred young, healthy healthcare workers (maybe Army doctors and nurses) somewhere, infected them all with as mild a dose as possible (drip one droplet full of infectious virus into their eye, say), and hope to have a set of young, healthy people with immunity who can work in your hospitals. I’d support allowing people to volunteer for this, and offering them a pile of money for doing so–I think the informed consent issue would in practice be less worrying if you were dealing with healthcare professionals, since they’d surely know what kind of risks they were running.
The potential downside is that you might get a bunch of serious cases, perhaps including a few people dying and several more ending up permanently disabled thanks to lung or heart damage.
1. Vaccines take time to develop, assuming we manage at all. Variolation can be done very soon. Because time is the big factor making governments consider taking risks (economy issues) variolation has a very large advantage- it might get us out of the economy vs millions of lives tradeoff.
What you mention should certainly be done, considering medical workers seem to be dying at higher rates than their equivalents in the rest of the population.
Is there any reason to think there will be more serious cases this way than the naive herd immunity plan?
If we’re doing variolation, would it make sense to do other experimental vaccine attempts at the same time? There are risks to experimental vaccines, but most of them don’t risk making you sick themselves. If we can grow enough COVID-19, we could just try inactivating it with heat or formaldehyde and then injecting it into volunteers, and see if it helps. Or start growing spike proteins in yeast and injecting spike proteins plus adjuvant in volunteers.
I don’t know how quickly this could be ramped up (producing a lot of vaccine is going to take time), but I think it would be at least as sensible to do as variolation. Again, you’d do it to healthy volunteer healthcare workers, in hopes of getting an immune population. I think the most likely failure mode for either of these would be not getting an effective immune response, but they would have 0% chance of giving you SARS-CoV2. There are some vaccines that make you more susceptible to the disease, though–that’s rare, but it happens sometimes. That would be the real risk.
FWIW, I’m a moderately high risk person. I’d volunteer to get either of those kind of experimental vaccines.
How would it make things worse? (Compared to letting people get it naturally)
The lockdown measures are intended to make sure people get the disease a few at a time, as opposed to all at once. If variolation was to be useful, you’d have to do it to a lot of people at once. If it causes terrible side effects in more people than a normal covid infection does, you have made things worse.
Even if it does not cause terrible side effects, many ethical systems (and insurance companies) think that “letting X happen” is less bad than “causing Y to happen”, even if X is worse than Y.
If you want to run trials until you’re sure that the variolation has no terrible side effects, at that point you have lost any advantages over a normal vaccine (which is being worked on at full steam).
@Kaitan if we just infected people with the virus in much smaller amounts, there would not be any worse side effects (unless rhere is a homeopathic effect…).
I think it would be much better as far as not overloading the medical system goes, you can choose the number of infected at any one time
@Purplehermann
We’d have to work out an amount of virus that will produce a big enough immune reaction to protect you, but will rarely cause the full blown illness. That’s probably not trivial. You’d also have to administer the virus to people in some way. Someone upthread suggested using eyedrops – it’s not out of the question that this could have some eye related side effect that normal covid won’t have.
Then you have to make sure the variolated people don’t go around spreading the virus to others. If variolation produces a bunch of additional asymptomatic carriers, that’s pretty bad.
It also won’t let you choose the number of infected, because the virus will still be spreading elsewhere. If we could stop that, we wouldn’t need any other measure. And if the healthcare system is already struggling, any additional covid cases through variolation would make things worse in the short term at least.
I don’t think variolation is worse than letting the disease run rampant, but I do think there are good reasons not to immediately assume it would be an easy way out.
@Kaitian
It wouldn’t let you choose everything, no.
The bonus there is that we can choose a flat number (that takes into account the projected number of serious cases in the next few weeks, and yes isolation would be important) that wouldn’t overwhelm the healthcare systems.
This seems like a serious advantage to me over the exponential spread with a week delay for symptoms that comes from natural spread.
I would probably go with mouth not eyes, but I’m sure there are people better able to decide on that.
Figuring out the dose shouldn’t take more than a few (two really) weeks.
Because this isn’t the eighteenth century, and we know lots of better ways to make vaccines than variolation. We have justifiably high confidence that at least one of these will work.
This being the 21st rather than 18th century, we also “know” that we need to test whatever we come up with for about a year on small test groups before we put it into general use. But that requirement doesn’t magically go away because we use an old technology to make the prototype vaccine in the first place.
If we’re going to wait on a year of testing before we introduce the new vaccine, then we’re almost certainly going to come out of that year with a safe, effective vaccine developed using more modern techniques. If “let’s use variolation!” is your way of sneaking in eighteenth-century accelerated testing protocols, then A: bait and switch and B: oh hells no. If we’re going to accept the risk of an accelerated testing regime, then we want to be explicit about that up front and we want to take that risk with a modern vaccine rather than something as inherently risky as variolation.
+100
And another 100.
Presumably this is only expected to provide benefit once we are able to track and contain the spread from existing cases. Variolation is useful if our infection rate is too low to provide wide scale immunity. But right now our problem is not that our lockdowns are too effective and the disease is spreading too slowly, but rather that our lockdowns haven’t even flattened new infections yet, so we are still constantly being surprised by who is infected.
I predict that if, in a month or two, infection rates are under control, and we have good testing and tracking, that some localities will start discussing the idea.
So Virginia has put a lockdown in place until June 10, which is… a long lockdown.
I am wondering if we’re now seeing a herd effect where no politician wants to be blamed for being the weakest on quarantine, so they’re just putting out random dates.
Shutting down for over two months is simply absurd at this point.
If at the end of April we still need to shut down for May, we can do that then.
Yeah, this is definitely an out of control purity spiral. Everyone is trying to out “I’m taking this seriously!” each other.
Purity spiral is exactly the term I was looking for. Thanks.
Although…while perhaps not ideal, a purity spiral is probably not the worst thing when trying to stop the spread of a virus.
It is if the only way to display purity is by wreaking economic devastation
The problem is if the decisionmakers either:
a. Don’t understand the decisions they’re making very well, so are responding to the wrong things.
b. Are mainly making signaling sorts of decisions (show how much they care) rather than actually useful decisions.
There’s a huge opportunity here for cargo-cult type behavior, where a bunch of people who never did (and never will) know much about how viruses work get the idea that some behavior is desirable (locking everything down, telling everyone to go out and party because it’s all a media hoax, whatever), and make a lot of bad decisions, because they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t have a good internal model of the problem, and so their solution won’t make sense except by accident.
I support widespread shutdowns now. But we *really* need to be planning, right now, for the next phase. How do we start things back up without just getting a big flare-up again? What information do we need to know how to do that, and how can we get it?
There are papers that have modeled/simulated this, and they often show that when you raise the shutdown order, you get a flare-up of cases. There are probably ways to avoid that if we think things through carefully, and raise the shutdown order gradually, along with making sure we keep the necessary stuff running with minimal disease transmission.
Really, once we have worked out how to run, say, a factory or warehouse or office with minimal disease transmission risk, that will give us a blueprint for slowly opening things back up.
I agree with all that. I’m just saying as far as irrational spirals go, a purity spiral might be one of the less bad ones to be in right now.
Let’s keep in mind that plenty of these decision-makers need to get re-elected some day, and saving us from the virus but landing us in a depression is a really good way to not get re-elected. The unemployed have plenty of reason to vote for anything but the status quo.
We should also keep in mind that
1. These decision makers are largely unqualified to make long term economic decisions
2. They have already tried to head this off at the pass with massive payouts to people
These decisionmakers are overwhelmingly not the kind of people you’d want to have making this kind of decision, in terms of health, economics, science, statistics, etc. Our political system creates a lot of dysfunction, and we should probably think about how to have less of that after we get through this crisis.
FDR’s case suggests the opposite. The depression had started before he got elected but it continued under him until interrupted by a war, and the only thing that got him out of office was dying.
I’m gonna have to disagree, strongly.
Spirals, in general, are a very bad idea, because you run the risk of ending up with a cure worse than the disease. An increasing risk, ‘coz that’s the nature of spirals.
Lest we forget, Italy – the Sick Man of Europe – has been on lockdown since the 12th of March at the latest. Going by Wikipedia, they had 10,590 active cases and 827 recorded deaths at the time.
Three weeks or so later (as of the 30th), they have 75,528 active cases (a roughly 7-fold increase) and 11,591 deaths (a roughly 11.5-fold increase). That’s… not exactly a strong endorsement of the efficacy of these measures in curbing either cases or deaths.
How about Spain? Third in number of cases, second in number of deaths, as I write. Wiki says the state of alarm was instituted on 14th March (@4,906 active cases, 133 deaths, as of the 13th). As of the 30th, there were 63,460 active cases (x13) and 7,716 deaths (x58).
The incubation time for COVID-19 ranges from 2 to 14 days, with 5 or 6 being typical. This means that if we consider Italy and Spain to be a disaster, it is one that has occurred despite the lockdown measures. Now, you can try to argue that without the lockdown it would have been a lot worse, but for that you’ll actually need to show data – not models.
What about China? They managed to contain it through lockdowns, haven’t they?
Yeah… I think that China solved the coronavirus problem in its own inimitable way: by going back to their roots and putting the kibosh on disclosure. It’s not like they don’t have the means to steer the flow of information out of China. How do they get away with it? A simple explanation is that perhaps they realized that COVID-19 isn’t as big a deal as they thought. If the disease isn’t causing many excess deaths (fatalities are concentrated among the old with co-morbidities – i.e. people likely to die anyway), they can simply adopt the “herd immunity” strategy, restart their economy and trumpet the wisdom of Xi’s government. Who’s going to gainsay them? The WHO?
I’m not exactly blowing bubbles here. There’s some questioning of the accuracy of the official numbers already. Also, let’s be honest – the 3,309 official reported deaths is peanuts when it comes to China or even just Hubei province. It won’t even register in the mortality statistics.
Speaking of which, the place to keep watch of – if you care for that sort of thing – is the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine’s England and Wales mortality during the COVID-19 outbreak – the only research I know of that attempts to determine the effect of COVID-19 on overall mortality and compare it to previous-year averages.
Sadly, they are limited by the speed of the Office for National Statistics, so the latest update (today, 31st of March) includes data up to the week ending on the 20th of March, inclusive. I eagerly await the updates over the next couple of weeks.
I think it’s:
5-8 days from exposure to symptoms
A week or so of overt illness that usually isn’t so serious
Some subset of people progress to pneumonia and end up in the hospital
That is, I think there’s more likely a 2-week delay in there instead of a 1-week delay. I don’t know how much that matters, though.
Given that it’s been around three weeks since the lockdowns were instituted, I’m not sure it does, either. If the lockdowns are effective in keeping people from being infected, shouldn’t we expect the number of visible active cases (i.e. symptomatic patients who have neither recovered nor died, yet) to peak out around two weeks after social distancing measures are put in place? That’s not what we’re seeing, though.
It could be an artefact of the testing regime, but that simply means that testing misses a huge number of active cases that can be subsequently “discovered” when more testing is performed. This is not unexpected, given that we know from the Vò tests that the majority of carriers are likely to be asymptomatic (but may develop symptoms at some point in the future).
However, if we assume that the number of people actually infected is greater than the number of cases detected, we must reappraise our mortality estimates as well. Everyone focuses on CFRs because they are available, but those are poor measures, liable to distortions from both how we identify cases and how we record deaths. What everyone should care about is IFR – how likely are you to die if you become infected – and if we assume that we’re missing most infections, that’s gonna be a good deal lower than the CFR – if only because people don’t die asymptomatically (in other words: we notice when they’re dead).
Faza says the hardest hit European countries weren’t the tardiest lockdowns, but they were. The FT has the four hardest hit countries as Italy, Spain, France, and UK (11,591; 8,189; 3,024; and 1,789 as of this afternoon). They were the four countries that waited until the most deaths to lock down (827; 200; 175; and 320).
It’s not true there’s a purity spiral. The Danish PM is bragging Denmark could end lockdown in April. If there was a purity spiral she’d be ashamed to say that.
It’s not a purity spiral if there is a range of positions and you think they’re all the wrong side of you. You might be the purist.
@Del Cotter:
Funny, I don’t recall saying anything of the sort. I just read my posts and can’t see it at all. Could you please point it out to me?
Regardless, the number of deaths at the time of lockdown is a poor measure of anything. At best it tells us how many deaths could have been avoided – if the lockdowns are effective at preventing infections and – subsequently – death of some of the infected.
What I did say is that these two countries (Italy and Spain) have been under lockdown for a good while now and both the number of cases and the number of deaths have kept rising – they have overtaken China on both metrics at this point, considerably so on the latter (Spain has two-and-a-half times as many deaths; Italy 3.75 as many).
ETA:
Even purity spirals come to an end, you know, because most people aren’t that desperate to sign suicide pacts.
Currently, people have started realizing what being under lockdown really means – and most places aren’t China. I’m just waiting to see who blinks first.
@DavidFriedman:
Not saying you’re wrong, but I’m going to fact check you here because of your bias.
What month or quarter of the Great Depression was peak unemployment, and how high was it when FDR started up the war economy (defense manufacturing and the draft started well before Pearl Harbor)? What quarter did US GDP turn the corner from negative to positive growth?
What I did say is that these two countries (Italy and Spain) have been under lockdown for a good while now and both the number of cases and the number of deaths have kept rising
I cropped this image from https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest (thanks to @Douglas Knight for the pointer)
https://imgur.com/jaTApMW
8 days after lockdown, Spain crossed the line so deaths were doubling in less than 2 days time (previously ~1.5 days).
When Italy locked down, deaths were doubling every 2.4-ish days. 13 days later, they crossed to 3 days time.
It takes time for the lockdowns to take effect.
Italy and Spain’s experiences seem like exactly what we would expect if lockdowns work. Both have leveled off after a certain delay. I’m actually not sure what Faza’s point is. He thinks lockdowns are ineffective and do nothing? That seems like an extraordinary claim.
@Edward Scizorhands:
I’m not sure what you intend to show with this chart.
If one person dies today and another person dies tomorrow, we’ve had deaths double over one day. Is that a cause for concern?
The time to double cumulative deaths will naturally flatten regardless of interventions, because:
1. the more people have died already, the more have to die to keep up the rate of doubling,
2. as more people die, the susceptible segment of the population decreases and we have no reason to believe that young people will suddenly become more likely to die once all the old and already ill people will die off.
This latter point bears elaboration. Assume that, if left completely unaddressed, COVID-19 would kill x people, in line with what we already know about how the disease spreads and progresses.
Initially, we would expect to see the number of deaths rise rather rapidly, as the susceptible population begins to fall ill and die. Again, if you have had only one death, another death will double the number of deaths. However, each additional death beyond that will contribute progressively less to the doubling rate, because you’ve had more prior deaths.
After a while, most of the population would have already been infected and either died or recovered, flattening the cumulative death curve.
Leaving all of that aside, the fundamental problem with using COVID-19 deaths for anything is Goodhart’s Law.
@Cliff:
I’m not saying lockdowns do nothing – it would be an extraordinary claim, indeed, to say they have completely no effect on the rate of infection.
The question is what they are doing and whether it is a thing worth doing given the cost of doing it.
If lockdowns work, they work with a delay. Italy had a lockdown in Lombardy since 8 March, which is 22 days, in the entire country since 9 March, but also all nonessential things were shut down only since 21 March. Wikipedia entry on a severity of stages of the Italian lockdown is confusing.
I think that to declare on the basis of available data, in light of a length of Italian lockdown, that lockdowns do not work, would be a feat of extraordinary overconfidence. Opposite is also somewhat true, albeit to a lesser extent, since our evidence that lockdowns work depends on how seriously you take data coming from China, whose validity is in dispute.
And if lockdowns work, in the absence of other available solutions, not doing them means likely death of 1 %? 2 %? 0,5 %? We are not sure, but nontrivial part of the population of given country.
Of course people have different values and thus will came different conclusions on what choices regarding lockdown should be made, given those facts.
It is if the trend continues, obviously: two people die tomorrow, four people the day after, eight the next day.
Perhaps you could rephrase your question?
If the disease is spreading exponentially, it will have no problem accomplishing this until the population saturates. If there have been only 8500 deaths there, they are not yet close to saturation.
I feel you are invoking Zeno’s Paradox here, as if you are arguing that an exponentially growing death rate is impossible.
EDIT: Dr. Lin’s updated doc has different numbers
Time from infection to death is 17 days on average (source from March 13 Dr. Lin)
Italy began lockdown on March 9th, 22 days ago, so we should see some effect in numbers of deaths. From here deaths are increasing by 8% per day, instead of the 15-20% per day earlier on.
If the IFR is .9% (most estimates are between .1 and .9 that I’ve seen) and cumulative deaths today March 31 were 12428 (from the above worldometer link) that means there were 1.4MM cumulative infections on March 15th.
If infections were growing at 8% per day from the lockdown, then that means today there are 5.2MM cumulatively infected, in a population of 60MM. In two weeks, at that rate, there will be 15MM infected and knocking on the door of herd immunity.
My hope is that by mid-May Italy is seen as the worst case scenario of letting it run, and that the worst case is not that bad, and other countries let their restrictions up because they ‘now have enough testing capability’ and enough masks and we all get back to work.
Oh, and I’m hoping that we don’t end up in a war with China. There is a lot of pretty crazy talk about China recently. A couple months ago it was “China has bought the world time with their expensive measures, and the west squandered it” and now it is “China has intentionally released this virus to sabotage the west” and I’m concerned that if people get very desperate (economically or otherwise) this will blow up into a war.
The quantity of infections and subsequent deaths there have been is nothing like enough to have depleted the pool of susceptibles yet. That is not the source of the deviation from exponential growth.
This slowdown would not yet have been a slowdown, would not yet have stopped under a business as usual SIR scenario, but would still be in the exponential growth phase now. The slowdown is the result of the lockdown. It just took a few weeks to kick in.
As of tonight, the FT has stopped plotting cumulative numbers and is now plotting seven day moving means. The graphs now show Italy has peaked.
But another way of saying that is that it is now at the peak rate, 50,000 cases a week. The lockdown has been successful, but now is certainly not the time to end it, with so many new infections coming fast. They need at least the whole of April to bring the numbers down like Wuhan. At least. It would have been better if Italy had started earlier.
America will not benefit economically from having dragged its feet before completely locking down. It would have been better off if it had started earlier, and nationwide.
@Faza (TCM) et al. The number of newly diagnosed infections is more informative than the number of active cases, as there is even more delay until death or confirmed recovery. If the Italy lockdown works, we should expect to see the number of new diagnoses to peak 1.5–2 weeks after the lockdown. That is what we see.
@LesHapablap They weren’t. New diagnoses are down to 4–6% in the last few days, and those are at a delay compared to when the actual infection happened.
There is no “business as usual SIR scenario”. Epidemics do not usually follow the unstratified SIR model. The CDC estimates the 2009 swine flu infected about 61 million Americans, so about 20% of the population. R0 is estimated to be between 1.4 and 1.6, so 20% of the population is not only below the epidemic final size, it is below the herd immunity threshold.
Point taken. But I don’t think the curves of confirmed cases or deaths would have been as low as they have been, if the respective governments had continued as usual without the lockdowns. Covid-19 has a higher R0 than the 2009 swine flu and a higher fatality ratio. I don’t agree that three weeks of lockdown have not helped, nor that the currently flattening curves represent a decrease in the susceptible population.
I fear the inevitable flare-up once the lockdown is lifted. Not because I’m afraid of getting sick, but because millions of oversensitized people will likely overreact and go into panic mode.
As an analogy–I’m very sensitive to noise, and I used to live in an apartment with a neighbor who liked to have loud parties. At 2AM, the music would stop, and I’d be immensely relieved–until it came back on at 2:30 and I was 10 times as agitated as before.
A COVID recurrence would be like the loud music coming back on, on a national scale.
Two months is, IMO, a reasonably good best-guess for how long a lockdown will need to last if you don’t already have a solid plan or what to do next and are developing your contact-tracing plan from scratch. But announcing up-front that it’s going to be two months, is going to make it difficult to walk back to one month if the situation develops in such a way that one month is enough. And, as others have noted, it risks driving a purity spiral in which the next governor says “OK, my lockdown is going to be four months!”
Why? It would seem to me the opposite would be true, its much easier to announce good news later (we beat it, lock down to be lifted early) than to add bad news later. If you announce that lock down should beat the virus in a month then it is at least plausible that you will lose credibility in month 2 when you have to admit that you are wrong. Considering credibility is central to lock downs working that is a bad risk.
The good news will not be “we have completely eradicated COVID-19”, so lifting the lockdown before the pre-announced date means handing your political enemies every subsequent death as your fault for having lifted the lockdown “early”.
Basically agreed with this.
Unless you have a vaccine, you are going to have a hard time lifting quarantine early. But if you set rolling “we’ll reassess in two weeks”, then you can actually lift it when it makes sense for “Hammer and Dance” style tracing.
This seems doubtful as everything being discussed is in terms of ‘flattening of the curve, and no one is claiming to end things perfectly and the public isn’t that dumb, plus the converse is also true. Order lock down and say it will be over in a month means you will be making people mad in a month and providing fodder to your opposition then, at a date a month closer to the election.
People hate uncertainty, and businesses really hate uncertainty. Rolling two week decisions just scream ‘we have no clue’ once they start getting rolled long, and also sets up having to repeatedly admit you are wrong in the tougher scenarios. Promise 1 month and it can be that you have to admit that you were wrong and now its 6 weeks, and then at 4 weeks you are admitting you were wrong twice before and its 2 months, and that is assuming you get away without having to make a statement about being wrong on the off weeks. Basically you are committing to highlighting your failure several times should it go against you.
Or substantially more effective medication, which could come a good deal sooner.
It’s the classic strategy of “under-promise and over-deliver.” Make everyone think it’ll last until June 10, then lift it on May 15 and say it can be lifted only due to the effective government response. It’s what Trump would do if he were competent.
Anyone willing to bet on this? I’ll throw down $100 for charity that any quarantine currently announced with a specified end-date will not be lifted before that end-date.
The real problem with lockdown orders is they are local, but the bailout packages will be federal.
If governors were forced to decide between lockdown and re-allocating 50% of the budget to paying a temporary UBI (most of that would have to come from public employee salaries and pensions (who are huge lobbying forces in every state), then we would get reasonable measures.
Public employee unions aren’t exactly known for reasonable and responsible behavior…
Well of course. Thats why governors should be forced to balance the interests of apoplectic public employee unions with their desire to lockdown the state for months.
I think they’d make the same decision as you, I just think it would be the wrong decision. Our lives are not worth their pensions.
Yes, but our lives aren’t being particularly well protected either.
My prediction (for the US at least) is that the absolute longest these lockdowns can last is until September or so – when the next school year is scheduled to resume.
Because if you start cancelling next year’s school too, localities are going to have to start laying off public school teachers, who have strong unions and stronger public support. Public schooling is too popular to suspend indefinitely. And if you concede that they can re-open, it’s hard to argue that other stuff can’t too…
Not if they start distance learning. The only thing they’d have to fear is that some parents would start home-schooling and “withdraw” their kids from the official school system, causing them to lose money.
While people criticise soft Western values and praise the Chinese for their obedience, I think that Spaniards in general have been way too obedient. And the media way too pliable. The opposition does not exist; checks and balances don’t exist.
Ordinary people are starting to break confinement rules. The only thing that surprises me is that there are only 60,000 cases for a country with 47 million. But then, the level of social pressure and vigilantism is quite extreme.
It seems like there’s been big game-changing things that happen fairly close to once every ten years, or at least I can name one within a few years of each of the last four years ending in 0:
1990 – Fall of the Soviet Union
2000 – 9/11
2010 – Not as sure about this one but maybe the crash in ’08?
2020 – C19
I invite you all to find a better example for 2010 and others for previous years ending in 0. How far back does it go until the pattern breaks? WWII’s end, with the first tactical detonation of a nuke which ushered in the age of nuclear paranoia, was smack in between two such years, so maybe that’s it.
The Great Recession would definitely be 2010’s event if you are going to call 9/11 2000’s. I can’t think of anything around 1980 though. Maybe the Three Mile Island accident? My impression is that it really changed the public’s view on nuclear energy.
The big change in 1980 was the end of stag flation.
The Iran hostage crisis?
Stagflation just feels like a ’70s cultural artifact to me, not a real macroeconomic issue. Like I can imagine suffering through hyperinflation because the government thinks it can do good by printing more money to chase fewer goods (uh oh…) but I can’t imagine living through stagflation without disco and bell bottoms and Jimmy Carter…
The only other contenders for 2010 would be (in US politics) the Tea Party and Occupy movements and (in global politics) the Arab Spring and associated social media revolutions (possibly including the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009). It definitely seems like the Global Financial Crisis far surpasses those, even though those others might be seen as the precursors to the social-media-prompted global electoral breakdowns of 2016 (Brexit, Trump, Duterte, Bolsonaro, and the near-failure of the Colombia peace deal).
I’m amused that the official departure of the UK from the EU in January is now not only not the event that makes the whole world sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister and protracted by the lights of perverted science; not only not the event that plunges the island of Britain into a Mad Max dystopia where visiting celebrities holding microphones plead for donations as they stand next to little children with flies on their faces and distended bellies; not only not the big game-changing event of the decade; not only not what future historians will answer to the question “what happened in 2020?”; but not the big news story of the first quarter of the calendar year.
1980 end of stagflation
1970(1) US ends the gold standard (temporarily, official in 73)
1960 US enters Vietnam
My understanding is that Vietnam did not become politically significant until 1968 or so.
I’d argue Medicare/Social Security for 1960s. Or if being strict about the year, the civil rights act.
I wonder if the killing of Bin Laden in 2011 might count, if people think that was a Schelling point marking the beginning of the end of public interest in war-on-terror/terrorist-hunting?
2010 – Arab Spring.
Year%10 plus or minus 3 covers the majority of years.
Quiet, you.Yeah, even +/- 2 years covers a pretty broad swathe. But I think in the back of my mind I was trying to limit myself to a total sum variance of 6 years every 4 decades.
As it is April Fool’s day, here is some news from the Planet Karatas:
The pattern of ten-yearly events began in 1980 with HIV/AIDS and will continue until at least 2080.
It is connected with the rise in interest in Indian culture and mysticism that occurred in late 1960s.
The gulf war and collapse of communism were predicted by the Sufi Sheikh Abdullah Daghestani (1891-1973) in the 50s-70s.
He also predicted the inundation of Cairo, presumably by the collapse of the Aswan Dam.
Another “coming attraction” will be a major flood, probably caused by a flank collapse on La Palma.
Is this a reference to all those scapegoat pigs people slaughtered in response to swine flu? 😀
My closest guess for 1980 is the Reagan/Thatcher revolution and the start of the “Great Moderation” and eventual “Washington Consensus”. But a lot of trends start around 1970 (maybe 1968-1973) when the post-war boom ends.
I work Engineering in a mid sized company in west palm beach, when I happened to overhear 1 coworkers asking another if he’d ever heard of SSC which he coincidentally had. now, obviously, this is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence, so I went over and said hello and made 2 new friends.
There are probably 12 people within earshot of me from my cubical, which would suggest that 25% of my coworkers are secretly SSC readers.
What would be the best way to get any more secret SSC readers to reveal themselves by placing things on my cubical desk or walls?
I’m thinking get a picture of a cactus saying “universal love”
As an aside, we should come up with some symbols or phrases to self identify.
The secret SSC symbol should definitely include paperclips.
OH MY GOD, SSC T-SHIRTS!!!
We should definitly have a SSC store… I would buy a t-shirt or some swag
Hell yeah!
The next time one of them annoys you, say “less of this, please” and wink.
I would not catch the cactus reference. I do see that it’s (parenthetically) on the top post recommendations page though, so now I feel ashamed and am wondering what other Great Posts I’ve missed.
Something like {kind, necessary, true}. I’m not good enough at set notation to write that as “proper subset of {kind, necessary, true} with cardinality >= 2.”
Getting “I like your shoelaces” vibes tho…
I find it interesting that I am definitely getting acclimated to putzing around inside 98% of the time. A week ago I was much more disoriented and frustrated, but now it just feels like this is how big the world is. I don’t know whether going out as normal again, whenever that can happen, will feel good or not.
My wife and I live on five acres. Even pre-Covid we typically left the property once per week (groceries). Sometimes twice (doctor, dentist, Home Depot). Such a life comes highly recommended.
That sounds easy. I’ve got a one bedroom apartment in the city.
We went for a little over two weeks with none of us going anywhere, aside from a walk outside with nobody close. My wife and daughter went shopping yesterday and today, carefully, and we now plan to stay in for at least the next month.
We have only about a third of an acre, but that’s still sufficient room for a lot of fruit trees (citrus and avocado currently still bearing, stone fruits due in another five or six weeks). Five acres would be great.
Under ordinary circumstances my wife goes shopping several times a week and we all go out to dinner at least once a week. So a considerably less isolated life than yours.
We haven’t eaten out for years. Five acres is a bit much. We work outside every day, but two would keep us plenty busy.
I’m going a little nuts here. I was accustomed to being home 22 hours a day, but 24 with three kids under 7 and it is getting tough. We have also been self quarantined for a week+ longer than most, so we are in week 4 here.
How bad do y’all think the market will get in Q2?
How low will the S&P go before it’s time to passively invest in it again? What bond ETF should I be in given the behavior the Fed/Treasury is pursuing for the pandemic?
I’m really having a hard time understanding why the market isn’t absolutely cratering right now. My model of how things work must be way off, because I’m hearing stuff like “Goldman Sachs forecasts 2nd quarter GDP growth of -25%” and meanwhile the stock market is acting as if it’s just a slightly unimpressive quarterly forecast or something.
I’m still waiting for SPY to drop below 150, but at this point I have no idea if/when that’s going to happen.
SPY 150 = S&P 500 craters to 1500 from this evening’s 2587?
I’m as baffled as you are. I would think the efficient market would be cratering that much while only select stocks like AMZN and the majority of the dividend aristocrats rally.
This. I opened my eTrade account and put in some money, but I’m waiting to buy anything because I’m expecting a massive crash. I don’t understand how people aren’t jumping off of skyscrapers when you hear “the US economy is going to contract by a quarter.”
I work in a skyscraper full of finance people. I suspect most of them are just too depressed to get past security to the roof.
See, this is where the obesity epidemic pays off for us. The only way to the roof is via the stairs….
Because the medium expectation right now is that the US economy has a V shaped recovery and fills that gap back in less than 3 quarters. From an earnings standpoint 3 months loss of revenue is huge, but if it is all back in 9 months then you are just looking at 1/30th-1/40th of a companies 10 year revenue. Even with some steep discounting you shouldn’t get to much more than a 20-25% draw-down in prices.
I’m just mad I didn’t buy Disney when it was in the low $80s. Now it’s back up almost at a $100. Crash again you damn rat!
It’s not going to contract by a quarter. The 24% (revised to 34% actually) number is annualized.
Elaborate?
The numbers are “annualized” which means they are is the amount of GDP loss you would get if that rate of contraction was sustained for a whole year. But this contraction is only happening for one quarter.
(1-0.34)^0.25 ~ 0.9 so a 34% annualized decline translates into about a 10% drop in actual production going from Q1 to Q2.
Did you forget that the market has already tanked? That expectation is priced in. Time to buy is now.
[Full disclosure: I bought during the downslide and have lost money.]
52-week low was before predictions of 30% unemployment and -25% GDP in Q2.
The lows have little to do with the news directly, the absolute lows were largely forced selling from margin calls etc, almost every crash looks similar to this with a sharp downward spike, a bounce and then another decline.
I think a lot of investors were predicting similar things privately even if it wasn’t a prediction openly being made by experts yet.
I wasn’t predicting unemployment that high, but I did think the GDP would do worse than that.
You don’t even need those predictions to exist, uncertainty will drive down markets pretty heavily. In some cases 30% UE and -25% of GDP is better than ‘who the eff knows what will happen’.
I’m definitely not an efficient markets purist but I think it’s fair to say that the easy money opportunities are gone.
Six weeks ago you had a huge information edge if you were just aware of coronavirus and realized it was going to be a big deal, and there were lots of ways to turn that edge into money.
Now, everyone in the market is thinking hard about coronavirus, probably harder than you are. There’s not much reason to think your opinions on the epidemic are better than the market’s now.
Quarterly rebalancing probably explains some of the increases in the last week or so.
I have heard this and I find it…. dubious at best, or at least weak in explanatory power. If re-balancing was a major cause then you would have large funds selling bonds and buying stocks, which would mean bonds should be taking a hit. As it stands bonds have been flat or up across the board (treasuries, junk, investment grade) while the rally went on.
Whereas I am having a hard time understanding why it has gone down so much. This us a temporary contraction — it is 100% related to the virus. Yes, the virus will be affecting us for a year or two, but presumably less so as time goes on as the world gets a handle on how to handle this thing. Stock prices are based on discounted cash flows, and there is no reason cash flow will be lower two years from now. It is now time to buy.
If that is your view then it seems hard to accept that the S&P was properly valued prior to the crisis. P/E ratio for the S&P was over 23, well above the historical average, the market cap of various indexes to GDP was at all time highs, and corporate debt ratios were at all time highs as well.
“Stock prices are based on discounted cash flows, and there is no reason cash flow will be lower two years from now.”
For any particular company, if there’s an x% chance of going out of business entirely, then that should be an x% discount, on top of whatever the expected loss of cash flow for the intervening year or two is in the (100-x)% chance of eventual recovery.
I guess everyone is assuming things will probably get back to normal (with a possible baby boom / carnivale type effect on top).
1) The market had tank already in expectation of the bad news to come.
2) As the people on reddit but it: Money Printer goes BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
The Fed has (as you might have heared) put up an 2 Trillion Dollar programm to prob up the bond market, which keeps companies running which otherwise would be in danger of going bankrupt.
The government/fed also tried multiple significant interventions to save us all in 2008/2009 and none of them worked (at least, they failed in keeping the stock market from losing half its value and of unemployment being quite high for several years).
What makes people think this time they can totally execute perfectly to avoid any similar outcomes?
If people think that, I don’t know why they would.
All I’m saying is, when the stock markets have one of the fastes raises in one week in history while the fed is pumping literally trillions in said markets, I suspect a correlation
That is very different from expecting it to perfectly avoid all bad economic outcomes this crisis has. The corona crisis might be a catalyst for the bond crisis that was looming, on the horizon for some months now. Everything the goverments do to migitate that crisis, might help, or might make it worse. I don’t know.
But when you ask me why the stock prises went up despite all the bad news last week, I wager it’s said interventions. That can change again tomorrow. (Hint: as of now S&P 500 and DowJones look like it might even change today.)
Standard disclaimer: this is not professional financial advice.
Every Bear out there seems to be saying 2100 (with a few saying 2000) as the test for the S&P, where if it breaks there (that is drops below 2100 and then either bounces back up toward 2100 but not sticking above it or plummets straight through to 2000) then you have the possibility of an absolute market route. No buyers, mass forced liquidations, hedge funds blowing up on a regular basis etc and testing of 1800 and possibly 1500s (ie 2007 and 2001 highs).
My guess is that the Fed would start buying equities somewhere in the 1800-2000 range for the S&P 500, but they have also been the most aggressive ever so far so that might well be under their range.
No idea. I mean some idea. I’m 2/3rds long dated treasuries and 1/3rd TIPS right now (technically ETFs for those things). With the Fed promising to buy corporate debt I am tempted to move money toward investment grade bonds, but having only ETFs available in our 401k that carries a lot of risk from corporate downgrades. Interest rates are low enough now that I am getting nervous about that position. I really don’t want to be in bonds at all, but have little choice there, and cash is basically the only alternative (and not literal, perfectly safe cash either. This is near the end of the 40 year bull market for bonds. Best case is Japanification and near zero rates for decades to come, worst case is defaults and rising interest rates killing your capital. In this situation you want to be out early rather than late.
IDK why you assume the only direction it can go in Q2 is down. Right now, there’s just high uncertainty, which means volatility not losses. There are still upside cases that exist.
I think its fair to say the market has priced in current information at this point. I haven’t stopped my passive investments or changed allocations, and I don’t think anyone who doesn’t specifically want cash on hand right now should, either.
Maybe you know something that the market doesn’t, but that’s not generally a good strategy. (I’ll grant that it probably was in February, but good luck knowing when you know more than Wall Street.)
It looks as though the CDC is gradually shifting its position from “face masks are useless and ordinary people shouldn’t wear them” to “everyone should wear them.”
If that happens, what are the consequences for the CDC? In a very different society one can imagine the people responsible for the initial advice committing suicide from the shame of admitting that they had been contributing to the problem instead of reducing it. In another sort of different society, one can imagine them explaining that their original advice was a noble lie, intended to save masks for medical personnel — although that runs into the obvious objection that lots of people could make masks for themselves if advised to do so.
In our society, can a high level bureaucrat admit very serious misdeeds, and if so how? As far as I know, Isaac Ehrlich (not a bureaucrat, but a high profile figure) has never admitted that what he wrote in The Population Bomb was wildly wrong. It seems to be now pretty widely recognized that the diabolic child abuse cases were modern witch hunts, convicting innocent people of imaginary crimes, but have any of the prosecutors responsible resigned their offices and attempted to compensate the victims?
Some people, such as Trump, are pretty clearly shameless, but it sometimes feels as though everybody is.
Cynical take:
There will never be any specific person or persons that actually take the blame. We will never know the names of any of the actual decision makers, ever. In the US the status of the CDC is and will remain independent of being correct or even remotely successful at fighting/preventing a pandemic.
This. It seems like “inside sources” have already conceded to mainstream journalists that the “masks don’t work” thing was a noble lie. That’s the most contrition we’re ever going to see. No specific individual is ever going to admit it publicly. It’ll just be one of those things that everyone knows.
I guess they could argue that the situation has changed: masks are not useful when they’re sold out and ten per million people are infected, but they’re helpful when many masks are available and infection rates are higher.
They could also argue that their available information has changed, and the new evidence has convinced them that masks are more useful for this virus than they thought.
I don’t know if either of these things are true (though I think they’re more likely than “we have decided to stop lying for no reason”). But they’re certainly explanations they could use.
In my experience, it is very rare for people to admit they were wrong. Generally they make excuses. I can’t tell if they’re just trying to save face, or if they’re honestly holding on to the belief that their intentions and general theories were correct, even if they may have produced a non optimal result.
I don’t think CDC officials committing ritual suicide or engaging in some other public self flagellation will improve the situation in any way. The best thing they could do right now is to publish a good explanation of why their recommendation has changed. Then again, maybe most people would only be confused by that, and public health would benefit more from just giving clear guidelines without any caveats about how they came to design that guideline.
Au contraire, suicide in case of horrible failure in public offices would put a strong incentive on competent policies, as well as making people trust the CDC more (“whoa, they take failure seriously”)
If people don’t admit their mistakes they are doomed to repeat them. If you had a coworker that wouldn’t admit when they screwed up, what would you think of them?
To take a real world example, the failure of most of the people who, fifty years ago, were confidently predicting that unless something drastic were done about population increase it would have terrible effects to publicly admit that they were wrong and their critics were right is one of the reasons I don’t trust similarly authoritative claims about climate today.
Sowell makes a similar point with regard to the fact that legalized abortion and widely available contraception were followed by the precise opposite of the effect, reducing the number of children born to unmarried mothers, that supporters of those changes predicted in arguing for them.
Two counterpoints:
1) Regarding overpopulation: That problem has been solved (at least in the developed world) essentially as a second-order effect from technological progress. I don’t think we should rely on climate change being automatically solved by some other, indirectly related process – most problems aren’t.
Note: In the past, some environmental problems have been solved through technological progress, but only after and because a lot of people made a big fuzz about them, and regulators took action. E.g., CFCs.
2) Regarding birth control: Group A making incorrect predictions about large-scale human behavior from intuition-based arguments should not influence your opinion about whether group B makes correct predictions about large-scale non-human systems from science-based models. Your argument boils down to “some guys were wrong about something for some reasons, so these other, unrelated guys are probably wrong about this other, unrelated thing for other, unrelated reasons”.
They aren’t unrelated. In a general sense they are the same guys — the NYT, lots of high visibility academics and pundits. In some cases literally the same guys.
Obviously it is possible that this time they are right. But almost all of us judge such things on second hand information rather than evaluating the evidence for ourselves. For most people, the reason to believe climate is a very serious threat is that lots of high status people say, with great confidence, that it is.
The fact that the same was true in the population case and what happened was the opposite of their predictions, things getting better in poor countries with growing populations instead of worse, is a reason to give little weight to that particular reason for belief. The further fact that the people who were wrong about that are mostly not saying so, apologizing, trying to figure out how so many of them were so confident in a false belief, is evidence that believing the truth is not a high priority for them — almost certainly a lower priority than believing things that let them feel good about themselves and fit in with the people who matter to them. That’s a further reason to discount their claims.
So far as the substantive similarity between the two issues, both hinge on the same mistake. You have a change that has both large negative and large positive effects, both spread out over a long and uncertain future, hence of quite uncertain size. You look for the negative effects, make generous estimates of them, don’t look for positive effects and when you come across any make conservative estimates. You conclude that the net is large and negative.
I raised that issue in the population case almost fifty years ago. When the climate case came around I looked sufficiently carefully at the arguments to conclude that the same thing was happening.
This is a webbed talk I gave on the problem common to both. If curious about the details of my views on climate, you can find lots of them on my blog.
There will be no consequences for the CDC or the FDA for their errors. The FDA continues to do the minimum regulation relaxation necessary to make it look while they are being flexible, while really not — e.g. they’re allowing NIOSH non-FDA N95 masks and masks meeting certain foreign mask standards, but not KN95 (which is pretty much the same). They’re allowing antibody testing, but only in clinical settings. They’re approving prescription of hydroxychloroquine, but only in hospitals (so it doesn’t override governors’ decrees against such prescription). They allowed hydrogen peroxide vapor sterilization of PPE, but limited it to 10,000 per day. That pissed off the Governor of Ohio who apparently went to Trump to get it relaxed. The FDA will continue doing this, because that’s what it does. That’s what a safety culture is all about: limit all possible risks of your actions and of actions you approve. Risks of not approving? Not your problem, unless Trump decides to come down and go all “The Apprentice” on regulators… but even then, the courts probably will have their backs.
Why does that show “pretty much the same thing” ?(kn95 vs n95)
There is more leakage. Is the difference unimportant?
How do kn95 masks compare to bandanas?
They’re better than the alternative currently being used, so they should be approved.
Less of this please.
My question wasn’t about whether to approve them, it was about why it is being called “pretty much the same” when a field in the document has the kn95s at a different spec (and it seems relevant).
Approving things as A-grade products willy nilly is a bad idea in general. The reason they aren’t being used instead of surgical masks is that they are more expensive (and legally are the same thing).
There isn’t more leakage. There’s no leakage requirement for the N95 mask, which is why it’s N/A in that table.
I understand that there is more leakage, N95 masks have <=5% or something like that (Scott's article on masks has a link to studies on leakage).
Is leakage unimportant in regards to corona?
I repeat: there isn’t a leakage requirement for N95 masks (there is for the exhalation valve, but presumably we’re interested in masks without such). That’s why the column is N/A in 3Ms chart. Scott’s studies compared either N95 or FFP2 (a European standard) masks with surgical masks; KN95 masks were not included.
I understood what you wrote.
Scott brought specs for leakage. There is less leakage in the specs for N95 than the specs for the KN95 (shown in 3M)
I am contradicting your assertion that there isn’t more leakage.
Is leakage unimportant?
I am asking a question about leakage, and whether it is irrelevant from a medical standpoint
Scott did not bring specs for leakage. He brought studies of leakage, for N95 (and not all N95 maks, but particular N95 masks) but no KN95 masks, and likely not in the same conditions as the tests used for the KN95 tests. In fact, if you look at the numbers, they’re all over the place, probably because of different conditions used in the different studies.
If you’re working off Scott’s data, you have no studies for KN95 masks. There is no spec for N95 masks. Therefore you have no basis for comparing the two on leakage.
Huh, didn’t realize specs and studies can’t be compared.
Could you explain why? Intuitively I would think they would be pretty similar
[Edit: I assumed until now that to qualify for a spec a mask would go under a few different tests in different situations, similar to the studies scott brought. That is, that the studies scott brought let us know the practical specs of the mask.]
A specification is a minimum (or, depending on context, a maximum). The performance of real systems is typically better than spec, often much better. Performance is what you usually get off the production line. Specification, is how bad it has to be for you to throw it in the trash as it comes off the production line, and nobody likes to throw half their output in the trash because it failed to meet spec.
If you’re comparing two things made to different specifications, noting that Specification A is tighter than Specification B is evidence but not proof that A will work better than B. But if all you know is that the measured performance of A is tighter than the specified requirement for B, your case is particularly weak because B is certainly better than specified by some margin and you don’t know what that margin is.
And, in my experience, various forms of “leakiness” are one of the places where specified requirements and actual performance are often widely different.
They’re approving prescription of hydroxychloroquine, but only in hospitals
Why is this a bad thing? We’ve already had one person at least in this entire thread complaining about Trump recklessly encouraging people to drink fish tank cleaner by careless words in a public speech and from what I’m reading, this is the kind of drug that is “okay at right dosage, very bad for you at wrong dosage, and the line between right and wrong is hair-thin” so being prescribed under medical supervision should in theory prevent “tragic deaths of couple who thought this was okay to take this drug”?
At the very least, you’d hope that “this is a drug that can only be obtained from hospital doctors” will stop any more people from taking whatever chemicals they have lying around at home.
That sort of depends on if it works or not. If it works, the governors and regulatory agencies are denying people life-saving medicine out of pure bureaucratic conservatism. If it doesn’t work the point is moot.
The FDA order has no effect on fishtank chemicals (which are apparently in short supply anyway)
It’s still a prescription drug, so it would be still be “prescribed under medical supervision” if someone not hospitalized took it; the supervision would just be by their regular doctor or an urgent care doctor or something.
If hospitals are overwhelmed, you’d like to allow doctors to prescribe something to their patients who likely have COVID-19 infections, so the not-super-sick patients can be treated at home. Ideally, there’d be enough of the drug to put people on it when they got flu-like symptoms, and maybe head off the pneumonia.
So, I’m now convinced to wear a mask when I go out to the store. All I have at home are N95 masks that my wife (who is immunocompromised) uses when she has to go out. So my question is, should I go ahead and use one of those, or should I save my small supply for my wife? I don’t really have any other options other than maybe using a scarf or something. Also, if I use the N95, do I need to shave off my beard for it to help, or would it still do as much as something like a surgeon’s mask even if I have a beard?
This is a question? Of course, save them for your wife! Use a bandana until supplies are available.
If it’s an option I would stop leaving the house.
If the supply is large enough that you can just not walk outside without a mask that would be best imo.
What happens if you run out? Why is she leaving the house? These are all questions you have to ask.
Just take into account that if you get it, there’s a high chance she gets it
Is your wife going to have to go out for some reason?
Remember that saving yourself from being infected is saving your wife. If you use the N95 use it right.
Since you live together, she gets it you get it. Take this into account.
The only reason my wife goes out is for doctor appointments, which is every other week. The only other reason I’ve gone out is for groceries, so I’m going out about once a week.
How long can you wear an N95 before it’s no longer helping?
Any reason you’re going out for groceries every week? If you’re limiting your trips that much, I think it’s worth it to buy larger quantities or get delivery.
When I hear “going out for groceries once a week” I think “good job getting it down to so infrequently.”
I normally go to the grocery store like five times a week, so buying large amounts of groceries is something I’m still perfecting. I’m trying to get it down even lower, but there will still be times that I need to go to pick up prescriptions.
Given that the normal use case is protecting against a large amount of mildly dangerous particulates/contaminants, it should be able to deal with normal air for quite a long time.
Don’t take my word for it, but I’d expect them to fail from age or becoming infested with unrelated microbes. In a dusty environment, they will eventually clog up but I don’t see that happening fast if at the shops/in the street.
Many resources for reusing masks online. But in my experience: I’ve been using them woodworking to keep out fine dust, and I’ve been basically treating them as completely reusable. Used them until they were too filthy or we got a new one.
In current scenario, you want to treat them as “dirty” simply because you went out of the house wearing them – just like you should treat your jacket or wallet. I think leaving them sitting for 1-2 days should be more than enough, given they’re closer to cardboard than plastic.
This is actually the same reason I had the N95 masks to begin with, and I’ve always used them until they were filthy. However, when I’m trying to keep sawdust out of my nose I’m not looking for 100% filtration, just better than nothing.
It does sound like if I use a mask for an hour or so once a week that it should last a while.
You don’t say how small your supply is. Can you use a mask then leave it somewhere, perhaps your car, for three or four days, then you and your wife uses it again?
Do you have citations for that delay effectively disinfecting a mask? It’s about to be personally relevant for me this evening.
I have citations for the claim that the virus falls to undetectable levels on most surfaces, such as plastic and metal, in three days, on some surfaces, such as cardboard, on one day. I don’t have citations specifically for masks.
I also have (i.e. have seen) citations for the claim that 70°C for half an hour will destroy the virus — I don’t know whether that would also damage your mask. Also that washing with either soap or dilute bleach will destroy the virus — again I don’t know how practical that is for your mask.
I’ve been using the three day rule for packages and mail, one day for packages that are all cardboard.
I only have three right now, and my wife has only used one so far. She’s used that one twice. If they can be used for a long-ish amount of time, then I would feel better about using one of them and letting my wife have the other two. If they only last for a couple uses, then I would be more likely to leave them for my wife.
I’d reserve one for you to use while shopping, and the others for her to use.
There are guides to disinfecting the masks in various places, but I don’t know how well nailed down they are. I’ve heard that 30 minutes in a 70 degree C oven (around 160 F) will sterilize them without damaging them, but I don’t know whether this is solid or not.
Correction: I think you mean Paul Ehrlich. Isaac Ehrlich was a bureaucrat, for a time, but he did not write The Population Bomb.
Thank you. My error. Two very different people.
I mean, I think you know the answer to this, but no, of course not. The systems are specifically designed to perpetuate themselves and the people behind them; to the extent they do anything of their own purpose (stop diseases, etc) it’s coincidental.
I think we’re waiting for the federal government to entirely collapse before anything meaningful changes.
How sure are we all that it *was* a noble lie, and not just conventional wisdom + not many infected people + not thinking asymptomatic spreading would be as common as we now think?
I’m not sure it was a noble lie — Scott in his post argued that it wasn’t, since the CDC took that position pre-Corona. More likely conservatism and bureaucratic irresponsibility. They didn’t want to say masks did help since it wasn’t clear how much help they were, so they said they didn’t.
Logically, they *must* help. The only question is how much.
I’m sure it wasn’t–this was guidance that was given out long before this crisis, and was echoed by the TWIV hosts. They’re doing an academic virology podcast, and it’s hard to believe they’re worried about perpetuating noble lies. Further, they were saying masks didn’t help long before there was any concern about a mask shortage during a pandemic here in the US.
There won’t be consequences. That is exactly the way we want it.
We find ourselves in a state of incomplete information. The only way to get the information we need is to observe failure modes. If we want to avert disaster, we are forced to act without complete information. And if we succeed, we will remain uncertain as to what actions were worth taking, because we can’t weight for unobservable failure modes.
The only way to be correct is to take action despite incomplete information, despite the fact that some of your actions will be – all your actions could be – dead wrong. That can resemble incompetence, and you can still fail, but it’s the only pathway on which success is possible.
Incompetence is being unwilling to act in the face of uncertainty. If we punish people for the natural outcomes of action under uncertainty, and subsequently no one is willing to act under uncertainty, then we have incentivized incompetence.
Even claiming “The CDC messed up on X decision” – very clearly fair – an organization can only learn if it is allowed to persist.
+1
Of course one effect of such a custom would be that they would be even more reluctant to ever admit that they have been wrong.
Yep. Aren’t we in “if the punishment for burglary is death, and the punishment for treason is death” territory here? If we executed anyone who ever declared allegiance to the enemy, why would they ever defect?
In situations where we can easily replace the people in charge, then a “kill the failures” approach works. However, we’re in an era where everyone in charge of anything, public or private, is too big to fail, and the process of booting the old guy, vetting the new guy, and then onboarding the new guy is far too onerous, especially during a time of crisis. (This is, after all, why Trump loves him those acting director appointments.)
No. Because observing that that death penalty would be better than done does not force us to impose the death penalty.
Albeit when it is morally certain that lying to us killed people, the penalty had better be severe.
I should clarify that I don’t literally mean a death penalty. Given that the consequences people felt most strongly about in this forum for years was often about getting cancelled (Brendan Eich), it seems that simply getting fired or resigned is already too severe an incentive. So, the people in power just dig in and use confirmation bias after the fact and claim that they were vindicated, amongst complex results, as we’re seeing with the recent praise for Cuomo.
Saying that Cuomo should resign if he changes his mind does not incentivize Cuomo to change his mind. Being able to easily boot Cuomo out of office and onboard a new guy is undemocratic, but might get someone with the opposite stance as Cuomo into power more easily. Or, alternatively, we offer incentives so that Cuomo benefits if he responds to evidence quickly.
I’m suggesting shame leading to suicide, not a death penalty. That only requires that the person responsible realizes what he has done — at which point admitting it and then killing himself, or retiring to a monastery, or … is what his conscience requires.
This selects for both people with no conscience and people who will never admit to themselves they are wrong.
*has already selected for
I interpreted shame as distinct from guilt, triggered only if the fact that the person failed becomes public consensus.
You seem to be presupposing that changing these recommendations implies a massive screw-up. What if it’s a minor screw-up? What if the difference in public health under the condition of “No one wear masks” is a rounding error worse than under “Everyone wear masks”?* If this is the case, then the CDC should still make the change in recommendations, and your question is nonsense.
*This is perfectly plausible. For example, perhaps masks have a marginal effect on transmission when worn by the general public and also reduce stocks available to medical professionals, for whom they make a big difference. In this case, a small difference in the relative rates and availability of masks could lead to different recommendations while have a small net effect.
This. I think there’s good reason to use masks, and to encourage their widespread use, but I’m not at all sure this is going to have a huge effect. If aerosol transmission is important, bandanas/surgical masks are probably better than nothing, but not great. If it’s mainly surface contamination, then the only thing a mask does for you is make it harder to absentmindedly chew on a fingernail while riding the subway. If it’s mainly close contact, then they may help some but the better answer is to move further away from your neighbors.
Seeing people wearing masks is also a reminder to move further away from them and others?
Masks have not been proven in published, peer-reviewed, randomized controlled trials to be useful for COVID-19 _specifically_. And the idea that one can rely on masks to keep safe from COVID-19 is without firm scientific support and is probably wrong anyway, if not dangerous. Therefore false: “we should consider wearing masks”.
That seems to be a common schema for the media’s ‘debunking’ argument that is being trotted out for pretty much everything these days. And it works just as well for masks as anything else. CDC can borrow this popular line of reasoning.
Removed content I was ninja-ed on.
I have written a blog post of my own on the idea of ending corruption from within an established corrupt system. Would like to share here. Your feedback is welcome.
https://www.ourrevolutionla.com/post/why-fixing-a-corrupt-system-from-within-will-fail
Is there anywhere else where conservatives and nationalists are more likely to make the argument that we can’t shut things for corona down because of the economy? If not, are there any reasons why conservatives and nationalists in America have this opinion? You can identify historical reasons why, for instance, guns are particularly important to American conservatives and nationalists and not important to conservatives and nationalists in many other countries. What I see is that it’s all emanating from Donald Trump. There are minor figures who aren’t Trump fans who are saying similar things, Ann Coulter and John Ioannidis, but I don’t think their ‘arguments’ would be listened to widely if not for people looking for a rationalization for agreeing with Trump. I’m starting to think of Biden as a disease of the skin, Trump as a disease of the heart.
I’ll be honest, I don’t think it is just conservatives and nationlists.
I think acymetric is right, and further I think it’s dumb to spend a lot of energy trying to decide whose team is for each policy. Instead, maybe look for the smartest people making each argument and see how the whole thing holds up?
The strongest argument for not doing lockdowns is the idea that we may accept all the costs of doing the lockdowns (huge number of unemployed people, whole industries wiped out, a major recession) and still end up with about the same number of deaths as if we’d just said “old and sick people, stay home and get your food delivered; the rest of us will be at work unless we’re too sick to come in.” If that’s how it works out, then shutdowns were a dumb idea.
Another possible argument for not doing lockdowns is that the economic costs will be so high they’re even worse than the costs in sick and dead and disabled people we’ll get from letting the disease spread. This isn’t crazy to think–imagine if we have a global economic crash that’s worse than the great depression, and end up with 40% unemployment and widespread poverty for the next decade–that would be so horrible you’d want to accept a fair number of deaths up front to avoid it.
The strongest argument for doing the lockdowns is the idea that we can accept all these costs and actually substantially decrease the number of people who die of this crap. One way for that to work is by spreading out the impact so we don’t have all the hospitals overflowing and all the doctors sick with COVID-19 in the same month. Another way is by actually getting R_0 down below 1 and making the disease disappear. Still another way is by getting the number of infections and rate of spread down enough that the rest of the medical system can catch up and give us, say, rapid tests, workable treatments when we get sick, enough PPE / safe protocols for treating people that keep us from having all our doctors and nurses get sick, maybe even a vaccine.
Another argument for lockdowns is that if we get a Northern Italy-level meltdown of the medical system, there will be such public demand for lockdowns that they’ll happen anyway. Again, you could argue this, but it seems plausible to me.
On balance, I’m convinced lockdowns now make sense, and I hope to God everyone is using this time we’re buying at great cost to get ahead of this crap. We can’t stay locked down forever, and we need to be working out how to come out of the lockdowns now. OTOH, for the one state where I know someone peripherally involved in the response, things don’t look good on that front. The person I know has been in on some of the meetings of the people trying to plan a response, she’s the only one in the room with any relevant expertise, and she’s not involved in any of the major decisions. The people making decisions are political/administrative types who know nothing about public health, epidemiology, statistics, virology, etc.
This is a great post, I just want to single out one concern I have (this isn’t directed at you, it’s just a concern I have generally and this gives me a chance to bring it up).
The concern here is there isn’t really any way to prove, or even just show strong evidence that the lockdowns were unnecessary after the fact. People who support it now will always just say “well it would have been worse without the lockdowns” and it is going to be hard to disprove that.
In a vacuum, that isn’t actually a huge concern, but in reality it probably means that we’re going to massively overreact to every new virus that pops up every few years (because they do, and usually they are ultimately no big deal). I guess if we start planning our economy and society at large around this kind of event a couple times a decade it would be fine, but I doubt we’re doing that or that we ever will.
Overreaction, panic and ignoring unseen costs seems to be the norm. See: plastic bag bans, human trafficking. The CDC itself has apparently been more concerned with stopping vaping than preparing for pandemics.
To push back a bit on this, you can’t argue that “this specific implementation of shutdowns were a bad idea” and then state, in a vacuum, that “do nothing” was a better option because “do nothing” was never a realistic option. The same political and administrative forces that influenced the way we implemented shutdowns would’ve existed if leadership had chosen an alternative plan.
In whatever hypothetical future autopsy of the US response that you’re doing, you have to present a realistic course of action that could’ve been taken under the same set of constraints that existed in the real world. Otherwise, it’s apples and oranges.
Proof is a high standard, but if a country reasonably similar to us, such as Sweden, doesn’t have a lock down and does no worse than we do with a lock down, that’s at least evidence.
Does this qualify?
1. Ask everyone over 65 to stay home, self isolating from anyone not part of their quarantine. Offer low income people a modest subsidy to help make it possible, provide a free or inexpensive grocery delivery service for them. Perhaps provide free quarantine hotels for the small minority who have no practical way of doing it themselves.
2. Ask everyone else to avoid large groups, practice social avoidance, wear masks. Perhaps make sure masks are available. If you can’t, make readily available online instructions for home made masks — which seems to have happened.
3. Wait until everyone under 65 who is going to get the disease has gotten it and recovered (or, much more rarely, died of it). Then stop 1 above.
@DavidaFriedman I think you’ll have some difficulty work that, the elderly aren’t great at accepting that they are elderly ime.
I can think of multiple people right now who are very much at risk, but kind of poo-pooed concerns from multiple people.
They aren’t flouting the guidelines for non at risk people, but aren’t willing to accept their vulnerability.
As for limiting large groups, this doesn’t seem to actually slow the virus all that much, and again I am incredulous that the rest of your provisions would work all that well.
Unless people feel the government is taking things very seriously, they don’t either.
(In my neighborhood I’ve watched the way people change their behaviour as goverment measures got stricter. Still not perfect, but before the government started getting very serious, social distancing wasn’t really followed.
I’ve seen this in most of my social circles.)
3. I assume we would need to be able to do a ton of immune body tests for this
@matthewravery
That’s true, except that I never said anything about doing nothing and wouldn’t because I certainly don’t think that would be the right approach. There is a lot of middle ground between “shut down everything for 3-6 months” and “do nothing” that could be explored. But I don’t expect anybody to be convinced they were wrong (on either side but especially on the side whose policies are actually being implemented) no matter what evidence is available to suggest they were, which was the point of my post..
Not really, that specific plan is the one that was rejected by the US and UK after initially being their preferred option, after they ran the numbers and realized it doesn’t work.
In particular, all that stuff about how this mostly only kills old people is only true as long as you have enough ICU units for all the young people who need to be hospitalized. A significant percentage of even people in their 20s and 30s still suffer severe symptoms, but are much likelier to recover if treated- but if they all get sick at once, most of them don’t get treated and they die.
Sweden does appear willing to run the experiment, though, so I guess we’ll see.
Treated how? What evidence is there of this? Yes, the hospitals will give oxygen and fluids… but do we know that actually helps anything?
Here’s the New York City data.
As you can see, this really is age dependent. Not just deaths, but hospitalizations and to a lesser degree symptomatic cases (asymptomatic individuals are not being tested).
(It’s also worse for men than women, something no one has been talking about)
There are gradations of lockdown. At one extreme, everyone is told to stay in their house except to get groceries or walk dogs. At another extreme, everything is normal but old people and people with chronic conditions are advised to stay home and wash their hands a lot. My guess is that we will spend a lot of time in-between these two extremes, even though right now, we’re more toward the first extreme.
Before the schools shut down, my workplace was encouraging working from home, allowing very generous sick leave, and explicitly asking workers not to come in if they were sick. They had the janitors going around wiping down doorknobs with disinfectant a couple times a day. I expect that when we go back to work, that will continue, probably for the next year or more.
A step down from the full lockdown would look like that generally. Schools would be in session, but extracurriculars would be canceled and sick kids would be sent home for a week with a nastygram to the parents. Big public gatherings would still be banned (no SXSW, no academic conferences). Restaurants might be allowed to stay open, but with mandatory daily fever checks for employees and each party seated 6 feet apart from all other parties. Masks and hand sanitizer would proliferate, and every surface would be being sprayed with Lysol or bleach solution as often as anyone could manage to do it. We’d still be having Mass every Sunday, but the archbishop would give a dispensation to anyone who felt it wasn’t safe for them to attend in person, nobody would be shaking or holding hands, and we’d all try to sit further apart. Basically the stuff that was happening in the week or two before the shutdowns happened.
What’s the difference in R_0 between those different policiies? Probably pretty substantial–closing down the schools and most workplaces probably matters a huge amount. But determining how this will fall out is basically an exercise in mathematical modeling, and there’s no way to actually know without running the experiment.
@acymetric-
Apologies, I didn’t mean to imply that you were advocating a specific policy. “No intervention” was a generic alternative I’ve seen thrown out. My point was that, whatever the alternative suggested, the analysis needs to occur within the same set of constraints as the actually-implemented option was.
I consistently see throughout SSC discussions of COVID a desire to simplify the modeling/decision-making by convenient assumptions about implementation, time effects, and path dependence. (Typically, they’re ignored.) As we criticize the choices made by various agencies and governments, we should at least bear these in mind as limitations they face that may not be readily apparent to armchair epidemiologists.
I am curious to see what happens now that Trump is on TV saying we need to keep everything shut down or else millions of people will die.
You’re conflating two groups. Centrist and center-right conservatives are likely to make this argument. They’re attuned to the economy, more likely to be working class (and hence hit hard by this), and more about GDP.
Nationalists are calling for locking everything down and crushing the disease, GDP be damned.
The coronavirus thing about the economy maps directly onto climate change debates. But I agree with acymetric, at this point it is definitely not just conservatives and nationalists. I am seeing many op-eds in newspapers all over the place by epidemiologists calling the lockdowns an overreaction. And politicizing this decision by making this an us vs. them issue would be a disaster.
An over-reaction is a win for the radicals, ultimately.
(That’s just a general observation. I really feel like I don’t have a horse in this game. I mean I do obviously, insofar as I am a horse. But politically… it’s really getting time for a Revolution, isn’t it?)
The basic debate in politics looks like: “There’s a problem, and I have a plan to fix it! We must act!” vs “No, that plan is flawed, or not nearly as cost-effective as you’d think.”
Over time, people form mental habits. The current situation seems to follow from those habits. People who think that we need major government intervention in [x] also think we need intervention here. The people who think that the interventions proposed for [x] are going to be ineffective and costly think that the lockdowns will be ineffective and costly.
Any given topic is pretty likely to look like that, but I’m not sure responses to different topics correlate all that well. For example, the right’s on the “something must be done!” side on immigration reform, while the left’s on that side on healthcare reform.
If you shut down the economy for one day, we can obviously handle it. If you shut it down forever, that’s just not going to work. My guess is that after about two-three months, the balance tips towards it not being worth the effort. But surely this is the kind of thing where advanced economic models could help decision making.
I don’t want millions of people to die in a pandemic. But you don’t want be paralyzed by fear. What kind of society is that?
Kingdom of Fear
My estimation would be similar. After 2 months of lockdown each additional month would, in my estimation, kill more people than C19 ever could if people just generally changed their habits to cleanliness and mask wearing and maybe the avoidance of 100+ gatherings.
Is there any evidence that would be relevant to this belief about particular months of lockdown? This seems quite plausible if two months of lockdown manage to get the infection rate back to what it was in late February, and we have testing and contact tracing capacity to keep it there. But if we don’t have that capacity, then we might just alternate between two months on lockdown and one month off.
Its just my general sense. Even the kind of cycling you are talking about would still kill a lot of people from lockdown-related deaths. Some studies I’ve seen is that we could be at 30% unemployment. Some estimates say that would be over a million extra deaths annually.
I’m completely disconnected from US public discourse right now, except from SSC, but I want to register a prediction: Haidt’s moral foundation theory would say that most democrats/left favor lockdown because they’re focused on possible victims to the exclusion of anything else. A small minority will grumble at having to obey rules, but won’t be openly against the lockdown per se. The rest of the world will be split – only the left is more or less monochrome on the issue.
I don’t think support from Democrats is nearly as universal as you think it is. Consider which economic groups generally lean toward which parties, and then consider which economic group is most impacted (short term, at least) by being out of work because their work can’t be done remotely.
This should be a thing, but it doesn’t seem to be.
As far as I can tell, the official Democrat position is that the lockdowns won’t actually harm lower-income/vulnerable populations, because the government can just give them stimulus checks and unemployment which will totally make them whole for all this. And if that doesn’t happen, it’s only because Republicans stopped it from happening.
That’s the official position of the party, not necessarily the position of the people. The Democratic party is clearly all in on lock downs. I’m fairly certain there is a sizable segment of their base (though not a majority) that is not on board with it.
Democrat leaders love taking support from their traditionally strong demographics for granted, so this wouldn’t be terribly surprising.
My read is that working class Dems are currently trusting that this will work out the way their leaders are claiming – that the government will make them whole.
Now, when weeks/months pass and it turns out that it doesn’t work out that way, they may change their minds. Or they may believe whatever they hear on the news, which will almost certainly be something like “Pelosi and Biden favored a massive stimulus bill that would have helped you, but Trump and the GOP blocked it.”
The same model would hold that the right would care most based on purity/sanctity.
The left in unique in being all about caring about vulnerable people, with a spot of independence thrown in. Not sure if it’s a new thing historically or there was always a minority behaving that way.
Theory says the right has more things it cares about. They care about other people, of course, but they can also understand the need to follow authority, or the idea of some things being sacred, or fairness, or loyalty. It’s more difficult to predict which one surfaces in a certain situation, so I doubt one in particular will dominate, or even two.
I think this is right. Among the people I know in the US, everyone I know on the left is completely and totally in favor of the lockdowns, without any hesitation whatsoever.
On the right I think it’s about evenly split into thirds: One third completely in favor of lockdowns, one third opposed, and one third that is, let’s say, “cautiously obedient” (as in, they aren’t really sure what’s best but will lean towards lockdowns).
I hope this doesn’t sound uncharitable, but my feeling is that if it was a left-wing President whose economy was at risk during an election year, the left would be less unanimously in favor of lockdowns.
If you look at localities by ideology, the left-wing areas, especially New York, were very slow to lock down relative to the right-wing ones.
“If you look at localities by ideology, the left-wing areas, especially New York, were very slow to lock down relative to the right-wing ones.”
This doesn’t seem accurate. If we look at the 15 states that still haven’t issued lockdown orders, 11 of them are solid red states, with only Iowa and Florida (as purple states) and Georgia and Texas (as reddish-purple states) being counterexamples. Out of the 35 states that have issued lockdown orders, only 9 of them didn’t vote for Obama (Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia – and I believe here, Arizona was late, and Louisiana has been particularly hard-hit so may have acted faster than its politics would otherwise suggest).
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-map-stay-at-home-orders-lockdowns-2020-3
As of today, NY, NJ, Louisiana, and Mississippi look to be among the least forward-looking, while CA, OH, and Washington are looking like they did a relatively good job.
I think you have to squint really hard to see a pattern based purely on political leaning.
@keaswaran
Thank you for the update. This is a good look at it.
I will correct my priors here.
And note that Louisiana is one of the few Southern states with a Democrat governor, although very right-wing for a Democrat.
Put me in the “cautiously obedient” third.
What do I have to do to get you in the opposed camp, today!!??
Three easy payments of $19.95?
If the hospital system is overwhelmed, the economy is screwed anyway. So I’m fine with locking down for another few weeks. But after that we’ve had plenty of time to prepare and the cure gets worse than the disease.
Also, my quality of life has improved. My job is in zero danger from this, I’m working from home, getting paid and basically living in my gameroom. It’s like I’ve died and gone to heaven.
Bad news, it isn’t just going to be another few weeks.
Yeah, I suspect this is what will ultimately shift a lot of Republican opinion.
Trump originally said “15 days.” Then when the 15 days is up, he said “whoops, another 30.” At the end of April when he comes out and says “did I say 30? I meant 90!” I think a whole lot of the “cautiously obedient” camp is going to convert to “opposed” which might cause him to re-think his position.
Yes, if that happens, I will then change my opinion. That’s the “cautiously” part of “cautiously obedient.” Temporary lockdown is okay, indefinite is not. If at the beginning of May the lockdowns haven’t helped and we’re still seeing exponential growth, then fuck it: we’re going to be dealing with the illness anyway, we might as well not (further) crash the economy at the same time.
Even when the full lockdowns stop, it’s going to make sense to have as many people as possible working from home. That’s part of lowering R_0, which we’ll want to keep doing until everyone is immune because they’ve had this crap or been vaccinated for it.
Ditto. Let’s give it the old-school try, but if it doesn’t work we have to take another strategy.
Obviously we’re in different bubbles, so I can’t claim my sample is any more representative than yours, but I’m pretty far left and I’m not in favor of the lockdowns (except for the part where I get to work from home, which I wish would last forever).
I also have a lot of friends, family, and general acquaintances in the service industry who are definitely not Republicans and also do not like the lockdowns (for presumably obvious reasons).
Interesting. Most of my family is “working class Democrat” and they seem totally in favor of the lockdowns (for the reasons I’ve described above, they trust that the government will compensate them for any economic harm they suffer)
Could be a matter of how much someone trusts the government…maybe an age thing? The people I know here definitely skew younger (early to mid twenties), except a few bartenders who are my age or older.
Quite a few people I know (who are out of work, not the folks who are essential or who can work from home) are already working on what they need to do to break their lease in the next couple months. Pretty sure they’re not expecting the government to make them whole.
This is my (limited) experience too + what Matt M is suggesting. Older conservatives I know are scared and enthusiastically for the lockdown. Friends in a similar age range as me are typically left-leaning and trusting of their governments (not all in the US), and they are also in favor.
Memories of the cold war, perhaps?
I think the primary predictor of lockdown support is whether or not it will cost you your job.
The most visible part of the left is the “extremely online” portion, which is also the part most likely to be able to work from home. (Note that this is not necessarily representative of “the left” in general.)
Trump’s base is the working class, whose jobs are much more at risk. No surprise that he’s more attuned to the downsides of lockdown.
I think that this is essentially libertarian position (which does not mean that all libertarians hold it, of course), so whenever you see political faction that is a mix of conservativish and libertarianish views, as opposed to National front style conservatism, they tend to make that argument. And it happens a lot in Europe as well as in the US. You are probably familiar with Britain, but also Germany under Merkel was honestly quite slow in imposing lockdown. Also Netherlands.
But left wing governments in Europe were also slow in imposing lockdowns.
US seems different since Trump was elected as an epitome of nationalist conservatism. But I do not think he really subscribes to that ideology, or any other ideology. This normally does not matter too much, since politicians including him tend to pursue platforms on which they were elected, but it matters in this freak event. Reaction on it was not part of his platform.
This. Trump is not an ideologue. He is a pragmatist. When he thought things would be “better” without shutting down the economy he was cheering on the stock market. When he thought things would be worse without a lockdown, we got the lockdowns.
I suspect you will see this in countries with a conservative leader who has been proactive, like India or Israel.
Welcome to Hollywood. Your Executive Producer is thoroughly sick of WWII movies, and wants a definitive parody of the genre that will cure all of us of hedgerow-envy forever. When this film has done its work, anyone who makes another movie about the Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, D-Day or Iwo Jima will get nothing but an earful of giggles.
Describe the film you propose to make.
I’d say a slapstick farce set in a German prison camp, but that’s just Hogan’s Heroes.
There’s a joke about Spielberg’s infamous 1941 in there somewhere…
Your Executive Producer is thoroughly sick
I’ll say.
If Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor didn’t manage it, nothing will…
Tropic Thunder?
Saving Private Ryan made entirely in Team Fortress
I thought variolation was just infecting people with a lower amount of the virus.
@TheNybbler pointed out that it is something else, so thanks.
My earlier post was meant to be purposely infecting people with small amounts of the virus
Shoppers Drug Mart (Canadian Walgreens) in Kitchener, ON is running out of many staples and limiting quantities of eggs/rice/pasta etc to 2 per family. I haven’t checked other grocery stores yet (I was there to pick up packages at their post office, I don’t get groceries from there anyways), and there’s a good chance this is specific to them (they’re right downtown, close to the transit terminal, which is convenient for many people who don’t drive), but this is clearly a suboptimal outcome.
What surprises me is I see no one raising prices on goods in short supply (TP/hand sanitizer last 2 weeks, durable food now). Is this because price-gouging laws are actually enforced (and are applicable to all these various goods), because of store policies against such behavior, or something else?
It seems to me like retailers are overlooking $20 bills on sidewalks repeatedly, and I don’t have a good explanation.
Probably if they raised the prices now, it would be very bad PR.
I have read about supermarkets who demand an additional 5€ for the second pack of toilet paper and 10€ for the third, which will be donated.
Which is why state governments should mandate price increases.
Take the PR load off of the stores.
I’d shout it from my rooftop if there were anybody outside to hear me.
That just puts the PR load on the governments, which are typically composed of (or at least lead by) people whose job depends on being popular enough with enough people to get re-elected.
Considering the governments are the ones leading the charge against “price-gouging”, not gonna happen.
The people who are currently breaking the system are typically the ones with the power to stop breaking and fix the system.
Do I expect all 50 states to act correctly? Hell no. But if a handful of states act correctly and follow this plan, those states will see supplies of hand sanitizer and TP return to their shelves. When other states wonder “how come those other states have TP on their shelves?” you can explain the reasoning to them. Many will resist wanting to hear the right answer; that’s fine. At least we’ve gotten most of the states to fix the problem, which is better than we are now.
This seemed like a good solution, why is government mandate better?
Because it takes the problem out of the hands of the store. The store isn’t losing the good will of customers; they are just obeying the law.
“By government decree, surge pricing is in effect on toilet paper.”
Once people see toilet paper is back on the shelves and available at some price, people will calm down. As the shelves fill, surge pricing is gradually lowered.
The worst-of-both-worlds solution is to have low prices on the primary market and true prices on the secondary market, which begs for hustlers and hoarders to buy it up. Force the primary market to raise prices at least to the level of the secondary market, and the hustlers and hoarders will stop.
Part of the increased demand for TP is panic buying, but some is due to the desire of everyone to keep a queued-up supply so they don’t have to go to the store as often, and some is due to the fact that everyone’s home all day. A month ago, most of my family spent about half our day somewhere other than home, using toilet paper there instead of here–now, we’re all here all the time.
Double the price of TP, but institute “buy one, get one free, limit one per family.” You can panic buy, but you’re paying double for everything over two packs.
I’ve seen some viral images coming out of… I want to say Denmark, where some stores have a policy of “first item is normal price, second item is 5x more expensive.”
I think technically that would still violate price gouging laws in most US jurisdictions, but the public reaction to it seems to be positive (i.e. people who would get really upset at ‘every item is 2x more expensive’ are fine with this scheme)
You have to consider the entirety of the public. Doubling or tripling prices may restrict people who would bulk-buy, but that only affects the people who have enough spare money to rush out and buy twenty packs of toilet paper in one go. Make the item two or three times more expensive, you may then force Joe Hoarder to only buy the usual amount.
But now you’ve made Susie Precarious – you know, one of the people at-risk because they don’t have/can’t afford health insurance, so continue going to work and don’t go to the doctor/hospital even if sick because they’re in low-paid jobs or even on welfare – unable to afford even her ordinary usual amount of toilet paper/hand sanitiser/tinned beans/rice.
So then you have a news story featuring a tearful Susie talking about how the new price increases means she can’t afford to feed her kids. Guess who now gets the blame? The government that mandated price increases, not the people who could afford to rush out and splurge on hoarding.
It’s surge pricing or ration coupons.
And since ration coupons can be traded for money, giving everyone money is the easier version of giving everyone ration coupons.
And, hey, we are already giving everyone money.
The average member of the public would definitely prefer ration coupons, IMO.
Only until they started waiting in lines and still couldn’t get what they wanted.
Under the current scheme, Joe Hoarder bought it all while Susie Precarious was at her second job, so she gets no toilet paper at all. Under the doubled price scenario she could buy half as much as normal and be more stingy with her use. There’s no perfect solution to problems that show up in an emergency, but the second option is obviously better.
You can have ration *books* that are for a specific individual.
> There’s no perfect solution to problems that show up in an emergency, but the second option is obviously better.
While the third solution, controlling quantities directly rather than via price, is better still.
One important difference is higher prices also encourage more people to want to sell the thing that’s in shortage, whereas keeping the price doesn’t.
Another important difference is that prices allow a lot more flexibility. Imagine giving toilet paper rationing books, one for each household. The home with six kids isn’t getting enough, and the home with one pensioner has a pile of the stuff in the closet. Or she sells her excess TP or lends her ration books to the family with six kids, probably violating some dumbass law somewhere.
I think a governor, mayor, or president might even be able to do it just with public speech, by giving them cover. Have the governor and state attorney general standing together to give a statement like “In light of the constant shortages of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, I really think it would make sense for stores to temporarily double their normal prices on those things, and we would certainly not prosecute them for that under these circumstances.”
This works as a Schelling point–all the stores know they can raise prices together, they won’t get arrested, and if everyone does it together, the public won’t blame any one store. Plus, toilet paper and hand sanitizer will probably be easier to find.
I think demand for hand sanitizer has just massively increased–it used to be that only a small fraction of people wanted it and people didn’t use it except after handling something dirty/before eating, now everyone wants it and uses it all the time. (And widespread availability of hand sanitizer and masks is, IMO, a prerequisite for stepping down from the current lockdowns to something a little less restrictive!) Eventually the price will settle into a new equilibrium–probably only a little higher than before, but higher.
OTOH, stuff like TP and pasta are different. The demand has gone up there for, as far as I can tell, about three different reasons:
a. Everyone is switching from food that goes bad quickly to food that has a long shelf life.
b. Everyone wants a bigger queue of pasta–where formerly you had a couple boxes of rotini in your house, now you want like ten boxes so you don’t have to go to the store so often.
c. People are buying because they fear they won’t be able to get it later.
(a) is an increase in demand that will stick around, but (b) and (c) should pass–once I have enough pasta queued up in my pantry, I can just buy more to replace what we’ve eaten.
Oddly enough, in my area, pasta and rice are plentiful, but it’s near impossible to find most varieties of fresh meat.
Yeah. Minor caveat, of course, but as of yesterday our local grocery store was pretty much out of pasta, rice and flour, but they were also out of some fruits/vegetables, desperately short on many more. And the ones they didn’t have tended to be quick-spoilers like green beans or berries (they had 4 boxes of strawberries, more of raspberries and blueberries but still not very much), while they had significantly more of long-term stick-around-forever things like sweet potatoes or apples (or moreso, ordinary potatoes, though I grant those are not really vegetables).
I think people are adding more than switching, perhaps planning to switch in a week or two when their fresh meat/produce has all been consumed and they don’t want to go back to the store.
I think all the different reports of what stores do and don’t have is the result of a sudden shortage, followed by a staggered delivery system that brings things back in irregular intervals. The store normally handles all that stuff so we’re completely unaware.
They are afraid of consumer backlash and longterm reputational damage associated with it.
A bunch of supermarkets in Germany have gotten creative with the toilet paper (splitting packs, raising prices from the second pack onwards, selling unusual brands and types) and have generally been criticised for it. So it’s probably mostly an intent to avoid bad PR. Most of these things will be available in normal quantities again once the hoarders have filled their pantries, so it makes sense for a supermarket to avoid irritating their customers.
Most people are irrational and would hate the company for doing so. There are many good case reports in the past where either the backlash or the legal repercussions were so significant that nobody wants to take the associated risk, even if the higher costs are directly consumed by the costs of procuring the materials for sale. (That is, the seller isn’t making any more money off of the sale)
I guess you haven’t been paying attention to the news but the province has been coming down hard on price gouging.
After a quick google, it seems TP/hand sanitizer are covered but food isn’t. So to the extent this is driven by government action we could see diverging behavior on those two fronts.
Except that the PR issue still applies.
A small mom and pop grocery might risk raising prices on whatever they legally are allowed to – but the big national chains won’t take the PR risk. It’s a potential long-term issue whose risk outweighs the benefit of temporarily making a bit higher margin on meat or whatever.
I would suspect that the grocery stores are already seeing higher effective prices paid. Grocery stores practice a lot of price discrimination, thrifty shoppers buy in bulk when they have sales and use coupons, less thrifty shoppers buy what they want when they want it. Currently everyone is paying pretty much the marked price for what they want, and they are (were) getting maximum traffic per employee for multiple days.
Aldi upped the price of canned mackerel from 47c to 53c a couple of weeks ago. But I didn’t hold it against them, they are generally low-priced and their prices rarely change. Actually when they want to increase the price of something they have a tendency to get embarassed and take it off the shelves for a bit. (Over the last few years they are tending to add some ‘value-added’ stuff, in contrast to the old cheap Aldi. But that is a separate issue, their good cheap stuff is still good and cheap.)
(Even at 53c, it’s some damn cheap protein and oil, goes well with rice, any way you like it.)
Update on renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS) inhibitors in the context of COVID-19. This is from Renin–Angiotensin–Aldosterone System Inhibitors in Patients with Covid-19, NEJM March 30 2020.
We have basically no preclinical or clinical data on which to base our actions. But, we do know that COVID-19 attaches to the cell and gains entry via the ACE2 receptor. Variations in the expressivity of ACE2 may account for the clinical spectrum of COVID-19 infection.
The concern with RAAS inhibitors is then : the body’s response to any perturbation is to push back. So, its response to RAAS inhibitors may be to increase the expression of all ACE receptors, giving the virus more targets. Thus, these drugs may be unhelpful.
Given that the RAAS system is extremely important, these drugs may even be potentially harmful. If the body responds by increasing the activation of the RAAS system in general, then this could cause huge problems. Lots of organs have ACE2 receptors, so there is the potential for worsened end-organ dysfunction if we are wrong. Moreover, the RAAS axis is extremely complicated – this all falls under the general medical dictum of “the dumbest kidney is smarter than the smartest doctor“, IE, screw with the kidney at your own great peril.This has led a number of centers to stop ACE inhibitors and ARB’s in all their COVID patients.
The linked paper suggests a competing hypothesis. If ACE2 is essential for viral entry, well, we already have drugs that block ACE2, and so they should block viral entry. Why not add these drugs to treatment regimens for COVID-19 patients, and reduce their infectivity?
Furthermore, this may actually prevent end-organ damage. ACE2’s job is to downregulate the RAAS. We know that the virus gains entry via ACE2, but then, it downregulates ACE2 once inside (so to increase infectivity by allowing viral particles concentrate attack on uninfected cells.) This downregulation of ACE2 (and local upregulation of the RAAS system) facilitates a local inflammatory response. In mouse models, this local inflammatory response leads to acute lung injury – meaning, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), the bad thing that requires mechanical ventilation. There is reason to believe that the local inflammatory response also leads to damage in other organs, such as the heart. So, we should consider strongly that RAAS inhibitors may actually be helpful.
There are two ongoing double-blinded randomized clinical trials examining the use of the ARB losartan in COVID-19 patients. Both are out of the University of Minnesota. One is trying it in hospitalized patients, one is trying it in patients who have not needed hospitalization.
We could also consider using ACE2 itself as a medicine. This would not necessarily prevent viral infectivity like RAAS inhibitors might, but, it could lessen the chance or degree of ARDS by reducing the local inflammatory response. In a 2017 pilot study of patients with ARDS due to other viral infections, giving people infusions of recombinant ACE2 resulted in lower sytemic blood levels of angiotensin II – meaning, the enzyme was still active despite not being on the cell membrane. However, that study was not powered to detect any clinical enpoints, and there are a lot of unexamined variables. We don’t know if that would work and the concerns above would still apply, but at the very least it seemed to be safe.
At the very minimum, we should probably not be empirically taking people off their RAAS inhibitors, especially if they have significant heart disease.
Dan Carlin just put out his first Common Sense episode in almost two years. I’ve listened to only half of it so far, but I keep thinking, if ever there was someone who needed to hang out in places like SSC, it’s Carlin.
Has anyone else listened to it?
Where does Carlin usually go for discussions? I see no forum links on his site, but I do hear him refer to one occasionally. It doesn’t seem to be Twitter or Facebook.
Sweden is doing it differently.
This is an odd thing for the Swedes to be doing. I suppose a relatively light case load is part of why they can be a bit casual abut this; things are much worse in other European countries. Here are some numbers of cases per million:
Italy 1906
Germany 1012
France 905
US 741
Sweden 551
UK 497
Canada 299
Deaths per million seems like more useful metric. By that measure, Sweden is actually worse off than the US, but not the UK. Also, why are you posting here?
Darn it, wrong thread. It’s too late to cancel my posting here, but I’ll repost to the current OT.
A study on Facemasks? https://reason.com/2020/04/03/a-mask-experiment/