Open Thread 150.75

This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

1,446 Responses to Open Thread 150.75

  1. Purplehermann says:

    Hi, thoughts on osteopathy for injuries taking a long time to heal? Physical therapy hasn’t helped much.

    Osteopathy looks like it is either quackery or a highly qualified professional from the internet, thoughts?

    • Iago the Yerfdog says:

      I’m curious if you actually expect anyone here to have, or anyways admit to having, a positive opinion on this.

      • albatross11 says:

        The way I understand it, many doctors in the US are DOs instead of MDs, and they generally have the same kind of medical school education as MDs, do residencies, pass board exams, etc. There are also osteopaths who actually try to do some weird bone-manipulation-alternative-medicine thing, rather than just doing standard medicine but having a different set of letters after their names.

        • Purplehermann says:

          Do the DOs who aren’t quacks have any particular extra knowledge on joints, tendons etc or are the quacks the only ones claiming that expertise?

      • Purplehermann says:

        Iago this didn’t look like an obvious case of homeopathy/essential oils, ie a bunch of people feeling that things work vs science.

        I wasn’t sure if osteopathy was part of the “magic” crowd or just an honest to goodness doctor specialized in bones/joints/muscles.

        • SamChevre says:

          No, osteopaths (technically, Doctors of Osteopathy–D.O.) are medical doctors, with the same training and ability to practice medicine as an M.D. (My family doctor when I was a child was a D.O.) They tend to have a bit more training in bones/joints/tendons and general wellness and a bit less in biochemistry, but they are eligible for the same residencies.

        • Iago the Yerfdog says:

          Fair enough. Having never heard of it before, I made an assumption.

  2. Deiseach says:

    A good news story from the coronavirus outbreak in Ireland – 82 year old man has recovered from it.

    It mentions that he’s a veteran of the Siege of Jadotville, see the Wikipedia article here.

    My father served as part of Irish U.N. troops in the Congo and Cyprus; he never spoke much about times there (he seems to have liked Cyprus a lot more) and of course by the time I was old enough to take an intelligent interest in such matters, I wasn’t particularly interested in military affairs and like many other things, it’s only when it’s too late to ask people about them that you then regret never talking about it.

    But the Irish forces were not particularly well-equipped or supplied (my father did regale us with some anecdotes about how the American soldiers were perceived as living in luxury by comparison), so holding out as they did at Jadotville was impressive. I did get the impression that my father wasn’t too impressed by the Belgians (one story he did tell us was of being sent as part of a guard, or some other reason his group were living in the house, of a Belgian; my father used to play traditional Irish music on the accordion so he was playing this at nights and eventually the guy snapped and yelled at him to stop that “diddly-diddly music”) but did like the natives, for whatever that’s worth.

    He does seem to have preferred his service in Cyprus – no stories of being shot at there, just of driving around the periphery of the island in the night time on unfenced and unlit roads where the cliffs fell off sheer to the side, talking to the Greek interpreter/guide/whatever he was with him about Irish and Greek music and how it sounded similar to my father as sean-nós singing 🙂

    • Robin says:

      And the thirst! Oooooh, the thirst!
      (Sorry, could not resist… I don’t mean to belittle what your father went through)

      • Deiseach says:

        No, laughing about it is the best response. I think he probably had something equivalent to PTSD after the Congo, but naturally at the time (early 60s and indeed until quite recently) there was nothing in the Irish army to even contemplate, much less set up to treat, such a thing so he (and others) were pretty much left to get on with it.

        Anyway, that’s all in the past!

        Now, think you are bored stuck at home with the lock-down? The Taoiseach is so bored that, even while in discussions about trying to form the next government, he’s doing a nixer with the HSE! 😀

  3. eliasgoldberg says:

    There’s an interesting video from Real Engineering about some of the subtleties of ventilator design here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vLPefHYWpY

  4. 4thwaywastrel says:

    I’ve noticed there’s a part of me that goes ‘ahhhh, you scamps’ when exposed to suspect alt right thinking. Where I’m much more negative on an equivalent level of leftist malfeasance. Am I alone in this? Is it actually fine to have higher standards of political actors you’re more sympathetic to? Do people on the right experience this?

    • toastengineer says:

      I think it’s just a question of how actually threatening the subject group is. The alt-right is funny, not scary, because they’re not very good at actually accomplishing stuff outside of the Internet (yet.) The left is scary, not funny, because they really can hurt you.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Yeah, putting up “It’s Okay to Be White” signs on campus is cheeky scamp stuff. Instituting university policy that they will prefer accepting black instead of white students with equal scores or eject men accused of rape without anything resembling due process or a fair hearing is not so funny.

        • albatross11 says:

          Contrast with the subset of the right that wants to bathe Iran in nuclear fire. That group sometimes gets significant power, and so is harder to joke about…

          • Matt M says:

            And yet, the amount of times they’ve successfully bathed Iran in nuclear fire (or even small arms fire, for that matter) is zero.

            Whereas, the amount of times the left has successfully instituted anti-white entrance policies and expelled students on flimsy sexual assault justifications numbers in the hundreds, at least.

            Edit: Also worth noting that the “go to war with Iran” people are very much neocon establishment and not at all “alt right.”

          • albatross11 says:

            They haven’t yet gotten us into a shooting war with Iran, but they’ve sure gotten us into plenty of shooting wars over the last couple decades. Though to be clear: the alt-right (to the extent I can untangle that term) mostly opposes that stuff.

      • edmundgennings says:

        Also the alt right seem to much more embrace humor and use it. This might be because of their marginal position in society and their youth.
        I may disagree with the ultimate political goals of putting up posters around town that say “Islam is right about women.” But people doing so and causing a bunch of outrage about how this is so offensive without explaining why is just funny in a way in which leftist activism rarely is. The alt right is in a position where they can make statements that the dominant cultural powers can neither say is right nor can they say that it is wrong and they use it.

    • Randy M says:

      I suspect different people will have different ideas of the central example of alt-right thinking, some of which will definitely get labeled much more harshly than “scamp.” It’s not a very precisely defined term.
      I don’t know if by ‘suspect’ you mean intellectually sloppy motivated reasoning, or attempts at deception, or what.
      I think it’s understandable for non-mainstream right people to be cagey about their true beliefs given overactive pattern matching on the part of the volunteer thought police, but on the other hand I wouldn’t give them any more slack for actual deception or falsehood.

    • Is it actually fine to have higher standards of political actors you’re more sympathetic to?

      For one thing, you are probably more able to evaluate the arguments of those close to you. For another, someone on your side making bad arguments is driving away smart people who might otherwise support your position. Someone on the other side making bad arguments is helping you.

      So far as actions rather than argument, someone on your side doing bad things makes you feel in part guilty. Someone on the other side doing bad things — that’s what the other side does, and provides additional evidence for your side.

      • DinoNerd says:

        [oops – this should have been a response to the OP, not to your response]

        When it comes to statements, I’m more intolerant of idiotic opinions among my allies. E.g. currently some collection of wingnuts in the UK has decided that Covid-19 is caused by 5G cell phone signals, or made worse by them, and some of those people are burning down cell phone towers in response.

        On the one hand, when I heard of this I immediately pictured these yobs as data-hating right wingers. But on the other hand, if they proved to be data-hating (or simply intellectually deficient) left wingers, I’d be much more upset about it. When (members of) my outgroup act stupid and destructive, they are doing what I expect; when (members of) my ingroup do the same, they both reflect badly on me and leave me feeling like I have no ingroup at all.

        FWIW, I have no data about the political affiliations of either the arsonists or their fellow believers. I hope they remain insignificant and their pet theory doesn’t spread to other counries.

    • meh says:

      The far right lies in advancement of their goals, while the far left lies to the determent of their (stated) goals. This makes the far right detestable but rational given their beliefs, and makes the far left seem frustratingly psychotic.

      • JayT says:

        Can you give an example of this? Because I feel like I see the same type of lying from both sides.

        • albatross11 says:

          I’m not really clear on what alt-right means–is that Tucker Carlson, Steve Sailer, Razib Khan, Charles Murray, Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer? There’s a *very* wide range of beliefs there.

          I’d rather engage individually with interesting thinkers rather than worry overmuch about labels, TBH. I don’t have to decide what team jersey Interfluidity puts on to notice that he’s often got interesting things to say. Likewise for Razib Khan, Scott Alexander, Sam Harris, Paul Graham, Freddie DeBoer, etc.

          As best I can tell, those guys are all pretty good about honestly expressing what they believe to be true. None seem to be fans of social truth trumping real truth, or of propagating noble lies, or whatever. They are often off-message, which is good because the need to stay on-message is also a need to shade the truth or your actual beliefs.

      • Spookykou says:

        I think this speaks more to your perspective than the internal beliefs of either group, FWIW I assume both lie to advance their goals.

    • bullseye says:

      It’s common and perfectly natural to have double standards. That doesn’t mean it’s good. Screw all the liars; as far as I’m concerned lying to promote your views is an admission that your views are based on, at best, sloppy thinking.

  5. johan_larson says:

    If you’re looking for a film to watch this weekend, consider “Their Finest”. Here’s the summary from IMDB:

    During the London Blitz of World War II, Catrin Cole is recruited by the British Ministry of Information to write scripts for propaganda films that the public will actually watch without scoffing. In the line of her new duties, Cole investigates the story of two young women who supposedly piloted a boat in the Dunkirk Evacuation. Although it proved a complete misapprehension, the story becomes the basis for a fictional film with some possible appeal. As Cole labors to write the script with her new colleagues such as Tom Buckley, veteran actor Ambrose Hilliard must accept that his days as a leading man are over as he joins the project. Together, this disparate trio must struggle against such complications such as sexism against Cole, jealous relatives, and political interference in their artistic decisions even as London endures the bombs of the enemy. In the face of those challenges, they share a hope to contribute something meaningful in this time of war and in their own lives.

    The film is based on an earlier novel with a far better title, “Their Finest Hour and a Half”. The film came and went in 2016 without much notice. It was made for a mere 10M euro, and I suspect the marketing budget was a buck fifty. But it’s now available on Netflix and well worth your time.

    • Clutzy says:

      Nah fam. LOTR extended editions is what I’m craving.

      • johan_larson says:

        It only takes a working week to watch all three films in the extended editions with all the alternate soundtracks.

      • metacelsus says:

        I recently finished watching these with my GF (it was her first time seeing them and she really enjoyed it)

      • acymetric says:

        I don’t think I’ve ever been enough of a fan of the LotR movies to want to watch extended editions. I already felt like I was going to walk out to a world flying cars and jetpacks by the time I was done sitting through the regular theatrical release of Return of the King in the theater.

        • JayT says:

          That was probably the worst theater experience I’ve ever had, it kind of made me hate the other two movies, even though I had really enjoyed them. I couldn’t imagine trying to sit through the extended version.

    • Tarpitz says:

      Happily seconding this. Very fine little movie, with a cracking central performance from the widely underrated Gemma Arterton.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      This sounds good. Do you mean streaming on Netflix, or on DVD from Netflix? I don’t find it on the former and we terminated the latter a while ago. I do see it on Amazon, currently for $1.99, which I can probably afford.

  6. You would think now, in these circumstances, people would think in less partisan terms than normal but they don’t. 90% of Americans are only able to conceive of politics in terms of what Trump has tweeted about. I don’t know how he manages to put a spell on people like this but Jesus Christ, I’m getting sick of it. Have any of you ever managed to convince anyone that Trump’s twitter feed is not the center of the world?

    • Machine Interface says:

      Today I rewatched Dawn of the Dead (the original). One of the themes in the movie is how the zombie problem is getting out of control because society is unable to take action in a concerted manner. A scene notably features an exasperated expert on television, lamenting that “this isn’t about Republicans and Democrats anymore!”

      This movie was made in 1978.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      When shit hits the fan, it’s much easier to find someone to blame than to deal with the shit all over the room.

      • albatross11 says:

        This is especially true when at every level of government, there are people who have utterly shit the bed, and who need to somehow find someone, *anyone*, other than themselves to take the blame.

        This is an old game, right? Every elite failure in my adult lifetime has devolved into partisan battles, probably because that’s what most of the talking heads understand. But there’s a deeper and sadder reason. We’re like some tribe somewhere who depends on the chief and the head witch doctor to know how to appease the gods and assuage the spirits and ensure good harvest and avert plagues and locusts and storms. And when that doesn’t happen, because the chiefs and witch doctors don’t really have any idea how to do those things, we depose the chief and the witch doctor and put in new ones. And of course, they can’t appease the gods any better than the last bunch, but hey, when they fail, we can just depose *them*, too.

        But of course, this doesn’t help much. It doesn’t matter which chimpanzee you put into the cockpit of an A-380–none of them can possibly fly the damned thing.

        • But it is much worse right now in the US than other places. It’s not inevitable for it to be this bad.

          • Nick says:

            I’m sensing agreement with an old observation from Tyler Cowen.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Interesting point of view from Cowen.

            The libertarian vice is to assume that the quality of government is fixed. The libertarian also argues that the quality of government is typically low, and this is usually the bone of contention, but that is not the point I wish to consider. Often that dispute is a red herring.

            I’ll take exception to a couple of the ideas here, because I don’t think it is a red-herring that libertarians view the quality of government as definitionally low. I think the view of the quality of government as fixed comes primarily from the view that government is bad by definition.

            Regardless, I think the view that government cannot be improved, and therefore any attempts to reduce the effectiveness of government are necessarily good, leads us to great extent where we are today.

            The libertarian wants to improve the quality of the engine (of government) by throwing sand into the dirty oil. Ya know, to clean the oil.

          • albatross11 says:

            If you think the government is usually lousy (because of internal incentives or the public-goods problem of voting or just because it attracts the wrong sorts), this pretty naturally leads to wanting to give it less power and resources, and trust in private/individual responses to most problems more than government responses.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            If there’s a general perception that government is not doing well in fact, I doubt that it has much to do with the views of a fringe ideology about whether or not it’s capable of doing well in theory.

          • JayT says:

            Regardless, I think the view that government cannot be improved, and therefore any attempts to reduce the effectiveness of government are necessarily good, leads us to great extent where we are today.

            Any attempts to “improve” the effectiveness of the government by the two parties undoubtedly involves making more government, and there’s that old adage “the best way to get out of a hole is to stop digging”. So, most things the libertarians support naturally shrink the government.

            Libertarians have backed policies that did make the government more effective and not necessarily much smaller (abolition of the draft, welfare reform), it’s just that those opportunities don’t actually show up very often, because it almost always goes against the interests of the people in power.

          • salvorhardin says:

            There are plenty of libertarians who specifically want to improve government by narrowing its scope, on the theory that it’s inherently hard and requires unusual, limited-resource focus and effort for government to do anything well, so therefore we should restrict it to the few things we most need it for (i.e. providing true public goods, which definitely include pandemic prevention and mitigation) so it will do those less badly than if it had a broader scope. I would cite Ilya Somin as an example of this view.

          • matthewravery says:

            @Paul Zrimsek

            If there’s a general perception that government is not doing well in fact, I doubt that it has much to do with the views of a fringe ideology about whether or not it’s capable of doing well in theory.

            “Starve the beast” has been a mantra of Republicans since the time of Nixon. It isn’t just libertarians that hold the view. It was the throughline of Republican domestic policy from the 80s through Paul Ryan’s speakership.

            Quoth Grover Norquist:

            I just want to shrink [the Federal government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub

          • JayT says:

            End of Nixon to the start of Trump is when the libertarian wing of the Republican party was at its strongest. Most of the guys wanting to starve the beast were pretty heavily influenced by libertarians.

          • End of Nixon to the start of Trump is when the libertarian wing of the Republican party was at its strongest.

            Republicans often used libertarian
            rhetoric, but from the beginning of Nixon’s term to the beginning of Trump’s, real federal expenditure more than tripled, which doesn’t look as though the beast got starved.

          • JayT says:

            Well, I didn’t say they were the majority or effective!

            It seems to me that the Republican party, aside for a few holdouts, aren’t even looking at spending as a bad thing any more. So even though the libertarians were fairly weak in the party at that time, they at least had some of their talking points on the table, and got some things passed (free trade, abolition of the draft). I don’t really see that any more.

          • baconbits9 says:

            End of Nixon to the start of Trump is when the libertarian wing of the Republican party was at its strongest. Most of the guys wanting to starve the beast were pretty heavily influenced by libertarians.

            This is very misleading. Goldwater was the presidential nominee in 1964, the Nixon through current era is characterized by the Republican party moving away from libertarian positions and the libertarians becoming less influential, not more.

          • JayT says:

            You could definitely put the start at Goldwater, but I feel like he was a bit of a false start. Nixon was very not libertarian, so that’s why I put the start at the end of him. That’s when Goldwater’s policies seemed to really get ahold of the Republican establishment.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            And there you go. The core project of the libertarians ended up having approximately zero effect on the course of events– so if this side point they made along the way, about the ineffectiveness of government, has (as we’re told) swept all before it, there’s reason to suspect that the cause was something other than the persuasiveness of libertarians.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Goldwater was the high water mark for libertarians, you see the growth of the libertarian wing/libertarian party because the influence of libertarian philosophy was waning. Prior to Nixon you could just say you were a Republican and have it understood what some of your preferences were, after Nixon you had to say ‘libertarian leaning’ before ‘Republican’ because just ‘Republican’ was starting to mean something significantly different. You get sub-groups as power wanes fairly frequently, as a split becomes more and more likely.

          • Prior to Nixon you could just say you were a Republican and have it understood what some of your preferences were, after Nixon you had to say ‘libertarian leaning’ before ‘Republican’ because just ‘Republican’ was starting to mean something significantly different.

            I can’t speak to the Republican context, but among conservatives in the early sixties it was common to distinguish between libertarian and traditionalist.

        • Buttle says:

          @albatross, Apologies for deliberately missing your point, which is a good one, but I have seized upon a shiny linguistic thing. Open thread, right?

          Specifically, I have always understood “shit the bed” as a euphemism (or maybe a cacophemism) for “died”. Learned it from a nurse, who spoke from experience. I’m curious about how many use “shit the bed” to mean “cocked up”.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            That sounds like a nurse specific thing (because it’s definitely one thing that happens frequently in death).

            I’ve never heard it to mean anything other than “screwed up”. Although, I’ve never thought to wonder at its derivation.

          • acymetric says:

            I’ve never heard it used that way (and I live with a nurse who has ICU and Cardiac post-op experience, so plenty of opportunity for dying patients). I’ve always seen it used to mean “screwed up royally” or a stronger version of “choked under pressure”. Used when people fail and fail hard (or unexpectedly, like screwing up something that should have been a slam dunk).

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Interesting. My feeling is that I’ve pretty much always heard it as the latter. The Online Slang Dictionary mostly agrees, though it does include “to die” after several variations of “to cock up”.

            On the other hand, I’ve heard “died” used similarly: “I really died on that test”.

            The earliest reference I could find via Google Ngrams was ambiguous, in the novel Zomburbia (who knew zombies were a thing that long ago?):

            My plan to save the world from the zombie hordes was going to shit the bed if the US. military didn’t get on the stick.

            ETA: No, wait, what the hell? The next line is

            This situation was so massively screwed it demanded that I update my Facebook status.

            Ngrams says 1949, and in fact Amazon says 1949.

            Also, I thought Amazon usually had a button I could use to report inaccurate product information…

            We now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            “Shitting the bed” is what a dog does when it’s really bad.

          • albatross11 says:

            I’ve always understood “shit the bed” as “fucked up royally.”

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            Not necessarily a person dying. When I’ve heard it, it’s usually referred to some piece of equipment conking out.

          • Buttle says:

            Thanks all for the responses — it seems that albatross’s usage is considered mainstream, my experience notwithstanding. The thing is that wetting the bed is something I think all of us probably recall, if only from very early childhood, but literally shitting the bed, once through with diapers, is really quite unusual.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I can’t even do that on SSC. Three years after Scott wrote “You Are Still Crying Wolf.” You think that’s possible for the rest of the world?

      • broblawsky says:

        To be fair, “You Are Still Crying Wolf” is about whether Trump is (unusually) racist. That question is settled in most people’s minds. Then the debate turned to whether he’s a criminal, and now it’s about whether he’s competent enough to handle the current situation. These are all distinct questions.

        • Matt M says:

          These are all distinct questions.

          In theory they are.

          In reality, the correlation between believing Trump is a racist, and Trump is a criminal, and Trump is incompetent (or not) is probably something like 0.99.

          • matthewravery says:

            I don’t think that’s true. There’s plenty of folks that have nuanced views of the President. For example, ~20% of people who voted for Trump think some tweets of his were racist. 64% of voters believe Trump committed crimes before he was in office but only 45% believe he committed crimes while in office.

            Perhaps you were deliberately exaggerating for effect, but I think the distinction is important. Partisianship in this country is high and has been on an upward trajectory the past 10-20 years, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s locked in. That’s why things like Obama-Trump voters exist.

            Among high information (read: people who watch cable news and), you might be right, but for the general public, I don’t think it’s nearly that high.

          • Spookykou says:

            I think believe is creating some of the confusion here, criminal as applied to Trump is a pretty fuzzy term, a lot of people are not thinking he secretly murders people, they are assuming some sort of white collar tax evasion fraud type of crime. Racism is also notoriously fuzzy, I think the better form of what Matt is saying is, the correlation between people caring a great deal about how racist and criminal and incompetent Trump is, to the extent that he is unfit to be the president(see how my version precludes(most?) Trump voters!) is highly correlated.

          • albatross11 says:

            matthewravery:

            Nice point. I think the people who are most visible on the internet/in media are people who are like 95% one direction or the other. But probably a lot of people are much more mixed.

    • gudamor says:

      SSC comments are the last place I expected to see this sentiment. To have the political parties come together and unanimously agree on something is how you get [insert historical example here].

    • Matt M says:

      Politics is society’s most popular sport.

      And with all of the other sports cancelled, it’s now the only game in town… I may not be able to root for Alex Ovechkin to lead the Washington Capitals to the Stanley Cup, but I can still vote for Trump to lead the GOP to own the libs in November.

      • matthewravery says:

        Yup.

        Asking MSNBC or Fox to not cover the President’s twitter feed is like asking ESPN to ignore the NFL Hot Stove season.

    • AG says:

      Voting is something low-power people can do at low cost to themselves, as opposed to starting a revolution or making enough money to change corporate or political policies that drive societal incentives.

  7. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Somebody sell me on “the Hammer and the Dance”, where instead of the government stealing Christmas and every day before it, we stay home for 7-8 weeks like Wuhan and then the state releases everyone except people who test positive, and they follow up those tests with competent contact tracing, etc to eradicate the virus.
    Please.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      The US has the second-biggest test capacity per capita (355 tests/day/million) and this is likely to grow.

      If you are not near NYC, then once each location gets over its hump, it will reach a place where you can track individual carriers and their contacts. This is much easier to start doing if people are mostly sheltered in place.

      Los Angeles County has 10 million people. At current testing, that gives them a quota of 3,550 tests per day.

      They have 5277 cases right now, about 720 more than yesterday.
      https://www.laalmanac.com/health/he999c.php

      Say they ignore the old cases and do contact tracing only on new cases. Also, pretend that they are effective at only targeting the new cases. That gives them 4.93 tests per new case. With one of them going towards the new case, they can then trace back 3.93 other people per case. If people are limiting their contacts, that’s . . . almost reasonable?

      There are a lot of assumptions I made that are incorrect, particularly that they are using 1.0 tests to find each new case. California is taking about 10 tests to find each case https://covidtracking.com/data/state/california#historical

      Still, an aggressive increase in the number of tests combined with a drop in the number of new cases gives cause for hope.

      Incidentally: everyone should keep a log book of each time someone in their house goes outside and interacts with other people. If you haven’t, start it today.

      • LesHapablap says:

        If LA has 5300 confirmed cases, and increased 720 today, that means there are around 100k to 200k infections present, growing by 20k to 40k today if there aren’t isolation measures in place.

        This is based on Italy’s spread rate prior to their isolation measures and assuming a .4-.9 IFR. 3550 tests per day isn’t close enough without two months of full lockdown to bring new cases right back.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        You got community spread, so you need a lot more fishing around. Also you need, I think, about 3 tests per infection: first to confirm, last two to clear.

        Incidentally: everyone should keep a log book of each time someone in their house goes outside and interacts with other people. If you haven’t, start it today.

        Could be you’re living in a much more civilized country than I, but I don’t think convincing a minority to go above and beyond will make much impact. The 80-20 law still applies – if people stay mostly indoors and wash their hands, they’re ok. Problem is people still doing house party or church events.

        To give a local example. We have shelter in place laws and can’t have groups of more than 3 people together in the streets. Ok – so far so good. But this rule does not apply to public transport – so we still have overcrowded buses (because our criminally incompetent and corrupt mayor had the brilliant idea of fucking reducing the number of busses. Not that they were enough before).

        Anyways, my point is why you have such low hanging fruits, making rules like “3 people walking together” or “logging your contacts” are superfluous and possibly even counterproductive – if they distract from the real sources of infection.

        • Del Cotter says:

          I think London Mayor Sadiq Khan has done the same in his capacity as boss of transport, cutting the buses and the Underground so more people are crammed in.

          There has been some discussion of the relative responsibility of Trump, Cuomo and di Blasio for the situation in New York, I’m surprised to see so little discussion of Khan’s performance in London.

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          There was a brief moment here in Warsaw, shortly after the first – somewhat milder – iteration of the lockdown was introduced in mid-March, where public transport was reduced to weekend levels all week long.

          The result was what you might expect. Whereas prior to the change I could count the number of post-lockdown passengers in a typical bus/tram on one hand, the number increased markedly when there were fewer buses going out.

          Since then, we’ve had a legal limit imposed on the number of passengers (one half the number of available seats), together with normal frequency being restored. Currently, the limit for a single tram car is around 8-9 people and I rarely see it approached.

    • WoollyAI says:

      For California:

      Based on the LA Times Covid Tracker, the growth rate in new cases and new deaths has slowed from about 20%/day to about 10% a day from late March to now. Presuming these numbers accurately reflect reality, then in mid-late April the number of Covid cases/deaths should peak. In California at least this will mean a lot of medical strain but there should be enough medical care for everyone who needs it. At this point the government can slowly begin returning to normal. For example, you could probably reopen a lot of stores but not sit down restaurants and see whether the number of infections spike. From there just slowly reopen the state.

  8. Machine Interface says:

    https://twitter.com/universalhub/status/1245766760042770433

    So apparently the US federal government is now just straight up stealing masks ordered by states, or even destined to other countries.

    I can’t wait to see the PR spin the Mandarin’s fanclub is going to put on this one!

    • The Nybbler says:

      People wanted the Defense Production Act invoked. This is what happens when you invoke the Defense Production Act.

      • acymetric says:

        How many people actually wanted this?

        • eric23 says:

          A lot of people wanted it invoked to produce more ventilators.

          Of course, it can be invoked to help and also to hurt.

        • Matt M says:

          Nearly every Trump tweet in the past week has been inundated by replies from Trump haters screaming that his not invoking the DPA was essentially an act of mass murder.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        No, this is what happens when you straight up refuse to coordinate, and also don’t communicate.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        People wanted Trump to invoke the DPA to increase production. Using it to do something else and then saying “but you wanted the DPA invoked” is disingenuous at best.

        • Matt M says:

          You can’t just order increased production of masks into existence. I mean you can try, but that takes a lot of time and money to actually result in more masks.

          Whereas “stop exporting” is an order you can give that will plausibly result in more masks available in the US right now, and will be less harmful and obtrusive to 3M than ordering them to somehow shift their post-it production into mask production would be.

          • albatross11 says:

            Isn’t this exactly what China did when COVID-19 started spreading rapidly in their country? This may or may not be the best policy, but blocking exports of currently needed emergency supplies isn’t obviously a bad idea.

            The government isn’t in the business of making N95 masks or hand sanitizer[1].

            What can government do about mask shortages? Buy masks from people that make them, offer them more money to make more, or seize masks already made and sold to someone else. That’s about it. Buy them or steal them. (Or maybe allow people to use different masks that don’t meet the paper requirements but are probably fine and definitely better than nothing, but hey, that’s crazy talk.)

            [1] It’s actually in the business of making it hard to make/import/sell those things, instead. Gradually, the administrative state seems to be relaxing some of those rules. Maybe eventually nurses taking care of people with COVID-19 will even be allowed to wear KN-95 masks instead of homemade bandana masks and breweries will be allowed to sell hand sanitizer without messing up their production lines. But hey, better that another 10,000 Americans should die of a virus than that one jot or tittle of regulations be waived for even a minute. Gotta keep your priorities straight, here.

          • The Nybbler says:

            allowed to sell hand sanitizer without messing up their production lines.

            Note that the TTB, which is responsible for the Federal Excise Tax, is allowing this. It’s the FDA which still objects, saying hand sanitizer has to have a bitterant. It is also FDA which objects to KN95 masks. So we’ve found a Federal agency more unyielding than the tax man.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            The problem with stopping exports is that other countries will block their exports, and do you really know what foreign components we require for our medical equipment?

            Even for things like N95 masks.

    • JayT says:

      I don’t think there’s enough information there to really draw any conclusions. Did they redirect those ventilators headed for Massachusetts to New York instead? New York has 100,000 more confirmed cases, so if they did, that would seem to be the right choice. If they just put them into a warehouse for no particular reason, then it would be the wrong choice.

    • broblawsky says:

      The Mandarin?

      • Leafhopper says:

        Trump, I presume.

        I’m now imagining him as the Mandarin from Iron Man 3.

      • Machine Interface says:

        That’s how I’m calling Trump from now on. Come on, it works on so many levels!

        • broblawsky says:

          I don’t think I’m getting any of them? I mean, I appreciate President Villain as much as the next nerd, but the Mandarin wouldn’t be my go-to.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Mandarin is also an orange fruit.

            A “mandarin” is “a powerful official or senior bureaucrat, especially one perceived as reactionary and secretive.”

            Plus the Marvel supervillain.

          • On the other hand, the actual (Chinese) mandarins got that position by passing a set of tests on literature, poetry composition, calligraphy, philosophy, … the middle one of which had a pass rate of about one percent.

            I don’t think that fits Trump very well.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            And on the gripping hand: the Great Wall!

          • Viliam says:

            literature, poetry composition, calligraphy, philosophy

            The modern equivalent of this is called tweeting. I heard that Trump is actually quite good at that.

          • broblawsky says:

            Mandarin is also an orange fruit.

            Ok, that’s obvious in retrospect.

          • Leafhopper says:

            @DavidFriedman what’s the middle one? Your list is four terms long.

            I’m curious whether it’s poetry composition or calligraphy that was so hard to pull off.

          • Not the middle subject, the middle test.

            There was a series of three tests — you had to pass the first in order to take the second, and the second to take the third. The second test, hence “the middle one,” had a pass rate of about one percent.

  9. Faza (TCM) says:

    Anyone else here a fan of Neebs Gaming (the guys behind Battlefield Friends/Doraleous and Associates)?

    For some reason I remembered one of their… skits, I suppose, and thought I might share it, ‘coz laughter is good.

    Church Gone Wrong, animated by Fantishow.

    Content notes: death, foul language, somewhat irreverent approach to church.

    Context: this was a scene in one of their 7 Days to Die gaming videos. Mostly (or wholly) improv, I believe.

  10. Purplehermann says:

    Ask them why governments would willingly crash their economies. Ie point out the scale of conspiracy + lack of incentive

    That or troll them hard. Mockery is useful

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      They would have a pretty easy answer for that. There’s fortunes to made during a crisis, especially if you know the crisis is coming.

  11. Konstantin says:

    What information is out there on the mental health effects of extended isolation? I’m seeing some people in my social circle who aren’t coping well. A close friend broke down in front of me, hugging me while tearfully apologizing that she knows she shouldn’t be hugging but she hasn’t hugged anyone in weeks and she’s been stress eating and an event she has been looking forward to for months has been cancelled and she can’t get a haircut and her work might lay her off and she just doesn’t know what to do. I’ve heard many people are trying to cope by using more alcohol, marijuana, and prescription drugs than normal. With the bars closing people drinking on the street has been a common sight in my neighborhood as they need somewhere away from home to chat with their friends. People are reaching their limits, and it looks to get much worse if this is extended another month or two. I’m lucky because I’m an introvert who can tolerate being alone for extended periods, but what’s the best way to help others?

    • Purplehermann says:

      I’ve been calling friends and a family member who are at home alone, and taking a bit more time to send a “hello” to friends than I usually would. Give them a bit of extra social contact, another person they can talk to

    • Machine Interface says:

      It’s hardest during the first 10 years, but after that you get used to it.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      I’m introv… well, floater really. But still I felt it too. What clinched it for me was realizing I can have skype beers. It’s a freaking wonderful concept. Video call a bunch of friends, and just, you know, drink beer and hang. Bonus: you can finally catch up with old friends in distant places.

      Also, I credit a lot of my wellbeeing to buying a stationary bike when the crisis started. Watching a movie and pedaling leisurely is about 500 cals. Two weeks in and Oura already tells me I have a lower resting pulse.

    • AG says:

      A friend of mine has a daily family Skype call. I have a standing invitation to a weekly Zoom call for a particular community I’m a part of.

      And I repeat from a couple of threads ago, people can talk to their own neighbors from over six feet away. Hold a silent, or not-so-silent, disco. Hold a driveway karaoke event. Even have a coordinated potluck, where everyone leaves a tupperware portion of their chosen dish on each others’ doorsteps so that there’s no direct contact. Or have everyone order the same takeout, support a local restaurant. Then share that event together, with everyone staying on their own driveways/lawns/porches/balconies, but in sight of each other so they can talk.

      Have your friend buy one of those body pillows or giant teddy bears to hug while on teleconferences with her friends.

      Instead of stress eating, have her redirect that stim need with chewing gum.

  12. albatross11 says:

    General pandemic comment:

    At every level, the pandemic seems to me to be exposing just how mediocre our decisionmakers are. I keep feeling like there are all these already-known broken parts of our society that we’ve let slide because fixing them would be a lot of effort, and this is coming home to roost at a maximally inconvenient time–as deferred maintenance often does.

    There are isolated people who’ve shown a good performance so far–the governor of Ohio seems to be one. But most people we’ve put in positions of trust to deal with this kind of situation have so far mainly served as a demonstration that we put a lot of third-rate people in positions of trust, or that we have a lot of dysfunction in our institutions that bite us *hard* during any kind of crisis.

    I’m not sure what the right response to this is. Short term, it’s easy–make sure we’ve got enough pasta and potatoes and toilet paper, keep our kids on-task with studying at home, thank God we had masks and hand sanitizer because we prepped a little for this kind of thing. Long-term, I’m not sure, except that I am beginning to suspect it’s going to look like a (hopefully peaceful) revolution.

    Consider the US fallout from the visible elite failures of the Iraq war and 2008 meltdown–loss of faith in mainstream media, Obama’s election, the rise of the Tea Party, Occupy, and later the rise of Sanders on the left and Trump on the right. Now consider how much bigger and more damaging and more catastrophic this set of visible elite failures is. What’s the fallout from *this* look like? The economic impact is likely going to be 10x as big, and along with it, almost everyone is likely to know people who die of COVID-19.

    Whatever anyone does now, it’s plain that all kinds of preparation that should have been done wasn’t, and that a lot of previous preparation (done after the H1N1 flu) was allowed to fall apart/lapse. Our regulatory agencies seem to be optimized for slowing down any effective response, doing exactly the opposite of what we need. Trusting the authorities and the system to do what’s right is visibly about the dumbest decision possible in a lot of cases.

    The heroes of this story, so far, are mostly people who went outside the system, violated rules, and often got screwed over for it, from that poor Chinese doctor who got hassled by the authorities for notifying the world about the initial outbreak to the scientist doing the unauthorized tests that showed community spread in Washington State to the ship captain that blew up his career to force the people above him to take care of his sailors.

    I’m a middle-aged guy with a wife, three kids, a dog, and a mortgage. It’s not a great sign when the status quo loses the support of guys like me. But I’ve lost what faith I had in most of the respectable institutions in my society, thanks to continued demonstrated failures and ineptitude and now a demonstration that they can’t get it together even in the most dire crisis.

    • salvorhardin says:

      Yep. I would add that a lot of large companies have done extremely well, have demonstrated themselves to be more resilient, rational, and public-spirited than most political actors, and… who knows what will happen to their status? In a just world it would go up, but we certainly don’t live in a just world.

      For now I’m going to watch what Martin Gurri says and take that as the least inaccurate likely prognostication, given his track record so far. On the one hand, continued institutional failure in general ought to accelerate the Revolt of the Public. On the other, many of the institutions that have failed are run by the people that Revolt put in office, who have consistently demonstrated that they govern even less well than the failing elites they overthrew. So, will the public go searching for the few experts and institutions who did well and cling to those, or double down on “tear it all down” outsider types? I have no idea, but that’s the question I’d look for believable predictions about.

    • gph says:

      The majority of the best and brightest aren’t motivated to become politicians and bureaucrats, and likely never will be. And while I think there’s been a few major letdowns, I don’t think it’s been that bad overall. The Chinese covering it up early was a huge problem, but I don’t know what we can do to change that in the future. The US federal govt response (and the equivalent national govts in other Western countries) has not been good, and Trump has been Trump, but it’s questionable if the populous would have accepted the type of response that would have contained the virus like we’ve seen in Korea etc. Beyond just testing, they have been doing contract tracing on a level that many in the US would find unacceptable. And would normal people in the West have accepted and maintained self-quarantines as well? I don’t think so. So I’m not even sure if a more competent administration would have been able to force the citizenry to do what was necessary to contain the virus. Governors have more power on that front, but again the best and brightest aren’t super motivated to spend their lives as politicians. And it’s hard to say back at the end of February if there was a complete consensus on how to response, even among the brightest and most well informed. There was still some debate between ‘herd immunity’, ‘flatten the curve’ and ‘complete lockdown in order to contain until it fizzles out’. That last option would have been the smartest looking back, but it was still questionable at the time if it could be pulled off, especially without causing more harm than the virus. It probably wouldn’t have been legal to take the steps necessary to go that route in most western countries.

      More planning would have been better, but it’s not just on our decision makers. Countries that are coming out looking good are mostly those that have dealt with similar epidemics in recent history, so it didn’t just come down to the politicians/bureaucrats making the right decisions. The culture was already there amongst the common person on how to respond. A lot of people here didn’t know how to respond other than to panic buy, or not care and go on spring break or keep gathering together.

      • mtl1882 says:

        The majority of the best and brightest aren’t motivated to become politicians and bureaucrats, and likely never will be.

        While it would take major changes in how we currently operate to make being a politician/official attractive to such people, I disagree it is a constant. I would argue at least into the early twentieth century, this was much more common in America. Some possible reasons: There was more autonomy: such people exercised much more power with much less red tape, and could/had to appeal to the public more directly in a less mediated manner–less of a song-and-dance thing as it became in the televisual era, and less dependent on physical appearance. There was much less specialization and standardized legibility: who we considered the best and the brightest had less to do with technical skill or credentials, and more about the ability to act effectively and advocate for one’s position (which often required high technical skill, but in a good balance with other things).

        Scott’s view of the Hoover biography kind of got at this—perhaps he isn’t a good example of the best and the brightest, but the point is that the definition can change. Many find it impossible to understand how someone can be that successful and that alienating. I don’t find it weird–it was common in earlier eras, because effectiveness was much more paramount to considerations we tend to conflate with competence, but that are related to it in complex ways (likeability, consistency, lack of involvement in corruption, typical emotions). Hoover was highly, persistently, and broadly *effective* compared to most people, even if he had some big failures. And for someone with his level of ambition, politics was attractive because at that time it was more ruthless and practical–an arena where skill in getting things done mattered more than looking good on TV. He easily moved from business battles to political ones, because they were more similar and individuals exercised more power then. Highly effective people, while often highly skilled, tend to want power in a broader field more than prestige (of course, great if you can have both!), because they want to put their ideas into action. Not sure if I’m explaining this well, but I think Scott Adams’ “talent stack” concept is a good way of thinking of this. Someone who is the best and brightest in the sense of the best overall combination of skills/knowledge at the time (rather than the best physicist, who probably doesn’t want to be a politician and probably wouldn’t be a good one) doesn’t want to be a bureaucratic (or corporate) drone, but they would like to exercise some form of political power. A politician or government official can hold that type of power where the systemic incentives support it. Being a Senator was at one point a really big deal, more like being a tycoon than whatever they are today.

    • johan_larson says:

      I guess the question is, “Who did better?”

      At the national level, the countries that really distinguished themselves are ones that got early practice with SARS. They’re veterans on their second tours of duty; they rest of us are fresh recruits.

      My employer suggested we start working from home March 16th. A few people kept coming to the office that week, but I think we were all gone by a week later. That doesn’t seem particularly farsighted to me. Public schools were closed here March 12, and an office probably promotes about as much transmission as a high school, perhaps a bit less.

      The first confirmed case here in Ontario was on January 25. The first really strong public-health measure — closing the public schools — was taken on March 12. That’s about six weeks of watching, waiting, figuring, and hoping. Did any major institutions take strong action in February?

      • baconbits9 says:

        It is really going to be tough to sort out the long term economic ramifications though.

      • eric23 says:

        At the national level, the countries that really distinguished themselves are ones that got early practice with SARS.

        That’s not really true. SARS was mostly focused on East Asia, but not entirely. Japan had no SARS cases, but did well this year. Canada had many SARS cases, but did badly.

        The real distinction is geographical: East Asia versus everyone else. Every East Asian country has controlled COVID19 well, but no other country has. That may be partly due to use of masks; besides that it seems to be the result of political culture and organization.

      • keaswaran says:

        I believe it was February 29 that the American Physical Society announced the cancellation of their large conference in Denver, scheduled for March 2-7. I think some conferencegoers had already reached Denver by the time the cancellation was announced.

    • meh says:

      and another popular vote loser winning in 2020 will accelerate this.

      • albatross11 says:

        It seems likely that the 2020 elections will be affected by this, and that will be enough for the losing side to spend lots of ink trying to put an asterisk by the winner’s name, whichever person wins. It’s also quite possible that one or both of the current major-party candidates catches this stuff and dies or is permanently too disabled to govern. I have no idea what that looks like if it happens. (Just about every state has restrictive ballot-access laws intended to keep third party candidates and joke candidates off the ballot, and whatever happens will interact with those laws.)

        Probably every state needs to be working out how to do postal voting for everyone, so that the national elections can go on even if we get a second peak around late October.

        • LesHapablap says:

          Worst case scenario: the next election does not go ahead as normal and Trump is either reelected in a very weak election process or just declares that he’ll run things for the emergency. With 30% unemployed, mass riots and protests occur which are brutally repressed: all gatherings with more than 10 people are illegal. China senses weakness in western governments amid all the rioting, distracted military and failing economies. And they are tired of all the anti-China rhetoric, which at this point is pervasive and extreme. Anyone with ties to China is accused of sabotaging the economic recovery and is monitored by the government. China brazenly starts taking territory, regional fighting breaks out. Trump escalates and promises that nuclear weapons are not off the table. Soon shots are fired between the US and China, and Trump responds to the sinking of a US ship with tactical nukes, and things escalate from there.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Probably every state needs to be working out how to do postal voting for everyone

          Do you actually find that to be a realistic expectation? Republicans are broadly hostile to this, while Democrats are broadly in favor. That strongly argues against an expectation that it will happen in every state.

          • eric23 says:

            Republicans are hostile, because voting-in-person increases the turnout of retired people (who don’t have to leave their jobs to vote), who lean Republican. However, if coronavirus is still around this November, retired people will likely be too scared to go to the polls and voting-in-person will become a liability for Republicans. That makes me think Republican states will support it. I also think Democratic states will support it, because this helps them in the long run, and because they are a bit less focused on zero sum political battles than Republicans.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @eric23:

            Republicans are hostile, because voting-in-person increases the turnout of retired people

            The option of by-mail voting can, necessarily, only increases their relative turnout. This is a, well, interesting way to state that Republicans are in favor of suppressing the turnout of other groups, the groups that have more problems voting in person. I think most people here aren’t going to miss this point. Might as well just come out and say it.

            We may see a sea change in Republican attitudes about this, but I am doubtful. Trump (and a number of others) have already explicitly stated the reason for their opposition by voicing their belief that allowing vote by mail would mean they would never win another election.

            I actually don’t think that it is true that it would prevent Republicans from winning elections, all though it would reduce some of the possible tactics for manipulating the electorate through turnout.

          • The Nybbler says:

            It’s not “suppressing” the turnout to not have mail-in voting. Mail-in voting does make it easier for the lazy to vote. It also vitiates the secret ballot; now you can be pressured in who to vote for, by family at the very least.

          • Matt M says:

            However, if coronavirus is still around this November, retired people will likely be too scared to go to the polls and voting-in-person will become a liability for Republicans.

            Not at all sure about this. Of everyone I know, the most reckless people I’ve seen in violating basic social distancing requirements has been the at-risk elderly demographic. My fiance’s grandparents are still going to the grocery store twice a day because they like being out and talking to people. We tell them they’re at risk. They don’t care.

            If the election was held today, there’s zero chance they wouldn’t go out and vote.

          • albatross11 says:

            I guess if your old and sickly already, you at least are probably bearing the full costs of your actions. At least when you take risks, you’re not imposing risks on me you’re not willing to take yourself….

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Not only does vote-by-mail enable vote-selling, but it was also the cause of the vote fraud that cost North Carolina a Congressional Representative for 8 months.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            It’s not “suppressing” the turnout to not have mail-in voting. Mail-in voting does make it easier for the lazy to vote.

            This is one of those comments that really shows the inherent contempt.

            The fact that there is, in fact, a difference in the willingness to vote in person depending on whether, for instance, the line is 1 minute, 30 minutes or 8 hours long, and whether you are scheduled to work the day of voting, have kids at home who need dinner, or a myriad other things, does not mean that the person who doesn’t vote is “lazy”.

            The actual cost to different voters of inflexible voting differs. No surprise that those who incur greater costs are less likely to vote.

            Yes, there are “lazy” people who don’t vote, but that in no way comprises the entirety of the set.

          • Matt M says:

            The state of Oregon has had vote by mail as a default for over a decade I believe.

            I suspect nobody has cried about it suppressing votes or enabling fraud or destroying anonymity because statewide elections have been won exclusively by Democrats in that timeframe. But maybe that’s a little cynical of me?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I suspect nobody has cried about it suppressing votes

            Say wha?

            enabling fraud or destroying anonymity

            or there hasn’t been evidence of such. If there is good evidence of fraud, and Republicans in the state aren’t pointing it out, then, well, I don’t think they are stupid.

            I agree that absentee ballots are more subject to fraud. This is definitely true.

            However, voter fraud of any kind becomes more efficient, effective and possible the fewer people vote. The more people vote, the greater the number of votes you need to buy to reliably effect the election, the greater the risk of discovery.

            The vote buying scheme in NC was germane precisely because so few voters were needed to win, as the election was so tightly contested. In a higher turnout election, I’d expect that the Republican candidate would have won easily, as 2018 saw Republican turnout suppressed and Democratic engagement unusually high.

            But there are other ways to make voting highly available, and retain mostly in-person voting. Republicans generally aren’t in favor of those either.

          • acymetric says:

            Not only does vote-by-mail enable vote-selling, but it was also the cause of the vote fraud that cost North Carolina a Congressional Representative for 8 months.

            I’m going to object to calling that the cause. It made the fraud much easier, but the cause was that the candidate and his staff decided to commit vote fraud. I can’t help but point out that it is the Republicans who are constantly up in arms over voter fraud, and using that excuse to implement thinly veiled (or sometimes totally unveiled) voter suppression policies in place, and yet it was a Republican candidate who was caught red handed committing it.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @acymetric:

            While I agree with the general sentiment, that particular case has more to do with Bladen and Robeson county specifically and less to do with party.
            I’m pretty sure that the guy doing the vote harvesting was doing it for Democratic candidates before he was doing it for Republican ones. He had been at it for quite a long time.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Yes, there are “lazy” people who don’t vote, but that in no way comprises the entirety of the set.

            I do not claim they are the entirety of the set. I do claim they’re a significant group. And I consider that requiring at least some effort besides checking a few boxes and putting a form in the mail basically saying “Send me my NEETBucks please” to be a feature, not a bug.

          • matthewravery says:

            I do not claim they are the entirety of the set. I do claim they’re a significant group. And I consider that requiring at least some effort besides checking a few boxes and putting a form in the mail basically saying “Send me my NEETBucks please” to be a feature, not a bug.

            This opinion is in such direct contradiction to the mythological history of America and so consistent with the actual history of America that I view it as art.

          • Loriot says:

            It’s not “suppressing” the turnout to not have mail-in voting. Mail-in voting does make it easier for the lazy to vote.

            I’m a pretty enfranchised person, but even so, mail-in voting *absolutely* increased turnout in my case. Since moving to California, I’ve voted in every single election, even the obscure local special elections I would have never heard about otherwise. It’s pretty easy when they mail a ballot to you.

          • Spookykou says:

            As a lazy(mentally crippled) person who doesn’t vote, mail-in voting would not change my behavior.

          • albatross11 says:

            As a thought experiment, suppose there was a change to elections we could make that would get 100% participation in voting by people who are crazy and delusional, people who dropped out of high school because it was too hard, violent sociopaths, and members of violent criminal gangs .

            We’d get higher voter participation. So this is good, right? We’d definitely want to make that change, right? Or might there be some downside to increasing the electoral voice of a bunch of people who are delusional, deeply uninformed, or evil?

            I think whether this sounds good or bad comes down to whether you see democratic representation as a good in itself, or a good in that it leads to better government and more human flourishing than other ways to choose who gets power.

            I don’t have any strong feelings about postal voting (it’s making a security/convenience tradeoff, but it’s one that’s right out in the open), but it’s not a given, at least to me, that every mechanism for increasing the number of people who vote must be good. Convincing lots more crazy, dumb, and evil people to vote seems very unlikely to me to lead to better government or better collective decisions.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            100% participation in voting by people who are crazy and delusional, people who dropped out of high school because it was too hard, violent sociopaths, and members of violent criminal gangs .

            Go look at a) registration rates, and b) participation rates and realize this thought experiment isn’t particularly germane.

            In 2018, less than 50% of the voting age population cast a vote for US Congress. In the 2016 presidential contest that rose to a blistering 61% of the total voting age population.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            In the 2016 presidential contest

            Yeah, how’s that working out?

            How would the next 5 percentage points of voter participation work? More “voting against their self-interest”? More https://politics.theonion.com/yee-haw-my-vote-cancels-out-yalls-1819584076 ?

          • AliceToBob says:

            I realize the mechanism in albatross11’s thought experiment is unspecified, but I don’t see any reason to believe that mailing in votes will incentivize high school dropouts, evil sociopaths, and violent gang members to participate any more than they already do.

            I figure the time subtracted — by filling out the ballot (correctly!) and walking to their mailbox — from whatever languid/nefarious activities they pursue, is likely a sufficient deterrent.

            Yeah, how’s that working out?

            Perhaps HBC is in favor (as am I) of people voting, even if it does not align with his political goals. So, it’s probably working out as it should, at least by that metric.

          • J Mann says:

            Vote by mail multiplies the effect of get out the vote campaigns. Now you don’t need buses to run people from Church or the local college campus to the polls, you just need people to show up in their house and help them fill in the ballot. (Assuming you can enter their house, which isn’t super clear right now).

            It also opens the door to pressure, vote-buying, and fraud.

            I don’t know enough to do the cost-benefits.

          • eric23 says:

            This is a, well, interesting way to state that Republicans are in favor of suppressing the turnout of other groups, the groups that have more problems voting in person…. Might as well just come out and say it.

            Yes, this is pretty well known and not particularly controversial (for example, its effects are weaker than those of gerrymandering). It’s not that Democrats are innocent of these tricks (they gerrymander too) but it seems Republicans generally go further.

    • LesHapablap says:

      There is still more to come: western states have spent decades ratcheting up compliance costs in nearly every industry (construction, transport, education, medicine, everything). We are soon going to find that industry during a depression can’t afford these measures but legally they will be impossible to strip away. Millions of small businesses will fail and it will not be economical to replace them, since start up costs are now vastly higher than they were 10 or 20 years ago.

      I just hope someone notices.

      • acymetric says:

        I’m not even sure magically stripping away the compliance costs solves the problem (at least not entirely). 2021 will be the year of national chains and large corporations.

        I’m especially concerned about what will happen to small locally owned music venues (please for the love of god do not let them all get bought up by LiveNation), but that’s probably only a concern for a small percentage of other people.

        • Matt M says:

          please for the love of god do not let them all get bought up by LiveNation

          It’s probably either that, or they go away entirely.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          I’m not even sure magically stripping away the compliance costs solves the problem (at least not entirely). 2021 will be the year of national chains and large corporations.

          Even national retail chains will file for bankruptcy or get bought out as their stock prices continue to crash after earnings reports of “0 dollars.” We’ve barely entered the bear market and look at this.
          Small business people are in vastly worse shape.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I think it’s possible national retail chains are more at risk than local small business retailers. The local retailers that survived the big box era already had to figure out some way to offer more than just the product on the shelf. It’s the various chain retailers that were already under immense pressure because they were having trouble getting online sales right, and their brick and mortar presence was less and less profitable.

          • JayT says:

            Yeah, I agree with HBC, at least in the long run. A bunch of stores will never reopen. Most of those will be small businesses, sure. However, I expect some national chains to run the numbers and realize that it just doesn’t make sense to reopen. Sears is the obvious one, but I could see JCPenney, Bed,Bath and Beyond, Pier One, and others making the same choice.

            The difference I see is that I think the mom and pop shops will be largely replaced. The big box stores are just going to go away.

          • ltowel says:

            Personally, I expect Nordstrom to end up as “Amazon Fashion” after the end of this. Partly because the headquarters are blocks apart.

          • acymetric says:

            I guess I’m thinking more restaurants than big box stores/retail. I agree that some of those are going to decide to ditch some of their less profitable local stores in favor of additional emphasis on online ordering.

            More of “Mel’s Diner” is now “Chili’s” or “Carraba’s” kind of stuff. Starting a successful restaurant is hard and I don’t expect we’ll be able to replace all the local ones that close shop with new local restaurants in the near or medium term.

            Personally, I expect Nordstrom to end up as “Amazon Fashion” after the end of this. Partly because the headquarters are blocks apart.

            No way they ditch the Nordstrom brand. Nordstrom shoppers are like a cult.

          • JayT says:

            I think the same will hold true for restaurants as well. I expect some big box restaurants to close because of this, and those are a lot harder to replace than mom and pop restaurants. To go from a small chain to a national chain is a pretty big undertaking. To take over a closed restaurant because it’s your dream to run a restaurant is easy, and people have already been doing that. Something like half of restaurants fail in their first year already, maybe this year it will be closer to 75%. I expect things in that industry to get back to normal faster than most others.

      • eric23 says:

        I don’t see a single source or number in your post (except “10 or 20”). Just unfalsifiable speculation.

          • Nick says:

            This should be a familiar refrain to long readers of this blog. Take for instance section III of Considerations on Cost Disease:

            I also want to add some anecdote to these hard facts. My father is a doctor and my mother is a teacher, so I got to hear a lot about how these professions have changed over the past generation. It seems at least a little like the adjunct story, although without the clearly defined “professor vs. adjunct” dichotomy that makes it so easy to talk about. Doctors are really, really, really unhappy. When I went to medical school, some of my professors would tell me outright that they couldn’t believe anyone would still go into medicine with all of the new stresses and demands placed on doctors. This doesn’t seem to be limited to one medical school. Wall Street Journal: Why Doctors Are Sick Of Their Profession – “American physicians are increasingly unhappy with their once-vaunted profession, and that malaise is bad for their patients”. The Daily Beast: How Being A Doctor Became The Most Miserable Profession – “Being a doctor has become a miserable and humiliating undertaking. Indeed, many doctors feel that America has declared war on physicians”. Forbes: Why Are Doctors So Unhappy? – “Doctors have become like everyone else: insecure, discontent and scared about the future.” Vox: Only Six Percent Of Doctors Are Happy With Their Jobs. Al Jazeera America: Here’s Why Nine Out Of Ten Doctors Wouldn’t Recommend Medicine As A Profession. Read these articles and they all say the same thing that all the doctors I know say – medicine used to be a well-respected, enjoyable profession where you could give patients good care and feel self-actualized. Now it kind of sucks.

            Meanwhile, I also see articles like this piece from NPR saying teachers are experiencing historic stress levels and up to 50% say their job “isn’t worth it”. Teacher job satisfaction is at historic lows. And the veteran teachers I know say the same thing as the veteran doctors I know – their jobs used to be enjoyable and make them feel like they were making a difference; now they feel overworked, unappreciated, and trapped in mountains of paperwork.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Doctors Wasting Over Two Thirds of their Time Doing Paperwork
            Survey Captures cost of Compliance – FarmersWeekly

            For what it’s worth, someone I know who verifies HIPAA compliance has been put on reduced hours. Because even though hospitals are operating at breakneck speed, they have decided to drastically reduce time spent on that.

            And they aren’t worried about it at all.

            I think our overblown administrative state is crazy. And there are good questions about what it’s caused us to do that got us in this shit, like the FDA bitching about testing. But once the situation got real, they seem to have relaxed that nonsense.

          • eric23 says:

            Your link about teachers never says how much time is spent on paperwork. Just that it’s “too much”.

            Your links about social workers and doctors criticize the large amounts of “paperwork” these workers do, without asking how much of that paperwork is necessary or not. For example, “paperwork” includes the doctor writing down which disease he thinks the patient has. According to the article, that is a “waste”. That seems dubious.

            Your link about farmers says that farmers have to install expensive equipment to avoid polluting the groundwater. You don’t think farmers can survive economically without polluting? Anyway this has nothing to do with bureaucracy, rather with the cost of equipment to avoid damaging other people’s property.

            Your link about housing essentially says that local NIMBYs have been empowered to veto any nearby development for arbitrary reasons. NIMBYs are a big problem, but this isn’t really a “compliance” issue because the NIMBYs will always find some excuse to veto. It’s not really any better for society if they pass law (zoning code) outright banning development, even though in that situation the “effort to comply” has been reduced to zero.

            In short, none of the links provide more than circumstantial evidence for bureaucracy having an effect on economic productivity. Do you have any more substantive links?

      • peterj says:

        I don’t have much hope that regulatory compliance will be relaxed for businesses small or large. While job losses will be high in the private sector, few if any of government employed regulators will lose their jobs. The powerful hand of the environmentalist-regulator-tort lawyer industrial complex will continue to see that compliance costs only move in one direction. Said complex seems to generate enough public outcry at any attempt at even the most sensible reform of existing regulations as to prevent any progress.

        • Matt M says:

          Agreed. If the FDA/CDC stopping localities from deploying COVID testing wasn’t enough to move public opinion against them, nothing will be.

          • albatross11 says:

            I wonder if we’ll just see increasing noncompliance. That’s a very risky strategy if you’re the only one doing it, but if everyone’s doing it, it’s a pretty low-risk strategy.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Nope. The Seattle Flu Study got stopped. And every researcher and research institute knows they won’t have a career, grants, or any necessary licenses if they defy the regulators now. The government has too much power for defying them to be a viable option; you’ll end up dead, jailed, or broke and forgotten, and most likely you still won’t get what you were trying to accomplish.

    • Matt C says:

      I share your disappointment. I didn’t hold our leaders in high regard before, but somehow I thought in a real crisis we’d see more . . . leadership. More people willing make decisions and act without waiting to be told. More people willing to break or change rules when it’s obviously needed. Less tragic incompetence, less blatant and callous indifference to injury.

      (True, we have seen some admirable behavior. Helen Chu is a national hero, but maybe it’s for the best, for her, that she sort of fades into the background.)

      Was there ever a time that the USA had better leadership all around? I have the idea that my parents and grandparents were more competent in difficult times, but maybe that’s just mythology and if you were actually there it was just as bad.

      I doubt there will be a peaceful revolution. I think despite this crisis we’re pretty much on the same track we were before, except the slope we’re sliding down got a little steeper. If we had any idea how to get better leaders we would have done it already.

      • Matt M says:

        I thought in a real crisis we’d see more . . . leadership. More people willing make decisions and act without waiting to be told.

        As someone who thinks things are shaping up such that the cure is definitely going to be worse than the disease, and that it’s clear our “leaders” have no endgame other than “indefinite quarantine until vaccine,” I think we have the exact opposite problem.

        Far too many people making decisions and acting quickly without sufficient data and without regard for the consequences, because it is of short-term political benefit to look like you’re “doing something” rather than be accused of not acting quickly enough.

        It’s overwhelmingly clear that the first shutdowns were ordered well before anyone actually attempted to model a cost-benefit scenario of the economic destruction that would ensue. In a just world, leaders who do that sort of thing end up with their heads on pikes, but I suspect we do not inhabit such a reality.

        • ltowel says:

          I think it’s pretty clearly becoming apparent that the cure is worse then the disease and it has been decided that the less fortunate will be gristle at the altar of Moloch for the sake of the rich, old and powerful.

          May it have gone differently if something was done ™ in January or early February? probably.
          The cat is out of the bag, appeasement has failed – ruining the lives of the poor, young, healthy is not the correct approach.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I think it’s pretty clearly becoming apparent that the cure is worse then the disease and it has been decided that the less fortunate will be gristle at the altar of Moloch for the sake of the rich, old and powerful.

            If the government had done nothing, “the rich, old, and powerful” would have been the ones who could have ridden out the wave of death the easiest.

            All the white-collar workers who can work from home would have hidden there. All the blue-collar workers would keeping going to work so they didn’t starve. A few percent of them would die, but not enough to stop the food and power from flowing, whew.

            I’m expecting to be paying for the relief from this disaster for the rest of my life, either in increased taxes or inflation eating my savings. I’m not saying that to bitch or complain; I mean it neutrally as we discuss how to get out of this mess. It’s inevitable at this point and I’m resigned to that.

        • Matt C says:

          One example of my idea of leadership would have been the relevant authorities doing testing and containment, similar to what we saw in several of the Asian countries, as soon as it was clear the virus had gotten out of China.

          You might say that this wasn’t politically attainable for the USA. But if we go there, I would say that lockdowns were similarly unavoidable once we saw what was happening in Italy.

          It seems like we at least agree that our leaders are blundering around in confusion and, even now, weeks into the crisis, are unable to plan or carry out plans effectively.

        • eric23 says:

          “and that it’s clear our “leaders” have no endgame other than “indefinite quarantine until vaccine,””

          No, it’s “quarantine until we figure out how to replicate what East Asian countries are doing successfully”

          • Matt M says:

            Do we agree that East Asian countries are actually successful?

            More and more I’m hearing pushback on that premise. That Japan’s lack of action has them poised for a horrible outbreak in a matter of days. That Korea’s success is contingent entirely upon a lack of international travel and as soon as that starts up again they’ll become overwhelmed. That China’s numbers are absolute fiction. Etc.

          • albatross11 says:

            But both of those are things we’ll have an answer to in another month or two.

          • John Schilling says:

            No, it’s “quarantine until we figure out how to replicate what East Asian countries are doing successfully”

            This would be a lot more convincing if our leaders were saying something along the lines of “this is what we think the East Asians were doing successfully and this is how we’re gearing up to do it here”. Pretty much all I’m hearing is A: lockdown and B: we’re working on a vaccine but it will take a year or more and C: moar testing! But if that’s all there is to it, then we’re going to be locked down for a year or more.

          • Matt M says:

            But both of those are things we’ll have an answer to in another month or two.

            Will we?

            If Japan is still looking good in two months, what will stop people from saying “They’ve just been lucky, they’re due for a huge outbreak any day now, and they’re lying about their numbers anyway.”

          • HeelBearCub says:

            At the end of this, if Japan has looked good throughout while not advancing any special measures, I think everyone, especially the infectious disease experts, will be examining what specifically made this possible.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            John, “Moar Testing” and selective quarantine is, in fact, a perfectly viable strategy if you push it hard enough. The question is, is anyone actually gearing up for “test everyone every day for a month or four”?

          • John Schilling says:

            Who, aside from a handful of nerds on the internet, is talking about selective quarantine?

          • keaswaran says:

            “Who, aside from a handful of nerds on the internet, is talking about selective quarantine?”

            I’m not sure who counts as a “handful of nerds on the internet”, but basically *everyone* who is talking about plans at all is talking about some sort of selective quarantine measures. That is, after enough weeks of this harsh lockdown that cases get under control, we start ramping up contact tracing and testing around all these cases, with positive tests sent to strict quarantine, and everyone else moving to the restrictions we had in the first couple weeks of March (ie, no big concerts or conferences, but restaurants are open with half the tables empty, and companies encourage people to work from home but don’t require it, and we actually greet people with elbow bumps, as opposed to handshakes like in the before time or not greeting at all as now).

          • eric23 says:

            That Japan’s lack of action has them poised for a horrible outbreak in a matter of days.

            People have been saying that Japan is “poised for a horrible outbreak” for a very long time now, but for some reason it never happens…

            That Korea’s success is contingent entirely upon a lack of international travel and as soon as that starts up again they’ll become overwhelmed.

            That makes no sense. They were “overwhelmed” by the outbreak in the megachurch, yet rapidly overcame it. Why should they be overwhelmed by a small number of travelers, who can be tested and quarantined upon arrival and then watched?

            That China’s numbers are absolute fiction.

            You must believe in prophecy. China’s case numbers (the doubling time, and the interval between lockdown and case number peak) exactly match the experience of other countries later on. If these numbers were faked, they could only have been obtained by clairvoyance. If the outbreak was not under control there, we would know from a casual glance at the state of their hospitals.

            (I have seen suggestive evidence that China’s death totals are inaccurate – I am guessing that many of the coronavirus deaths were assigned other causes in the official records. But that has little bearing on the public health measures we are debating)

          • eric23 says:

            Who, aside from a handful of nerds on the internet, is talking about selective quarantine?

            A handful of nerds who are making all the public health decisions? (Just not on the internet)

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        When we were fighting the Soviet Union, I got the feeling that Basic Competency was a desired value. Being right mattered. The enemy didn’t value truth, so we did.

    • Loriot says:

      I have a hard enough time getting the higher ups at my company to get on board with important maintenance work. Mostly we do it without their knowledge. Our CEO and founder has a “move fast and break things” attitude that we’re still dealing with the aftereffects of many years later.

      So given that it’s hard to do unglamorous work even to prevent forseeable disasters and even when the decision makers have strongly aligned incentives, I hold little hope of government doing a better job.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Nothing will change. Reason being, those who tried to do right got punished for it, like you said. The doctor got hassled by authorities, then died of the disease. Another Chinese doctor involved in sounding the alarm, Ai Fen, has disappeared (or been disappeared). Companies trying to make tests and masks have hit roadblock after roadblock. The Seattle Flu Study got put in their place for not going through proper procedures. The Captain got fired. The lesson is clear: Follow procedure, don’t stick your neck out, take care of yourself…quietly.

    • CatCube says:

      I think we’re seeing the effects of pursuing lower-variance strategies in government. I’m sure there’s a public policy name for this that I don’t know, but I’ll call it “McDonaldsization” or “Budweiserization” of government services. This is just a hypothesis of mine from observation of my own federal government job.

      If you walk into any McDonald’s in America, and order a cheeseburger, you will get the exact same thing. You’ll get an identically-tasting sandwich in New York or Los Angeles. For Budweiser, I’m using a story I read once (but can’t pull up with DDG right now) where a trappist monk called Budweiser the most amazing beer he’d ever tasted–not good, mind, but amazing–because they made millions of cans of the stuff every year, and every one tasted exactly the same.

      McDonald’s and Budweiser are mediocre, but they are very, very consistent above all else. It’s much easier to get this consistency with mediocrity, especially at a low price point and very high production rates.

      My perception is that the push in government is to have repeatable, “knowable” decisionmaking processes that are well-defined by process. For example, I’ve been involved in choosing construction contractors, and if I had to describe the role of the engineer in this process in a single sentence, I would say, “Be a dumb little box-checker.” For example, we once excluded a contractor from being awarded a contract because they didn’t meet the required three similar contracts over $500,000 in the past 5 years as stated in the Request for Proposal. The three of us on the board concluded from the remainder of the proposal and from our own experience working with this contractor on other projects that they were perfectly capable of doing the work. The lawyer told us it didn’t matter, and because they didn’t have the right piece of paper the contract could not be awarded to them, and went to another bidder at substantial cost to the taxpayer.

      To a certain extent this is self-inflicted: the requirement for three similar jobs over $500,000 in the past 5 years was written by the engineering staff ourselves (well, the senior engineer on the job, before I was assigned to help in the evaluation). This seemed to be a good balance to help exclude the plainly incompetent, but it caught an obviously very qualified contractor. We were not allowed to use our judgement to say, yeah, here’s what the rubric we put out says, but we’re going to deviate from it because the totality of the proposal and our history with the offeror shows that we’ll get the best value for the Government by accepting this one, even if it doesn’t technically meet the objective standards set.

      Now, this procedure was put in place for a very good reason! Plenty of people in the past in my position would use that flexibility for thoroughly corrupt ends, to steer the job to a specific contractor for a kickback. But it’s stultifying and demoralizing to know the right answer and to be bureaucratically hemmed in. It’s easy for people to say, “Y’know what? I’d rather earn a bunch more money in the private sector.” Now, you’re obviously reading something written by somebody who’s been in this process and elected to stay with the job–despite this frustration, I like the stability, the regular hours, and the projects we work on are fascinating–but there’s going to be a filtering effect for people who are willing to do the box-checking and say “it hurts less if you don’t struggle.”

      This is very different from the big dam-building era of the ’30s through the ’60s when the engineers were allowed to bulldoze towns because we thought this was the best place to build a dam. If you’re an ambitious risk-taker where making something that you could see from space gives you a hard-on, working for the Bureau of Reclamation during that time frame was your jam. John Savage* could stand on a bluff overlooking Grand Coulee Dam and scream at the heavens, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and DESPAIR!” This…may not have been so great for the people who weren’t civil engineers.

      Similarly, the heyday of the Public Health Service had people who were driven and focused: you give them a task like “Make malaria disappear in the continental United States, and your only constraints are budgetary.” They’ll go out and do that, and do it successfully. If you need to spray oil on swamps, go spray oil on swamps. Sure, hose down neighborhoods with DDT. If you need to quarantine people, knock yourself out. This was very attractive to driven, competent people who could single-mindedly focus on that task.

      These same single-mindedly focused people also did the Tuskegee Experiment. Out of pure scientific curiosity, they wanted to know how syphilis affected guys, so they just left a bunch of (black) guys untreated and watched what happened. Shit like this is why there are now a bunch of bureaucratic rules that constrain them. Even if they weren’t paid as well as the private sector, there were significant psychic benefits to the job in being powerful and unconstrained. There were also very, very, significant downsides to everybody who wasn’t them.

      Like I said, we’re now shooting for lower variance–we have much more constrained, mediocre people, but we also don’t have the hard-chargers that bulldozed neighborhoods to build highways or conducted Naziesque human experiments. Maybe we swung too far in the other direction–I certainly think so, but I’m also not an objective observer–but there were very real tradeoffs to the high-variance “hard-charging and competent, but also charged hard for stuff that nobody else wanted.”

      * Edit: For some reason, I thought I had read somewhere that John Savage had used the nickname “Jack,” but I can’t seem to find that now. I must have misremembered.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Scott, consider this for one of your “comment of the week” highlights.

        • albatross11 says:

          +1

          I suspect CatCube has a lot right here. Maybe this is pendulum-swing stuff, but it feels like a broader change in society. Like the whole society has become more arthritic and got more fat in its arteries than it did 50 years ago, and somehow we just can’t respond dynamically without some kind of painful and hard changes.

          • LesHapablap says:

            It is absolutely not a pendulum swing, more of a rachet, and it effects nearly every industry. It is much easier to implement new rules and procedures than to get rid of them.

          • keaswaran says:

            My thought is that in general the value of human life has gone up. Doing things that could kill lots of people seem much more palatable if the average person has a greater chance of dying from an infected scratch and experiences a lot of suffering anyway, but once people have pretty good lives, it becomes a lot less worth it. A person with a shack is much less risk-averse than a person with a mansion, in terms of risks that might destroy their home, and similarly a society with early or mid 20th century living conditions is much less risk-averse than a society with 21st century living conditions.

            I think the fact that we are willing to try this one weird trick of having everyone work from home for a few months while paying unprecedented amounts of unemployment insurance to the people who can’t work from home, as an attempt to save a few million lives, indicates that we find lives much more valuable than people i the 20th century did. And if we’re right about the value of lives, then that’s a good thing!

          • Aapje says:

            I notice that at the intersection of the Western and Third world, this difference in viewpoints regularly leads to misunderstandings. For example, a lot of Western people seem unable to fathom that poor people would risk their lives and that of their family for material gain, so they regard all these people as refugees from violence.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Making a public note that I think there is a key point here that I will comment on later.

      • John Savage* could stand on a bluff overlooking Grand Coulee Dam and scream at the heavens, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and DESPAIR!”

        Probably not if he knew the rest of the poem.

      • Seeking lower variance is understandable but I think it’s doomed. The end result is not peaceful stability but stagnation and ultimately collapse. History if full of empires that desperately try to hold on to what they have but suffer decline and collapse.

      • Clutzy says:

        I think having low variance in government is a good thing, and its not what we have at all. Its impossible to have low variance when the feds are consuming 20% of GDP and have dozens of agencies. If you don’t think there is massive variance then you simply aren’t interacting with them on a day to day basis. If you interact with a federal agency, you basically are playing bureaucrat roulette. There are incompetent, competent, neutral, malevolent, and beneficent variations. The only combos you want are competent-neutral and competent-beneficent. They are the rarest. There is a lot of competent-malevolent, which is the worst, and a whole host of incompetent. This, sadly, also applies to judges in the federal system. I, sadly, often have to explain to clients the cost of administrative appeals in cases they would clearly win against the agency if it ever got to the appellate court level. But that is 3 levels and a million+ dollars in litigation ahead of us.

        I think treating what happens at agencies as low variance is an insult to low variance. Its a much more malevolent thing than low variance. I would describe they system as “oppression by confusion.” People who have to interact with the federal agencies experience high variance, which is what oppresses them, precedent is seemingly meaningless, there is no way to know what the decision will be. There are probably entire Fortune 500 companies who would not even exist today if they ran into a different patent examiner and different FDA official at the beginning.

        I don’t disagree with all of the post, but I think this is a needed caveat.

        • keaswaran says:

          What is the alternative that is lower variance? My impression is that if you’re governing with a bunch of bureaucrats filling out forms, there’s still a lot of variance, but it’s much less variance than if you’re governing with Robert Moses or John Savage just single-handedly making a decision about which neighborhood to blow up without even looking at the forms.

          • Clutzy says:

            Sure, but that is still easier as a business to react to because its a uniform national policy, even if it changes every 4-8 years.

            The problem with the bureaucratic model is that it has “a bunch” of them. Its only effective at promoting the goal of low variance if there is a small enough group with a small and concise directive.

      • salvorhardin says:

        This is essentially the Philip Howard “Death of Common Sense” thesis, no?

        How might we track quantitative metrics which would give us a sense of how big a factor this is?

      • CatCube says:

        Thanks for the comments. I’ll respond in one omnimbus comment.

        I should note that I think I misstated what I think is the driver here: I don’t think there was an conscious intent to pursue higher rules and a more mediocre civil service. The higher rules came about in a patchwork fashion, often in response to real or perceived abuses, and the greater mediocrity evolved from that because the straitjacketing made it less attractive to driven people.

        I mean, I’m not saying that every civil servant is an incredibly mediocre dullard–I’m one, after all, and I’m not that self-hating! I think it’s maybe a “hostile work environment” to people who want to just get things done without spending three-quarters of their day dotting Is and crossing Ts on meaningless administriva? Like all hostile work environments, you’re not going to find no people to whom the environment is hostile, but you’re going to find fewer of them. I’m not saying I’m one of the “highly-competent” toughing it out, just merely average who can easily tolerate it, though it wears on me from time to time.

        Note also that I’m a design engineer working for the government in the area of dams and civil works, so I have a postage-stamp view of this. I’m reporting what it seems like from my very narrow view, and most of my examples one way or the other come from that arena.

        @albatross11

        The broader change is because we give more people say in what we do, and make sure that we farm decisions around to interested parties, which means we take years beating decisions to death. My go-to example here is The Dalles Lock and Dam. Upstream of the damsite was Celilo Falls, a sacred fishing site for the Columbia River Indian Tribes. At the falls was Celilo Village, which had been inhabited for 10,000 years and had been an important meeting and trading site for the Tribes in the entire region for that whole time. The Tribal leaders tried to point this out and how this dam would crush their entire society.

        They got told that this was the best site to build the dam due to engineering considerations–it was where the run-of-the-river started at the Bonneville reservoir, so it was a prime power-producing site, and it would vastly increase the efficiency of river transport because it is right where the old and too-small Celilo Canal started so the new lock would provide passage to much larger tows over the falls.

        Therefore, they got told to take a lot of pictures of all the stuff they were complaining about, because it’s going to be underwater, and we’ll build them some houses to replace the village. Then we didn’t build the houses.

        Similarly, when designing highways, engineers often chose routes that were 1) direct routes for efficient systems and 2) cheap to construct. This combination meant finding poor neighborhoods where land was cheap and putting a highway right down the middle of them. This lead to the “highway revolts” where many of the stultifying rules like the EIS process and lawsuits alleging “disparate impact” started.

        If you try to strip away these rules, the people who rely on them to gum up the works to make sure their concerns are addressed will fight you like rabid weasels. Because to their eyes, the “arthritic and fat” process is what’s preventing them from being steamrollered by government engineers in cubicles.

        I know less of the history of something like the CDC and detailed examples, but I’d be surprised if somebody who did couldn’t pull up similar abuses that the current rules were passed to prevent–I used the Tuskeegee Experiment above, but I couldn’t point to the exact rules and their interactions the way I can for the EIS, Historical Preservation, and Archeological standards that make construction so painful.

        @Wrong Species, @LesHapablap

        It is absolutely not a pendulum swing, more of a ratchet…

        Seeking lower variance is understandable but I think it’s doomed.

        I think these are similar objections, and both come from the same thing, similar to how it’s hard to cut a government budget: it’s easy to say the total budget is too big, but each individual line item has a constituency that will fight ferociously for it. It’s easy to say that there are too many rules, but when you start wanting to cut things you have to look at individual rules, and many of them actually have some pretty easy-to-see rationales. You often can’t cut them back without essentially saying: yeah, some people are going to get hurt or killed, but the price of deregulation is worth it. Note that I agree the price of deregulation is worth it, but it’s very politically difficult to say.

        Note also that people writing regulations are often in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” bind. One example of this I found from the Twitter account “@CrimeADay”:

        21 USC §§331, 333, 352 & 21 CFR §344.50(d) make it a federal crime to sell earwax remover without a label that tells people it’s “FOR USE IN THE EAR ONLY.”

        I used to enjoy looking at this account periodically, but for whatever reason I actually dug in to this one, and realized that the account, and especially this tweet, is vapid, sneery, bullshit. When you actually look at the regulation, it states:

        (d) Directions. The labeling of the product contains the following statement under the heading “Directions”: FOR USE IN THE EAR ONLY. Adults and children over 12 years of age: tilt head sideways and place 5 to 10 drops into ear. Tip of applicator should not…

        The reason that it’s “a federal crime to sell earwax remover without a label that tells people it’s “FOR USE IN THE EAR ONLY.”? Because the regulation specifies the exact text that the directions use, and that happens to be the first sentence. Do you know what this regulation is? It is the easiest regulation in the world to comply with! Your label designer cuts and pastes it from the regulation! Bam, done. I’m a structural engineer and I can figure out how to comply.

        What exactly is this tweet trying to say? That we should reword the regulation to have a less-easily-mockable first sentence? That’s a pretty stupid thing to pick at, and if it’s the worst thing in the regulation we’ve won. That we shouldn’t have regulations on labelling at all and we just sort it out in court if somebody chugs your earwax remover? Because that’s a harder sell to me. Now, instead of the exact text for the directions being given to you, you have to pay a lawyer $300 an hour to write your directions, because the guidance for what to write is smeared across 20 judicial opinions in 8 different jurisdictions.

        As I understand it, the labeling for beers is much less strict: the ATF has wide latitude to tailor requirements to specific beers and company requirements. This then requires months of painful-for-breweries back-and-forth with the ATF before they can sell. That’s the tradeoff to just having a bright-line rule: somebody using their judgement can screw with you.

        @Clutzy

        I’ll defer to your expertise to dealing with this from the outside, as my major experience is from the inside. As I said, this is a hypothesis from my own experience, and I admit it can be incomplete or wrong more often than it’s right. I will note, though, that if you think the malevolent/competent axis is bad now, imagine if they weren’t straitjacketed and had more latitude to use their judgement.

        @salvorhardin

        That looks like a book-length treatment of exactly what I’m talking about, which I’ve not heard of before (so their is a public policy name for it). I’ve picked up a Kindle version. Thanks.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I’m someone who lost all faith in the elite institutions…at least a decade ago, and I don’t think they’ve done all that awfully here, largely because I don’t think there’s much of anything they can do in the face of a pandemic.

      Imagine the institutions were competent. What exactly happens differently? We get some tests out sooner? You still have a disease that appears to spread like wildfire and overwhelms the healthcare system and kills vulnerable people, just maybe it does it a little more slowly. Competent institutions still can’t predict the future, still can’t conjure information about the virus out of thin air, and don’t have the power to track or quarantine people at will. I don’t see the outcome being much different. I think the problem in this case isn’t so much that the institutions are unable to do a thing they should be able to do, but that this is not a problem institutions are able to solve at all, or solve well.

      I know various ways the response would be better, but what exactly does the eventual outcome of all this look like on Bizzaro Competenco World?

      • albatross11 says:

        There were pandemic plans in every state and in the whole country, as a result of the H1N1 flu. This isn’t something that nobody could have seen coming, it was a low-probability but forseeable risk. H1N1 turned out not to make people all that sick; SARS didn’t spread much to the US. A pandemic flu strain hit the whole world harder than this crap has just over a century ago. This is something we have government departments and laws actually written for. And mostly, those guys have dropped the ball.

        This isn’t like expecting the USG to be prepared to respond to an alien invasion. It’s more like expecting the Army to be prepared to fight a land war somewhere in Asia, and when the war starts, it turns out they didn’t keep enough guns or bullets for all the soldiers because of budget cuts, so can Americans please send their rifles and bullets to the Army so they can shoot back at the invaders? Oh, and the guns have to be exactly the ones specified in some regulation somewhere, even if that means half the soldiers go to war with wooden pretend rifles.

        • matthewravery says:

          It’s more like expecting the Army to be prepared to fight a land war somewhere in Asia, and when the war starts, it turns out they didn’t keep enough guns or bullets for all the soldiers because of budget cuts, so can Americans please send their rifles and bullets to the Army so they can shoot back at the invaders?

          It’s not the Army, and it’s not a land war in Asia, but you’ve hit far closer to the mark than you probably intended.

    • Deiseach says:

      Whatever anyone does now, it’s plain that all kinds of preparation that should have been done wasn’t, and that a lot of previous preparation (done after the H1N1 flu) was allowed to fall apart/lapse. Our regulatory agencies seem to be optimized for slowing down any effective response, doing exactly the opposite of what we need. Trusting the authorities and the system to do what’s right is visibly about the dumbest decision possible in a lot of cases.

      (1) Quick – what’s the Next Big Disaster that is going to hit, when is it going to hit, and what should be done about it?

      Because that’s the kind of crystal ball reading that nobody can do well, not the best expert in whatever field you care to name.

      There is a ton of things that could happen but we can’t prepare for them all. So there has to be decision-making about “do we stock up on masks and hand sanitiser for the entire nation, do we start on the asteroid-blasting rocket mission, do we start evacuating people from the areas that are going to be uninhabitable due to climate change?”. I don’t envy anyone who has to try and plan for that, and if you figure out – or know someone who can figure out – what the Next Big Bad will be, outside of Nostradamus, then please share your knowledge!

      (2) Re: the preparation after the flu – it’s because it wasn’t as bad as prognosticated (thanks to several measures) and because nothing big hit immediately afterwards that things lapsed. As the saying goes “eaten bread is soon forgotten”. When a possible pandemic didn’t hit after 2009, in time people get tired of “do we have to have all this unused equipment sitting around and spending money on it, money that could go elsewhere to be of some immediate use, money that comes out of our taxes?”

      Name your natural disaster and people will react the same. Vesuvius erupts, but people keep on living and working in the danger zone: “Today, it is regarded as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world because of the population of 3,000,000 people living near enough to be affected, with 600,000 in the danger zone, making it the most densely populated volcanic region in the world, as well as its tendency towards violent, explosive eruptions of the Plinian type”.

      It’s like the anecdote that Hammett has Sam Spade tell in The Maltese Falcon about the guy who up and disappeared one day but then eventually drifts back to the kind of life he left behind: “He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

      (3) There should be and probably will be a change in how things are done after this, but the fundamental system is going to remain the same because a wholesale change is just too big an upheaval. And what do you replace it with – the Chinese system, the system in Singapore, the system in Sweden, what?

      We may vote out the current lot of chuckleheads but then we’ll vote in a new set of chuckleheads, and when they are all prepared for a pandemic but the Next Big Bad turns out to be (select at random) crop failure, volcanic ash grounding all flights, or multiple earthquakes happening at the same time, and they don’t respond effectively, we’ll criticise them the same way.

      • Ant says:

        To support this, during the last flu, the French health department “overreact”, commanding flu vaccin in large quantity and 2 billions of masks. They were scorned by almost everyone, (What are we going to do with 2 billions masks ! They are in the pocket of BigPharma for buying all these useless vaccine).

        In January and February we had a lot of people blaming the government for overreacting. They are now blaming it for not doing enough. And I can assure you that if the government had done enough, the majority would have mocked it for overreacting. There is no winning move here and you must still play the game.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Given my line of work, I very much appreciate the ironies of “no one notices your work if you do your job well.”

          Still, if some non-China national government had shut down their country in February, while they would have been laughed at for a few weeks (maybe even by us) the fact that every other country got nuked would make them look like geniuses right now.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Still, if some non-China national government had shut down their country in February, while they would have been laughed at for a few weeks (maybe even by us) the fact that every other country got nuked would make them look like geniuses right now.

            At least until people started to realize that now they’d have to stay locked down — at the very least, isolated from international travel — indefinitely.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            If they had locked down back then, they would probably come out of it by now. They would need tests for track-and-trace as well as for border screenings.

          • Matt M says:

            If they had locked down back then, they would probably come out of it by now.

            If “come out of it” includes “allow international travel” then all it takes is one infected person coming in and then bam, you’re at risk again and right where everyone else is…

          • John Schilling says:

            all it takes is one infected person coming in and then bam, you’re at risk again and right where everyone else is…

            Which is right were you are guaranteed to be for the rest of this year, probably next year, maybe for the rest of this decade. This disease is not going the way of smallpox or even polio, any time soon. So any plan that requires your country to have literally zero SARS CoV-2 carriers, is a non-starter. The only plans that have a chance of working are those that are robust against the finite number of carriers who slipped through your “first we locally eradicate SARS CoV-2” step, which will incidentally be robust against some finite number of new arrivals as well.

            And these are easier to deal with, because you can do screening at ports of entry easier than you can internally. International travel bans are neither necessary nor sufficient, and not really appropriate except as a way to buy you a few extra weeks if you get caught by surprise at the outset.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I was going to say “obviously I meant to say they would protect the border” but I looked at my comment and there it is:

            They would need tests for track-and-trace as well as for border screenings.

            Somehow Germany has an incredible number of tests. I don’t know why they aren’t listed on https://ourworldindata.org/covid-testing#tests-per-day but they are doing 50K tests a day, about 1/2 the rate of the US with 1/4 the population. The nytimes.com article listed elsewhere on this page gives some summary of how they got super-aggressive testing in place:

            In mid-January, long before most Germans had given the virus much thought, Charité hospital in Berlin had already developed a test and posted the formula online.

            By the time Germany recorded its first case of Covid-19 in February, laboratories across the country had built up a stock of test kits.

            It also describes their testing regimes:

            As soon as the test results were in, the school was shut, and all children and staff were ordered to stay at home with their families for two weeks. Some 235 people were tested.

            If you can test everyone coming into the country, citizen or not, you’ll do a great job of keeping your cases near zero. (And if foreign nationals are coming from very hot spots, maybe you test them once, sit them somewhere for 24 hours, and then test them again.) Not exactly zero, but having a shitload of tests means you can follow-up when there are breakouts.

    • BBA says:

      I’m disappointed that so few people are recognizing how universal the failure is. Even now, most commentary just falls back on ORANGE MAN BAD or ORANGE MAN GOOD. I guess it’s to be expected in an election year, but *siiiiigh*.

      Speaking as the token Democrat, I don’t think Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden would’ve handled this any better. The reasons for the failure would’ve been different (deference to “expertise”, performative anti-racism) but it ends up in exactly the same place, the hidebound CDC and FDA wasting time and obstructing testing and treatment until we have to lock the whole damn country down.

      So now I’m hearing the argument that randos on Twitter are a better source of information than the government and media. This is only true for carefully selected Twitter randos – you won’t find anti-vaxxer or Q*n*n “information” in mainstream sources either. And even for the sources that have led you well so far, as any ad on CNBC will tell you, past performance does not guarantee future results.

      What else have we got? I got nothing.

      • albatross11 says:

        +1

        I’m not sure what the right answer is, but a marginal course change between generic D [Hillary] and generic R [Jeb!], or even unsettling out-there unready D [Sanders] and R [Trump] is plainly not it.

        Also, as best I can see, culture war/tribalism is part of the problem at least as much as part of the solution, because it’s an effective way to get people to stop thinking about some inconvenient issue.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Speaking as the token Democrat, I don’t think Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden would’ve handled this any better. The reasons for the failure would’ve been different (deference to “expertise”, performative anti-racism) but it ends up in exactly the same place, the hidebound CDC and FDA wasting time and obstructing testing and treatment until we have to lock the whole damn country down.

        +1
        Orange Man was elected to poke the elites in the eye. The result of choosing that over managerial competence has been… amazingly mediocre. It turned out no one in the West had a plan better than “wait, then shut down their entire economy so we all suffer from the pandemic at a rate the health care system can handle.”
        I don’t think people are going to accept universal house arrest except for supermarket runs and walking our dogs six feet apart for the rest of 2020, let alone however long “flatten the curve!” would actually take. And when governments let up, the same old people who’d have died if everyone wasn’t quarantined still die? What a plan. Much wow.

        • salvorhardin says:

          The US is not the only place in the Western world whose institutions have been weakened by populist poke-the-elites-in-the-eye candidates and causes; I would certainly put both the UK and Italy in that category, for instance. Angela Merkel in Germany has already done quite a bit better than most of the rest of the Western world, and has strengthened what I think was already her leading bid to go down in history as one of the few truly great heroes of the political class of this generation.

          More generally, what this demonstrates is that the response to a global threat is only as strong as its weakest links. The US used to know that, and used to be willing to cooperate enthusiastically and in good faith even with geopolitical adversaries to do things like knock down pandemics. Then under Trump we stopped doing that:

          https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/breaking-china-exactly-wrong-answer/608911/

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

            Based on today’s chart (archive: https://i.imgur.com/rqnci2h.png ), Germany doesn’t seem to be doing much better than other countries. It actually is worse than the UK.

            (If you asked me which European country would do the best, my money would be on Germany, because it is full of Germans.)

          • matthewravery says:

            @Edward Scizorhands-

            I guess I read that chart differently than you. Germany looks like it’s leveled off. The UK seems on a clear upwards trajectory. The derivative and second derivative are the most important things to look at, IMO.

            And the absolute number of confirmed cases is pretty pointless if you’re not even normalizing for population or testing.

          • JayT says:

            I think it’s too early to say Germany has done quite a bit better. If you look at the deaths, they are doing slightly better than the other countries at this point, but I’m not certain it’s going to stay different enough to really make a big difference.

            I looked at where the countries with the highest death totals were after they got to 100 deaths, and to get to their 1444 it’s taken one day longer than the UK, two days longer than the US, and three days longer than France. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not a huge difference.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            I’ve seen various charts with various choices about where they start — 30 daily cases, 60 daily cases, 100 daily cases. I understand the justification for doing that: the first case is almost guaranteed to be an outlier and the second might come in an hour or a fortnight. But the lack of consistency makes me wonder whether there is some curve-fitting going on, like with the statistics about terrorist acts that conveniently start in October 2001. Can anybody tell me how sensitive curves like these are to exactly where they start?

          • gudamor says:

            @Doctor Mist
            Hopefully this doesn’t sound too dismissive, but if you doubt other’s analysis, why would you trust someone else to do this sensitivity analysis?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            All the below my considered conclusions, without the advantage of being an epidemiologist.

            Early case and death numbers are inherently noisier. The specific of one person or cluster matter a lot. If your first case is recorded in an elder care facility, your early case numbers are going to look much worse than if your first case happens to be a pro-basketball player.

            The more people are infected, the less the specifics of any individual matter, the more everyone infected can be modeled as “average”.

            Death numbers are inherently less subject to similar kinds of issues, where your apparent case load depends on how much testing you are doing and who you are testing. Absent some sort of active suppression of information, people who are in critical care with Covid symptoms are highly likely to be identified as such.

            So once you start to see a steady doubling of deaths, then you can be pretty sure that all of that randomness inherent in the beginning of the outbreak is over, and the curve will depend much more on population level factors and actions.

            Basically I’m saying, you can’t put too much stock into the early, expected to be flat, parts of the curve, other than knowing that if you have already taken action weeks before you have a chance at it staying flat.

          • JayT says:

            I went with 100 deaths just because I had to start somewhere, and there were a lot of countries that had just a couple for a long time before it really blew up. I’m guessing in those countries it was people that came from somewhere else that died, so it really hadn’t gotten into the general population yet.

            If you go from the first death, it’s been 27 days since Germany had their first and they’ve had 1,441 deaths overall. On day 27 the US had 1,209, and France had 48. Obviously, France has been hit much harder than Germany has at this point, so looking at first death doesn’t really tell us much, because France didn’t get to 10 deaths until day 22. If you look at 100 though, that really picks it up when the virus has a firm foothold in the country.

          • matthewravery says:

            @JayT-

            I agree, it’s too early to know anything, especially if we’re only getting as deep as raw counts. Case counts are noisy because of issues like test frequency, false positive/negative rates, test protocols, etc. Death rates are noisy because there’s fewer data and it’s very much a lagging indicator. My response was to the chart that Edward shared. If there’s any conclusion you can draw from that, it’s that Germany looks better than a lot of places.

            Having said all that, the key thing people should be keeping in mind is that we just don’t know much at this point. The ship has sailed on an early SK/Singapore-type of response, so that’s a fine spot to make criticisms and comparisons. Beyond that, most everything is speculative. If you want to do comparisons based on deaths/cases, you’ll probably have to wait until this thing has run its course in most places, which means another month or two minimum. And even then, the most useful thing to look at will be how the death rates changed year-over-year in different areas rather than just look at actual diagnosed cases/positive tests and such.

            This isn’t to say that criticisms of specific government decisions are invalid, just that using empirical rates of death or confirmed cases is not a very good basis for such criticisms at this point.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            gudamor:

            Well, to be honest, I actually do sort of feel like I trust this crowd rather more than I trust some other crowd, if only because this crowd might be a little more likely to show their work.

            HeelBearCub:

            Yeah, that’s what I was getting at when I said I understood the justification. No matter where you start, it’s going to be flat for a while and in that sense it doesn’t matter where you start as long as you are consistent. I can’t actually construct in my head a model for the disease that would let me jigger how locales compare by jiggering the start threshold, but I was curious if I was missing something.

            To all:

            And I wasn’t actually doubting so much as curious. Maybe 5% wondering if anybody was cherry-picking to make political hay (though the fact that I can’t quite put my finger on what the hay might be should probably make me reduce that) and 95% wondering about whether I should be wary for my own understanding about comparing one source’s “start-from-30” graph to another source’s “start-from-100” graph.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            https://www.businessinsider.com/tool-shows-coronavirus-cases-rising-country-by-country-2020-3?op=1

            This tool lets you set whatever you want as “day 0” (1 case, 100 cases, 200 cases) and compare countries, including on a per-capita basis.

            Per-capita cases, Germany is doing pretty good, nearly always the best, so my prior comment about Germany being about average was off-base.

            France seems to be ahead of Germany unless you put the slider for “day 0” all the way to the right (250 cases).

            If I look at deaths (instead of cases), Germany is doing great. Their graph has barely started.

          • salvorhardin says:

            Yeah, the biggest point in Germany’s favor is how they’ve managed to keep a lid on deaths, see e.g.

            https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/world/europe/germany-coronavirus-death-rate.html

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I think the “low” deaths in Germany are consistent with them simply being a large country with a large population that has done slightly better at managing growth.

            Look at these charts and if you start the counter not at absolute numbers, but per capita, and you can see that Germany is mildly successful, but still early. Switzerland was on a similar curve at the same point, looked as if they were doing well, but lo and behold they are climbing rapidly.

            Now, maybe Germany is doing great and the growth is about to nose over, but we literally can’t tell that right now. It will probably be another 4 to 7 days before you will really be able to say that they have done well at managing things (or we are about to see rapid growth in deaths per capita, just like Switzerland).

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Orange Man was elected to poke the elites in the eye. The result of choosing that over managerial competence has been… amazingly mediocre.

          I don’t think these things follow. I wasn’t voting for Trump because I thought he would be more competent at government. I thought he would do fewer things against my interests and more things in favor of them. So instead of “let lots of indifferent-to-hostile foreigners into my country” he would not do that. Instead of “move factories to China as fast as possible” he would not do that. This has largely worked out okay, despite the administrative state working against him nonstop.

          My ultimate goal would be, as Steve Bannon expertly articulated at CPAC 2017, “the dismantlement of the administrative state.” But that wasn’t really what Trump offered and wasn’t much on the table. “Drain the Swamp” was about the politicians less than the bureaucrats. But you seem to think Trump voters would consider him a success if he had…I don’t know, improved the competency of the administrative state? I didn’t want it made better. I wanted it dismantled. But that’s not something Trump ever said he would do.

          • matthewravery says:

            I think LMC’s point was that the guy who (in LMC’s view) was put in place to poke the elites in the eye did about as well (in LMC’s view) as the other places that were still run by elites.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            If the point is that The Other Emperors Also Have No Clothes then yes, I agree with that. The professional government institutions advance the interests of the professional government class. Whatever they accomplish towards their stated missions is incidental.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Even now, most commentary just falls back on ORANGE MAN BAD or ORANGE MAN GOOD

        Present company excluded? I usually think ORANGE MAN PRETTY GOOD but all I’ve been saying this whole time is “ORANGE MAN FINE.” I agree with:

        I don’t think Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden would’ve handled this any better.

        But I don’t think they would have handled it much worse. Mainly because I don’t think this is really a problem where what the federal government does matters all that much.

        • albatross11 says:

          I think what the feds do matters a lot, but that the part of the federal government whose response mattered and matters still is pretty far fro the president, and he probably barely knows what goes on in there most of the time. The FDA and CDC screw-ups that delayed widespread testing in the US for like a month and a half, and the FDA’s continued delaying actions on everything, those seem like major failures at the federal level. But they’d look the same under Jeb! or Hillary or Bernie or Rubio, absent some previous energetic attempt to change the rules and culture of the FDA on the part of the president.

          What you can blame Trump for here is:

          a. Maybe having something to do with some reorganization that got rid of the pandemic office (probably he just signed off on some very dense plan written by aides–there’s nothing in Trump’s statements or history to suggest that he took a deep interest in the workings of the FDA or CDC before).

          b. Trump’s lack of careful public messaging. He’s probably worse at that than Hillary would be, but I’m not sure how much that matters.

          c. Realizing this was serious early on and giving whatever push he could from the top. I think Trump failed here, but I am not sure Hillary, Jeb!, Cruz, or Bernie would have done better–most mainstream sources were downplaying the risks, and I don’t see a lot of reason to think any of those folks would have had better insight than the mainstream. (I think Cruz would have been our best bet, since he’s probably the smartest of that bunch and he’s pretty independent-minded.)

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Trump’s appointed people in his own Cabinet were internally sounding the alarm back in early February, but couldn’t get his attention. I think a standard politician would have heard “very-bad-event-with-very-low-probability just got slightly more probable” and thrown resources and attention at it at this point.

            Non-Trump Presidents would probably have not put in place border protections, but given how very flimsy Trump’s border protections were, I’m not sure it bought us very much time. I used to say it bought us a month, but between (1) finding out how porous they were and (2) looking at other countries that seem to be right in line with us, I’ve become increasingly skeptical of that.

          • Matt M says:

            I think a standard politician would have heard “very-bad-event-with-very-low-probability just got slightly more probable” and thrown resources and attention at it at this point.

            So why didn’t all the standard politicians throughout the rest of the world do just that?

            Basically nobody was throwing a lot of attention at this in February. Not Trump sure, but also not Justin Trudeau or Angela Merkel or whoever else we’re supposed to think is super-competent by their sole virtue of being Not Trump.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Matt M

            +1

            If Trump had been getting skunked in performance by the technocratic governments of the West, we could say “he obviously screwed up”, but other than perhaps Germany, all the technocrats are failing just as egregiously or worse.

            The US performance on this has been distinctly average, and while I wish Trump had listened to Senator Cotton, Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon more, I always wish that, so no change here.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            a. Maybe having something to do with some reorganization that got rid of the pandemic office

            This didn’t happen, though. The National Security Council positions of pandemic response and bioterror response were merged into one. So now instead of having one guy saying “no natural plagues going around” and another guy saying “no man-made plagues going around” at the NSC meetings you have one guy saying “no natural or man-made plagues going around.” This is a complete non-issue.

            b. Trump’s lack of careful public messaging. He’s probably worse at that than Hillary would be, but I’m not sure how much that matters.

            Absolutely agree. I don’t care when he speaks off the cuff about stuff that isn’t important. This kind of is.

            c. Realizing this was serious early on and giving whatever push he could from the top.

            Sure, but like you say, that’s just wishing for a president with a crystal ball.

            I am heavily biased against the technocracy. I should be dunking all over them. I’m not because I don’t think this is the sort of problem government can solve. If a supervolcano erupted and half the country were bathed in fire and ash, I would be sitting here saying “if only we’d had competent technocrats, they could have prevented this!” They couldn’t have. This is a natural disaster, and they’re doing…pretty well okay, but it sucks not because they suck but because natural disasters suck.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Most of the reason I want and expect the US to pay more attention to the very-rare-but-super-dire cases is American Exceptionalism. I know a lot of liberals hate AE, but too bad. And maybe people voted for Trump because they didn’t want America to have a special place in the world, but for so many things either the US does it or it doesn’t get done.

            If an asteroid is coming at Earth, who would deflect it? The US.

            If Osama Bin Laden is found and needs killing, who is going to do it? The US.

            If there’s a loose nuke somewhere in the world and we need some team to go grab it, who would do it? The US.

            If some disease is ravaging the world, who would invent the vaccine? The US.

            Canada doesn’t pay attention because America’s hat doesn’t have to pay attention.

            The more I think of this, the German response stands out because Germany seems themselves as the leaders of Europe (even if they don’t want to say it out loud). They certainly aren’t expecting Belgium to do it.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            If some disease is ravaging the world, who would invent the vaccine? The US.

            Great, yes, and that’s still possible. But not something the president (or even the technocracy) will have anything to do with. That would be researchers, which are distinct from the administrative technocracy. But for this plague so far, “who will lock up their citizens for weeks or months to slow the plague? The US!” is not really a thing.

    • matthewravery says:

      There has always been incompetence and perfidy among government officials. The difference is we used to view it as a problem of individuals failing at their jobs. The solution was to hold those individuals responsible for their failures and demand that their replacements be better qualified and held to a higher standards.

      These days, it is fashionable to view these failures as inevitable and unremarkable. The solution is to shrug and move on, not to demand that our public servants be good at their job. Such attitudes make bad behavior more acceptable and harder to punish. This is true of both elected officials and the people they appoint. Couple this with across the board reductions of status for people in public service (with the armed services being mostly but not entirely excepted), and you’ve got a triple whammy of suck:

      1. Fewer people with elite talent interested/willing to take the jobs in Government
      2. Lower expectations of moral integrity placed on those people (which become internalized)
      3. Acceptance of poor performance as inevitable and not a problem to be fixed

      Elaborating on (3), if every time a government official screws up, it reinforces your pre-existing world-view, it becomes harder to root for or try to enforce competence.

      (There are tons of other issues with the way we in the US do government these days; these comments are meant to address the questions specifically about leadership that Albatross brings up.)

      • These days, it is fashionable to view these failures as inevitable and unremarkable. The solution is to shrug and move on

        The solution is to have government, which is where these failures are most likely and most damaging, control less.

      • WoollyAI says:

        The solution was to hold those individuals responsible for their failures and demand that their replacements be better qualified and held to a higher standards.

        I think this ignores the complexity of the issue of bureaucratic incentives. Because you can’t retain talent if all you do is punish failure; you also have to reward success. But that has it’s own complications.

        Consider all the nurses, doctors, EMTs etc who work for the government right now, much less the executives at the CDC. Is there any discussion of them getting a bonus, or a payraise, or any other reward if they perform well in this critical time? The scuttlebutt I hear in CA is concern over the return of furloughs as tax revenue falls, which for people in essential positions means a 20% pay cut.

        Allow me to make this a little more concrete. The California Department of Public Health has an Emergency Preparedness Office, which seems pretty important right now. It’s headed by Tricia Blocher, who made $98,140 in 2019.

        If you want the ability to fire Mrs. Blocher if California’s Covid response is worse than the average of other comparable states/nations, fair enough, but you’re not going to attract the top talent for $98k/year unless you offer bonuses/incentives for exceptional performance and, more importantly, worryingly, give her the ability to reward those working for her for exceptional service.

        It might seem like I’m asking for more pay for civil servants, and I kind of am, but I’m well aware of all the potential issues of making the head of the Emergency Preparedness Office a $250k/yr position with $1 mil/yr in bonuses to award to top performers underneath her. It’s entirely possible that we could make those changes and end up even worse off thanks to corruption/nepotism/stupidity. To give her the money/power, you have to trust her to do the right thing, and at scale, that means you need a systemic way to make her incentives align with the public good. Which is really, really hard.

        I mean, most large companies have major bureaucratic problems and they have the dual advantages of being smaller than government and having one clear goal (profit). If even Google or Facebook accumulates bureaucratic cruft as they grow, what hope does the CA Dept of Public Health have?

        I concur that the current situation is really bad; civil servants are heavily insulated from any consequences for their actions, good or ill. But we’re stuck at a sub-optimal Schelling point for good reason: an effective government response would require greatly empowering bureaucrats that the public by and large doesn’t trust. You can’t just punish; no one with any talent will remain in a position where they only get punished, but offering rewards for performance is really, really difficult. I don’t see a good way out, especially not as the public ala Albatross keeps losing faith in the government.

        • albatross11 says:

          I don’t think there’s anything inevitable about having civil servants get paid poorly relative to similar people in the private sector–that’s a policy choice.

  13. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Depending on your age, how deadly does COVID-19 actually get if the health care system is slammed?
    What percentage of people who test positive even need a hospital bed? And don’t we have the labor and supplies (besides PPE, obviously) to treat such people in converted buildings and tent hospitals: indeed isn’t this what we always do during a bad flu season?
    When you see terrifying data like Italy’s, it includes numbers like “5% serious or critical”. Does that mean 5% of people who test positive need ICU care and 100% of that 5% would die without it, while the “mild” 95% are at no risk of death while the ICUs are slammed?

    • The Nybbler says:

      At all levels, SARS-CoV-2 appears to be age dependent. You are less likely to be infected (Diamond Princess data), less likely to have severe symptoms given infection (NYC data, because they’re only testing severe cases), less likely to be hospitalized given severe symptoms (NYC again), and less likely to die given hospitalization (Italy, NYC, Wuhan, Diamond Princess). I don’t have ICU data however (I think it exists for Diamond Princess). The weird one is developing symptoms at all; the Diamond Princess data show those between 20-50 are most likely to be symptomatic. This could be an artifact of some sort; there’s little other data on low-symptom or asymptomatic infections.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        At all levels, SARS-CoV-2 appears to be age dependent. You are less likely to be infected (Diamond Princess data),

        Let’s look at children and working-age adults in a worst-case scenario:
        Of the 347 passengers 20-29, 28 (8.07%) tested positive.
        Of the 428 passengers 30-39, 34 (7.94%) tested positive.
        Of the 334 passengers 40-49, 27 (8.08%) tested positive.
        Of the 398 passengers 50-59, 59 (14.82%) tested positive.

        Let’s be pessimistic and round to 8.08% at age 49 and under. That’s out of total population of ~71.7 million people 0-19 and 125 million age 20-49: 196.7 * 0.0808 = 15.89 million infections in a national petri dish.
        42.83 million Americans are 50-59, * 0.1482 = another 6.35 million infections.

        less likely to have severe symptoms (NYC data, because they’re only testing severe cases), less likely to be hospitalized (NYC again),

        OK so what are the rates here, if known?
        EDIT: I’ll just go by the 10-39 death rate of 0.2% of confirmed cases unless someone has better data:

        5.8 million infections 19 and under. Round to 1 in 1,000 children (through age 19) due to the minuscule number of deaths under age 10 = 5,800 deaths.
        125 million – 40.46 million = 84.54 adults 20-39. 6.83 million infections. 1 in 500 deaths = 13,662 deaths.
        3.269 million infections age 40-49 * 0.004 (twice as deadly) = 13,077 deaths.
        42.83 million * 0.1482 = 6.347 million infections, death rate rises to 1.3%, so 82,516 deaths.

        • The Nybbler says:

          NYC data is here. I’m currently waiting for food delivery and too hungry to do the math, but you can see it visually by clicking on the Cases/Hospitalizations/Deaths sliders under “Cases by age”. Note that “cases” are heavily biased towards those with severe symptoms, because that’s what they’re testing.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Turns out NYC has done the work for me.

          Percent of positive cases hospitalized by age group

          0-17: 9%
          18-44: 9%
          45-64: 22%
          65-74: 36%
          75+: 48%

  14. AlexanderTheGrand says:

    I’ve seen a lot about the incubation period of coronavirus being 2-14 days, from exposure to first symptoms.

    I would like to know, how long after symptoms does it hang around enough to be picked up by a pcr test from a throat/nose swab?

    I was sick with something in early march, recovered around 2 weeks ago. I’m trying to figure out, if I got tested today and was positive, how likely it’s residual. This is hypothetical by the way.

  15. Deiseach says:

    It’s Saturday of my third week working from home, how are you all holding up? It’s a little bit weird now I have to admit, I’m in that liminal state where it’s not exactly like a holiday (because I’m still getting and having to respond to work emails) but it’s not at all like work-working.

    Also, the weather has been extremely good for March/April so far, ordinarily it would be ‘rain rain rain’ but now that everyone has been confined to home or very limited routes, suddenly it’s blue skies and sunshine!

    Anyway, given that the real Grand National had to be called off, they’re running the Virtual Grand National instead, all betting proceeds to go to the NHS. I’m so lacking something better to do, I’ll be watching a fake horse race at 5:15 p.m. on ITV 🙂

    • HeelBearCub says:

      I’m a programmer for a company that already had strong support for the ability to WFH. My work is basically unchanged, except that we are doing emergency projects to try and help customers adapt to their own issues with responding to the outbreak. (I’m currently procrastinating on a P1 fix I need to get done by the end of the weekend).

      Which I will count as extremely fortunate. Otherwise I’d probably be going slowly more insane.

    • Nick says:

      Working from home? What’s working from home?

      Oh, right, that thing I could be doing if my damn employer had listened to me weeks ago when I said we need to prepare.

      Also, the weather has been extremely good for March/April so far, ordinarily it would be ‘rain rain rain’ but now that everyone has been confined to home or very limited routes, suddenly it’s blue skies and sunshine!

      Who knew climate change could be reversed so quickly. 😀

      • Deiseach says:

        When we get good weather while the kids are all still stuck in school it’s called “exam weather” (because it usually hits during the start of the national exams in June, and no, you can’t automatically expect June in Ireland to be sunny and dry!)

        This time around looks like we’re getting “corona weather” 🙂

    • Anteros says:

      Well, seeing as you ask… I’m doing splendidly, thanks. We live in the absolute middle of nowhere in rural France, so we’re pretty much unaffected by the bulk of the lockdown malarkey. It’s true we have to carry a signed form when we go to the shops saying ‘I’m going to the shops’ and another when we walk the dog, saying ‘ I’m walking the dog’, but it isn’t, honestly, that onerous. The kids think it’s hilarious and assume policemen must be idiots. Policemen being people I’ve not seen one single example of in the seven years I’ve lived here.

      My parents-in-law have decided it’s time to embark on numerous projects on their 7 acre plot and as they aren’t currently allowed to employ anyone to do the work, it’s all come our way. Not strictly legal, of course, but we see them every day and consider them part of our self-isolating family. It helps that my mother-in-law is just about the best cook in the world and so after pottering around in the morning on my quad bike or a tractor, or perhaps putting in some fence posts, I sit down to a two hour feast with my extended family. Sometimes there’s a bit more work in the afternoon, but often enough there’s a long sieste or the kids will persuade us oldies to spend some time on the trampoline or play parlour games.

      Speaking of kids, of course our children are home from school for a month or two, but miraculously they’ve discovered they actually like doing school work via the internet, have both learned to skype, and need precisely no chivvying along to keep up with their homework.

      Yes, I do feel somewhat guilty about it, and empathize with people stuck in small flats on the 23rd floor of a gruesome skyscraper, but really – what am I supposed to do to ameliorate their distress?

      How was the Grand National?

      • Deiseach says:

        How was the Grand National?

        Interesting! Would be fascinating to see if the real race turned out anything like the virtual race (the hot favourite only came in fourth). There was a real heart-stopping moment where at the second-last fence the horse in the lead was a faller – good amount of drama involved!

        Luckily I hadn’t bet on anything because my two picks were fallers/pulled up 🙂

        Surprisingly good fun, actually, and I could well envision a world where animal rights activists get horse racing banned so it’s all done virtually. I don’t think it’s very likely, but it’s certainly doable. Also a great way to hash out the kind of “who would win between X and Y?” disputes because they had a Classics race beforehand where all the previous winners raced, and Red Rum (a much-loved former champion) won that one (I do wonder if the programmers put their thumbs on the scales for that result, but I have no idea if so).

        • JayT says:

          There is a casino in Las Vegas that has a mechanical horse racing machine, and it’s by far the cheapest way to have a ton of fun in Vegas. It’s amazing how worked up people get about it with only a quarter on the line.

          • LesHapablap says:

            SIGMA DERBY! I used to play that at MGM back in the mid 2000s. We’d start playing and it would inevitably draw a crowd, such an incredibly fun game.

          • JayT says:

            The MGM has a new version of the Sigma Derby that was impressive because the horses aren’t on a track, so they jockey for position. It’s pretty cool, but then they went and ruined it by putting a CG version of the race on a TV above the track, and the TV was a second or two ahead of the actual track, so everyone just watches the TV. I haven’t been in over a year, so maybe that was fixed, but it really ruined the excitement of the race.

    • broblawsky says:

      I’m working from home 40% of the time and from the office 60% of the time; the blessing (and curse) of being in manufacturing. There are severe limits on the kind of work I can do from home, so I’m mostly just boning up on data science and neural network techniques.

    • Lambert says:

      I was expecting that Heath Roinson cartoon with the horse on the treadmil.

    • We are doing fine. My work is self-assigned, converting a couple of my books into audiobooks plus yard work, so staying in the house and yard is no problem. Most of my realspace socializing is with my wife and kids and we are all self-quarantining together, so that isn’t affected either. Most of my online socializing is here. I am thinking about going back to WoW, which I returned to when they brought out Classic and then dropped out of a month or two back.

      Today is my daughter’s birthday. Not being able to shop for presents was a minor inconvenience, but I think we have adequately dealt with it — no details provided since she may read this.

      So over all, things are pretty easy for us, although I do worry about friends.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Weather’s been crap (cold, rain, and sometimes cold and rain). Weather finally become OK today, but then I crashed one of my RC helicopters and another one malfunctioned and crashed. Then I got run off the field I was using. I’ve lost a huge chunk of my money and along with it any prospect to retire in the near future. Work goes on but it’s really hard to actually be motivated; it was hard already.

      But I’m not taking New Jersey Transit any more, so I got that going for me, which is nice.

    • I have been furloughed with 80% pay from my software development job, and have no work to do. Frankly I’m really enjoying this so far, because I like freedom. Obviously, I am a bit worried about whether my job or even my company will still be there after all of this is over.

      • AG says:

        I have been furloughed but get 0 pay unless I submit vacation time. I’ve sent an email to my supervisor making a case for why I’m a unique exception and should still get to WFH, but that’s unlikely, so I am planning to apply for unemployment.

    • Silverlock says:

      Doing fine, thanks, but some of my co-workers not so much. I work in IT at a regional healthcare provider in the American South, and we recently had to furlough/lay off several hundred (non-clinical) people.

      I had already been working from home one day a week anyway, so the switch to every day has been pretty easy. The main difference is that my wife and daughter are also home with me now. I do miss my lunch group, though; I have been lunching with them for many years now.

      • Would it work to lunch with them online — all of you in Zoom or something while you eat your separate lunches?

        • Silverlock says:

          We have thought of that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we start Skyping or Facetiming during lunchtime. Two of the group have been continuing to go in to the office, but I doubt that will remain the case for much longer.

    • John Schilling says:

      Now working from home roughly four and a half days a week, the remaining half-day being for things that can only be done in a classified environment. It’s going tolerably well, but there are definite losses in productivity. Collaboration isn’t as easy, which means there’s less of it. In particular, what was supposed to be a two-day workshop involving participants from several corporations, universities, and government agencies working together on a common problem, turned into a two-day teleconference that defaulted to one group presenting their work and future plans to only limited feedback. Also, it’s nearly impossible for the home office to be as distraction-free a proper workplace. And if that is partially compensated by the ability to slip back into work for e.g. an hour or two in the evening, that still goes against easy collaboration because it’s less likely that the collaborators will be working at the same time. Some major projects and operations are definitely being delayed by all of this, but not to the extent that e.g. you have to worry about GPS shutting down on you any time soon.

      No layoffs or pay cuts, and none expected, at least. The one part-time octogenarian in my section went to zero-time for the duration, but she was working more for social than economic purposes. Currently living with her adult son, doing well last time I talked to her. One possible coronavirus case in my team, more likely just flu but she and her husband went into full lockdown for two weeks and are now fine.

      Otherwise, my house is much cleaner and better organized than it was two months ago. I try to find an excuse to get out of the house once a day, if only for a walk, but that doesn’t always happen. Social interaction is basically limited to a few internet forums like this one, and a couple of people that I talk to on the phone every few days. There’s little danger of starvation or other physical harm if we have to keep this up until the FDA approves a vaccine, but I’d be a very grumpy misanthrope at the end of that process I should think.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      As a Marketing Coordinator at a Casino, there are some things I can do to work from home, but since we’ve been entirely shut down since March 13th, we pretty much ran through those tasks two weeks ago…

      …which is why I’m basically waiting to be unemployed. The company is trying hard to retain it’s employees, and as of the 10th will have paid hourly team members a full 3 weeks worth of full time pay for little to no actual work outside of our security and housekeeping staff. But in Ohio Gov. DeWine has extended the stay-at-home order through May 1st, and I am seriously concerned that something has to give.

      I can’t apply for unemployment until I’m actually unemployed, and I can’t commit to a new job when work still wants me on-call to WFH or to come in for physical work on-property Monday-To-Friday (This has only happened twice in three weeks, a few hours loading food bank trucks with basically whatever they wanted from our restaurants’ stores, and some basic planning on promotion rules and execution for May and June)…

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      I am holding up great, relatively. Exercise is a lot harder. I get out on a bike ride most days, something I had barely done for several months.

      My biggest hurdle is trying to hold other people up, both at my house and remotely. I’m an introvert but I’ve been making a point to reach out to old friends to do welfare checks. Emailing with my parents every day or two, and now Skyping with them every week.

    • DinoNerd says:

      I was first encouraged to work from home on Friday March 6. I went in to the office once or possibly twice after that, to collect equipment I expected to need. So I’m at the start of my 5th week, unless you count from the last time I went in.

      For the first week or so, many things were still open, and then we had first a country-wide, then a state-wide shutdown, and finally an enhanced county-wide list of things not to do.

      I’m climbing the walls, in spite of considering myself to be an introvert. Lack of exercise is not helping – I walk the dog once a day, and it’s just not enough. I’ve ordered an exercise bike online, and hope it gets here. (Amazon, Fedex, UPS etc. are still operating today, but what about next week, when it’s due to arrive?) I also have no idea how I’m going to find space for it.

      My housemate is laid off. My brother in law works for a company that was supposed to be prepared for WFH, but was not. One sister came down with some kind of probably-not-covid-19 bug, but recovered without testing, while her husband and his employer was adapting to WFH. My other sister had a household medical emergency – fortunately not her – an elderly housemate with dementia fell and broke her hip – during the crisis.

      My sisters (who live 1000s of miles away from each other and from me) and I are calling each other on the phone a lot, and I’m trying to coax the one who has a Mac to try out Facetime. I’m also facetiming with more local friends. And there are lots of video conferences with coworkers as well; blessedly IT had already rolled out something a lot better than Zoom, because we work at multiple sites worldwide, when we’re in the office; all they had to cope with was capacity problems.

      My household has been doing jigsaw puzzles together to cope with stress, and to find something to do for people at loose ends. There’s one on the dining room table right now. I’m thinking of dusting off my childhood Meccano (= Erector set) and building the biggest, most complex project I can find space for.

      Compared to average, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve got a single family house, with a yard. I’ve got money coming in, and a job. No one I care about has caught it, and the only person I know who may have caught it has recovered. And if I do catch it, my local hospitals don’t appear to be overwhelmed (yet?). But it’s very hard to feel that way.

      I had planned to retire at the end of this May. That’s not going to happen, and I’ve no idea when the situation will be stable enough for me to re-estimate when I’ll really be able to afford to retire, post financial crash. A close friend had already announced his retirement date (early April), and made all the arrangements, when the financial crash began – so couldn’t easily delay it. Now he’s officially retired. We haven’t discussed his financial situation, but I worry about him.

      Every time someone stops being visible for a few days – coworkers, bloggers, etc – I worry that they’ve either caught it, or are choosing some self destructive way of coping with their stress. (E.g. the colleague that already showed the signs of being a potential alcoholic.)

      The weird things is, I wasn’t remotely this stressed by 9/11, whereas most of the folks around me were visibly running off the rails. But this has turned out to be an unexpectedly huge emotional weight.

      I hope you are all doing much better than me, particularly emotionally. Either that or I hope we can wake up and discover this is all a very bad dream.

      • Am I right in remembering that you are a programmer? If so, perhaps instead of building something with Meccano, you could think of an idea for a program and make it. One of the neat things about programming is that you have the necessary tools for doing quite sophisticated work, given the needed skills, right on your on your desktop.

        If you were very lucky, you might even produce something other people would pay you for.

        • DinoNerd says:

          That’s correct, and if I’d been laid off, that’s probably what I’d be doing. But programming won’t get me out of this chair – and building big Meccano models would. (In my teens, I created an Eiffel Tower model that nearly reached the ceiling, and had to be built downstairs in a family room, because my bedroom was on the top floor where the ceilings were lower.) I don’t have the space for something that huge here, but could still manage something too big to be conveniently reached while sitting at a table.

          Probably what I should do is sort the heaps of junk that have accumulated in the decades we’ve been here. Except I doubt that goodwill is open to accept donations right now.

          • Probably what I should do is sort the heaps of junk that have accumulated in the decades we’ve been here. Except I doubt that goodwill is open to accept donations right now.

            Could you sort it into trash bags or big cardboard boxes or whatever of that sort you have, put it somewhere out of the way, possibly in your car, and plan to deliver it to Goodwill when that becomes possible?

          • johan_larson says:

            Or just throw it out. If no one wants something, even for free, it’s worthless. And it’s OK to throw out worthless stuff.

            If you feel unbearably guilty about throwing out serviceable goods, hold a virtual garage sale on Craigslist, with everything listed at rock-bottom prices, for pick-up only. Anything you still have at the end of a couple of weeks, can be thrown away.

      • Rebecca Friedman says:

        I know I don’t know you very well, but virtual hugs. This sounds really rough, and I’m sorry it’s hitting you this hard. Good luck finding space for the exercise bike!

        I assume you don’t garden? You mentioned having a yard, and – I usually only plant a few tomatoes, but this year I’ve spent a lot more time on gardening, and I’m finding it helps a lot. Pulling ivy (our principle weed) makes for a remarkable amount of exercise, and working outside in the fresh air seems to be good for my mood. I assume you’ve probably already thought of this/have no interest, but tossing it out just in case.

        (I have managed to make space in my room for dancing, so I’m fine. Bless whoever took all the Youtube videos, with their music at the right speed with the right number of repeats.)

        • DinoNerd says:

          Thank you.

          Gardening is definitely the kind of thing I need – outdoors, physical, and producing something tangible. Yet it hadn’t occurred to me at all. Clearly I need to be nudged to think my way out of the box.

          Gardening itself is probably not the right answer for me. My family thinks my thumbs are black, and they are close to right. More importantly, our household gardener is the one who got laid off. So I should probably leave that to her. But maybe she’d appreciate someone wielding a shovel to put in new raised beds or some such. (That’s probably about my fighting weight, for gardening.)

          In any case, you and David have now got me thinking outside of the box. Perhaps I’ll start cleaning out my garage – physical activity in itself, and a possible place to set up the exercise bike – or a place to put the stuff that’s currently blocking better exercise bike locations.

          • If you happen to have a lot of scrap wood around, or if you are willing to risk Home Depot (I’m not), you could build a raised bed for vegetables. I built two for Becca before we started the quarantine and would be happy to provide instructions.

            Her system, which I am sure she would be happy to describe for you, requires a lot of random dead plant material for the bottom layer — which reduced the yard’s decades long accumulation of cut up tree branches and the like by a lot, but may not be an option for you. And you need dirt as well. But it seems to work very well for the friend from whom Becca got the idea.

            A lot of what you can do depends on what happens to be in your house. I solved the Becca birthday present problem by making her jewelry, a ring and two pendants, but then I have a lapidary and jewelry making setup in my basement and enough rough to keep me busy for a very long time. Meccano aside, what do you have in your home that could be used for interesting projects? Cloth and a sewing machine? Nails, screws, wood, and carpentry tools? Paper and drawing implements — but that might leave you still in your chair.

            Any interest in cooking experiments? The SCA sometimes has “siege cooking” contests, where you are given a specified set of ingredients and asked to make something from them. This looks like the opportunity for a natural experiment along those lines.

          • Lambert says:

            My plan, before I unexpectedly needed to move to a house where the garden doesn’t get much light, was to put together a hydroponic system.

            Plan was some kind of flood/drain cultivation of vine/climbing plants controlled by and arduino in a waterproof junction box. The water level in the growing containers is usually low to let the roots absorb oxygen but it’s periodically flooded so they don’t dry out.

            Now I’m left with a bunch of coir I don’t know what to do with.

          • DinoNerd says:

            I’m cooking more than usual, but unfortunately that’s only brought me from approximately never to about once a week. Experiment number one, and its sequel (making soup from some of the leftovers) went well. Experiments 3 and 4 not so much; number 4 was supposed to be a stew, but I put in too many beets; adding sour cream and pretending it was supposed to be borscht is helping me get through the leftovers.

            It turned out that every single herb or spice I had in the house, or at least all those I’ve tried so far, are essentially flavourless from age. (I can still taste and smell other things, so it’s the spices, not me.) We did a grocery run today – might be the last one for a while – and I at least bought some black pepper, and a fresh ginger root, but no herbs etc. (We already had fresh garlic.)

            Experiment 5 looks like being fried liver and onions – something I’ve made successfully in the past. I’m ready for another success, after the last two meh results. So when I saw the liver today, I grabbed it.

            It would be good for me to do more of this, and my retirement plans included cooking more often. But it’ll take a bit of practice to get reliable results, unless I’m following a recipe exactly. (I used to be more competent, but that was well before I took my current job, and basically stopped cooking.)

          • Rebecca Friedman says:

            Do you have herbs in the garden? That can help. We are largely relying on ours for herbs, at the moment; we have some dried, but the sooner we can transition away from relying on those, the better. I’m mostly worried about chervil; we use it in spinach tarts, and while we have some in the ground, if it does well this will be the first time. I suppose if we need to, we can leave it out.

            Honestly, though, cooking without a recipe (or without one you know well) is a trick I still haven’t mastered myself; I tend to be about 50% on “will anyone but me eat this.” I’m compensating by buying lots of dry ingredients so as to be able to follow my recipes, and adjusting from known recipes if I can’t; don’t know if you have the ingredients (or recipes!) to make that work for you, but… nothing wrong with working from recipes.

          • Rebecca Friedman says:

            @ Lambert

            If you’re doing hydroponics, does it have to be in the dirt? I assume you don’t have a balcony/sunny bit of space inside by windows you don’t urgently need for anything else?

    • JayT says:

      Work wise, not much has changed. I normally did one of two days from home already, and my current job is fairly solitary. There have been a few times that it would have been a whole lot easier to go talk face to face with someone rather than trying to talk over Slack or Zoom. Overall though, it’s been fine.

      Socially, I’m actually hearing from friends more often than I did before the lockdown. All of my closest friends live in different cities from me, so it’s easy to go weeks at a tie without hearing from them since everyone has busy lives and families. Now though, everyone has their evenings pretty much free, so I’m chatting/Zooming/gaming with a bunch of my friends. That part of it has actually been a lot of fun.

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      Oddly, my life hasn’t really changed. I still go to the office every day (and will continue to do so, until forced to stop). I’d been sitting around at home when not at work for the past eight years and like it, so no change there. I’ve not really been socialising before lockdown, so I feel no urge to start now. On the bright side, the streets and public transport are nigh empty so the commute has become roughly ten times as enjoyable.

      Of course, things may soon change for the worse. I’m probably not first in line for redundancy, but if enough of our clients go bust, I’ll be out of a job. I do have sufficient savings to see us through for a couple of years, maybe (assuming no hyperinflation or other economic collapse, which may be optimistic), but I’d rather not dip into them too much, if I can help it.

    • albatross11 says:

      I’m working full time remotely. My wife had just returned to work after many years as a stay at home mom, and she got furloughed from her part-time job, with no guarantee of actually being called back. I think I could be more productive from home than in the office, except that home is full of distractions, and also I’ve had a hard time focusing on work when the world is on fire. The kids are mostly staying on-task w.r.t. online lessons, we’re all holding up OK, but we’re already sick of this and there’s probably a long time to go until it ends.

      • acymetric says:

        I am definitely more productive working from home, but I don’t really know how to present that to my employer because “I’m more productive working from home, can I work from home sometimes after this is over” sounds a lot like “I’m not as productive as I should be in the office.” I do really hope they start allowing at least some limited work from home opportunities after this is over.

        • Purplehermann says:

          Maybe frame it as “commute is tiring and wastes time, and my work from home is just as good” or similar?

      • JayT says:

        Work from home is interesting for me. I’m a software engineer, and I’m far more productive when doing individual contributor tasks at home, but when I’m doing management/architecture type work, being in the office is 100% better. So, I wish that my company was more flexible on this kind of thing. Their policy is one day per week at home, and my boss will usually let me get away with two if I ask him. But with the way work normally falls out, I would be better off doing five days at home some weeks and none others, and sometimes in between.

    • VoiceOfTheVoid says:

      Falling behind in my classes cause a virtual lecture just feels so much less…urgent than a lecture in physical meatspace.

      My dad taught me how to change a tire today–yay for learning basic life skills! And then made me do it 11 more times to swap out the snow tires with regular tires on our family’s cars.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Was WFH 60% of the time. Then the guy in the office next to me was isolated at home, so my wife said I need to be 100% WFH or stay at a hotel. So…I’m now 100% WFH.

      WFH is way better for my productivity, at least right now. We did a MASSIVE system change this year, which requires me to spend a lot of time monkeying around spreadsheets and crunching numbers. Basically ideal for WFH.

      Plus, no commute, which means a LOT more time to cook, and I can swap laundry and do a few dishes during downtime. So, overall, way better!

      Also, it looks like the Bulls are firing GarPax and the Bear got a new QB (along with a big improvement to our Defensive Front 7), so sports next year might not be totally terrible!

    • Randy M says:

      how are you all holding up?

      It’s not too bad, but it’s frustrating.
      My wife and daughters were visiting out of state friends when this started getting serious a few weeks ago. At first they were looking for a way back when the flight was cancelled… but then my wife got spooked, since, after chemo 8 years ago, she’s immunocompromised and the oncologist basically told her to make quite sure she doesn’t get this. Additionally, staying with the friends, my daughters have an acre of land and other people, so all in all we feel it’s better that they stay there while there is the quarantine and threat of illness more serious here (so. California) than there (Idaho).
      When my work shut down, I drove up there to shelter in place with them… only to have it reopen three days later having been classified as essential. We do make actual physical things, though not exactly everyday items–construction materials, basically. On the one hand, yay, paycheck and hint of normalacy… on the other hand, after a week vacation I flew back home, alone. I get to do bed time stories over the phone again.
      I can usually be content solitary, but the indeterminate nature and questionable value of the measures make the loneliness acute. You can be pretty sure your choices are rational, and yet be extremely frustrated at the large chance it’s all for naught, you know?

    • SamChevre says:

      Working from home is better than I expected. Admittedly, I made like Taffy and brought home everything* including my desk chair and dual monitors. I’m working as many hours as ever, but seeing my children more since I can take a 5 minute break and do something with them.

      We already homeschooled, so other than working at home not much has changed for us.

      *I got my manager’s permission

      • DinoNerd says:

        I wish I’d thought of bringing the desk chair. The one I have here is decent, but the office one is better. I did bring home a backpack full of misc. electronic paraphenalia, most of which I haven’t yet needed, just in case.

        • Matt M says:

          I went with my fiance to her office this weekend just to get her desk chair and bring it home. Not sure if your employer would allow you to do that or not, but hers had no objection to it.

          • DinoNerd says:

            At this point I need approval from a corporate VP just to go into the building. It seems like overkill, but apparantly we had people ignoring mere recommendations, and working at their usual desks every day.

          • albatross11 says:

            The problem here is that there’s an actual goal (drop R_0 through the floor) and then there’s a set of rules/laws/directives imposed from on high to try to accomplish that goal. But since the people issuing the directives don’t know your local conditions (and often they don’t really know what they’re doing themselves), the directives are often kind-of silly. I fervently hope that some smart people are working out sensible directives for when we end the hard shutdowns in favor of less stringent attempts to slow the spread of the virus.

            As it stands now, in principle at least, going to five different stores and wandering the aisles of each for half an hour is OK, but visiting a friend and standing 10 feet apart outside is not. The first one exposes you to many other people and the second exposes you to nobody, but it was easier to write the rules this way, so those are the rules we’ve been told to follow.

        • Aapje says:

          I got a 10-year-at-work gift, which I used to buy an Aeron for home. It was a very good decision.

        • CatCube says:

          The annoying thing for me is textbooks. Luckily we can go get stuff, we just need to let our Branch Chief know (only two levels up from me), and he’s really reasonable about it. Of course, we’ve not had the issue where people ignored the WFH guidelines. One guy bitterly complained, pointing out that if he was the only one here there was little risk, but dutifully packed up his desktop and all his monitors into his truck and took it home.

  16. Brassfjord says:

    How come people can’t separate “than” from “that” anymore? I’ve seen it several times in this thread alone.

    • Tarpitz says:

      Autocorrect, probably.

      • Brassfjord says:

        Why would autocorrect even try to correct either of these words, when it can’t understand the meaning of a sentence? That’s just sloppy programming.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          It’s correcting some misspelling. The original is neither “than” nor “that”.

          Likely typed on a small phone screen, so the misspelling is just down the vagaries of typing on a screen.

        • Tarpitz says:

          I used “autocorrect” in a loose and sloppy sense – what I really mean is predictive text. Someone typed “tha” and misclicked (mistapped?) or the words swapped round in the prediction bar as they added a letter, or something of that sort. It’s likely to be a smartphone-driven typo plus lack of proofreading, not a grammatical or linguistic misunderstanding.

    • Machine Interface says:

      If not autocorrect, both are particles that can introduce a subclause. “Than” is rather specialized and there would be not be much confusion in getting rid of it in favor of “that” — French actually uses the same word for “that”, “than” and “as”! So maybe it’s the beginning of a grammatical change that will swipe the English language — or maybe it’s a temporary trend that will die in the egg.

      • Brassfjord says:

        I react immediately when I see “that” instead of “than” (which is the most common mistake) because to me the meanings of the words aren’t even close.

    • Deiseach says:

      Could be some fumbling when typing, I’ve often hit “teh” instead of “the”. And I’m constantly seeing people spelling “rogue” as “rouge”.

  17. johan_larson says:

    The Canadian province of Ontario yesterday held a press conference where they presented the results of the models they are using to make policy decisions about how to fight COVID-19.

    The estimated death toll, in April:
    if nothing had been done: 6,000
    under current measures: 1,600
    under stricter measures: 200

    Their estimated death toll from the disease, in Ontario, over the next year or more: 3,000 to 15,000. Ontario has 14.7 million people.

    The government also announced further shutdowns:

    As of Saturday at 11:59 p.m. in Ontario, all industrial construction except critical infrastructure projects, such as hospitals and transit, must be halted, and no new residential construction will be allowed to begin, (the Premier) Mr. Ford said.

    But he said critical projects, including sewers, water infrastructure, hospitals and public transit, must continue, adding the province has hired 60 new inspectors to survey construction sites. He said 45,000 families have houses under construction, and can’t be left without a place to live.

    Other changes include: closing cannabis stores and moving sales to online-only; making hardware stores, pet and animal supply stores, office supply stores and safety supply stores curbside pick-up and delivery only; further limiting veterinary services and research services.

    So here in Ontario, you can still pick up booze in person, but you have to get your weed online.

    • Christophe Biocca says:

      PDF of slides

      Here’s something I see that’s suspicious, and maybe people who understand epidemiology can explain:

      I divided confirmed cases by population in that age range, and 0.0382% of people over 80 have tested positive for the virus, but only 0.0027% of people under 20 have (an order of magnitude + difference).
      Does that mean there’s something like ~1000 undiagnosed cases among the under-20 crowd? Or is my assumption that age doesn’t change your odds of catching the virus incorrect?

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Is Canada doing lots of testing of asymptomatic people? If not, we could easily see a magnitude difference of apparent incident rates based on what we know about who is most likely to be symptomatic (the 80 year olds).

      • The Nybbler says:

        Diamond Princess data argues for odds of catching the virus being age dependent.

        Of the 16 passengers under 10, 1 (6.25%) tested positive.
        Of the 23 passengers 10-19, 5 (21.74%) tested positive.
        Of the 347 passengers 20-29, 28 (8.07%) tested positive.
        Of the 428 passengers 30-39, 34 (7.94%) tested positive.
        Of the 334 passengers 40-49, 27 (8.08%) tested positive.
        Of the 398 passengers 50-59, 59 (14.82%) tested positive.
        Of the 923 passengers 60-69, 177 (19.18%) tested positive.
        Of the 1015 passengers 70-70, 234 (23.05%) tested positive.
        Of the 216 passengers 80-89, 54 (25%) tested positive.

        • noyann says:

          The data also support closing schools.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Of the 16 passengers under 10, 1 (6.25%) tested positive.
          Of the 23 passengers 10-19, 5 (21.74%) tested positive.
          Of the 347 passengers 20-29, 28 (8.07%) tested positive.

          Heh, then the numbers don’t come close to 21.74% again until age 60-69. Sample size artifacts!
          I also find it hilarious that there were 39 children aboard to 1938 people 60-79.

        • Matt M says:

          It’s a little crazy to me that these numbers are so low.

          People often joke about cruise ships being the worst possible scenario for disease spread. Phrases like “floating petri dish” have been in common usage well before COVID was even a thing.

          So how is it that >80% of the people onboard a floating petri dish with COVID on it managed to avoid catching it? If that can happen in the worst case scenario in terms of a lack of social distancing, why are we arresting people for surfing by themselves in the ocean because it’s “putting us all at risk?”

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            So how is it that >80% of the people onboard a floating petri dish with COVID on it managed to avoid catching it? If that can happen in the worst case scenario in terms of a lack of social distancing, why are we arresting people for surfing by themselves in the ocean because it’s “putting us all at risk?”

            We should really run numbers on how many people will die from letting everyone go back to work based on the petri dish data.

          • mfm32 says:

            Were the passengers tested only with a PCR test? I would assume so, given the timing. In that case, it’s possible there were others who where infected or exposed to the virus but mounted immune responses and did not have active infections when they were tested.

          • Matt M says:

            Were the passengers tested only with a PCR test? I would assume so, given the timing. In that case, it’s possible there were others who where infected or exposed to the virus but mounted immune responses and did not have active infections when they were tested.

            In practical terms, “they had the virus but never noticed it” doesn’t really seem that different/worse than “they never had the virus at all.”

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I think the reason for limited outbreak is that the ship went into a quarantine. It’s quite suboptimal to do it on a boat — especially if the crew is still moving about freely — but passengers were mostly confined to rooms and IIRC fed in their rooms.

          • mfm32 says:

            @Matt If the infection rate on the ship was higher than recorded, that’s actually really good news. “Had the virus but didn’t notice” is basically the best possible outcome, because it means you’re (very likely) immune. On the other hand, if the infection rate was as reported, we might still take caution because people might have avoided infection because of luck or unusually vigorous lockdown of the ship.

            That said, I remain a bit confused by some of the public advice and commentary that seems to imply simultaneously that R_0 is high, CFR is high, and the vast majority of people have not been infected and therefore are not immune. It seems hard to square all of those claims. I think this is related to the Nostalgebraist critique of the flattening curve post.

          • Matt M says:

            I remain a bit confused by some of the public advice and commentary that seems to imply simultaneously that R_0 is high, CFR is high, and the vast majority of people have not been infected and therefore are not immune. It seems hard to square all of those claims.

            Me as well.

            Something about this whole narrative doesn’t add up. I’m not saying the entire thing is a conspiracy, but as you say, among the threeor so assumptions needed to really freak out about this (R0 is high, fatality is high, most people not infected yet), it seems like at least one of them almost has to be false for the numbers we’re actually seeing in real life to make any sense at all.

        • Nick says:

          Do you think there’s anything going on with different behavior here? Like, it spread faster among the elderly because the elderly were mingling at scheduled events all day while the kids just went off to their cabins to play on their smartphones?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            There are often group social events for the 12-17 year olds, that even appeal to sullen teenagers.

            In fact, last time I was on a cruise with my oldest, he was in that age group and loved those social events, right until he came down with some sickness.

      • albatross11 says:

        If they’re testing based on symptoms/known contact, then I’d guess this is a biased sample. Lots more 80 year olds than 20 year olds show up at the hospital in a normal year with pneumonia, and nursing homes are a common place to get a visible case and then you might test everyone else in the nursing home.

  18. Clutzy says:

    Just saw a clip of a podcast where the Weinstein brothers were discussing how lab rats are a compromised sample for things like cancer and drug toxicity because lab conditions for breeding are nothing like the real world. I’ve always suspected rat studies ever since a Jr. Year Honors Neuroscience class I took where we exclusively read rat studies about various chemicals. And the cancer rat studies have always seemed a bit absurd.

    I am hoping someone with more than 3 years working in labs and hospitals as an undergrad can set me straight why this is not a disaster.

    • Byrel Mitchell says:

      This basically boils down to ‘all models are wrong, some models are useful.’ A mouse model for cancer particularly is a bit suspicious. Mice don’t develop the same types of cancers that humans do naturally, so it’s necessary to artificially trigger them. It wouldn’t be surprising if that affected the cancer behavior in some meaningful way.

      At the same time though, mouse models for cancer are much better than in vitro or proxy chemistry models (though more expensive) and worse than dog models (who are prone to the same sorts of cancers as humans and often have the same genes as risk factors, but are more expensive than mice.)

      Edit: I missed your request for minimum experience; I’m a research consultant for dog breeders, and I’ve done a literature review on canine genetics. A lot of the papers in that area are on the genetics of canine cancer, with an aim to select breeds with really high incidence rates of specific cancers that are nearly identical in dogs and humans so those breeds can be used as animal models for treatment. But I have no experience in labs as you requested.

  19. Everyone believes that rebelling against authority makes you cool but I don’t think that’s right. People like those who rebel against the “wrong” authority. Rebelling against the “right” authority makes you a monster. We’re just so used to this idea that people adopt the rebel aesthetic regardless of whether they are actually rebelling against the system or working with it.

    • Iago the Yerfdog says:

      Similarly, everybody tells you to stand up for what you believe in until it’s something they are strongly against. Then you’re just a trouble-maker. It’s a double-bind.

    • I want a grand political awakening where people stop using these universal slogans and actually admit they are for the things they find to be good and against the things they find to be bad. That would be nice.

      • noyann says:

        +1
        Defining your stance by the existence of an authority is merely catching up what in the terrible twos (and to some extent puberty) was insufficiently developed.
        Terrible twos: sense of self-efficacy.
        Puberty: realistic assessment of role/position in society.

        A remark about authority in general: I judge authority threefold:
        – Authority by competence — that’s evident (for examples cf. SSC). If they are curt or appear arrogant that’s often because they have more important things to do than enlighten me.
        – Authority by personality — someone you can trust to be rational/follow insights and act morally, in situations of stress or against their own profit. This authority often goes with charisma.
        – Authority by position — “the boss”. If not backed up by another type of authority it’s just someone you have to work around.

        • bullseye says:

          – Authority by personality — someone you can trust to be rational/follow insights and act morally, in situations of stress or against their own profit. This authority often goes with charisma.

          We should not trust charismatic people to act morally. Charisma is a great way to get away with immoral behavior.

      • HowardHolmes says:

        people…admit they are for the things they find to be good and against the things they find to be bad. That would be nice.

        Or: people admit that they define as good what they are for and define as bad what they are against.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        “I’m for things that are good, and against things that are bad” was my slogan on my campaign posters for senior class Treasurer. I won, too!

      • Baeraad says:

        I think that would be nice, actually, yes. I would very much like to see an end to people excluding others in the name of tolerance. This is not because I want everyone to be included. There are plenty of people who I don’t want within a thousand miles of me, and tolerance be damned. It’s just that the logical contradiction of it gives me a headache.

        Also, I think that if we all admitted that we are not trying to further “tolerance” but to push for our preferred values, then that would give us at least one thing in common with the people we disagreed with, since they were also trying to push for their preferred values. Which would make it a little more possible to empathise with them and see where they were coming from. Which might actually lead to just a little bit of… y’know… tolerance.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Related to Conquest’s First Law: Everyone’s conservative about what they know best.

    • eric23 says:

      As they say, you can go to a classroom and ask “Who here views themselves as a nonconformist?” and every single student raises their hand.

      • AG says:

        Can’t that be true, though? In a “normal is a social construction” sense, or in a “the distribution is wide” sense. Just because you’re within six sigma doesn’t mean that you aren’t away from the mean. Even in the heyday of melting pot America, you still have your Chinatowns and Little Italys and Jewish Quarters and such.

      • The Nybbler says:

        If you’re ever in a classroom where someone tries this, don’t raise your hand until everyone else does, then raise it. The questioner will likely quiz you on this, and you can explain that you’re actually a conformist but didn’t want to go against the group.

  20. Machine Interface says:

    The seasonal flu in Italy usually kills about 8,000 people a year, over a period of several months. Covid19 has already killed 184% of that, over a month and half, and is nowhere near done (still above +5% new deaths each day), and that’s with the extreme confinement measures. If that doesn’t convince someone, nothing will.

    • Subotai says:

      8,000 seems rather low to me. What is your source? This paper estimates an average of about 17,000 excess deaths per year attributable to influenza in Italy from 2013-17.

      I agree that COVID-19 is significantly more dangerous than the flu and I also expect many more people to die in the next few months. But based only on the number of deaths so far in Italy, it’s not yet worse than a bad flu season.

      • Machine Interface says:

        I googled “quante gente muore di influenza ogni anno” and got this page: https://www.epicentro.iss.it/influenza/sorveglianza-mortalita-influenza

        In short and in English, it explains the two ways the Italian healthcare system calculates flu victims. One is a statistical system where all deaths are comtabilized for a given period of time, then influenza deaths are “deduced” by removing all other causes of deaths based on know statistics. The other method consists of actual analysis of cases that reach hospitals and end up in deaths.

        It aknowledges that both methods probably miss a number of flu deaths, but concludes: “È grazie a queste metodologie che si arriva ad attribuire mediamente 8000 decessi per influenza e le sue complicanze ogni anno in Italia.”

        (“It’s through those methodologies that we can attribute an average of 8,000 deaths due to the flu and its complications each year in Italy.”)

        I’ve seen the repeated number that flu kills 10,000 each year in France, so 8,000 in Italy seem plausible to me based on population size differences, but maybe Italy has aggravating factors.

    • eigenmoon says:

      This article argues that official COVID-related figures are way too low. The province of Bergamo usually has 900 deaths in March but had 5600 deaths this March, of which only 2000 are officially counted as COVID deaths. If you agree with the article, it’s not 184% of that, it’s 522%.

  21. Le Maistre Chat says:

    I’m feeling scared about the Fed/Treasury’s bailouts and, secondarily, the $1200 AchooBI. How bad do y’all think inflation will get from increasing the money supply while GDP contracts 30% (apparently that’s annualized, so actually 10% if stay-at-home orders end forever after one quarter and like 50% if they last 18 months?)?

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Your question as phrased implies that you think GDP contracting is inflationary. That’s not what I would think is the standard take.

      The real issue as far as inflation isn’t GDP contracting, but rather the question of supply chains, which are under threat. But I wouldn’t think that would manifest as general inflationary pressure. The volatiles (like oil) are waaaaay down in price. Specific items with inelastic demand (like PPE in a pandemic) and supply chain problems will be more expensive, but I don’t believe that would look like general inflation. The demand for most non-essential goods will be way down, and that should reflect in low prices.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        The real issue as far as inflation isn’t GDP contracting, but rather the question of supply chains, which are under threat. But I wouldn’t think that would manifest as general inflationary pressure. The volatiles (like oil) are waaaaay down in price. Specific items with inelastic demand (like PPE in a pandemic) and supply chain problems will be more expensive, but I don’t believe that would look like general inflation. The demand for most non-essential goods will be way down, and that should reflect in low prices.

        This is all true. My concern was inflation in rent, health care, and consumer staples. However, the first two of those could be changed by government action, requiring sophisticated modeling of those market distortion effects rather than Econ 101 “more money chasing fewer goods reduces the purchasing power of each money unit.”

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Why would increasing the money supply would increase the price any of those things? An increase in monetary supply isn’t going to make more dollars directly available to people who pay for rent, healthcare or consumer staples (unless you think big banks are going to be speculating on those things, which, in the absence of some exogenous means of increasing demand by consumers, would seem to counter productive).

          Increasing monetary supply essentially just keeps credit flowing, preventing a credit shock in addition to everything else. In this instance, it is “inflationary” in the sense that it’s designed to prevent the deflation that comes from the sudden lack of money available to all of the consumers.

          New rent demand will be down (people who would enter the market will stay at home with their folks, or stay in their existing mortgage, because how are you going to sell your house right now) . Discretionary healthcare spending will be down (healthcare employment is, ironically, one of the hardest hit sectors of employment right now because of that sudden contraction in discretionary visits). Supply chain issues could potentially push staple prices up, but that’s relatively small potatoes compared to everything else).

          I mean, if we go into a full on crisis of staple supply chain, sure I could see huge price increases in those goods, but then I would think that monetary policy will be the least of our concerns. On the margin, increased money supply makes more credit available to support increased/changed production.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I mean, if we go into a full on crisis of staple supply chain, sure I could see huge price increases in those goods, but then I would think that monetary policy will be the least of our concerns. On the margin, increased money supply makes more credit available to support increased/changed production.

            Yeah, I’m updating toward “hoard food and hygiene supplies, do not hedge against inflation in portfolio, because it won’t be bad for other CPI elements.”

    • broblawsky says:

      I’ll bet you $100 CPI doesn’t peak over 5% any time this year.

    • nkurz says:

      It might be relevant how you are defining “inflation”. I was recently trying to learn how “Treasury Inflation Protected Securities” (TIPS) work, and whether they might be a good inflation hedge. They are a US Treasury bond that is indexed to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers (CPI-U). CPI-U splits urban residents’ expenses into a lot weighted categories, and then calculates how much the items in each category cost over time. Approximately, here are the big ones:

      Shelter: 33%
      Medical Care: 9%
      Food at home: 8%
      Food away from home: 6%
      Recreation: 6%
      Housing Fuels and Utilities: 5%
      Housing Furnishings: 4%
      Transportation Insurance and Maintenance: 4%
      Transportation New Vehicles: 4%
      Communication: 4%
      Education: 3%
      Apparel: 3%
      Personal care: 3%
      Transportation Motor Fuel: 3%
      Transportation Used Vehicles: 2%
      Transportation Other (Air, Public): 1%
      Alcohol: 1%
      Tobacco: 1%

      (Taken from from https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2016.pdf, quite possibly with errors, although I think it adds up to 100%)

      Looking at these, I don’t think a majority are going to go up enough to offset the ones that are going to go down. The dominating one is Shelter. Are urban rents going to go up in this crisis? Maybe, if the somehow the cities are able to reopen with jobs before rural areas, but it seems more likely that housing costs come down. What do you see going up enough to offset this?

      On the other hand, it does seem that many individual items are going to be in short supply. And you’d think that having a lot of newly printed dollars chasing a smaller number of goods would cause the price of these goods to go up a lot. But at least as officially calculated, apparently the cost of consumer items (not) on the shelves doesn’t seem to be a major driver of increasing inflation.

      (And I’d be interested to hear thoughts on whether TIPS are a useful diversification at this point.)

      • Creutzer says:

        At this point, the CPI-U is basically known to be manipulated to hell. Therefore, TIPS are not a good inflation hedge.

      • baconbits9 says:

        as nkurz mentions the dominant part of CPI is shelter, and the dominant part of shelter is owner equivalent rent (OER). OER is weird, but I am neither going to attack it or defend it here, but it seems unlikely that in the short term that OER will be increasing.

        The most likely cases that I can think of for OER increasing is in 1-2 years with a massive recession followed by defaults and many abandoned homes/buildings as evictions and bankruptcies cripple the housing stock along with very limited new construction. This could start pushing rents up as uncertainty prevents large scale investments into rehabbing and new construction. Or you could have massive government programs to put floors under rents (ie rental vouchers as part of a bailout) which hold rents stable in depressed areas while the limited places that do have jobs available see upward pressure in prices.

        One concept that I think is likely to be true is that higher interest rates (or rising interest rates) push up rents relative to nominal prices, and I don’t think we are getting higher interest rates any time soon.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Urban rents: we’re in a crisis where unemployment is expected to exceed its Great Depression peak, due to non-essential employers being shut down as part of stay-at-home laws. US Governors are declaring that renters don’t have to pay their rent on time and the money supply is being increased in the form of $1200 dollar checks per adult citizen and $600 per qualifying child. What happens if the mean person spends practically all of this new money on consumer staples, knowing that there’s no penalty for not paying May and June’s rent as well as April’s (this varies by state, but CA is already at 3-month deferral)?
        Though the US has more homeowners with mortgages than renters, and banks will demand clients’ AchooBI as mortgage payment, unless the government freezes that. And people with mortgages can no more be evicted than renters, and the gov’t now has a history of bailing out the banks…

        • The Nybbler says:

          You know who isn’t relaxing requirements for payments? Muncipalities with property tax payments. I suspect landlords and working-class homeowners are going to get squeezed.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            You know who isn’t relaxing requirements for payments? Muncipalities with property tax payments. I suspect landlords and working-class homeowners are going to get squeezed.

            Landlords are not politically sympathetic. That’s going to get interesting for middle-class people who chose to invest in a rental property instead of stocks and bonds.
            Working-class people who own rather than rent are sympathetic, especially in the new political climate. Watching us get squeezed will be even more interesting.

          • Matt M says:

            Roughly half of my property tax payment is supposedly specifically dedicated to schools.

            Which are closed.

            I’m sure they’ll be refunding that to me any day now, right?

  22. Le Maistre Chat says:

    University of Texas president addresses racist ‘zoombombing’

    (Published March 31, in case you’re thinking “Heman Sweat Center for Black Males” was some esoteric gay joke for April Fool’s.)

    • eyeballfrog says:

      At a large university where 4% of the students are black and, as Sutton points out, an even smaller percentage are black men

      This is such a weird way to say that UT has black women students.

      • Aapje says:

        Perhaps they want to avoid saying that black men are a minority compared to black women, to prevent making a claim that goes against the oppression hierarchy?

    • Tarpitz says:

      Could you give a brief synopsis for those of us who can’t read the article due to being in Europe?

      • gph says:

        A college organization based on supporting black male students moved their meetings to videoconferencing with zoom due to the pandemic, but they posted the link to the meeting in public places and didn’t password protect or otherwise screen who could join so inevitably racist trolls started joining the meeting and doing what they do. They quickly ended the meeting, promised they’d protect future meetings, and apologized profusely while condemning the trolls.

      • Aapje says:

        You can still read it by using archive.is

    • Deiseach says:

      Since I am a European citizen, the UT is protecting my delicate sensibilities by not letting me access the link (presumably they’re not in compliance with GDPR requirements).

      Looks like I’ll just have to look up what “racist zoombombing” is all by myself!

      EDIT: Have done so and it looks to be “idiots on the Internet taking the chance to be idiots on the Internet on new platforms”. I doubt that it’s a co-ordinated racist strike against the Black Male Students of the University of Texas and just the ordinary kind of “yelling insults and swearing online so funny hur hur”.

  23. Matt C says:

    Frozen food and preserved coronavirus: concerning or not?

    I assume that coronavirus can stay infectious a long time if it’s kept cold/frozen. I’m not worried about frozen foods that we bring home and cook, but what about things like frozen berries (probably picked by a person) that you wouldn’t normally cook? I’m reluctant to eat these now: have I gotten on the train to Crazy Town?

    Special case: what about ice cream? I’d expect that ice cream (from a grocery store carton) isn’t touched by people at all after it’s been sterilized/pasteurized and would be as safe as any other food, despite being frozen and not cooked. Since we eat it regularly I’d like to be sure I’m thinking correctly here.

  24. Papillon says:

    As an economics masters student, the debate about the field’s merit is a constant source of anxiety and confusion for me. Just take a look at the goodreads quotes page for ‘economists’; it seems like there’s a real contingent of smart people who believe economics has no value whatsoever (or even that it’s actively harmful). It’s come to the point where I have to make my mind up one way or the other on whether I’m wasting my time. If anyone would like to recommend works on this topic, or post their own thoughts, I would appreciate it greatly.

    • Part of what is going on is that economics leads to conclusions that many people don’t want to believe. People on the left don’t want to believe that increasing the minimum wage will result in more unskilled workers being unemployed, people on the right don’t want to believe that protective tariffs make the country that imposes them poorer. If you are very clever and understand economics, it’s sometimes possible to make a coherent argument against such a conclusion, as Card and Kruger did for the minimum wage case, but even then the conclusion is generally much more limited that what people want to believe.

      It’s much less work to claim that economics is bunk. Especially if you don’t understand it very well.

      • Loriot says:

        The other problem is that it’s really hard to actually get hard data or do controlled experiments at any meaningful scale. Which means for example that both the positions you mentioned are fiercely contested without conclusive evidence on either side. To some extent, economics is even anti-inductive.

        My dad is an economist and hence likes to tell economist jokes. One of his favorites goes as follows

        Student: We know how to lie with statistics, but how do you lie with economics?
        Teacher: Well, what is the difference between statistics and economics?
        Student: What?
        Teacher: For statistics, you need data.

        • My economics jokes are not about economics, they are jokes that teach economics.

          For example:

          One of the elephants in the Moscow zoo was coughing. The zoo keepers decided on the universal cure — a bucket of vodka.

          The next day that elephant was fine, but the other elephants were coughing.

          I don’t think my father had any jokes about economics.

        • noyann says:

          No lesson about hangover and its cures?

      • Aapje says:

        @DavidFriedman

        People on the left don’t want to believe that increasing the minimum wage will result in more unskilled workers being unemployed,

        They may not believe in your model with fixed level of skill, believing instead that those people can and should be upskilled.

        people on the right don’t want to believe that protective tariffs make the country that imposes them poorer.

        Again, those people may not believe in your model that just accounts for stable situation and they may care more about having domestic ability to make things when shit hits the fan and your trade partners suddenly stop wanting to trade, for whatever reason.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Or it could be that other people have different values than the economist they’re arguing with, and the economist treats their own values, like “make cheapest products” as if they’re universals, when they are not.

        • Except that what you describe is not the economist’s value.

          Insofar as there is a value implicit in the analysis of the effect of tariffs, it’s “people should get what they want,” made more precise in the definition of economic efficiency.

          • Aapje says:

            Economics has shown that people don’t have consistent and/or clear preferences, though.

            Economists often pick values that certain people see as important and/or which they can calculate, ignoring values of other people.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            But what if people want jobs, like in manufacturing plants? Should they get those?

          • Economists often pick values that certain people see as important and/or which they can calculate, ignoring values of other people.

            I have no idea what you are describing or what sort of economists you have in mind. An economic argument such as the argument for the inefficiency of tariffs doesn’t involve plugging in any particular values, merely assuming that values are reflected in choices.

          • But what if people want jobs, like in manufacturing plants? Should they get those?

            How much people want such jobs will be reflected in the wages they require to do them. If, at the wage at which the potential worker is indifferent between having the job and not having it, the value to consumers of what is being produced is less than the cost of producing it, then giving those workers what they want costs other people getting what they want. If cost and benefit are measured by what people are willing to pay or accept, the cost is greater than the benefit.

            I don’t know if you are familiar with the concept of economic efficiency, which has shown up off and on in these discussions. The simplest description is that it’s maximizing the total amount by which people get what they want where the problem of interpersonal comparison is solved by defining how much you want something by how much you are willing to pay for it.

            For a more detailed explanation I can point you at books.

      • eric23 says:

        People on the left don’t want to believe that increasing the minimum wage will result in more unskilled workers being unemployed, people on the right don’t want to believe that protective tariffs make the country that imposes them poorer.

        …and libertarians don’t want to believe that market failures are pervasive!

    • matthewravery says:

      Not sure if this is reassuring or not, but I studied econ in undergrad, found job prospects not to my liking and went to graduate school for statistics instead.

      If you’re asking whether there’s useful stuff to learn in econ for future employment, I think the answer is “yes”. The skills that’ll be most transferable to different jobs will be whatever you learn about econometrics and programming. There’s a lot of useful stuff to understand from econ (game theory, optimization, dynamic equilibria, etc.) that transfers well to generic “analyst”-type jobs as well.

      Whether the field of study has value as a science? Sure it does! Just not half so much as economists like to think! Keep the hubris down and adopt a stance of epistemic modesty and your studies will be as useful as anyone else’s.

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:

      my personal read on it is that people saw just how insanely large the influence of Keynes (and also Marx. and Marx was blatantly wrong!) was on policy as actually implemented, and decided it was way more economically efficient to subvert the entire discipline of economics than to buy politicians, in terms of “desired policies implemented per dollar spent”, and then that happened. Which means pretty much no economic thought since Keynes can be even remotely trusted. Huge parts of it was manufactured to order by think tanks with extremely overt agendas or written by professors sitting in chairs with explicitly political strings to their endowments.

      This is not a conspiracy theory, because none of this is hidden. The orgs doing this have web pages and proudly announce their goals.

      But it does explain why so very much ink has been spent trying to make up reasons to repeal things like inheritance taxes that have nearly zero dead weight costs. The people writing the justifications for this shit are simply not operating in good faith.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        The implied claim that people don’t change their behavior in response to inheritance taxes will raise a few eyebrows in the estate-planning business. Where are you getting that from?

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:

          oh, they will, when they are old, gray, and staring down the reaper. Hence the enormous spend on lobbying.
          The 24 year old who embarks on the empire building that creates the fortune their older self spends so much energy trying to turn into the foundation of an wealth oligarchy? Not so much.

          This is quite easily demonstrated by the fact that time periods and places with draconian inheritance taxes still had and have brisk business formation. Hell, the present legal regime in the US is in fact pretty darn bad, as far as that goes, both in a historical and an international comparison.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            None of which changes the fact that the resources expended on evading inheritance taxes are real resources that could be better used elsewhere. Since they have historically been levied at a high rate on a narrow base, inheritance taxes produce more deadweight loss than just about any other form of tax, in proportion to the meager amount of money they raise for the government.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            Inheritance taxes are, primarily, a political tool intended to limit the formation of an inherited aristocracy of wealth. That was explicit when they were introduced. Do you really, seriously, think this is a lesser concern in the present moment?

            The arguments against them dont occupy such a prominent place in economic debate because they are a major economic keystone, but because many, many present day economist are simply the lackeys of the rich, and are actively trying to facilitate inherited plutocracy. Perhaps not consciously (… I would not discount it, given the paleoconservatives and their reactionary thought) but simply because those who advance arguments which are convenient to the plutocracy get steady employment, while someone who formally proved that an inheritance tax of a 100 % was the economically optimal policy would thereafter find themselves obligated to monetize their python skills in some other field.

          • baconbits9 says:

            The 24 year old who embarks on the empire building that creates the fortune their older self spends so much energy trying to turn into the foundation of an wealth oligarchy? Not so much.

            This incorrectly assumes that all wealth in this manner is produced from scratch by a single entrepreneur within their lifetime.

          • John Schilling says:

            Inheritance taxes are, primarily, a political tool intended to limit the formation of an inherited aristocracy of wealth. That was explicit when they were introduced. Do you really, seriously, think this is a lesser concern in the present moment?

            Social, technological, and economic change would seem to be occurring at a greater rate than in the past, making it less likely that inherited wealth would translate into a powerful aristocracy. And a cursory examination of the currently wealthy, particularly those most commonly accused of being dangerously powerful plutocrats, suggests that inherited wealth is neither necessary nor sufficient for great economic power and may be a relatively minor part of the process.

            So, yes, seriously.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            … really? Uhm. Okaay. More limited question, then. Do you disagree this is such a focused topic essentially because it makes the patrons of economic think tanks happy?

          • ana53294 says:

            Inheritance taxes are, primarily, a political tool intended to limit the formation of an inherited aristocracy of wealth.

            Is this an explicit political goal? Is that the real, ultimate goal of inheritance taxes?

            Because if that is the goal, then there are other ways to do it, too. Like, enforce wills and let children get disowned. Apparently, it is not allowed to disinherit kids in the UK, Spain, and I’ve heard they have similar laws in France and Germany. Note that none of those countries have low inheritance taxes.

            If not allowing the creation of an aristocracy through the inheritance of fortunes, shouldn’t we be promoting parents’ ability to leave nothing to their kids? But every time this gets mentioned, it’s always taxes and never other ways to reduce rich people inheriting money.

            I find it interesting that out of all the things that could be done to reduce intergenerational money transfers, the ones that give the least liberty to the individual over what happens with their money after they die are used. It’s almost like the reduction of liberty were the goal.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            Forced heirship has the same goal, only with the built in assumption that the typical rich person has quite a few living children at the time of their death – because that was almost invariably the case when those laws were implemented. They disallow disinheriting, because they view disinheritance as a tool of passing a fortune on undivided to a preferred heir.

          • ana53294 says:

            If you want to avoid undivided inheritance, you could specify the maximum % of your fortune you could leave to your children.

            So, rather than force a parent to give 50% of their fortune to each of their two children, say that you can give a maximum of 1/number of children % to each child. In that case, a parent would be able to give 50% to each child, 50% to one child and the other 50% to charity, 40% to each child and the rest to charity, or 100% to charity, or whatever other combination they want.

            Those laws, as you say yourself, were made in a different era. Since then, many things have changed, the inheritance tax law was reformed multiple times, but interestingly, forced inheritance hasn’t. Even though nowadays, forced inheritance doesn’t lead to much dilution of a fortune, because people, even rich people, don’t tend to go beyond 1-2 kids.

            So, those who want to change inheritance tax right now – why focus on tax and not forced heirship? You could then have more Bill Gates like cases, which sounds like a great way to reduce inherited wealth aristocracies.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            Eh, if I were designing inheritance taxes, the implementation would be that you cant gift anyone more than 5 million (in anno 2000 euro) total, whether before or after your death. That would encourage the rich to toss that sum at their spawn early on where it might do some good if they inherited any real talent for entreprise, instead of having a billion land on a 67 year old who is certainly not going to do anything remotely interesting with it. If you dont want the state to take whatever is left over after that, find more people to throw 5 million gifts at.
            No eternity trusts, no entails. Money belongs in the hands of the living, not the dead.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            I jumped in to counter a particular claim: that inheritance taxes “have nearly zero dead weight costs”. If economists are correct in concluding that they don’t, I’m not particularly interested in Bulverist speculation about their motives for saying so.

          • Nornagest says:

            Eh, if I were designing inheritance taxes, the implementation would be that you cant gift anyone more than 5 million (in anno 2000 euro) total, whether before or after your death.

            That’s pretty much how gift and inheritance taxes already work in the US. The penalty after you hit the limit is about 50%, not 100%, but gifts do count towards inheritance limits. (You can choose to have them taxed immediately, but there aren’t many good reasons to.)

      • Guy in TN says:

        The deadweight costs argument is particularly amusing to me, because a simple application of the of the concept to government expenditures would imply that reducing taxes would also incurs a deadweight loss. But for some reason the Objective Rational Economist crowd never brings this up.

    • theredsheep says:

      Well, speaking for myself, I find the field fairly incomprehensible–full of jargon and marked by a tendency to speak of complex human group behaviors as though they were vectors in physics–and have no claim to expertise whatever. But it seems to me that:

      1. Economics is concerned with questions of money, which means questions of class and power, which means it’s intrinsically political.
      2. There are so many confounding factors involved in analysis of any given example that you could argue plausibly over what caused what until the heat death of the universe.
      3. While economic decision-making is a major part of public policy, few people feel competent to discuss it, or pay close attention to the nitty-gritty of it.
      4. It is very difficult to become a respected expert in economics without becoming in some way beholden to or shaped by wealthy people, either by working for a “think tank” or university or by spending many years being taught by those who are.

      When you add all these together, it’s hard to resist the temptation to assume that some unknowable but significant percentage of it is bullshit. Epistemic learned helplessness defaulting to cynicism. No, this is not healthy or productive, but it’s how I feel.

      • Well, speaking for myself, I find the field fairly incomprehensible–full of jargon and …

        Let me recommend a book to you.

      • 4. It is very difficult to become a respected expert in economics without becoming in some way beholden to or shaped by wealthy people, either by working for a “think tank” or university or by spending many years being taught by those who are.

        Insofar as that’s true of economics, it is equally true of other academic subjects. How then do you explain the observed fact that university professors are, on average, much farther left than the population?

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          @DavidFriedman: They’re beholden to left-wing wealthy people?
          Even publicly-funded universities also have endowments from woke capital. I got my Bachelor’s at U of Oregon, which gets a lot of money from the Knights of Nike fame.

        • theredsheep says:

          1 through 3 are doing most of the heavy lifting there. 4 is less relevant for other subjects because wealthy people’s interests in medicine, engineering, comp sci, literature, etc. are not all that different from middle-class or poor people’s interests in same. I don’t know about poli-sci, but I would expect that poli-sci professors are a lot less influential in actual politics (only so much you can do with a constitution and elections) than econ professors are in economics.

        • edmundgennings says:

          Variation on number 4 which I would be interested in feedback on
          The federal reserve and other central banks are important career wise and as sources of funding etc for professional economists. They are not the equivalent of darpa but important. However, central banks are important objects of study for economists and given the previous, economists will be loth to decree the existence of the fed. Hence we ought to be moderately more skeptical of central banks that the near unanimity of credible economists backing them would normally justify.

          • Hence we ought to be moderately more skeptical of central banks that the near unanimity of credible economists backing them would normally justify.

            I’m not sure that near unanimity exists. Most economists pay more attention to thinking within the framework of existing institutions than to recommending radical changes, but I don’t think it would be hard to find economics Nobelists who were in favor of abolishing the Fed.

          • edmundgennings says:

            Interesting, thank you

    • MisterA says:

      Economists in the US made a bunch of predictions about what would happen if we embraced global free trade, policy makers followed those predictions, and it turned out they got it so wrong that it pushed whole sections of the nation into deep, decades long descents into poverty so severe it’s reducing the average American lifespan.

      I think updating priors in favor of greater skepticism about the claims of economists is warranted.

    • Guy in TN says:

      Consider this hypothetical analogy: Oceanography is the scientific study of the ocean. In theory, no one should be against “oceanography”, assuming they value truth-seeking as a useful endeavor.

      But what if, for some reason, the vast majority of people who claimed to be “oceanographers” were operating on the assumption that you should catch as much fish as possible from the ocean? (This is a controversial position, because many members of the general public do not support removing all the fish from the ocean. These people do not usually go into the increasingly hostile field of Oceanography in this hypothetical) And what if every talking-head on television who claimed to be an “oceanographer” causally equated oceanography with fish-catching? And every Oceanography university class, textbook, and od-ed was oriented around the basis of maximizing fish-catch?

      (And they even create a website called OceanoLib, which is a collection of writings dedicated to maximizing fish-catch. The synonymy has become so rampant, that you can simply append the word “Ocean-” to your organization and we all intuitively understand what that stands for!)

      Of course, when cornered by someone rhetorically tenacious enough, they will admit that Oceanography does not technically require you to be in support of maximizing fish-catch, and of course its just an objective science. That doesn’t stop the 99/100 cases where people say “you just don’t understand Oceanography” in a debate to mean “you just don’t agree with my normative claims about fish-catching”.

      It should be no surprise that in this society, whatever percentage of people who are opposed to maximizing fish-catch, will quickly become roughly the same percentage of people who are opposed to “Oceanography” (despite oceanography supposedly being a value-neutral scientific tool that is useful for everyone)
      ——————————————————————
      The thing about economics is, there’s what it’s supposed to be (a science-based tool for analyzing how humans produce and use things) and what is quite often is (the advancement of normative political theories). In particular, “economics” has been nearly engulfed in synonymy with “people who think we should (note the normative here) maximize economic value/achieve economic efficiency”.

      I mean, how could anyone be against knowledge and understanding of the world, right? How could anyone be against science?

      Don’t operate with that level of naivete. You should know better than to study say, feminism, and think that the content of the coursework is going to be value-neutral on the subject. Or environmental science, if you aren’t interested in green politics.

      So don’t study economics in the United States unless you are interesting in advancing economic liberalism. And also, don’t be surprised or confused when you hear people who are against economic liberalism say they are against “economics”.

      • So don’t study economics in the United States unless you are interesting in advancing economic liberalism.

        One possible consequence of studying economics is that you conclude that economic liberalism — I assume you are using “liberal” in its 19th century (and current European) sense — is a good thing that should be advanced.

        If you are determined not to reach that conclusion, avoiding economics might be prudent.

      • Controls Freak says:

        Oceanography

        Why don’t you just go the whole way and directly refer to climate change damage science?

      • raw says:

        Oceanographers study the physics of the ocean and are not interested in fish ;-).
        Marine biologist on the other hand…

    • DinoNerd says:

      I’ve attempted to learn a bit of economics, and found it’s rather like learning theology. If I accept the writers’ premises, I can draw conclusions they’d agree with, so they are logical in that sense. But they generally make no attempt to demonstrate that their premisses accurately describe the real world.

      My other problem with economics is specific to macroeconomics. The premises of microeconomics are comparatively basic, and comparatively well accepted – kind of like religion 101 as taught to children. But Macroeconomics seems to have many sects, each with their own set of premises, that somehow fail to agree with each other, never mind agreeing with either my intuitions or my observations of the real world.

      But IMO the biggest problem with economics is that it’s actually about human behaviour, and nonetheless usually makes the assumption that humans are “rational” in ways that humans demonstrably are not, and that which farthermore often would not be to individuals’ advantage in the real world. I much happier with those within the discipline who actually study real people, with our biases, foibles, ignorance, and instincts. But I figure they have a long way to go before their predictions/recommendations have more value/accuracy than those of the local preacher or shaman.

      • But Macroeconomics seems to have many sects, each with their own set of premises, that somehow fail to agree with each other, never mind agreeing with either my intuitions or my observations of the real world.

        I like to describe a course in macro as a tour of either a cemetery or a construction site.

      • But IMO the biggest problem with economics is that it’s actually about human behaviour, and nonetheless usually makes the assumption that humans are “rational” in ways that humans demonstrably are not, and that which farthermore often would not be to individuals’ advantage in the real world.

        I don’t know what your definition of “rational” is, but mine, which I think corresponds to how other economists use the term, is that it means having objectives and tending to take the actions that best achieve them.

        I find it hard to see how that can not be to individuals’ advantage in the real world. Can you explain?

        • HeelBearCub says:

          See, here is that ambiguity.

          Earlier you strongly agreed that economics models people “as if” they take the actions most likely to lead to their desired objective because that produces the best models, even though people aren’t actually rational in that way.

          Now you are saying that this how people actually are. The “as if” has disappeared.

          • I didn’t say that is how people are. I said that is what “rational” means. You appeared to be saying that if people acted rationally, they would be worse off than if they did not act rationally, and I do not see how that can be true with my definition of “rational.”

            It isn’t that people are or are not rational in that way. People are sufficiently rational in that way sufficiently often so that it gives us a better way of predicting behavior than any alternative — where “I don’t know what they will do” does not count as an alternative.

            If we had a good way of predicting what irrational things people would do, a way that did not depend on the sort of detailed knowledge I have about myself, that would be even better. But, pace Kahneman, I don’t think we do.

            And “rational in that way” does not mean “get that result by rational thinking,” since that is only one of the possible mechanisms.

          • Aapje says:

            @DavidFriedman

            He didn’t say that people are better off without some level of rationality nor that rationality is more often harmful than not. HBC used the word ‘often,’ which is substantially weaker than mostly.

            Let me give an example. There is suggestive evidence that apps like Tinder may be a very poor way of finding a long term relationship, but have many features that make people feel like they are making progress to that goal, while simultaneously allowing a pleasurable level of safety, low investment, etc.

            So people may be better off in the long term if they are dissuaded from using it.

            Similarly, people may like to ‘hang out with’ outrageous vloggers more than the real life people they might befriend/hang out with, but they may be better off with real friends than faux friends.

            Similarly, people may prefer music therapy over chemotherapy, but if the science tells us that the latter works a lot better against cancer, they may be better off with the poison.

            So what is then a rational society? Is it one that allows individuals to make the choices they prefer? Is it one where experts choose it? A mix? What mix? It is one where we have a mythology/ideology/religion/whatever that shifts decision making in a way that many deem preferably in the long term? Etc.

            Economists often treat their preference as obvious, especially if they are libertarian, yet it isn’t obvious at all, given that people decided against libertarian society for much of history.

  25. Le Maistre Chat says:

    How should you respond to such talking points?

    “If it’s just a Spanish flu, bro, we’re in deep trouble.”

  26. Clutzy says:

    Depends on what you want to do. Everything they said is “not wrong.” And indeed, some of the things are true, and the hysteria is probably much too much. If you actually want to engage say something like, “diseases don’t scale linearly”, if a virus is just 5% more deadly and 5% more likely to spread, it doesn’t mean its on 5-10% worse, it could be 100% worse. ”

    IMO the post makes a good point on diagnoses vs. actual infected, but its ease of spreading is actually why C-19 is so dangerous. Its kill rate if it had a normal flu spreading rate would be pretty acceptable.

    • EchoChaos says:

      Its kill rate if it had a normal flu spreading rate would be pretty acceptable.

      No, it’s orders of magnitude more deadly than the average flu.

      H1N1 infected a third of Americans and killed 18,000 and was a pretty bad flu.

      That’s a ~0.01% fatality rate. COVID-19 is over a hundred times more lethal at the absolute minimum.

      • Clutzy says:

        H1N1 spread much more than your normal flu didn’t it? I don’t think the average flu infects 1/3 the US. Last year the estimate was 36-41 million infected. 360k deaths is a high estimate for C19’s lethality, but that is bad number, but pretty managable, particularly if it kept C-19’s kill spread.

        The fact that lots of people estimated 60%+ people would get it is the most concerning thing.

        • MisterA says:

          360k deaths is a high estimate for C19’s lethality

          No, that is a high estimate for C19’s lethality if you shut down the whole planet to stop its spread.

          The estimates if you treat it like the flu are in the millions.

          This thing is somewhere in the neighborhood of Spanish flu, not regular flavor.

        • Clutzy says:

          The thing is, no one would treat it like regular flu if a flue mutated to have a 1% kill probability. Everyone would be really good about handwashing etc. A 1% kill flu that spread as easily (not very) as most seasonal flus would be pretty easy to contain.

          And the reason corona is so bad is because normal procedures don’t work. People can be asymptomatic spreaders for over a week. Oftentimes tests will still come back negative even during that time. A particularly high kill flu would typically show a fever in 2-3 days.

        • The Nybbler says:

          A 1% kill flu that spread as easily (not very) as most seasonal flus would be pretty easy to contain.

          Flu is never contained, so I don’t see how you can say that. The last time we even tried to contain the flu was 2009; it failed.

      • gph says:

        >COVID-19 is over a hundred times more lethal at the absolute minimum.

        Eh, I wouldn’t be super shocked if a post-pandemic study found that a lot more cases went unnoticed as well as a lot more deaths being attributed to Covid-19 when another underlying issue was the main cause and Covid-19 was basically incidental and/or was only noticed because everyone is paying super close attention. I don’t know how a study could properly quantify all this, but I’d say my range on the true fatality rate is somewhere between .1% – 2%, only going higher because it spreads so fast and overwhelms the medical system. While I think you’re generally right, I’m not very confident in the data at this point given the general heterogeneity were seeing from different countries/regions to put 1% as the absolute minimum.

      • MereComments says:

        I think when this is all over the actual death rate for people who were infected is going to be significantly less that 1%, probably by an order of magnitude.

      • LesHapablap says:

        Most of the estimates I’ve seen have 1% as a maximum. The latest estimates from Italy are about .4% and that is with overwhelmed hospitals counting every infected patient who dies as a COVID death. (see notes on April 3rd here)

        Now, it may well be a useful ‘noble lie’ to keep claiming that there’s a 4% fatality rate to get people to stick with their lockdowns. But the problem there is if people actually believe it, then they demand their politicians overreact.

      • Anteros says:

        That’s a ~0.01% fatality rate. COVID-19 is over a hundred times more lethal at the absolute minimum.

        I think this is much too high.

        I’d like to hear people’s estimates, and perhaps we can revisit in a years time for bragging rights/to see who made a lucky guess. I’d suggest a range of a factor of two, and my WAG would be a lethality of between 0.2 and 0.4.

        I’d also guess that this correlates pretty well with whether people think the ‘cure is worse than the disease i.e those that think the death rate will end up being more than 1% will think all the lockdowns are worth it, and vice versa.

        However, my strong suspicion is that the feeling about the lockdown comes first for most people and the estimate for the death rate follows.

        • The Nybbler says:

          I’d guess just under 1%, maybe 0.8% to 1%.

          And yes, I think the lockdowns are not worth it.

          But I can’t base this on anything but intuition, VERY incomplete data (e.g. the Diamond Princess) and some qualitative reasoning. The models being promoted are known to be wrong (vastly overestimating spread for influenza), and the data’s crap anyway, so it’s worse that GIGO — it’s GIGGO, garbage into garbage, garbage out.

      • Matt M says:

        But the problem there is if people actually believe it, then they demand their politicians overreact.

        If?

        Bro, that ship has long since sailed…

  27. broblawsky says:

    Once someone postulates a sufficiently large and powerful conspiracy, their hypothesis becomes unfalsifiable. That’s about the time when I disengage.

    • EchoChaos says:

      +1

      For the most part, the answer to “how do I engage with a crazy conspiracy person?” is “don’t”

      • Brassfjord says:

        Good advice. But how do you decide who is a “crazy conspiracy person” and who has got valid points?

        • matkoniecz says:

          Note, I had limited exposure to this type of people. But I would list crazy conspiracy person indicators as including

          – ignoring evidence, ignoring and dismissal of valid crriticism
          – lower quality sources
          – self-contradictory and overly complex theory
          – overly certain that it is right
          – extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence
          – blatant lack of knowledge in some topic while claiming to be expert on it
          – lack of knowledge in relevant topic
          – history of being crazy conspiracy person

          Also, typically there are multiple things going at once. If someone believes in chemtrails I am not going to treat him/her seriously. Similarly forum where chemtrails are treated seriously would cause me to skip entire site.

          Note that “crazy conspiracy person” and “has got a valid points” is not fully disjoint.

      • eric23 says:

        You don’t reply with the hope of changing their mind.

        You reply with the hope of making them look stupid so that the other 100 people reading the debate later on won’t take their side.

        Sad but true.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      While I agree with the consensus that COVID-19 is exceptionally bad and warrants most or perhaps all of the exceptional responses we’ve seen, I don’t think Atlas’ author thinks this is a conspiracy, but a mass hysteria, which are different things. I don’t think he’s alleging a shadowy cabal is tricking everyone into thinking COVID-19 is bad. A mass hysteria is more of a weird artifact of human psychology. Like satanic daycare panics, or “the summer of the shark.” No one alleges a shadowy cabal of shark haters were out to fool everyone into thinking shark attacks were way up. It was a slow news cycle, one media outlet started reporting on shark attacks (which are usually ignored) and then another one did, and another one did, and pretty soon everyone thought the sharks were going crazy, even though there were fewer shark attacks and deaths that year than the year before when nobody had cared about shark attacks. The same thing could be going on here, but I don’t think it is.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        I haven’t read the the article linked by the OP, but Honcho makes a good general point here. “Jaws” is a fictional movie and some novel shark attacks in an area don’t warrant going “inverse Larry Vaughn”.

        On the other hand, that doesn’t mean a smart seagoing predator couldn’t prey on all the unsuspecting residents of some area. Even when that kind of behavior is unprecedented. (In this case, Orcas eating 1/3 of the seal population in a single canal, staying for weeks).

        Just make sure to apply this idea to the early coverage of Covid-19 that warned against the population treating it as a pandemic when it was wasn’t apparent that it was poised to become one.

  28. J Mann says:

    I think a chart of recent weekly or daily death rates by age group and country vs same time last year could be informative, unless it’s swamped by noise.

    • Evan Þ says:

      Last time I looked, European death statistics were reported on a long enough delay that we couldn’t (and wouldn’t expect to) see any difference in most places. I’m not sure if they would’ve become visible by now.

      • matkoniecz says:

        googled, unverified, not attempted to find raw data

        https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-04-01/italy-sees-fewer-coronavirus-deaths-on-wednesday-but-new-cases-grow

        Separate data from national statistics office ISTAT showed deaths in the north of Italy doubled in the first three weeks of March compared with the average during the same period between 2015 and 2019, reflecting the onset of coronavirus.

        In Bergamo, fatalities more than quadrupled, while they increased between two- and three-fold in several other Lombardy cities. In some small towns at the heart of the outbreak they were up 10-fold this year compared with 2019.

        found page, not looked at data: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/weekly-all-cause-mortality-surveillance-2019-to-2020

        • JayT says:

          That UK site is interesting. Looking at the first 12 weeks of this year in comparison to last, we aren’t really seeing any impact from COVID19, even though the UK has had over 4,000 deaths attributed to it.
          2019 / 2020
          10,955 / 12,254
          12,609 / 14,058
          11,860 / 12,990
          11,740 / 11,856
          11,297 / 11,612
          11,660 / 10,986
          11,824 / 10,944
          11,295 / 10,841
          11,044 / 10,816
          10,898 / 10,895
          10,567 / 11,019
          10,402 / 10,645

          This data is only for Britain and Wales, but that’s almost 90% of the UK’s population, so I don’t think that would make a huge difference.
          Did the UK have a particularly bad flu season last year? Are the COVID deaths being offset by a lower rate of accidental deaths (eg, fewer drivers means fewer car crashes)? Anyone have any thoughts on this?

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Two (of many) possibilities:
          – What would we expect those numbers to be based on known mortality rates. Note, the UK has a different population this year than last. I don’t know how much this difference should make, but it’s definitely in the realm of the possible.
          – How far forward in time do we expect to see revisions for a given weeks number? If revisions keep coming in for two months, you may look back at this data in May and see something quite different.

        • Del Cotter says:

          Britain and Wales”? WTF?

        • JayT says:

          Sorry, England and Wales.

  29. matkoniecz says:

    Ignore? Spending time on explaining why this specific arguments are unbelievably weak is unlikely to be effective. Especially as it seems to be constructed to be deliberately misleading.

    Or maybe reply with some of standard flu vs COVID effects.

  30. John Schilling says:

    With the most graphic descriptions I can find of treatment and triage at Italian hospitals.

  31. matkoniecz says:

    Probably everyone heard “your smartphone is faster than Apollo 11 Guidance computer”.

    Now the same can be said about some USB-C Chargers.

    See https://forrestheller.com/Apollo-11-Computer-vs-USB-C-chargers.html

    • John Schilling says:

      The Saturn/Apollo system at least had full manual reversion on all flight controls, allowing the entire mission to be flown with no computers at all if need be. The same cannot be said for the USB charger, I expect.

  32. Viliam says:

    I found this article comparing the corona virus situation in Slovakia and Indiana. According to author, there are many similarities — similar population size, similar distance to local corona virus hubs, the same day the virus appeared — but different reactions to the virus, possibly responsible for most of the differences in the outcome.

    For example: (btw, Google Translate seems quite competent these days)

    March 9 (Monday) [three days after corona virus first appeared locally]

    Slovakia — It is forbidden to organize any cultural and sporting events (including holy masses) in Slovakia. Almost all universities have already stopped teaching. Several regions closed secondary schools, Bratislava also elementary and nursery schools.

    Indiana — Nothing special is happening in Indiana. Just the Holy Masses stopped shaking hands and stopped drinking from the chalice (which has been done at almost every Holy Mass so far). All my roommates are on holiday.

    Not sure how much the situation is really comparable, but… I admit that from my perspective, the situation in USA seems quite insane. (Well, the local situation is also quite crazy: one day the government is telling you that face masks are useless, two weeks later wearing the face masks is mandatory for everyone.)

    • eric23 says:

      Right now Indiana has 4411 confirmed cases, 127 deaths. Slovakia has 485 cases, 1 death.

      Seems clear which approach is working…

    • JayT says:

      I know very little about Slovakia, but Indianapolis (the capital and largest city of Indiana) is about twice the size of Bratislava, and Indianapolis’ metro is more than three times as large. Most of Indiana’s cases are in the Indianapolis area, so how much of this difference is due to policies and how much is due to the size of the population centers?

  33. Matt M says:

    I think we have a lot of people here who follow goings-on in the DoD relatively closely.

    Anyone care to give a quick high-level summary of what exactly is going on with the USS Theodore Roosevelt?

    • sp1 says:

      (Note: I’m fairly well informed on this, including having a friend who is on the TR, but may get some of the details wrong. Mea culpa if so.)

      High level: CO wrote a message to his superiors about the situation / ship’s readiness with a recommendation to offload the crew in Guam, included other recipients on the message, and one of those recipients allegedly leaked the message to the San Francisco Chronicle. The CO is from the San Francisco area. CO was fired for revealing operational information in an unclassified setting and either intentionally directing it to leak or not caring that one of the many recipients might do so.
      (Another quick edit: The DoD said after the letter was published that they’d already been working to quarantine the crew in Guam. So the strong implication is that the CO had been communicating with higher authorities, the problem was already being worked on, and then he decided to write and allegedly help leak a formal letter dealing with the same thing they were already dealing with. He most likely did so because things were moving slower than he would like or he was getting some sort of pushback. Please note the speculative nature of the previous sentence, I have no insider information about his motivations.)

      The big question is was it unjust?
      Argument for yes: He was a patriot putting the lives of his sailors ahead of his own career prospects and boldly standing up to Trump / higher Navy / the DoD. This letter can’t be considered outside the backdrop of the McCain and Fitzgerald incidents a few years ago. A big contributing factor in both cases was a culture in the Pacific Fleet where COs didn’t feel that they could speak up when their ships weren’t ready to deploy for either manning or equipment reasons. If they did they were ignored or punished. Now the CO of an aircraft carrier raises a similar alarm about a literal pandemic and gets canned? Shame all around, Trump doesn’t care about enlisted people, DoD out of touch, etc.

      Argument for no: Are you joking? The CO of an aircraft carrier publicly revealed that his ship isn’t in shape to fight (never mind that his letter stated they would deploy and fight if necessary, we all know what he was saying) and recommends most of the crew be offloaded because he’s panicking over basically a flu outbreak? This isn’t a cruise ship filled with old people who want to get out of their Ohio nursing home to see a sunset over the ocean before they die in six months, these are largely young and healthy people who could have fought it off. Diseases run rampant on ships all the time. That’s not a good reason to flagrantly violate the chain of command, operational secrecy, etc. so that he could get great PR or use a newspaper to pressure the Navy. (EDIT: I forgot another component of this argument. Lots of commands across all the branches have people testing positive for the virus. If DoD didn’t firmly shut down leakers immediately then more COs might think it’s alright to take their concerns to the press. Bad for the chain of command, bad for possibly causing a panic, bad for revealing our weaknesses and emboldening Cuba to invade or something.) Unfit for command, disgrace to the uniform, etc.

      • albatross11 says:

        If you punish people for giving you bad news, you won’t get any bad news. That’s great for avoiding the stress of receiving bad news, but there’s occasionally a tiny little downside….

        • EchoChaos says:

          Note that the problem is not that he gave bad news, but that he let it out into the press.

          This is a funky one because the lines cut pretty unusually in the Red tribe circles, and I’ve seen both people praising him and people furious at him. This isn’t one where we have a consensus.

          I tend to fall on the “argument for no” side, but this isn’t obvious.

          • Matt M says:

            FWIW, I’m ex-Navy and still have a handful of veterans (and some still on active duty) on Facebook, and the reaction I’ve seen so far is 100% in support of the CO.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Matt M

            Indeed, all my ex-Navy friends have been in support of the CO, although the general consensus is “he had to be fired for this, but he sacrificed his career for his men, what a hero”.

            The non-Navy vets (especially Army, but even some AF) are a lot harsher and believe that this should’ve been handled better given the intel it gave our adversaries.

            Good example of the latter on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KurtSchlichter

            Kurt is a retired Army O-6, so he was a rough equivalent and understands command.

          • sp1 says:

            Yes, from what I’ve heard the crew is generally behind the CO. Especially on the enlisted side, if only because of the surprise that someone above 0-3 was willing to take a chance with their career for the sailors’ well being. As I noted and John Schilling expanded on in his excellent post, the Seventh Fleet has had a real problem with operational tempo for a long time.
            I also lean toward the firing being the correct thing to do but he’s going to be very well liked because of it. My very cynical take is that he’ll use this as a plank when he runs for office somewhere in the next ~3 years.

      • Matt M says:

        Do you have any sense of how bad the situation on the ship actually was? Was this a full on outbreak, a few isolated cases, entirely panic driven?

        Do Navy ships have the capability to test for COVID? Any ventilators at all?

        How was morale? Was the crew actually fearful of the disease or not really?

        • sp1 says:

          Not exactly. There were more than a few cases but it’s not like people were dying in the passageways.
          I doubt most of the junior crew was taking it that seriously because young sailors don’t tend to take a lot seriously.
          There was a medical team onboard that could provide testing but I don’t know the full capability of their sickbay. They would have also had the option to offload anyone sick enough to need ventilation.

        • John Schilling says:

          I’m pretty certain anyone who needs a ventilator, or even “just” an ICU bed, is going to get one, on the ship or off. The problem is the 90% who are only mildly symptomatic and are being told “suck it up; you still need to work 100 hours a week to maintain mission readiness”. In very close quarters with four thousand other potential victims. And the most Crozier could have informally done for them was to send them to their nearly-as-crowded messes and berths – while asking five other people to step up and work 120-hour weeks to cover for them.

          I suppose when the ship is divided between the uninfected working 168-hour weeks, and the infected who are the only occupants of the berthing areas, the problem solves itself. But that just sets us up for a weird inversion of the traditional zombie movie, where the infected few are defending themselves from the ravenous uninfected hordes driven to homicidal insanity by sleep deprivation.

          • Garrett says:

            How much of that 100 hours/week as actually necessary and how much is it work to keep the men too busy to get into trouble?

      • GreatColdDistance says:

        No substantive response here, just want to say that I really like this comment both in content and format, does a really good job of summarising both arguments and I’m still left slightly uncertain how you really feel about it.

        • sp1 says:

          Thanks. I wanted to try to be fair to both sides, which was easier than normal because I’m also uncertain. I lean towards the firing being necessary but if more information came to light I could easily switch sides.

      • matthewravery says:

        The Bayesian argument is that, unless this guy is a total moron, he strongly believed that if he didn’t leak the letter (he clearly wanted it public), the Navy wouldn’t act quickly enough to save lives of his sailors.

        As to whether he was correct that the Navy wouldn’t act quickly enough and sailors would die, IDK, but he obviously thought that was the case.

        Whether it’s generally good for Navy captains to be in the habit of making calls like this, well, it’s a double-edged sword. All of our armed forces pride themselves on the ability of their leaders to think autonomously and generally put trust in them to do so, but orders also need to be followed.

        The observed result (Captain makes the correct decision for his ship and Sailors and is relieved of command) is unsatisfying but probably optimal. He might still get to retire as a flag (though I really doubt he’ll command as one) and regardless he’ll get plenty of opportunities to be a well-paid consultant. This is important, since it’s in the Navy’s interest to keep producing officers willing to sacrifice their careers for the benefit of their ship and crew.

    • John Schilling says:

      Probably the most important thing is that the USS Theodore Roosevelt (now presumably renicknamed the “Big Sick”) is an aircraft carrier assigned to the US Seventh Fleet. The Seventh Fleet has achieved notoriety the past few years for being so very, very focused on its very, very important missions that it somehow forgot that expecting every man to give 110% to the cause is not meant to be taken literally. Sailors are regularly working 100+ hour weeks and going days without sleep, ships are going to sea with critical systems inoperative because maintenance has been deferred for years, and this has resulted in several highprofile incidents. And while the Navy has tried to implement reforms, these may have done more harm than good – “look, here’s more work for us to do, but we can’t slack off on the very, very important missions we already have!”

      So, as of March 20, the Seventh Fleet was doing pretty good on the coronavirus front, but as a precaution put enhanced medical teams on several of its ships including the Roosevelt to conduct testing and other preventative activities.

      The first confirmed cases were reported four days later. By the end of the month, the total was over 100 out of the 4000+ men and women aboard. The ship was at this point docked at Guam, but the crew remained aboard to maintain mission readiness. At that point the Roosevelt’s Captain, Brett Crozier, sent an open letter to the Department of the Navy indicating that it was impossible for him to adhere to the prescribed isolation requirements, that maintaining the ship in a mission-capable status would inevitably result in crew fatalities, and asking for the ship to be evacuated and decontaminated. This was apparently done two days later.

      The open letter had by then leaked outside of Navy circles and into the media, which was predictable and probably intentional on Crozier’s part. He was, predictably, relieved of command for having unprofessionally circumvented the chain of command and making the navy look bad. Seriously, Navy leadership barely tried to conceal the “he made us look bad” part, because they’ve apparently never heard of the Streisand effect.

      If the open letter really was Crozier’s first communication to the Navy that there was a problem that would impair mission readiness, then he was indeed unprofessional, and extremely stupid. If instead he had made prior requests through channels and received the usual 7th fleet “Shut up and maintain 110% mission readiness, but here’s some extra stuff for you to do now” response, this may have been a deliberate decision to sacrifice his own career to save the lives of some of his men. His men do seem to appreciate the decision.

      Over the weekend, the Venezuelan Navy had one of their warships literally sunk in a battle with an unarmed cruise ship. But the men of the Armada Bolivariana de Venezuela can still hold their heads high and say “At least we’re not the 7th fleet”.

      • EchoChaos says:

        Over the weekend, the Venezuelan Navy had one of their warships literally sunk in a battle with an unarmed cruise ship. But the men of the Armada Bolivariana de Venezuela can still hold their heads high and say “At least we’re not the 7th fleet”.

        Speaking of which, is this not the weirdest story to ever somehow not be front-page news?

        When I saw it yesterday I had to doublecheck that it wasn’t a weird April Fools joke.

        • matkoniecz says:

          I was waiting until today before mentioning it to anyone because I was sure that it was an elaborate joke.

          • John Schilling says:

            No joke, but the cruise ship was the RCGS Resolute, so maybe some nominative determinism at work.

          • Matt M says:

            I also think I read that the cruise ship in question typically visited Antarctica, and as such, was equipped with a reinforced hull (necessary for icebreaking), which is why it was able to withstand this (the implication being that your average cruise ship may have been not as fortunate).

          • John Schilling says:

            From post-impact photos and descriptions of the sinking, it looks like Resolute put her bow into Naiguata’s side at least once. That would have turned her reinforced, bulbous bow into something like a proper ram. And I have to wonder whether that may have been a deliberate action by Resolute’s master, steering into the collision to decisively end the confrontation rather than have his ship sunk or his crew imprisoned in a Venezuelan stockade.

            Would be most impolitic for him to ever admit that, of course.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I also think I read that the cruise ship in question typically visited Antarctica, and as such, was equipped with a reinforced hull (necessary for icebreaking), which is why it was able to withstand this (the implication being that your average cruise ship may have been not as fortunate).

            One of the few pleasure vessels in the world capable of sending either a Venezuelan warship or Cthulhu to the bottom by ramming.

          • Lambert says:

            I thought Antarctica was full of Shoggoths, not Cthulhu.

          • matkoniecz says:

            And I have to wonder whether that may have been a deliberate action by Resolute’s master, steering into the collision to decisively end the confrontation rather than have his ship sunk or his crew imprisoned in a Venezuelan stockade.

            Would be most impolitic for him to ever admit that, of course.

            I was thinking that this specific warship was just unreasonably unlucky, what was combined with incompetence and not using full firepower.

            This would make it even more interesting.

            I wonder what are other cases of civilian machinery/tools used to overcome attacking war machinery. With exception of civilian explosives, that would be too easy.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Lambert: Was the Resolute actually in the Antarctic when it sank a warship? If so, yeah, it’s for sinking shoggoths instead.

          • bullseye says:

            I looked up some news articles on this, and the cruise ship did not ram the naval vessel. The cruise ship just sat there and did nothing while the naval vessel rammed it. “The navy vessel continued to ram the starboard bow in an apparent attempt to turn the ship’s head towards Venezuelan territorial waters.”

          • John Schilling says:

            @Lambert: Was the Resolute actually in the Antarctic when it sank a warship?

            I told you, we’re doing nominative determinism here. And as it turns out, the Venezuelans have accused Resolute’s captain and crew of Piracy.

            You may therefore correctly surmise that she was in fact in the Caribbean at the time, and more precisely fifteen miles off Tortuga. Well, a Tortuga, if not the most famous one.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            So they couldn’t ram Cthulhu but they could ram this guy.

          • John Schilling says:

            So, if they need to rename Resolute to avoid further entanglements with the Venezuelan government, what’s Portugese for “Black Pearl”? Seems like there might be a marketing opportunity here.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            @matkoniecz:

            I wonder what are other cases of civilian machinery/tools used to overcome attacking war machinery.

            During WW1 it was a fairly standard tactic for Allied merchant ships to attempt to ram and sink German U-boats if they saw one surfaced. WW1 U-boats normally operated on the surface, and didn’t always bother to dive to attack merchant ships- sometimes they would stay surfaced and use their deck gun to save torpedoes.

            I can find 4 incidents of WW1 U-boats rammed and sunk by British merchant ships (though one of these was the RMS Olympic, a liner operating as a Naval troopship), one rammed and sunk by a French merchant ship, and one rammed by an armed British merchant ship then sunk by gunfire.

      • Matt M says:

        Thanks John. I suspected you’d be someone able to deliver something like this.

        I saw the videos on FB, posted by a lot of my Navy veteran former colleagues. I’m definitely sympathetic to the CO.

        In theory I understand the argument that he has publicly exposed the (un)readiness of a major military asset to our potential adversaries… but give me a freaking break, do we really think China is about to invade Guam during all this?

        If COVID is serious enough to shut down 75% of the US economy, it’s serious enough to park one of our 12 (?) aircraft carriers for a month, is it not?

        • The Nybbler says:

          but give me a freaking break, do we really think China is about to invade Guam during all this?

          If China thought they could take advantage of this to take some territory, they would. It wouldn’t be Guam; more likely somewhere to the west-northwest.

        • salvorhardin says:

          For me, as a less military-adjacent observer, the extraordinary and telling thing is that Trump went to great lengths to protect Eddie Gallagher from punishment but bestowed no clemency whatever on Crozier. There may be a code of ethics according to which both of those decisions are correct, but it is difficult to imagine how that code of ethics could be called decent or civilized.

          • Anteros says:

            ‘Trump’ + ‘code of ethics’
            ?

          • Matt M says:

            This is a really poor comparison.

            The only punishment so far that Crozier has faced is being removed from command. Now that’s not nothing, his career is probably over, etc. But he hasn’t been formally disciplined (isn’t being forced out or reduced in rank or threatened with prison), as far as I can tell the Navy isn’t planning on doing any of that, his retirement is still safe, etc.

            Gallagher was facing all of that. And after months (years?) of lobbying by various people, Trump basically got his punishment reduced to… losing his job and his career being over. So, same as what Crozier is facing now.

            The Navy is getting rid of Crozier, but they aren’t throwing the book at him or trying to “make an example of him” the way they did Gallagher.

        • LesHapablap says:

          In theory I understand the argument that he has publicly exposed the (un)readiness of a major military asset to our potential adversaries… but give me a freaking break, do we really think China is about to invade Guam during all this?

          It would be terribly unsporting, wouldn’t it!

          I heard they were taking over more islands, but that could have just been facebook trash

      • bean says:

        Roosevelt isn’t quite Seventh Fleet. She’s homeported at NAS North Island, and normally part of Third Fleet, but was chopped to Seventh Fleet as part of her deployment to WestPac. So the culture isn’t quite as toxic, although it’s still pretty bad.

        Overall, I’m with sp1 on this. Can’t quite make up my mind on what’s the right thing here.

        • John Schilling says:

          I think the important part, organizationally, is that the people deciding whether Roosevelt is allowed to put her crew ashore for isolation on Guam were 7th Fleet brass. That’s where the cultural toxicity matters.

      • Garrett says:

        Given the typical young age and good health of those in the military, what are the odds of permanent injury or death for the sailors onboard the ship?

      • Deiseach says:

        Over the weekend, the Venezuelan Navy had one of their warships literally sunk in a battle with an unarmed cruise ship.

        I had to look that story up, and it just gets better and better.

        I thought ramming as a naval tactic had gone out with the Romans?

        It looks like there may be deeper roots to the whole thing, given that Colombia and Venezuela are at each others’ throats and with rebels on both sides of the border running rampant, so the accusation of “transporting mercenaries to attack military bases in Venezuela” might not in fact be completely pulled out of the air, if ostensibly civilian ships have indeed been engaged in gun-running or the likes.

        But it’s still a very bad result for the Venezuelan navy!

  34. fion says:

    Does anybody know why the UK has so few COVID-19 recoveries?

    From this link (at the time of posting), the UK has had 3605 deaths and 135 recoveries. In other words, 96% of closed cases ended in death. My best guess is that the UK takes much longer than other countries to declare a case “closed” when it ends in recovery, but I’d be grateful if anybody either knows this for a fact or knows of an alternative explanation. For context, other countries have:
    Italy: 43%
    Spain: 26%
    Germany: 5%
    France: 30%
    Iran: 16%
    Turkey: 47%
    (All stats from the same site as the UK ones.)
    So what’s going on?

    • noyann says:

      Selection bias. The more folks are tested, (e.g. Germany), the more quick/easy cases are caught and enter the statistics, and the lower the death rate appears.

      ETA: that does not rule out other factors, of course.

      • fion says:

        Does this imply that the UK is doing far fewer tests than other countries were when they were at a similar point in their outbreaks? Like an order of magnitude less? I would be surprised if this was even the main factor.

        • noyann says:

          Less testing tends to go with more severe illness in tested population, because the tests are given to the ones with (more (severe)) symptoms, as was reported from Italy.

          • fion says:

            Yes, I understand that. My hypothesis is that the main factor is the UK refusing to declare that people are recovered as early as other countries are.

            Only 135 official cases have recovered. For that to be due to lack of testing, then there’d have to be pretty much no tests done on non-critical cases. Hell, even critical cases should have had more recoveries than that!

          • Tarpitz says:

            IIRC, we’re doing less testing per capita than many other countries due mainly to not having much of a pre-existing domestic industry for it (we largely outsourced it to Germany). Tests in the UK to date have been largely restricted to hospitalised patients and medical staff. However, it can’t be the main explanation for these figures, because we are doing more testing per capita than France. In other words, your explanation seems likely to me.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Ignore Iran and Turkey as autocracies. They aren’t of the same type, for a variety of reasons.

      Germany is at 5%, and are at a similar stage in the process of infection. Italy, Spain and France all began seeing deaths well before the UK.

      Given the roughly somewhere between 2 to 6 week timeframe on this thing, we should expect to see recovery numbers lag behind all the other indicators the most. Most especially when we aren’t testing very many asymptomatic or slightly symptomatic people (the ones who can recover quickly).

      • fion says:

        Yeah, I’ve also been looking at the trend over time. The UK’s death rate* doesn’t look like Spain or Italy looked two weeks ago. Both were between 30% and 50%. France is weird. Between the 16th of March and the 17th of March they jumped from 93% to 23%, when their number of recoveries went up from 4 to 594.

        I suppose the point is yes, there should be a lag in recoveries, but why is it more in the UK than it has ever been in any other country? The UK is kind of like Italy was two weeks ago in both deaths and confirmed cases. But two weeks ago Italy was getting 500-1000 recoveries every day. The UK has 135 to date.

        *I know this number isn’t really the death rate, but we need to call it something

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @fion:
          I’ve linked several previous versions of Kevin Drum’s charts plotting the deaths from Covid-19 in the various western democracies.

          Here is today’s

          As you can see, if you look from the same point when deaths in the target population reached the same per capita number, 1 total death per 10 million in population, everyone seems to be roughly on the same curve as Italy. Spain is higher, Switzerland a little lower.

          Canada looks like a real outlier right now, but it’s still very early for them. Also see the caveat for the US.

          The US is currently under the various EU curves, but I don’t think that’s really valid for the same reason that comparing the EU as whole to Italy by itself doesn’t make sense. The growth of the disease is always going to be primarily local. Looking at different states or regions separately would likely look very different. Looking at the New York area, or the Northeast as whole, would be more comparable to an individual EU country.

          • fion says:

            I’ve seen plots like those. To me that indicates that there’s nothing weird going on in the UK that’s making the disease more deadly, which was never a very likely hypothesis.

            But it doesn’t tell us anything about recoveries as far as I can tell.

          • JayT says:

            I’m assuming that the difference in recoveries is entirely baked in by how the different countries report or determine their statistics.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @fion:
            Again, recoveries lag even further behind infections than deaths do.

            You can’t compare today’s recovery rate in Italy to the UK’s recovery rate. You would need to compare the reported recovery rate from two weeks ago. I don’t know what those reported rates were, but I doubt very much that it was 43%.

            Remember, case loads are doubling every few days in the initial stages of the outbreak. That means that until you start to get over the hump, that even if we assume only about two weeks between diagnosis and recovery, that’s something like 4 to 7 doublings of cases diagnosed before the first recovery. That’s going to hold your recovery rate at 5% just by case growth alone.

            You won’t see a substantial recovery number compared to total cases until growth stops.

          • fion says:

            @HeelBearClub

            Italy’s “death rate” two weeks ago was 44%.

            Scroll down to look at the bottom graph.

            Remember, case loads are doubling every few days in the initial stages of the outbreak. That means that until you start to get over the hump, that even if we assume only about two weeks between diagnosis and recovery, that’s something like 4 to 7 doublings of cases diagnosed before the first recovery. That’s going to hold your recovery rate at 5% just by case growth alone.

            I don’t think your maths quite works here, because what we’re calling “recovery rate” isn’t recoveries divided by total cases, it’s recoveries divided by closed cases. Assuming deaths take some time between diagnosis and death (say a week) then we’re down to the “head start” of deaths being only a week. Which is only two doublings, a factor of 4, so expected recovery rate of 80%.

            Hmm. Ok, that’s still pretty high. So maybe the question is why didn’t this happen in Italy (or any other country other than the UK and arguably France)?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I don’t think your maths quite works here, because what we’re calling “recovery rate” isn’t recoveries divided by total cases, it’s recoveries divided by closed cases.

            How do you figure the maths work that way? Closed cases either result in death, recovery, or what? You don’t close cases for people who still have the disease, Germany or the UK doesn’t have a death rate of 95%, so, I think your assumption about recovery rate has to be incorrect.

            Depending on what you are reading, you may be seeing different measures and estimates, but there is no way any national cohort that doesn’t solely consist of 20 ninety year olds in a nursing home has a final recovery rate of only 5%.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            As for that Italian graph, what’s missing are all of those cases that were mild, didn’t require hospitalization, but can’t be officially closed, because the system is stressed. Note that 95% of the active cases are mild. If 95% of cases are mild, how do you get ~42% fatality?

            Note how flat the curve is on “recovered” per day as compared to deaths per day.

    • Eigengrau says:

      Related: authorities are puzzled as to why the recovery rate in British Columbia is so high, over 50%. That’s over 50% of total cases, not resolved cases. This is much higher than anywhere else in Canada despite other provinces using basically the same definition of recovery (10 days symptom-free iirc). The testing rate is pretty high but again not substantially greater than their neighbors. Whatever the explanation, I hope this effect is real and that we can export the cause everywhere else if possible.

    • raw says:

      At least in Germany there is no obligatiion to report recoveries. So any numbers for Germany are more guesses.

  35. Randy M says:

    So now that we’ve had a few weekends with Corona and the attendant restrictions, I’m curious how people are adapting to it romantically. I see a few possibilities:
    1. Breaking lockdown for this, but only with long standing relationships.
    2. Breaking lockdown, even for new acquaintences.
    3. As above, but wearing protection has a new meaning.
    4. A surge in tele-dating with a promise of proximity at some future point.
    5. Being too distracted/worried to think about this at the moment.

    Anyone know how the non-married/co-quarantining are or will approach this as the problem drags on through the season?

    • fion says:

      I’ve been meeting people through dating apps for the past four years leading to several short to medium term relationships. At the moment I say on my profile that I’m not going to meet anybody but I’m still swiping and having conversations with people. In those conversations we’re not saying “maybe we should meet up when all this blows over”; we’re just having normal chats. I find it very annoying that I can’t be meeting people right now. Finding somebody to be with long term is something I feel ready for now, and I’m so picky that I fear it could take years!

      I get the impression that some people on the apps are looking to meet up IRL, which I consider incredibly irresponsible. I’m sure it’s possible to do it safely, but I don’t trust them to do so.

      A close friend told me that he’s planning to keep seeing his girlfriend. But neither of them are coming into contact with anybody else, so they see it as being quarantined together as if they were a household, even though they live in different houses.

      • Randy M says:

        Finding somebody to be with long term is something I feel ready for now, and I’m so picky that I fear it could take years!

        FWIW, I think this is a legitimate cost to mourn if the Covid restrictions last for much of a year.

        • Nick says:

          I wonder if, decades from now, folks will commonly think the US’s declining interest in sex, relationships, and kids began with the 2020 pandemic, only to learn that it started years before.

      • Matt M says:

        A situation like this might actually serve as something of an additional filter away from “people looking for short term” in favor of “people looking for long-term”

        FWIW, I met my current fiance on an online dating app, and we first started talking when our area was basically shut down due to a major hurricane, which destroyed my car such that it was well over a month before we could actually meet in person.

    • Elementaldex says:

      There is another related and interesting point for the married. If one spouse is a known vector how does the couple handle it?

      My wife is in healthcare and works as part of a group of ~10, they apparently talk about radically more personal things than my workplace does because she reports that of the long term relationship members of her group she is the only one still sleeping with her spouse/SO. They are at a facility with a Coronavirus quarantine ward which they all have to go into.

      My only data-point on your initial question is that my best friend is seriously but fairly newly dating someone (~2 months?) and they just decided this week to stop seeing each other in person for an indeterminate length of time.

      • snifit says:

        Many healthcare workers are isolating from their families as best they can. The best way to protect their families is to live in an entirely different house, but many are using a spare bedroom and bathroom and maintaining distance within the same house.
        My wife is a physician and we are not distancing. Our family, however, has been isolating as a group for almost 3 weeks now since we expect to become a vector at some point despite her best efforts.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Do you have a plan if all the adults in the house get hit hard enough that they cannot do childcare?

          • snifit says:

            I don’t. My wife may have thought of it already–she’s been in “plan a month ahead” mode for about 6 weeks now but we haven’t talked about that scenario. For my part I’m counting on the likelihood that we get mild cases.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @snifit:
            Hope for the best.

            Prepare for the worst.

    • tossrock says:

      A friend of mine in SF is going the “keep meeting up with a single other person, but feel bad about it” route. The easy joke here is that they’re providing an essential service.

    • metacelsus says:

      I’m now staying with my girlfriend and her parents, after Harvard kicked me out of their grad student housing. I hadn’t planned on moving in with her until June, but it’s going well.

      Her parents are hardcore Trump supporters though, so I can’t openly complain about how his leadership is failing in this crisis.

    • Hamish Todd says:

      After more than a year of soul-suckingly large amounts of time spent on okcupid and dates that went nowhere, I meet a lady I really like, go on a second date, I really really like her, and I am getting nice signals from her too!

      Then fucking Coronavirus. She has to return to her native country. Cue a week of maddening uncertainty because she has to uproot her life, I don’t want to come on too strong, and even if she liked me it would be the most understandable thing in the world to say that the situation is too complicated to continue.

      But turns out she really likes me too 🙂 We video chat. I am happier with my life now than before Coronavirus!

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        I got into my first real relationship after being laid off following 9/11.

    • Andrew Hunter says:

      I’m sitting in my apartment not dating anyone or trying to. There’s not much to be done; afaict nobody will meet up (and as stated i kinda doubt I’d want to meet up with someone who would. There’s a bro-y saying I’ve heard once or twice: “any girl who would make you wear a condom, you probably don’t need one; any girl who wouldn’t, you really do…” I always use protection with non-exclusive relationships, but the point stands.)

      There’s video chatting, I suppose, but I look even more hideous than normal over video chat, and humans aren’t really rigged to develop emotional attachments except in person, so it’s pointless anyway. A number of people out there don’t seem to internalize the thing that the goal in dating is to actually build a connection–this is the biggest problem with a lot of things like The Rules. They optimize for choosing dates you won’t like or attach yourself to.

      (My pickings on Hinge et al were pretty iffy before this, but timing sucks. My ex and I broke up in October; we maintained a pretty close, good relationship for quite some time after, she spent lots of time with me, etc…it rapidly fell apart to the point we can’t interact well in the three weeks before lockdown. Woof. Even as an ex she would have been good to quarantine with.)

      Oh well, guess I’ll date in September, maybe. If we don’t get more competent rapidly in the next month or two it’s all moot, anyway.

      • AG says:

        humans aren’t really rigged to develop emotional attachments except in person

        Perhaps that’s a majority subset, but a subset nonetheless. A few of my strongest relationships are primarily based in text chat, meeting through fandom interests. See also how many women prefer to read their porn instead of watch it.

    • Tenacious D says:

      I bought a ring a week before non-essential stores in my area were told to close…

      (this didn’t significantly alter my timing, but anticipating it gave me just a bit of extra motivation not to delay).

    • Jake R says:

      I think it’s called sexting now.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      All of the above. Many people are moving together, and there’s definitely less hookups.

      I tried finding something stable for the duration, but as luck would have it the first three I moderately hit it off are or left to different towns. In the (now boringly usual) twist, tried to keep in touch but it turns out at least one wanted remote sex much more that connection. *sigh* men, the new romantic sex.

      I’m occasionally hooking up with one person – not the safest possible thing, but reasonable considering current situation here and my general health.

    • WashedOut says:

      In my country (Australia) people who are in the same household count as one person for physical-distancing purposes, and gatherings are limited to 2 people maximum.

      This means that me and my fiancee are not effected romantically, and neither are other couples in our social network. The single people I know are being very cautious and mostly have put dating on indefinite hiatus.

  36. rocoulm says:

    About a month ago, I started experiencing an intermittent issue with my cell phone. It shows the correct time of day, but sometimes date displayed would be in mid-2000. After some careful observation, I decided it’s most likely occurring whenever I’m connected to a particular cell tower near my house. Does this sound plausible to any of you in the know about how these work? Is it possible for a cell tower to be desynchronized like this? If so, whom do you contact to get the problem looked at?

    I should mention that I haven’t yet asked anyone else in the area if they’re having the same issue. Maybe it’s just me…

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Cell phones absolutely can be set to sync time with towers. You can disable syncing with the cell network to test.

      You can find cell tower maps online built by hobbyists online. I don’t know how accurate they are for identifying the tower owner.

      • Randy M says:

        I don’t know how accurate they are for identifying the tower owner.

        Regardless, it should be pursued. I’m hoping for a Scooby-Doo style unmasking at the end of this.

        • Buttle says:

          I’m hoping it turns out to be a poorly configured Stingray. Shaggy could have a field day with that.

          • rocoulm says:

            This has also occurred to me. For what it’s worth, I also started getting buttloads of security certificate errors when browsing the web around the same time…

          • rumham says:

            @rocoulm

            If those two issues are related then it’s probably not a stingray. It’s probably malware or a poorly coded app causing glitches.

          • rocoulm says:

            @rumham

            Would this still be the case if I get no certificate errors using any other cell towers?

          • rumham says:

            @rocoulm

            With that piece of info… Probably not.

      • rocoulm says:

        Sorry if I wasn’t clear; I’m aware phones are normally synced to the nearest tower. This has only really been a minor nuisance, since I changed my phone settings to fix it once I discovered what the problem was.

        What I was getting at was whether or not an individual tower could be desynchronized from the ones around it. I assumed this sort of stuff was computer-controlled with little room for error, but maybe not.

        As far as contacting the owner/operator of the tower, I had assumed they were all managed by some faceless megacorporation with a suitably enigmatic customer relations department. If that is the case, I’m really not sure where to start, but I’ll check out some of those maps you mentioned.

    • fion says:

      I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I laughed out loud at how bizarre and incomprehensible this bug is to me. Like… what?!

      • rocoulm says:

        None taken.

        It took me a surprisingly long time to notice. The main symptom was that my phone would notify me of texts, but then wouldn’t display them when I open my texting app. Eventually I noticed that they were there, but they were appearing at the very top of my (chronological) text history, and I just had to scroll up for 10 seconds or so to see them.

  37. salvorhardin says:

    How on earth is it defensible to give Jared Kushner, of all people, any sort of serious responsibility or authority to coordinate the federal government’s response to COVID-19? Any thoughts on what the real strategy or intent is here?

    To anyone Trump-sympathetic or supporting, I’ll just say: this is exactly the sort of personnel choice that makes it seems to the rest of us that he is both extraordinarily incompetent and extraordinarily corrupt, even compared to regular politicians. Listening to Fauci and letting Fauci tell the truth in public, while they are indeed good things, don’t outweigh the impact of this sort of obviously ludicrous nepotism.

    • Matt M says:

      Trump believes that Kushner is an effective manager, and (perhaps more importantly), an effective manager who can be trusted to properly execute Trump’s preferred policy goals. “Coordinating the government response” seems to be a primarily managerial task that requires balancing risk/reward scenarios from a variety of perspectives, and does not require specific scientific expertise, as such.

      We may disagree that Kushner is an effective manager (I don’t think he is!). But if instead of Kusher, he appointed Elon Musk or Oprah or Jeff Bezos or any number of people who are generally thought of as effective managers (but who lack specific domain-level expertise on COVID), I suspect the outrage would be significantly less…

      • salvorhardin says:

        Oprah would, and should, inspire the same level of outrage. Musk too, actually, given how scattershot he is when working outside his domain. Bezos would be a better choice, and as such require less outrage.

        The point is that there is actually a fact of the matter about which people are good administrators of efforts like this. And Trump is a systematically and extremely bad judge of that, because he consistently prizes loyalty above competence, so he again and again replaces actual competent people with worthless sycophants. His beliefs about who makes an effective manager are not just wrong, they are culpably stupid and corrupt.

        • Bezos would be a better choice

          Bezos would be a terrible choice, given that he is currently doing a job he is very competent and and one that plays a major role in ameliorating the problems of lockdown.

          • Anteros says:

            Fair point, and I agree with you, but If I’d made the suggestion as Matt M did, I would have subconsciously added the caveat ‘assuming he wasn’t doing anything else for a while’ or just made the point that he was the kind of person who had appropriate skills for the job.

            I don’t think suggesting that Jeff Bezos could be a sensible appointment is negated by the fact that he’s doing a good and ‘important’ job elsewhere.

          • albatross11 says:

            +1

            Amazon is doing more to keep people safely in quarantine than any federal agency.

          • salvorhardin says:

            Well, yes of course, but you know what I meant.

      • Anthony says:

        “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.”

    • Did Michelle Obama have any qualifications to do the whole anti-obesity thing? You could say that was merely “symbolic,” etc., but I really doubt you would have said that at the time.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        If we had a pandemic that attacked only fat kids, I wouldn’t want M.O. in a leadership position on the task force to stop it.

        Completely different kinds of issues, completely different time frames of needed action, etc.

        • You say that now. Would you have told them, “hey, maybe you guys should stop calling this an ‘epidemic?'” I doubt it.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Words get used ambiguously. Welcome to language.

            “We have an epidemic of overweight children” doesn’t mean “2 million children will die this year if we don’t successfully address their weight problem this month”.

            JFC

          • Elementaldex says:

            I accidentally reported HeelBearCub’s comment. Mea Culpa!

            I meant to be replying to say: I’m legitimately curious how we would respond as a nation to a situation where the lives of two million obese children depended on getting them to a normal weight in a month.

          • @HeelBearCub,

            The stated reason they called it an epidemic was to inspire the sense of urgency you are talking about. Now you want to say “well, we didn’t really mean it.” A lot of people said that at the time.

            “Words get used ambiguously” – how about “words get used deceptively?”

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @ElementalDex:
            That would be well nigh impossible. How it was handled would depend a great on the particulars.

            @Alexander Turok:
            Like I said, welcome to language. I don’t suppose you think the War on Drugs involved the Army shooting mortars at bags of cocaine trying to overrun their position. I don’t think you believe that an epidemic of crime is literally caused by an infectious disease.

            Then again, given that we don’t know what the causes of widespread obesity are, it could be infectious. Epidemics are just widespread infectious disease within a community at a point in time.

            Point being that the word “epidemic” is frequently used to mean “widespread and harmful”, even though the literal meaning also includes “caused by an infectious disease”.

            And epidemic doesn’t specify degree of harm. We could easily talk about an epidemic of Chlamydia in a community.

            So, like I said before, welcome to language.

          • @HeelBearCub,

            I simply do not believe you would have had a problem with “M.O. in a leadership position on the task force to stop” a pandemic that attacked only fat kids.

        • J Mann says:

          Seconding HBC. Giving the First Spouse leadership of some public leadership posts is traditional and IMHO not harmful and maybe a little helpful if she brings some attention to an issue.

          Putting Michelle in charge of the Ebola response or Iran nuclear negotiations would be closer.

          IMHO, Jared is closer to Hillary at State – people who like him think he’s smart and hardworking, and the general theory is that to run an operation you want a smart hardworking generalist who gets advised by the experts. Unlike Hillary, he’s a relative of Trump’s, though. (To be fair, people who like Michelle also report that she’s smart and hard-working, but she wasn’t put in charge of anything mission critical.)

          • JayT says:

            So, how would you compare it to Hillary chairing the healthcare task force back in the 90s?

          • J Mann says:

            Good point. Yeah, about the same. As I said, Hillary, like Jared, is generally viewed as smart and hard-working by people who aren’t politically disposed to hate her, and like Jared, she was someone the President was impressed by and trusted. (I’d argue that healthcare reform still isn’t as vital as a response to an out of control pandemic, but at the time, HCR advocates felt it was pretty important.)

            I’d note that I think conventional wisdom is that appointing Hillary to healthcare reform was worse than a crime, it was a mistake. If your goal was to pass healthcare reform, she didn’t have any particular experience managing or selling that kind of project, and having her in front of it further politicized it. Comparisions to JK are welcome.

      • salvorhardin says:

        This is pure whataboutery, and very weak whataboutery at that. Yes, the childhood obesity thing was symbolic, and yes, I would have and in fact did say that at the time. First Lady vanity projects are a perfectly normal part of American presidential rituals, they are never on the critical path for any urgent national priority, and everyone knew perfectly well that that was one of them.

        Even if it were not symbolic, it was clearly not an urgent response to a catastrophic, acute nationwide crisis that is crashing the economy to Great Depression levels. Nobody actually thought that it was any such thing, and there was no serious case to be made that the consequences of Michelle Obama’s lack of domain expertise would be anywhere within four orders of magnitude as grievous as the consequences of Kushner’s lack of domain expertise here. This is not a remotely reasonable comparison. If Obama had made his wife undersecretary of defense for antiterrorism, say, that would be a reasonable comparison– and would have been so obviously inappropriate that it would never have been considered.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          When you posted this:

          To anyone Trump-sympathetic or supporting, I’ll just say: this is exactly the sort of personnel choice that makes it seems to the rest of us that he is both extraordinarily incompetent and extraordinarily corrupt, even compared to regular politicians.

          you were sort of inviting comparison to regular politicians.

          A lot of people regarded Bill Clinton’s health-care reform attempt as an urgent national priority at the time he made the disastrous choice of Hillary to run it.

        • Plenty of people said obesity was an “urgent national priority” at the time, thus the whole “obesity epidemic” framing.

          You explicitly said this is “extraordinarily incompetent and extraordinarily corrupt, even compared to regular politicians,” I mention another politician, and that’s “whataboutery?” Whataboutery: what Leftists say when called out on their hypocrisy.

          What “domain” are you talking about? Do you even know? His job is to “coordinate on supply chain issues,” he has some experience in business. Is he an “expert?” Maybe not. But I really doubt you’d care if he was part of your tribe.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Right. They called it an “urgent national priority.” But it wasn’t “urgent” like stopped a pandemic or a loose nuke. It was “urgent” like “get kids to say no to drugs” or “get kids to read.”

            JFK was criticized for putting his brother as Attorney General and rules were put in about that. Hillary Clinton trying to run the health care reform is a closer complaint … and it got shot to hell before it changed anything, partly because people didn’t like an unelected wife doing that.

        • EchoChaos says:

          What are you looking for, besides a fight and anger?

          People have given you examples of other politicians who use members of their family to push or execute policies, including major keystone policies like Bill Clinton’s healthcare overhaul.

          • salvorhardin says:

            Hillary’s involvement in the healthcare taskforce is a somewhat closer analogy, yes, and was inappropriate, but the distinguishing factors are:

            — it was not an acute emergency response, it was a policy task force, that’s an entirely different level of inappropriateness

            — Hillary, as corrupt and tone-deaf as she is, is 100x more competent an administrator than any of the jokers in Trump’s inner circle.

          • Loriot says:

            Wasn’t the healthcare reform thing basically just coming up with a proposal for the legislature to vote on and then knocking heads together anyway?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Hillary…is…competent…administrator

            I see no evidence of this. She caused all kinds of screw-ups and scandals in her husband’s White House (healthcare, travel office), got slotted into a guaranteed Senate seat win whereat she accomplished nothing, and then she set the world on fire (in the bad way) as Secretary of State, and then lost an election to Donald Trump. I see no evidence Hillary is competent at anything besides marrying well (for some definitions of “well”).

            I’m no fan of Kushner, but what makes you think he can’t, “coordinate supply chains” or whatever it is he’s doing? That doesn’t sound hard. I bet I could coordinate supply chains and I have no supply chain coordinating experience.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I bet I could coordinate supply chains and I have no supply chain coordinating experience.

            Wow.

            This isn’t a mistake I expect you to make generally Honcho, but that is some prime Dunning-Krueger right there. I would think your general love (IIIRC) of military history would make you respect logistics more.

          • Lambert says:

            > I bet I could coordinate supply chains and I have no supply chain coordinating experience.

            That kind of thinking is why invasions of Russia usually end so badly.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            But this isn’t a war. Honestly, I don’t understand what it is Kushner is being asked to do here. Why does the government need to be coordinating supply chains right now? Can’t the people trying to make ventilators say “hey, we need to buy X, Y, Z parts” and then buy the parts from people who make X, Y, Z parts? If Kushner’s job is then to say “yeah, you should totally do that,” or, in the case the part suppliers are shut down because of a governor’s orders, call up the governor and say “hey, the vent maker says they need this company open, tell them they can open back up,” then I’m pretty sure I can do that job.

            What specifically is Kushner being asked to do here that’s hard?

            And as for me, I’m only moderately interested in military history. You might have me confused with EchoChaos, who seems to read more books on the subject that I do.

          • acymetric says:

            I’m no fan of Kushner, but what makes you think he can’t, “coordinate supply chains” or whatever it is he’s doing? That doesn’t sound hard. I bet I could coordinate supply chains and I have no supply chain coordinating experience.

            Having put some time into a career in logistics (I’ve since switched to something different), you’re probably correct in the long term (given time to learn the systems, processes, and how everything interacts most intelligent people are capable of it if they’re willing to do that kind of work), but you’re probably completely incorrect in the short term.

            I would expect someone with no logistics experience to take minimum 6 months, probably closer to a year, to become truly effective at coordinating logistics at anything larger than a single small business.

          • matkoniecz says:

            I bet I could coordinate supply chains and I have no supply chain coordinating experience.

            I bet against. There is plenty of evidence that coordinating supply chains is not something easy that you can just start doing.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Conrad Honcho:
            What kind of stuff needs to be prevented or done?

            Preventing things like FEMA outbidding a state for the same PPE or ventilators. Deciding who gets how many of what from the federal stockpile (which contrary to what Kushner misunderstands, is explicitly there to supplement state needs, rather than for exclusive federal use). Figuring out which state gets their requests met first. Figuring out when to count on incoming supplies, so that later needs can be met by incoming supplies rather than stockpiles. Determining whose manufacturing capacity to commandeer so that the DPA power is utilized most effectively.

            Plus, all of the myriad complexities that I (and you) don’t know about. The things that make supply chains break under stress.

          • Lambert says:

            Also a bunch of important people who know their part of the supply chain inside-out will be in hospital on ventilators.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            HBC: Those things sound important, yes. But none of those things sound particularly difficult for anyone with modest experience in business and government, which Kushner has. I’m confident with the help of a staff I could do those things. Why do you think those things are hard? Why do you think Kushner can’t do them?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Honcho:
            Well for one, because FEMA is pulling PPE contracts away from states, and Jared did just declare on national TV that the national stockpile wasn’t intended for state use.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            HBC:

            I didn’t know what you were talking about, so I went and looked this up. Here’s what Kushner said:

            “The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use. So we’re encouraging the states to make sure that they’re assessing the needs, they’re getting the data from their local situations and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we’ve given them”

            And then I found this on twitter, where people are upset that the HHS website description has changed. First it said “supplies severe enough to cause local supplies to run out” and now it says “supplement state and local supplies.”

            These are the same thing. Yes, states are supposed to have their own supplies and not rely on the federal government stockpile, but the stockpile exists to cover over for states that either screw up or are hit so badly their local supplies run out. But from that first website photo it says “this repository contains enough supplies to respond to multiple large-scale emergencies simultaneously.” It does not say “states don’t need to worry about having their own supplies because this repository contains enough supplies for all 50 states plus the territories.” Like Kushner said, “it’s not the states’ stockpile.” It’s to supplement the states, not do their jobs for them.

            You have to start actually reading the articles, and not just looking at headlines and getting mad.

          • Loriot says:

            +1

            I’m a democrat, but I still remember being puzzled when I saw that story pop up on Reddit with the two screenshots side by side, and wondered which one was supposed to be the bad one.

        • albatross11 says:

          The childhood obesity thing is exactly the sort of generic good works that first ladies traditionally do. I don’t think you learn anything at all by trying to compare the previous first lady’s attempts to get kids to eat healthier and get more exercise to coordinating the federal response to a once-in-a-lifetime massive epidemic that’s lined up to kill several hundred thousand Americans.

          I think a major problem for Trump is that he doesn’t have a lot of people he really trusts and can count on to run anything for him. Some of that is his being an outsider, but I think it’s mostly that he’s not an easy guy to work for–lots of his initial allies got pushed out after awhile because they couldn’t get along with Trump, or he got annoyed and started undermining/badmouthing them on Twitter. You can see this in the very high turnover in his administration so far, too.

          The consequence of that is that it’s hard for him to find top-tier people to work for him to run some important thing. Most such people figure working for Trump will be a nightmare, and they’re probably right, given how that worked out for guys like Mattis, Tillerson, Kelley, and Sessions.

          Hence, he needs to assign someone like Kushner to this sort of job.

          • Matt M says:

            +1 to all of this.

            I definitely agree with the general argument that putting Kusher in charge of emergency COVID response is a much higher level of nepotism than the traditional first lady busywork (regardless of the specific words used to describe said busywork).

            I also agree that Trump is in a tough spot in the sense that there are so few people he can trust not to betray him, that his pool of potential candidates who meet the basic criteria of “competent” AND “can be trusted” is incredibly low, and it’s unsurprising that he continues to defer to his family in situations like this.

            If there’s a steelman argument for nepotism, it probably involves something like “you can at least count on your own family not to be scheming behind your back to royally fuck you over.”

          • @Matt M,

            No one put Kushner “in charge of emergency COVID response.”

          • salvorhardin says:

            Well, indeed, Trump can’t trust competent people not to betray him because any competent person knows that betraying him is basically always the correct thing to do for the country and for human civilization generally.

          • Matt M says:

            Well, indeed, Trump can’t trust competent people not to betray him because any competent person knows that betraying him is basically always the correct thing to do for the country and for human civilization generally.

            I mean, fine. But if your prior is “decent people won’t work for Trump” then it seems a little ridiculous to criticize Trump for not selecting decent people, right?

            I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but you don’t seem to be arguing in good faith. You’re coming across as a hyper-partisan whose only purpose is to remind us that Orange Man Bad.

          • Loriot says:

            Trump’s seeming inability to hire competent people is largely his own fault, so it seems entirely fair to me to criticize him for it.

          • Matt M says:

            Not if you take it as a prior that anyone willing to work for Trump and not actively sabotage his efforts must, by definition, be incompetent.

          • Loriot says:

            Suppose we had an anti-vaxer politician who decided that it was imperative to end all vaccinations, even optional vaccinations. He has trouble finding anyone with serious health credentials willing to work for him, half the experts already in place quit in protest, and he fires everyone else anyway on the assumption that anyone willing to stay must be secretly be intending to undermine him.

            Who’s fault is that?

          • Matt M says:

            I feel like this is such an obvious subterfuge.

            Your problem with Trump, as with your hypothetical “no vaccines allowed” President (is it even worth it for me to point out that Trump has no positions that are this obviously uncontroversially terrible?), is that you disagree with his political goals.

            So just come out and say so.

            Stop trying to hide your political bias behind “The problem is that he picks incompetent people” when you define “competent” as “someone he wouldn’t pick because they disagree with him.” It’s a largely pointless dance.

            We get it. You disagree with Trump. That’s cool. Huge swaths of the American population disagrees with whoever it is you like. It’s fine. We’ll have another election and maybe your guy will win. But don’t pretend the problem is some totally different (and definitely objective!) thing.

          • Clutzy says:

            Well, indeed, Trump can’t trust competent people not to betray him because any competent person knows that betraying him is basically always the correct thing to do for the country and for human civilization generally.

            Seems like an odd statement to make. Trump has picked some people who have been competent and loyal. Sessions and Barr at DOJ have been tireless in this. Casting out Sessions over his Russia refusal would probably have been one of Trump’s biggest mistakes ever if Barr hadn’t existed. People are loving Fauci who is in his administration (these people don’t include me).

            I mean, generally I’d agree Trump has a staffing problem because his views and personality are very niche within the group of people who can pass through the Senate if the media targets that appointee. For instance, can you name a person who could have been confirmed as head of CDC that publicly called C-19 a pandemic and emergency in mid January? Called for travel restrictions and stockpiling of PPE + guidelines for social distancing? Called for ramming through new tests in January? Enacting the DPA to force mask and ventilator production in early February? Even the now revered Fauci was still skeptical of its pandemicness in late Jan.

            The problem isn’t that Trump picked bad people for responding to C-19, its that the only good people to pick exist far outside the political sphere’s realm of acceptability. There are people I know of who would have made all the choices that would have looked extreme then, but amazing now. Maybe 1 could have ever gotten a cabinet position, maybe. And that would be Tom Cotton if we are very charitable about his timeline. And no one would have been thinking about him for CDC chair, and its dubious if anyone would have thought that was a good pick at anytime before March 1st 2020 (and it still probably isn’t even if he was ontop of Corona warnings).

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Alex Azar, Trump’s HHS Secretary, seems to have been competent and was trying to get funding for PPE back on February 5th. Even if he didn’t think a pandemic was likely, he was recommending prudent risk.

      • Loriot says:

        I don’t see why first ladies shouldn’t be allowed to have hobbies like anyone else. My aunt spends her time donating books to poor local schools. That’s different that putting your wife in charge of the education system, let alone say, emergency management.

      • eric23 says:

        What do you mean, “do” it? She was just there as a speaker, for PR.

    • Deiseach says:

      How on earth is it defensible to give Jared Kushner, of all people, any sort of serious responsibility or authority to coordinate the federal government’s response to COVID-19?

      I don’t know anything about this, so my first question is: is this a real responsible position or is it one of the PR type ‘Czar for Bottletops’ positions? My intuition is that the real work is going to be done by the civil servants, as usual, while the figurehead gets to announce big splashy announcements in the media and do a lot of “I’m very glad you asked me that question, Stuart” type interviews.

  38. GearRatio says:

    Besides codecademy, how should I be learning SQL if I don’t have access to a company database or similar hands-on training? I’m guessing I’m going to top out what abstract lessons on functions can do for me pretty quickly.

    • Nick says:

      If you want to play around with querying data yourself, Microsoft has the Northwind database, which is one of their go-to examples. And there are similar databases on the web, I’m sure.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      You can run PostgreSQL or MySQL on any Mac, Windows, or Linux machine you’ve got.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        There’s a free home version of Microsoft SQL Server, also.

      • Rob K says:

        And once you get it up I’d suggest giving yourself a research question that can be answered with the US census and downloading data from their ftp site.

        The process of loading and manipulating the data for that purpose should give you a good chance for hands-on practice with a lot of the key skills.

    • johan_larson says:

      Do you have a PC? You can install a database system on it directly. MySQL and PostgreSQL are free.

      Here’s the download page for PostgreSQL.

      https://www.postgresql.org/download/

      If you take some sort of online course for one of these systems, they’ll probably start by having you install the system yourself.

      Here’s a free tutorial: https://www.postgresqltutorial.com/install-postgresql/

    • Statismagician says:

      There are large public (mostly health care-focused, obviously) datasets available through CDC, NIH, and various medical schools, e.g. BRFSS, CDC Wonder, Federal data warehouse.

      SAS University Edition is free if you have a .edu email, and has a SQL implementation through PROC SQL – not the most efficient, but free, relatively user-friendly, and cloud-based. You would have to learn enough SAS code to import data (which is trivial).

      That’s just what I know about, I’m sure other people have less biostats-focused suggestions.

      EDIT: They do, and are faster at sharing them than I was.

    • Drew says:

      Here’s a table with 17 billion reddit comments. From there, try answering questions, like what’s the funniest joke that’s been reposted 10+ times.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        FWIW, I’m guessing this isn’t really a good starting problem for someone trying to learn relational DBs. This is not a question relational DBs are going to be very good at answering (because the relationship between the “same joke” is abstract and not defined in the DB). You’ll spend all your time trying to get a relational DB to do something it’s not really designed for, rather than learning what RDBs are good at.

        If someone already did the work to identify and correlate reposts, I’ll proactively retract this comment.

        • matkoniecz says:

          Maybe define repost as “exactly the same comment, longer than N characters”? Without trying to catch ones that are almost the same.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Now you are doing non indexed string compares in a cross join of millions and millions, even billions, of posts.

            That’s not the kind of thing an RDBMS does well.

          • johan_larson says:

            If the comparison predicate is equality, joining a few million rows to a few million rows won’t be a problem. Sort-merge-join or hash join should make short work of it.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Just finding dupes should be a matter of sorting by that column, and then walking through the list, comparing each element to the one before.

            I’ve never used cursors, but this may be a good case for cursors. It might not count as being done “inside” an RDBMS, though.

            How much would “SELECT COUNT(*) GROUP BY COMMENT HAVING COUNT > 1” suck? It’s keeping track of a bunch of information we don’t need and will throw away instantly.

    • matkoniecz says:

      For basic SQL there is plenty of in-browser emulators.

      See https://www.w3schools.com/sql/trysql.asp?filename=trysql_select_all

      http://www.sqltutorial.org/ https://selectstarsql.com/ is also bookmarked as “useful for initial SQL learning”

      ———–

      If for some reason you are interested in geographic databases then OpenStreetMap may be interesting (sort-of equivalent of Google Maps dataset, but available on an open license) – see https://switch2osm.org/ https://www.openstreetmap.org/ https://planet.osm.org/ https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Downloading_data

      (note that full database is 132 GB – after compression)

    • Erusian says:

      A lot of people are giving you decent advice if you’re interested in very large datasets. I’d suggest something simpler. Install SQL locally. Go download a basic app or project or sample or whatever and poke around in its database. Perhaps something with a model system. Unless you want to do pure data processing, in which case upload the data to SQL and try getting results from it.

      Happy to help you with basic setup.

      • GearRatio says:

        I think I’m going to do both – download a huge dataset and mess with it as well as download some smaller projects like you suggest, to try to get a feel for both. Thank you!

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @GearRatio:
          I’m not sure what code academy teaches you, but if you don’t know what an entity-relationship diagram (ERD) is, and you don’t know what 3rd normal form is, I’d also try to understand those two concepts at the very least. They provide a really solid grounding for understanding what an RD is. Perhaps in parallel with other things.

          Microsoft Access used to be a great, practical way to understand ER diagramming, as the default way of actually creating the DB was through an ERD. It looks like it’s still available, and free evaluation copies can be had. But it’s been a very, very long time since I did anything with it.

          Oh, and FWIW, don’t get too entranced with Access. It’s fine for what it is, but it wasn’t really designed to be scalable, and it was more pointed at people who were power users (sort of in the same vein as Excel macros).

      • Aapje says:

        Big data sets are bad for learning, because there will be a lot of waiting. He is better off with a small data set and lots of different queries.

        • Chalid says:

          I mostly agree with this, especially as OP wants to be some sort of data analyst and not an engineer.

          However, he should play with big things long enough to understand indices.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      There are three levels in learning SQL (bar of course hands on experience, which helps at each level):

      – basic stuff – select, update, create table etc. Pretty much go through the tutorial
      – “advanced” stuff, which you read about in the tutorial but now use to solve more complex problems. Lots of group by, subqueries, temporary tables etc. Again – not just read the tutorial and do some examples, but actually solve problems with them.
      – performance – and this is why people are recommending big data sets. Once you get here you find out quite a lot of what you’re doing above can’t always be used. How do you alter a table of 100+mil records in production? Why is index order critical? And so on.

      Unfortunately, there are some things you can only truly learn on a biggish production system. For example I’m in the process of fighting deadlocks, and a lot of previous common knowledge gets thrown out the window. i.e.: now subqueries are bad and updates need perfect match to indexes and order by. Who knew.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        now subqueries are bad

        Just as info, this depends on the RDBMS, it’s plan optimizer, and the type of subquery.

        MS SQL Server will frequently have the same plan for a subquery and a join. It depends on what the subquery is doing.

        Solving SQL performance issues has been a good chunk of my career. Knowing when you can throw ACIDity out the window is one of the big tricks that maybe clashes the most with classic good RDBMS practices.

        • Nick says:

          throw ACIDity out the window

          Surely you mean drop ACID.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Damn, I missed a chance to pun. I think if I get one more point, my Dad card will be suspended.

        • Garrett says:

          I’d note that you can also get a lot of interesting performance improvements if you are willing to drop normalization as well.

          • Nick says:

            I went to a conference last year with a workshop on nonrelational databases, and I got it, I guess, but it kind of required turning my brain inside out. And my recollection is that there were lots of cases where a relational db is better, anyway.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Denormalizing key pieces of data is always one tool available to increase performance. There isn’t actually a requirement that a DB be fully 3rd (or, heaven forbid, 4th or 5th, which I can’t actually remember the requirements for) normal form. That’s something I’m perfectly happy to do.

            For example, carrying around a “master id” on all of the various child tables is perfectly valid for performance, and even ease of use purposes, echoing that ID on the “grandchildren” of the parent table, which is not strictly 3rd normal form.

            And there are DBs, the various NoSql approaches, like Hadoop, that basically drop the whole idea of normalization. I don’t have practical experience with those, however. Not sure if that’s what you are talking about Nick.

          • Nick says:

            Not sure if that’s what you are talking about Nick.

            It is! I don’t have practical experience with it, either. Just a long workshop that, afaict, nobody was fully paying attention to. =/

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I do a lot of data warehousing stuff, and one of the key concepts is the “star schema” in which the tables you’re accessing are denormalized. When I first started learning this stuff…I’d say I felt “anger” and “confusion.” But after working with it, yeah, it completely makes sense to optimize for speed and throw referential integrity right out the window when you’re dealing with tens or hundreds of millions of rows you only want to access in certain ways. It felt dirty the first time I did it, but it got easier and easier each time…

          • Radu Floricica says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            Well, it’s Sunday anyways, why not learn something new. I take it from your description that alcohol is recommended to help things along?

          • Radu Floricica says:

            Well, apparently I’m a dirty guy, because I was kinda doing that already. If anything, it makes me think of normalizing more.

            I have a database with lots of addresses, and I keep all of them raw, even though many are duplicates. I also scan for duplicates for things like reusing coords. I don’t want to normalize, too much of a headache, but I wonder if I could go mixed – when I find a duplicate also put it in a separate table and link with an id. That table should offer faster lookup, and future duplicates could be searched there first. Also low risk, worst case I just dump it and it works as usual.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Sure, knock yourself out. If you want to learn data warehouse concepts, the meat and potatoes is The Data Warehouse Toolkit.

            For the concepts anyway. For the software, I’m not sure how to go about playing around with your own data warehouse like you can with an SQL server. I’ve used OBIEE with Informatica, cognos and Business Objects. But it was all learning on the job stuff.

            Definitely a good skillset to have. Very in demand, very easy to get work, high salaries.

  39. souleater says:

    How much time, effort, and expense would it take to get an ADHD diagnosis? I don’t have a regular doctor (no health issues, so no reason to go) and I think ill have to go for a
    Physical with a generalist
    A consultation with a generalist to get them to reccomend a psychiatrist
    A consultation with a psychiatrist

    Which works out to around $200 out of pocket just for a perscription that I might not even find helpful.

    Is there an easier way to (legally) get an adderall perscription?

    • Garrett says:

      Are you looking for easier or cheaper?

      If you want easier, look up something like “concierge medicine” or “executive medicine” which is basically medicine for people who’d rather trade money for time. Tell them what you suspect, what you are looking to try, and possibly offer to take a drug test to demonstrate that you aren’t a meth/cocaine/whatever abuser who’s just looking for a legal fix. This might work.

      Cheaper. Err. A lot of primary care physicians will handle prescriptions like that. But in those cases it helps to have a long established relationship with your doctor where they understand that you are a reasonable, thoughtful person. If that was the case you might be able to ask them. Even in this case you might be able to avoid the consultation with the psychiatrist, but any medical provider is going to be nervous about new patients asking for controlled substances.

    • No need to get recommended for a psychiatrist, just call and schedule. 200$ out of pocket sounds about right on the price.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      There are centers that specialize in the diagnosis and treatment of ADD. That may be your easiest route, although of course you run to the hammer/nail problem. An ADD treatment center hammer is incentivized to think lots of things look like an ADD shaped nail.

      That may not be an issue of you are reasonably confident you do, in fact, have ADD. And of course some places will be better about this than others.

  40. Two McMillion says:

    I’ve never smoked before, but after reading Scott’s warning in the last coronalinks post, I’ve decided to start.

    • VoiceOfTheVoid says:

      I really hope you’re joking

      • Two McMillion says:

        I am not.

        The past few weeks have really driven home for me how much I loathe doctors and healthcare workers. They’re mostly smug busybodies who think their credentials give them the right to lecture you on how you should live your life. Each of us gets only a limited amount of time on this earth- seventy, maybe eighty years. Who the heck are you to go around telling me I shouldn’t do things that I enjoy?

        The people I pay for advice are one thing, but doctors don’t confine their health lectures to when you ask for them. They feel empowered to offer their stupid opinions at any time it happens to come up in conversation. Screw that. I’m all for good health, but I despise anyone who thinks they can come from on high and lecture me, and those lectures are frickin’ everywhere in the middle of this virus. Who gave them the right? Who told you you were allowed to tell me what to do?

        Scott’s comment in the post about taking this opportunity to push his opinion about not smoking on people was the last straw. He’s admitted to taking advantage of people’s fears to push his opinions on them. I don’t care if his opinions are well formed and scientifically accurate; I’m sure they are, but that’s not the point. Screw anyone who thinks they can do that, and as far as I can tell most doctors do.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          The fact that it’s his blog and not yours might have a little something to do with it.

          • Two McMillion says:

            Sure. Let him express his opinion. I find many of them insightful and interesting. I have decided to take a specific action because of this specific opinion.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            You can do what you like, but I don’t understand the dudgeon.

        • Two McMillion says:

          Smokers have been beat up one side and down the other. It’s legal to discriminate against them. People make fun of them. New laws to make it harder for them are proposed all the time. Seriously, guys, enough is enough. Just shut up. I hate the way smokers are treated and people who try to grind them down more can go jump in a lake.

          • Jake R says:

            I largely agree with you but it takes a truly impressive amount of spite to say “smokers are treated like shit, therefore I shall start smoking.”

          • Anteros says:

            I think you misunderstand Scott’s point if you think he’s in the business of ‘grinding people down’ – especially with his specific choice of time and place to suggest ‘quit smoking’. I would wager that the vast majority of those who take that advice from their doctor would subsequently feel more like hugging them than resenting them for badgering them into better health.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            I hate the way smokers are treated and people who try to grind them down more can go jump in a lake.

            If I find myself stuck next to a bunch of odious smokers I might. It’ll smell better down there. I can hold my breath longer than them, to boot

          • Aapje says:

            @Two McMillion

            A lot of smokers have been huge dicks to me. Hard to feel sorry for them if so many abuse any freedom they get.

          • acymetric says:

            If I find myself stuck next to a bunch of odious smokers I might. It’ll smell better down there. I can hold my breath longer than them, to boot

            Are your feet cemented to the ground? If you’re around a “bunch” of smokers maybe you’re intruding on their space, not the other way around.

          • AliceToBob says:

            Are your feet cemented to the ground? If you’re around a “bunch” of smokers maybe you’re intruding on their space, not the other way around.

            When I lived in cities, it was very common for people to start smoking at the bus stop as they waited. Or to disregard signs to the contrary and smoke around the entrances to malls, where the smoke would linger for a long time due to the structure of the buildings involved. Or at the playground, a parent would walk off 20 feet and smoke, seemingly oblivious to the stink they’re inflicting on others. So, in my experience, your objection doesn’t apply.

            On a different aspect of the issue, I view smokers as a significant reason why early diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer is still so abysmal.

        • Machine Interface says:

          That’ll show them, I’m sure.

        • matkoniecz says:

          If you want to ruin your life then feel free to do so 🙂 But do not complain about valid advise.

          And please do not smoke near me, or near my family. And please do not smoke if that would end with littering ground with cigarettes.

          Signed, person supporting reduction of smoking by taxing cigarettes, making socially unacceptable to smoke in public places and making it illegal to smoke in public places.

          • And please do not smoke near me, or near my family.

            Wonderful. A new Culture War topic more or less orthogonal to the usual ones and having only marginal connection to Coronavirus.

            Are you claiming that smoking outdoors where someone else can smell it is a health risk? If so, on what evidence? I can easily believe that living with someone who smokes a lot has some adverse health effects, but my conclusion when I looked into the question a few years back, in response to my university proposing to ban all smoking on campus, was that the claims the proposal were based on were bogus, probably going back to deliberately dishonest “research.”

            If your claim is only that you don’t like the smell, then I agree, but don’t find it an adequate reason to forbid people from doing something very important to them and marginally unpleasant for me.

          • matkoniecz says:

            I am unsure about health risk (on the one hand there was obvious disinformation campaign, on the other hand I heard that evidence for indirect effects seem shaky).

            I never really checked it, because smell is sufficient reason for me.

            But I care about smell. Anyone smoking in public forces other to to smell cigarette smoke. And I consider this somewhere between “extremely rude” and “should be illegal”.

            And given that smoking is self-destructive entertainment with negative effects to other people, I am perfectly fine with limiting it, up to outlawing it in public. I am fine with smoking as long as people are not forcing others to inhale their smelly smoke* and are not littering.

            *obviously, it excludes people that are fine with that

          • danridge says:

            @DavidFriedman Honestly, I don’t care if it’s a health risk and I wouldn’t want that to be an argument anyone used for smoking bans (if it WAS a health risk, I guess that would be a compelling argument, but let’s put it aside).

            I have heard from musicians who played back when smoking was allowed in clubs and bars; you’d get home and it was just clinging to your clothes. And your hair, you’d have to shampoo right after you got home. And today, when people sell used gear, they’ll generally include something like “was kept in a non-smoking space” if it’s true or if they think they can get away with it. It’s just really noxious; I don’t need a doctor to tell anyone that. It’s a valuable feature of society/culture to have a constant shame pressing down on those who smoke, lest they think someone would want to be around them (not just when they’re actively smoking, it clings to things). It really surprises me that health evidence is what it took to start a cultural shift on this.

            All that being said, I’d be on your side in something like banning all smoking on a campus. Makes sense not to allow it indoors. But university campuses can be huge places, and the scenario where you step out of a building and go around a corner away from foot traffic to smoke shouldn’t be a problem, whereas a ban on campus could just encourage people to e.g. go to the busy street right off campus and smoke there, which likely would put more smoke closer to more students. Partially that’s me breaking with matkoniecz and saying we don’t need to completely ban and dehumanize smokers, and partially it’s just an argument in favor of institutions thinking through their policy interventions.

          • matkoniecz says:

            To clarify, I would not support dehumanization of smokers (this kind of thing is never ever good idea, for any group of humans).

            I would be also fine with smoking area where sokers are not bothering others.

          • actinide meta says:

            My wife is extremely allergic to tobacco smoke and can have mild trouble breathing after walking by someone smoking outside (or sharing an elevator with someone who was previously smoking!) I don’t have any allergic reaction, and doubt that there are serious health consequences for me to breathing small quantities of smoke, but find the smell very unpleasant. I can’t think of any reason not to think of smoking in public as an assault, along the same lines as, say, urinating on someone from a balcony (which probably also doesn’t usually have much “health risk” – healthy urine is reasonably sterile).

            People should of course have the right to smoke tobacco (or old tires) on their own property, so long as they dispose of the byproducts.

        • albatross11 says:

          You’ll (*cough*) show him.

        • Aapje says:

          @Two McMillion

          Smoking seems to not be so enjoyable for many people, being more of a compulsion than a choice to enjoy themselves.

          Aren’t there better vices to pick?

        • Deiseach says:

          Have you also decided to start taking medicinal doses of arsenic, because this is the level of bloody fucking stupid this decision is on? Because yes, medically used in appropriate cases under careful supervision it does have a limited range of benefits! But nevertheless people did manage to kill themselves handily during the 19th century taking small doses and letting it build up!

          I’m holding Scott guiltless on this (though glaring in his general direction about that particular post) because the people on here are supposed to be able to tie their own shoelaces, so it’s not his fault if we do Dumb Crap That Will Get Us Killed.

          But oh brother. Well, what flowers would you like for the funeral?

          • Robin says:

            Not only in 19th century. Arsenic is one of the few cases where homeopathy has an effect:
            https://smw.ch/article/doi/smw.2019.20071/

          • matkoniecz says:

            It is concluded that an avoidable toxicant such as inorganic arsenic, for which no scientific safe dose threshold exists, should be avoided and not be found in over-the-counter medications.

          • I thought the point of taking low doses of arsenic was to make yourself immune as part of an elaborate plot to murder someone and get someone else blamed for it.

            Inspired, no doubt, by Mithridates.

          • Deiseach says:

            I thought the point of taking low doses of arsenic was to make yourself immune as part of an elaborate plot to murder someone and get someone else blamed for it.

            From my (cursory) reading of 19th century fiction, ladies took it to get improved complexions and gentlemen to, let us say, restore manly vigour. (I’m going on very hazy memories here but I think at least one famous poisoning case rested the defence on ‘my husband was taking arsenic to improve his tra-la-la‘ and it was left up to the jury to decide if Mrs Tra-la-la had taken advantage of this to give him an overdose or if he’d killed himself by doing Dumb Shit – pardon the crudity – but don’t hold me to this as I can’t remember where I read it).

            It was also touted as a general cure-all, besides being used as a pigment and dye to get a good lasting green colour. Honestly, while we’re complaining about the FDA and like bodies, we should pause to acknowledge that when people were free to dose themselves with whatever they liked in whatever amounts they liked, a heck of a lot of quacks were selling literal actual not metaphorical poison to them!

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      Since you’ve never smoked before, it’s gonna be a bit of a slog to start. You could probably have picked a better time, too (smoking is best as a social activity).

      I’m not gonna encourage you, ‘coz it’s your health and life on the line. Me, I figure you gotta die of something.

      All that aside, I feel your anger. Consider this a show of support whilst everyone else is jumping on you.

      • Deiseach says:

        If he wants the health benefits of nicotine (excuse me while I snort disdainfully) then let him take up patches or gum or the other delivery systems out there.

        Deciding to physically smoke tobacco for the hit is ‘performing trepanning on myself’ levels of stupid.

        For someone who has never smoked before, the easiest way to give it up is never start in the first place. Deciding to take up smoking because – what? everybody is against it? people disapprove of smokers? it’s cool rebel time? – is behaving like a bratty fourteen year old (and I was a bratty fourteen year old, and I am now very glad that I didn’t get away with half the crap I wanted to get away with).

        • If he wants the health benefits of nicotine (excuse me while I snort disdainfully) then let him take up patches or gum or the other delivery systems out there.

          I’ve been mildly tempted to try something like that, since a lot of people seem to find the mental effect attractive, and most of the health effect seems to be due to the smoke, not the nicotine.

          I have refrained, so far, given a family history of heart problems.

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          There are health benefits of nicotine? News to me.

          • Deiseach says:

            Supposed to help with concentration and focus, as well as appetite suppression. (Granted, when you’re dying from cancer induced by smoking, it’ll certainly quash your appetite).

            And it’ll kill the aphids on your roses to boot (a great source for Golden Age murder mysteries which solved “but where did X get the poison from?” by shoving in references to X, or Y, or Z, being a keen gardener so X could get their hands on enough nicotine to do the deed that way).

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            Oh, that’s good! Now I don’t have to worry about getting aphids on my roses, which is a blessing in these trying times.

    • rahien.din says:

      This is genuinely interesting, and I hope you will say more.

      For background : I am a doctor. My patients sometimes come to me seeking help with a specific problem. When I describe the solution to their problem, some of them will refuse to do it. This becomes frustrating, because they seem dissatisfied that they still have their problem, but simultaneously, proud that they are not utilizing the solution.

      When that happens, certain traps are easy to fall into, such as “This patient is being defiant and obstinate.” In general these must be avoided because A. even thinking that is damaging to the patient-physician relationship, and B. who would really refuse care out of obstinacy? We are trained to respond internally that “There must be some way I can better help my patient.”

      But you seem to be making this exact move of “I believe my doctor has correct opinions, but still, how dare they tell me what to do.”

      Would you tell me more about that? It would actually be helpful to my patients. Medical treatment has to be worth it to the patient – it has to improve their life. If there are people whose lives I will not improve, it’s better for my patient and I if we can discover that quickly.

      What should a doctor ask you, in order to elicit those core values? What should their response be, once those values are elicited? In what situations would you still want to undergo treatment? Would you want to see that (or any) doctor again? If so, why?

      • Matt M says:

        IMO, the doctor must understand that different people have different values. Specifically, some people may value “living life to its fullest” more than “living as long as possible” (relative to other people, at least).

        For such people, it is harmful to the relationship if the doctor says things like “You need to quit smoking, quit drinking, quit eating red meat, and engage in cardiovascular exercise for an hour each day.”

        Rather, the doctor should say, “Here are the risks you face if you do not take the following mitigating actions.” In other words, instead of saying “You need to stop smoking,” you need to say “These are the risks you face if you don’t stop smoking” and let the patient make up their own mind as to whether those risks do or do not outweigh the benefits they receive from enjoying smoking.

        This seems like basic common sense that most doctors should probably be doing as a matter of course, but many definitely do not.

      • It’s not exactly along the lines you are asking, but here are two different anecdotes:

        Back when I was a post-doc, my father had a bypass operation and suggested that I should check on my cholesterol level. I asked someone at the Columbia health care about it. He told me that it was not at a dangerous level. I asked what it was, and he initially refused to tell me. Eventually, I think when he figured out that I was a post-doc not an undergraduate, he told me the figure. But my impression was that the default attitude was “if you give patients information, they will try to make their own decisions, so better to tell them only the conclusion.”

        Much more recently, my cardiologist was advising me on exercise. He gave fairly specific advice — twenty minutes a day of brisk walking, where two episode of ten minutes, or twenty minutes of something else, wouldn’t do. I asked him for his reasons. He told me he had been a coauthor on a paper on the subject, so I asked him for a copy and read it.

        The paper provided no support for his detailed recommendations — it basically reported asking people whether they got exercise and then seeing whether they later had heart problems (from memory, so I don’t guarantee the details). Even for its intended purpose it was very nearly useless, since there was no attempt to look for direction of causation — it could be that people in good health were more likely to exercise and less likely to have heart problems. It read to me like a paper written by people who want a publication on their record, not people who were actually trying to find something out.

        The basic recommendation, usually in the form of 150 minutes a week of exercise such as brisk walking, I can find from many sources and generally follow, often with yard work instead of walking. But on the details, it seemed clear to me that my cardiologist was giving advice without paying much attention to what reasons there were to believe it, taking advantage of his position as an authority.

        I see a lot of the equivalent elsewhere in life and dislike it. For a lethal version currently in the news, consider the CDC advice not to wear a mask. Or most confident talk on culture war issues from either side.

    • ana53294 says:

      Do you want to be smelly? Is your partner OK with you starting to smell like an ashtray?

      Have you considered this may make it harder to find an apartment or a partner?

      The reason why I didn’t take smoking, even though there was quite a bit of social pressure when I was a teenager, was that tobacco smoke stinks. If you’re going to start smoking, go for cigars, they smell a bit better. Or pipes, maybe? They look kinda cool.

      • danridge says:

        Cigars are kind of weird advice given how much more intense they are; if you were going to go that route, I’d add first, just remember you don’t have to finish in one sitting as you’re getting started. And really, don’t be tempted to smoke one indoors, it’ll be with you for ages. If you’re thinking of smoking as an occasional thing though, it’s probably a lot nicer than cigarettes.

    • J Mann says:

      1) I don’t wish you ill, but it would be funny if you acted like this to amuse the people around you.

      2) To second some of the comments upthread, if you start smoking, please don’t litter. (Smokers: can you just carry an Altoids tin or something for butts?)

      3) Maybe consider vaping or chewing nicotine gum?

      • J Mann says:

        (I must have misformatted the link on “acted like this” – I meant to link to a video of George Costanza taking up smoking on Seinfeld)

    • LesHapablap says:

      As an occasional smoker, you really don’t want to go down that path. Even without long term disease, smoking makes you smell, it ages your skin, stains your teeth. It lowers your status. It gives you a constant cough. You’ll get sick more often and be in worse shape for any physical activity. It is horrendously expensive and will only get more expensive.

      But the worst thing is just having an addiction. You will have this activity that you MUST do, and if you can’t for some reason, you will have this gnawing hunger that eventually turns into headaches and general feeling of sickness. You won’t be able to focus on anything else until you get a cigarette.

      And even if you quit, years later it will always be at the back of your mind, pulling on you, a constant weight, sapping a little bit of your willpower, adding a little to your general stress level. “It has been a really tough day today, I could use a cigarette, god that would feel good,” and now your tough day just got a little tougher because you have an addiction you have to fight.

      • danridge says:

        The withdrawal is specifically from nicotine, right? I remember hearing that it is an incredibly effective nootropic and considered that it might be interesting to try an alternate delivery method to cigarettes, but given the issues smokers have quitting it seems like it’s at least strongly worth avoiding developing a habit.

      • LesHapablap says:

        I’m not enough of an expert to say, except that there are many psychoactive chemicals in cigarette smoke.

    • Purplehermann says:

      I am allergic to tobacco (nicotine specifically i think), and for years smokers made my life noticeably less enjoyable. Now smoking is much less common in public and I don’t live on a campus where hundreds of smokers live (people smoking near my dorm windows was particularly horrible) and I really really appreciate that difference.
      So purely on an emotional/instinctive level I hate smoking and don’t look kindly on smokers. Add the whole “they’re killing themselves” thing and I don’t feel bad about looking down on smokers. (There are considerate smokers and those trying to quit, they don’t count).

      Most people aren’t bothered as much as i am, but I still hope smoking becomes less common, and if takes shaming, taxes, laws, ads or interventions I’m perfectly fine with that

  41. baconbits9 says:

    This is the sort of story which highlights a lot of the potential issues with the shutdown/start up V shaped story. Summary: Milk is being dumped despite higher milk prices because processing plants can’t turn milk directly into the products now being demanded. Demand for processed cheese for fast food restaurants has collapsed and wedge cheese demand has increased, but there are two massive frictions here. First is shifting from processed to wedge and all the costs associated with that, and then there is the shift back from wedge to processed when the economy reopens. If the expectation was that this shift was permanent then there would be a race to adjust all the necessary shipping, processing and packaging equipment and start on this new pathway, there would be dead weight loss from dumped milk and possibly culled herds while the switch was being made but the disruption would be a one off with losses for one section but investment and growth in another. This investment is what drives a V shaped recovery, not the resumption of consumption, the losses in one sector (or even in one sector of one sector) are followed by growth in another sector.

    This is unlikely to impossible under the current regime, there is no way to recoup millions of dollars in new investment and retooling in a short time span, especially when the expectation is that you will have to retool again to shift back to a different demand paradigm immediately afterward, and this is for an industry that is not suffering a demand collapse, only a demand shift.

    • Loriot says:

      I was wondering why milk went on sale at Safeway two weeks ago for the first time ever that I can remember.

    • albatross11 says:

      The demand for restaurant-cooked meals is going to be lower for quite awhile, not just during the lockdown. If you’re a 50 year old asthmatic, how many meals are you eating out in, say June 2020, with the bad outbreaks and hospital meltdowns mostly done, but virus still circulating in the environment?

      • baconbits9 says:

        The demand for restaurant-cooked meals is going to be lower for quite awhile, not just during the lockdown

        How much lower? What specific types of meals will decrease by what %? Will the alternative cheese consumption hold up while restaurant cooked food remains down over months to years?

        • albatross11 says:

          I don’t know. I’m just saying that it seems inevitable to me that restaurants will still be very short on customers willing to eat there in person (and maybe even order take-out) in the next several months. Until there’s a good reliable vaccine or we’ve actually stopped the spread of the virus, at least susceptible people and people close to them are going to be damned careful about that stuff. Add in the people who’ve lost a lot of income and won’t have the money to eat out, and changes in habits, and I think the near-future prospects for restaurants is pretty grim.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Yes, there are lots of things that are inevitable, but the issue is largely that there is a 2nd expected shock to the demand side coming. It is much easier to start retooling for the new normal the more that you know about the new normal. For a V shaped recovery you want people to be putting investments towards the new normal now, not waiting until things reopen, watching that process unfold and then starting major investments

          • HeelBearCub says:

            What Bacon said, but put a different way.

            Capital investments aren’t typically expected to pay off in the time frame of “under a year”. And if the lag between “I decide to invest in equipment” and “my equipment has now made the product in demand” is on the order of months (which, given that cheddar cheese ages for 2 to 3 months, is an absolute minimum), your confidence that you can get even a few months of return on product is going to be very low.

            Plus, we have supply chain issues on this equipment itself. How much of the necessary equipment is ready to be bought right now? What’s the likelihood that equipment manufacturers will make these available in quantity given the even shorter term nature of the demand they would expect?

  42. johan_larson says:

    Sweden is doing it differently.

    While countries around the world impose strict measures to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, Sweden has followed a different path: no lockdowns, no school closures and no ban on going to the pub.

    The Scandinavian country is pursuing what Prime Minister Stefan Lofven calls a “common sense” response to the pandemic by keeping the country largely functioning and aiming health measures at the most vulnerable.

    “We who are adults need to be exactly that – adults. Not spread panic or rumours,” Mr. Lofven said in a televised address to the country last week. “No one is alone in this crisis, but each person has a heavy responsibility.”

    The approach has put Sweden at odds with many countries across Europe, including its neighbours – Denmark, Norway and Finland – where almost all public venues have been shut and people have been ordered to stay indoors. In Sweden, most bars, restaurants and schools remain open, and people continue to mingle in parks and on city streets.

    The government has introduced social-distancing guidelines and encouraged people to work from home. Gatherings of more than 50 people have also been banned, and some businesses, notably cinemas and ski resorts, have voluntarily closed. But few of the measures are mandatory, and almost no one expects Sweden to adopt the kind of fines and police checks that have become commonplace in Britain, France, Spain and Italy.

    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

    • John Schilling says:

      This should work adequately well against COVID-19. Whether or not it does work adequately well, is going to be highly informative re: level of trust and faith in baseline humanity. Best of luck, Sweden.

      • Machine Interface says:

        Anecdotically, one person I know from Sweden (in Skurup) has told me none of their cowerkers take government warnings seriously and all think even basic advices like “wash your hands” are overblown.

        • John Schilling says:

          It was nice knowing you, Sweden. Dibs on Gotland, once it’s been properly depopulated and decontaminated.

    • Matt M says:

      Good. I am very glad they are doing this.

      Not because I know it’s the best policy. I don’t. But because in order for us to ever know what the best policy was, it’s really important that someone does this.

    • Aapje says:

      Deaths per million seems like more useful metric. By that measure, Sweden is actually worse off than the US, but not the UK.

      • Statismagician says:

        Yeah. Sweden has ~125% the population of just NYC. Simple counts don’t tell you much when you’re comparing across such different groups.

      • baconbits9 says:

        I am not even sure deaths per million is a good metric, deaths are coming from specific subsections of the population which means certain countries are going to have higher expected death rates. I’ve seen speculation that Italy’s death rate is high in part because they had a very mild flu season this past year.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          Compared to other years, Italy had a mild flu season, but compared to other European countries this year, the Mediterranean countries were the worst hit. The only European countries with worse flu than Italy were Spain, Portugal, Greece, Malta, and Austria.
          Nordic countries had milder than normal.

          Source: Euromomo (beware the blue line)

        • EchoChaos says:

          It’s not bad, but comparing to the entire United States isn’t terribly helpful either. We have multiple clusters which are moving in different ways.

          The West Coast (and Western USA in general) are handling it pretty well, while the Northeast is getting obliterated and the South is just starting to see it.

    • JayT says:

      One thing I find interesting is that Sweden has a very similar number of cases as Norway, despite Sweden’s larger population. However, they have six times the number of deaths. Anyone know if this is a testing issue where Norway is doing more testing, so they have more known cases while Sweden is undercounting? Is there some other reason Sweden would have so many more deaths?

      • 10240 says:

        Sweden has no idea how many cases they have. They only test people in at risk groups, healthcare workers, or people with severe symptoms since March 12.

        • Matt M says:

          They only test people in at risk groups, healthcare workers, or people with severe symptoms since March 12.

          Isn’t this true of most countries at this point? It’s definitely true of the US!

  43. gbdub says:

    A theory going around that California, which you would expect to be hit particularly hard by COVID (dense population centers, lots of travel from China), is doing better than expected because California already has significant herd immunity. The idea is that California got hit by an early and unusually rough flu season, but that was actually COVID-19, and as a result the pandemic has partially burned out already.

    Any chance this is actually true? Could it explain the “success” of some of the other Asian countries?

    • Aapje says:

      The west coast is the most Asian, so you’d expect it to hit there first.

      Yet if the theory is true, where were all the ICU cases that seem so typical of COVID?

      • gbdub says:

        That was the “bad flu season”, so the theory goes. The ICU cases were there, but to the extent they were higher than normal it was just thought to be seasonal flu and went uncommented.

        I think this is unlikely… you would think healthcare workers at least would more widely notice the similarity. But as far as weird theories go I thought it was an intriguing one.

    • Chalid says:

      I find it very unlikely. If the virus had spread much more widely and was much less deadly than commonly thought, then South Korea and Singapore (who successfully are preventing spread, for now) would look very different – either they would not have been able to contain it in the first place, or they would have contained it and their IFRs would look much lower.

    • Eric Rall says:

      California also has only a very limited capacity to test for COVID-19, which is artificially depressing the statistics. As of Monday when I was evaluated, my local hospital was only collecting samples for COVID tests from health care workers and inpatients. I was told verbally that I “very probably” had COVID, but they weren’t able to test me; my discharge paperwork said “Upper Respiratory Infection, Acute”. I looked up online, and my county’s (Santa Clara) public health lab’s website said they had the capacity to test 100 samples per day (so probably 25-50 patients worth of tests, assuming 2-4 samples per patient). There are also private labs starting to run COVID tests here, but not enough.

      Death and hospitalization statistics would be less inaccurate than overall confirmed cases, since critically ill people in the hospital are getting tested, but there are still going to be a lot of deaths that aren’t counted because people died outside of hospitals or before they could be tested. This would show up as a spike in the overall death rate, but if those statistics are publicly available on a daily or weekly basis, I haven’t been able to find them.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        I was told verbally that I “very probably” had COVID, but they weren’t able to test me; my discharge paperwork said “Upper Respiratory Infection, Acute”.

        Sounds just like a friend of my brother who lives in California. “You probably have it, but it’s mild. Go home, isolate yourself, and tell us if it gets worse.”

      • matthewravery says:

        California also has only a very limited capacity to test for COVID-19, which is artificially depressing the statistics.

        I think this is wrong. California looks better than most of the country whether you look at confirmed cases per million or deaths per million. Deaths are the more favorable of the two metrics.

        For your supposition of “California just looks good because of testing” to hold, you’d have to posit that CA has done pretty well initially and then especially bad over the past 1-3 weeks, and the deaths are about to spike hard. What evidence is there for this particular pattern?

        • Eric Rall says:

          I’ve got firsthand evidence (see above) that Santa Clara County had extremely limited testing capacity relative to the number of suspected cases, as of a little less than a week ago. This might be limited to my county, or it might be a regional or statewide issue, or it might be most of the country doing a shit job of testing people.

          This does suggest that one of the following is true:
          1. The death count here is likely to spike in the coming weeks.

          2. The CFR is much lower than is currently believed.

          I think the former is more likely, although I hope it’s the latter. I suppose we’ll find out in tge coming weeks.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Everyone has limited testing capacity, though. Thus it can’t be artificially suppressing statistics vs. other states.

            That said, I think the idea that there is some sort of immunity in CA is bunk.

          • Eric Rall says:

            “Limited capacity” is not a boolean value. One area could have an order of magnitude more testing capacity than another (either absolute or relative to suspected cases), but still be “limited”.

            According to this article, CA is one spot short of dead last in per capita testing in the US:
            https://abc7.com/coronavirus-covid-19-covid-testing/6075023/

            New York has done the most testing per capita, about 13.5x as many as California.

    • No:

      1. The death rate is >> than the flu.
      2. For herd immunity to have a significant affect, you need a significant fraction of the public to be infected.

      Do I really need to explain what these two facts imply?

      • gbdub says:

        1. By death rate, do you mean “number of dead people per day” or “deaths as a percentage of infections”? The problem with the latter is that we don’t know the denominator for sure, and if a large number of people were infected but never got noticeably sick, or did get sick but were misdiagnosed with seasonal flu, that could be skewing the death rate.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      I don’t believe it because if California achieved herd immunity, it would look worse than Italy.

      But here’s another issue. People do directly test for the flu. He says that it was blamed on B/Victoria. That’s because back in November and December about 2x as many of the positive flu tests showed B than A (the opposite in February). There are a lot of negative flu tests. I don’t know how the numbers compared from this year and prior years. I don’t know where to get California numbers, so I don’t know if it was particularly low this year. I don’t know who gets tested. If people with mild cases test negative, whatever, but I’d think that serious cases would always get tested and someone would notice if serious cases were negative. Maybe that’s too much faith in “the system,” but I’d think by this point, someone would remember that it explains this mystery they brushed off a few months ago.

      • Rebecca Friedman says:

        Not everyone gets tested; nobody tested me when I had it last year, and I had a fever above the “go to the ER!” threshhold. (That said, I was at home, they’d have to have told me to come in.) Also, I was in a household with someone who did go to the ER, who may well have gotten tested, so they had reason to assume they knew what I had (and were right!). They prescribed us all Tamaflu, which worked very well; personally, I’d expect them to notice if Tamaflu stopped working, which unless it works for Covid is another count against that theory.

    • Clutzy says:

      I think that, if the East Asia numbers are even remotely accurate, there has to have been a previous, probably less virulent, version of the virus that spread and gave a substantial number of people partial or total immunity.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        You’d have to explain how it never left Southeast Asia

        • Clutzy says:

          Sars was never really a problem outside of SE Asia. Lots of regions are having variation in the susceptibility of their populations to C19. it appears.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Now you’ve run into Occam’s Razor. You still have an unknown viral susceptibility to explain, but now you have an unknown virus as well.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            If it was a population level event in SE Asia, such that it conferred population levels of immunity, you have to explain what kept it in SE Asia.

            If it was a problem that flared up, but was contained before it got to be a population level event that was widespread, then you don’t have population level immunity.

          • Clutzy says:

            It seems to me that it was a Razor solution. The just so stories being batted around about perfect reactions are what appear overly complex and implausible.

        • gbdub says:

          The theory I originally linked to would say that it did leave SE Asia and made it at least as far as CA (but not to Italy or NY in significant numbers).

          If the version COVID-19 now causing a major pandemic is a more virulent mutation of an earlier virus, wouldn’t we expect it to eventually “outrun” the earlier version?

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        SE Asia has had serious outbreaks in recent memory. It’s possible they gave people some resistance to this. Much more likely is that it had their populace and institutions primed to fight this one.

      • gbdub says:

        Of course, if that were true, why did Wuhan get hit hard? Unless the origin of COVID-19 was elsewhere and Wuhan was the first place the “new version” hit without previous exposure to the less virulent version.

      • eric23 says:

        Except that the doubling time in South Korea (after the megachurch outbreak) and China (initially) was the same as that seen in Western countries. Suggesting that people there had no better natural immunity than Westerners, rather their governments contained the outbreak better except for these two failures.

  44. mtl1882 says:

    I haven’t seen this covered much. The prime minister of Singapore said this week and earlier this month that he expects this to take years to run its course, and that it’s not under control and will probably get worse before it gets better. He also did CNN interviews, but I haven’t watched them. This assessment doesn’t surprise me, though it is hard to know exactly what he means, but I keep seeing Singapore being held out as some sort of miracle cure if we can only get our act together. That’s not how he’s framing it. Some in Singapore have pushed for harsher lockdowns.

    Singapore has said a total lockdown will not eradicate the virus and any measures put in place have to be sustainable in an outbreak that could last for many months.

    “There is no such magic solution,” said Lawrence Wong, co-head of the government’s virus-fighting taskforce.

    Also, not sure how rerpresentative it is, but this article talks about Singapore’s contract tracing method, which apparently relied less on tech than on very good detective work based on patient interviews about their interactions, phone calls with those named, and use of CC TV footage for more anonymous interactions. It also does not emphasize testing–anyone who might have been exposed had to stay in total lockdown for 14 days.

    Paul Graham tweeted asking why we weren’t asking Taiwan and Singapore what they would do in our shoes. I find it highly implausible that the U.S. government has not consulted with officials from those governments.

    • Kaitian says:

      Singapore is a city state famous for its law and order policies. The US is a large landmass with a ton of poor people, a lot of weird special legal rules for small areas, and a lot of very remote rural communities. What works for Singapore will not work for the US: most areas don’t have much video surveillance, many Americans would strongly resist having their phone calls monitored or being locked in quarantine, even the climate is colder and thus presumably more conducive to passing on the virus.

      Taiwan might be a closer comparison, but still has a lot of differences. For one thing, it’s an island with not too many ways to cross its (de facto) borders.

    • Skeptic says:

      We’re about 2 months too late for track and trace. And in reality, the US government was never going to be capable of doing it in the first place. The US gov competency is mostly limited to mailing checks and setting money on fire for the MIC.

      Mark this comment, I will gladly eat my words if the government institutes a successful track and trace program, gets R0 < 1, and we’re all back in the office in the next few weeks.

      I don’t think it’s even within the realm of possibility and given the combination of our low trust society and incompetent government probably never was.

  45. JayT says:

    I have a dog question. I’ve always been told that dogs shouldn’t eat onions, and from what I’ve seen online that is true. What nobody tells you though, is what amounts of onion is dangerous for dogs? Are raw and cooked onions equally dangerous? I know there have been times that my dog has snuck cooked onions out of the garbage with no ill effects.

    What I’m mostly interested in, is that if I boil a chicken carcass to make broth, and I put onions in the with the carcass, would it be safe to scrape off the leftover meat on the carcass after boiling it and give that to my dog? Or is the fact that the meat was cooked with onions enough to make it dangerous?

    • Deiseach says:

      I never knew that about dogs, I had heard that chocolate was very bad for them. Probably should avoid givng anything cooked with onions to your dog if this is the case, and also I’d discourage the dog from rooting in the bins (apart from the fact that it may spill the rubbish all over by doing this, it’s not any help if you are avoiding feeding it onions but it’s sneaking them out of the scraps).

      • JayT says:

        This isn’t a normal occurrence, she’s actually really good about leaving food that isn’t hers alone. However, there have been a few times that the temptation was too great for her, usually when I’ve left a bag of scraps on the floor for too long.

      • Matt says:

        My dog (~50lbs) once ate the better part of a pound of milk chocolate chips that he somehow stole from the kitchen counter. Result: He spent the night hyperactive (running all over the house) and with diarrhea (runs all over the house). In the morning, he seemed fine. He’s 15 years old now.

        • JayT says:

          My sister-n-law’s pug one time knocked over chairs to build a stairway to the countertop so that he could eat a bowl full of Easter candy. It was probably close to a pound of candy, and the dog weighed maybe 25 pounds.
          He threw up and had diarrhea all over the house until someone came home, at which point they took him to the vet. The vet said that there is so little actual chocolate in cheap Easter candy that he wasn’t really in any danger. He injected a bag of saline solution into the dog’s back and sent him home. The dog was pretty crazy the rest of the night since he was hungry, but we weren’t allowed to feed him.

          My other dog with chocolate story is the time my grandmother’s 12 pound miniature schnauzer snuck into the closet that had christmas presents and ate a pound of dark chocolate…two years in a row. That dog lived to be 16.

    • Desrbwb says:

      The amount of onion that’s dangerous obviously depends on the dog, with bigger dogs having less to worry about. The dangerous amounts seem to hover around the 100g of onion per 20 kg body weight (around 0.5 % of total body weight). There’s no real difference between raw and cooked onions, as the toxic chemicals survive the cooking process. However, compared to the other big ‘don’t feed your dog this’ foodstuff, chocolate, onions aren’t that dangerous.

      How much meat do you get off a chicken after making stock (which is what I assume you mean by broth)? How many onions? Our family dogs have always had a little gravy and meat trimmings from roast chickens stuffed with at least 1 onion since I was a child. While I wouldn’t give a dog the stock itself, I probably wouldn’t worry about tiny amounts of leftover meat like that unless the stock was really overloaded with onion. After all, most of the onion juices should have stayed in the stock (that’s the point of stock after all).

      Obligatory ‘not a vet’ disclaimer.

      • JayT says:

        When I roast a chicken I’ll cut off the meat, but I’m not scraping around for every last morsel. I’ll cut off the parts that are easy to cut off, and the rest will go in a pot with an onion and some other aromatics. Afterwards, I’ll pull off the meat that’s falling off the bone and give it to my dog. I’ve been doing this for years, and she’s 11 with no health issues at all, so I assume I haven’t been doing any damage, I was just curious.

        My dog is right around 20kg, and giving her the meat off the bones would come nowhere near 100 g of onion, so I will stop worrying about this.

    • Well... says:

      Usually if you’re making broth you’re using a fair amount of salt. That’s way too much salt for dogs, whose palates are many times more sensitive to salt than ours. It actually burns something in their mouth that seriously hampers their ability to smell, and they need to be able to smell like you need to be able to see and hear.

      Caveat: I am not an expert, but this is what I learned from dog trainers and from my training when I worked at a pet store years ago.

      • JayT says:

        I don’t heavily salt the liquid when making broth/stock, so I don’t think this will be that big an issue. Also, my dog is a salt junky. If she has the chance to eat something salty she goes crazy for it. I don’t give her things with salt often though.

        • Well... says:

          Oh, dogs love salt. But it’s terrible for them. Also, I’m not sure what you mean by “heavily” but even what most people would consider “light” salt is probably still way too much for dogs. I don’t know if you’ve ever tasted dog biscuits or things like that, but the most surprising thing about them is how bland they are. That’s for a reason.

    • FLWAB says:

      From my understanding Desrbwb has it right: depending on size they have to eat a good amount of onion, and it’s not as bad for them as other foods.

      I just wanted to put in that something all dog owners should worry about more than onion is grapes/raisins. They are much, much more toxic to dogs than onions.

      Of course your average dog isn’t likely to want to eat a grape, but it was something I was unaware of for a long time and it’s actually pretty scary how toxic they can be. But my little beagle has eaten the occasional scrap of onion or licked bowls that contained dishes with onions and has had no problems.

  46. VoiceOfTheVoid says:

    Do these comments support LaTeX?

    $$\frac{1}{2}$$

    Darn, appears not.

    • Iago the Yerfdog says:

      No, but I think it’s a safe bet that the commentariat supports the wearing of latex gloves. Unless you’re allergic, then use nitrile.

    • Robin says:

      I presume that people who are interested in the formulas of your comments are fit to read LaTeX markup just as well.

      • fion says:

        “Your brain does the translating. I don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead. Hey uh, you want a drink?”

    • Lambert says:

      I thought you were supposed to use \( this is maths \).

  47. Loriot says:

    My company had a big meeting today to announce that one of my coworkers was transitioning. It’s the first time someone I’ve actually known has transitioned. It was startling at first, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it pretty quickly.

    • Evan Þ says:

      Huh; why’d they hold an all-company meeting to announce it? I hope the person in question wasn’t embarrassed.

      • Loriot says:

        Presumably so they could answer questions from anyone who isn’t familiar with the concept and inform everyone at once.

        • Deiseach says:

          A meeting seems a bit extravagant, surely an email sent round to everyone would have done just as well? I suppose if the person in question is prominent in the organisation, or wanted this to be as public as possible, then okay but it does seem to be drawing a lot of attention to make X stand out where people would otherwise not know or care one way or the other about X.

          Ah well, good luck!

          • Loriot says:

            She’s one of the oldest remaining employees at the company.

          • Deiseach says:

            Oh I see, one of the founding members as it were, so they’d be well known to everyone, customers as well presumably, and it would be a big public change.

            That does explain it.

    • chrisminor0008 says:

      Are you in California? I just can’t imagine that kind of virtue signalling happening anywhere else on the planet.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Not everything is an SJW plot.

      • Loriot says:

        What makes you think it’s virtue signaling? It’s more like “here’s your coworker’s new name, so stop calling her by the old one”.

    • salvorhardin says:

      How big’s the company? Usually I’ve seen this sort of thing handled by email and/or internal forum/announcement tool posts, but an announcement to dozens of coworkers doesn’t seem weird in the way that an announcement to thousands would.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      My company had a big meeting today to announce that one of my coworkers was transitioning.

      I can’t believe I’m the first to ask this, but how big a meeting? Did the company just break the law?
      Or did you mean like a 500-person Skype call to tell everyone that a co-worker is transgender?

  48. WarOnReasons says:

    How likely it is that Spain or Italy will default on their debt in Greece-like style?

    • Tarpitz says:

      I think this is largely a political question, not an economic one. Will Germany agree to Coronabonds? How much Italian/Greek government debt is the ECB willing to monetize? Absent drastic policy intervention, I see default as a near-certainty, but I don’t feel able to make good predictions about the likelihood of drastic policy intervention.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        Given that the eu has been undershooting its inflation targets for goddamn ever, the best move is to monetize a healthy chunk of everybodys national debt. Not singling out the south, just “and now everyone has a national debt 20 percent of gdp lower”

        • Tarpitz says:

          That might well be a good idea economically, but I don’t think it solves the political problem of selling looser monetary policy to Germany.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            This crisis doesn’t raise the specter of moral hazard in the same way that the 2008 crisis did, which (I think?) has been a big part of Germany’s stance on EU monetary policy. That may make it easier to push monetary stimulus (as well as being more permissive of fiscal stimulus via government bonds).

            Just a WAG though.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            It would make the policy both not a transfer, and also not a “reward for irresponsibility” because it applies to all. The point would simply be to kick the engines of creation back into gear. Very much including in Germany, which has been operating way below its potential output for decades now.

          • Tarpitz says:

            I guess we’ll find out. German folk/institutional memory of Weimar hyperinflation has always struck me as a pretty important factor in European monetary policy that I still expect to be difficult to dislodge.

    • cassander says:

      On the one hand, IIRC, Greece was actively cooking their books to hide how much debt they were taking on. so it seems unlikely. On the other hand, the economic consequences of long term shut down are so astronomically enormous that all the usual rules go out the window.

  49. littskad says:

    In a recent open thread, there was a discussion about how in some languages, you must say certain things “sit”, “stand”, or “lie” somewhere, where in English you’d just say the things “are” there. There’s a very nice recent article in the Moscow Times (in English) about how Russian handles this sort of thing.

    • Creutzer says:

      What’s interesting is that German is 100% like Russian in this regard, everything matches 1:1, despite the two languages not being all that closely related and not having had very significant contact. This seems to suggest that this stuff is non-arbitrary and there is actually some deep feature of how humans conceptualise things that makes sense of which verbs go with which objects/position pairs.

      • Kaitian says:

        You can’t generalize from two languages like that, especially not two that have interacted as much as German and Russian.

        By contrast, Mandarin Chinese generally uses one word for “put” and one for “be in a position”, but there are different words for “carry on your back”, “carry in your arms”, “carry in your hand” and “carry with someone else”. Japanese has a bunch of different words for “wear” depending on the type of clothing (socks, jacket, pants etc). So different languages just make different distinctions.

        The object position verbs make sense to me intuitively: stand – it’s actively upright, sit – it’s unexpectedly immobile but not lying down, lie – it’s passively lying flat. But then that’s how I’ve used them all my life, and someone coming from English or Chinese might be as baffled by them as I am by distinctions that other languages make but mine doesn’t (e.g. when to use the -ing form in English).

        • Creutzer says:

          Of course, different languages make different distinctions. But here’s the prediction I’m willing to make: you will not find any language that is Russian+ which has the same verbs, but applies them in a slightly different way. For example, there is going to be no language that is like Russian except that plates “lie” on the table.

          Compare this to prepositions, which, in contrast, are to a notable extent arbitrary. In Russian, you are “on the kitchen”, which is bizarre from a German point of view. The language-specific arbitrary choice of propositions is a well-known problem for language learners. The choice of prepositions also varies between more closely related languages, such as Russian and Czech, even though they are both Slavic.

          • Hoopdawg says:

            Polish plates do indeed lie on the table. (We can also be both “in” and “on the kitchen”, with the latter specifically referring to a workplace.)

      • Del Cotter says:

        There’s the concept of a “sprachbund”, two unrelated languages that have spent so much time with each other, they pick up bits of each other’s grammar.

      • Purplehermann says:

        They sound kind of similar to me, add the similar alphabets and I’m skeptical of how distantly related they are

        • Creutzer says:

          Tagalog and Finnish and Welsh use the same alphabet and are as unrelated to each other as any three languages can be. Alphabets have nothing to do with anything in linguistics.

          How distantly related Russian and German are is also not really an open question. Slavic and Germanic languages split thousands of years ago. It would, of course, be a slightly stronger argument if one found two completely genetically unrelated languages. However, the 1:1 mapping between Russian and German cannot be entirely inherited from a common ancestor because it extends to objects that simply did not exist at the time the two languages’ last common ancestor was spoken.

        • Del Cotter says:

          They’re not very distant in that they’re both Indo-European, but they’re not close either, in that one is a Slavic language, and the other is West Germanic. The original poster was pointing out what they saw as commonalities being strangely not shared by, say German and Dutch, which are both closely related West Germanic languages.

    • Robin says:

      Thank you! And I was surprised by Dutch strawberries sitting in the juice.
      Some seem familiar, like sitting in prison and lying in hospital, but why should a mouse be sitting? Or a roof on the house?

      Which reminds me of some fixed expressions, craftperson edition:

      “Sitzt, passt, wackelt und hat Luft.”
      (Sits, fits, wobbles and has air.)
      Meaning: It is done, not perfectly, but will do.

      “Nach fest kommt lose.”
      (After tight comes loose.)
      Meaning: If you screw something too tight, you’ll break it.

      “Lehrjahre sind keine Herrenjahre.”
      (Learning years are no master years.)
      Meaning: The apprentice has to follow all orders. (Naturally, the most hated phrase among apprentices)

      “Tritt sich fest”
      (It’ll be treaded tight)
      Meaning: Something has fallen down. Don’t bother to pick it up. If you step on it enough, it’ll be tight on the floor and the problem is solved.

      • Del Cotter says:

        You translate “fest” as “tight”, but if you use “fast” you have the opportunity to see similar idioms in English:

        “Play fast and loose”
        Act carelessly

        “Hard and fast”
        Stuck immovably; from ships running aground (what I was saying about English having a lot of idioms from the age of sail)

      • Aapje says:

        @Robin

        None of those examples are to be found at your linked page.

        Anyway, it seems to me that Dutch commonly uses ‘sitting’ as the default and/or acceptable alternative. Gold can sit or lie in the safe. You can sit or be in self quarantine. You can sit or be in prison. A book can sit or lie in a box (in general, sitting is commonly used when things are in a container, including people or animals).

        Another example is the verb ‘vastzitten,’ which literally translates to ‘fixed sitting.’ This refers to something being stuck to or in something else. So:
        – ‘Mijn tong zat vast aan de bevroren reling’ = My tongue was stuck to the frozen railing (‘zat vast’ is past singular of vastzitten)
        – ‘Ik zit vast op het vliegveld’ = I am stuck at the airport (or more literally: I am standing fixed at the airport)
        – ‘We laten de gevangenen vastzitten’ = We leave the prisoners in prison (or more literally: we leave the prisoners sitting stuck (where context makes clear that this is in prison))

        This is much more commonly used than ‘vaststaan,’ which literally translates to ‘fixed standing.’ You would use that like so:
        – ‘Ik sta vast in de file’ = I am stuck in traffic (or more literally: I am standing fixed in traffic)
        – ‘Mijn besluit staat vast’ = My decision is final (or more literally: my decision stands fixed)

        After tight comes loose.

        I like that one.

        • Robin says:

          My examples (sitting in prison, lying in hospital, the mouse is sitting on the table) are not from Dutch, but from Russian, i.e. littskad’s article above.

          And it’s funny that I sometimes want to shout: “Yay! Vastsitten is festsitzen and vaststaan is feststehen!” And then comes another sentence of yours, and I’m like “ah no, that’s something else”.

  50. HeelBearCub says:

    Well, it appears that the South better hope that the experts are wrong.

    Because as of March 26th, only (by my eye, urban) pockets of the South had stopped going out, according to cell phone data. As compared to basically the rest of the country having already started isolating. Maybe there is some sort of bias that would cause Southerners to need to drive more than those in all other parts of the country, but I don’t know what that would be.

    I was hopeful that NC, which was taking this seriously 3 weeks ago, the governor urging people to reduce activity, etc. would look better than it does.

    Maybe the Triangle should lock out the rest of NC. Haha. Got’eeem.

    No, I don’t mean that, but my wife is likely to end up on or near the front line when things get bad, so I might be, justifiably, a little salty. Bitter humor and resignation is what I got at the moment.

    • Bobobob says:

      My part of the triangle (Raleigh) is in complete cooperation mode. I can see how outlying areas might be less compliant, though.

    • Carolus says:

      I have family out on the coast (not Outer Banks) and it sounds like their city is taking it seriously. Restaurants are only doing take out and people seem to be social distancing. Then again, the garden supply store and Lowes are still open, so take from that what you will.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Mecklenberg County (Charlotte) formally locked down a day before Wake County (Raleigh) and two three days before Durham County (er, Durham).

        Lots of people were nervous to be the first to lockdown (which makes me super impressed with Seattle), but once one county in a state does it, others quickly follow suit.

      • Cliff says:

        Lowes is open everywhere and doing huge business. The stores are packed all day long (!)

        • albatross11 says:

          Lowes and similar stores carry essential stuff, in the sense that if my toilet breaks, I’d really like to fix it ASAP. But also there are lots of people who finally have time to do some home improvement project they’ve been meaning to do for months.

      • albatross11 says:

        A family member of ours has a property on the Outer Banks, and apparently they more-or-less closed the town down–they explicity didn’t want people driving down from NYC or DC or wherever and bringing them COVID-19.

    • EchoChaos says:

      To be fair, a large part of this is rural-ness.

      https://twitter.com/ComfortablySmug/status/1245742013330440193

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        I don’t know why people, including someone smart like Kevin Drum, pull out that graph.

        The NYT article is really good and has a much better map.

        https://twitter.com/oliviacpaschal/status/1245711609890320386

        EDIT No, I know exactly why: because it confirms their priors that Southerners are dumb.

        • EchoChaos says:

          I don’t know why people, including someone smart like Kevin Drum, pulls out that graph.

          I know exactly why. He wants to make political hay and dunk on the outgroup, which is Southern whites.

          It doesn’t matter that a large part of those travelling are Southern blacks or that it’s for good reason, he just wants to dunk.

          Also, the thing that actually matters for spread is interpersonal contacts, not how far you went. You can have more of those in half a mile in New York than in twenty in some of those counties. Which is why New York is the epicenter, and not the rural South.

          Edit: You got it with your edit.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Note, from that twitter thread:

          Their list of where people are still traveling the most only includes counties of >500,000 people (for context, I reported a story on a rural county of just 2,000 people last year), and does include a lot of urban Southern counties.

          My emphasis, but it would appear that “this is just the rural effect” doesn’t make a ton of sense in that context.

          And while we are it, Drum very specifically says that Southerners are not stupid.

          • EchoChaos says:

            And while we are it, Drum very specifically says that Southerners are not stupid.

            And then implies that they are stupidly unable to listen to any other sources other than Fox News (Tucker Carlson was talking about Coronavirus early, but hey).

            I would think it was equally in poor taste to dunk on New York for having the biggest outbreak, by the way.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Dude, you relentlessly say the “mainstream” media can’t be trusted because it’s constantly lying. You are doing it in this thread.

            You can’t have it both ways.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @HeelBearCub

            Huh? Are you mistaking me for someone else?

            I haven’t said anything about the mainstream media in this thread other than anger at Kevin Drum for dunking on the outgroup.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            EDIT No, I know exactly why: because it confirms their priors that Southerners are dumb.

            Edit: You got it with your edit.

            IOW, you are endorsing the idea that the information coming from the NYT and Drum can’t be trusted.

            You are blind to it at this point.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @HeelBearCub

            I am agreeing with the NYT data and Drum is not part of the “mainstream” any more than Breitbart is.

          • acymetric says:

            Note, from that twitter thread:

            Their list of where people are still traveling the most only includes counties of >500,000 people (for context, I reported a story on a rural county of just 2,000 people last year), and does include a lot of urban Southern counties.

            My emphasis, but it would appear that “this is just the rural effect” doesn’t make a ton of sense in that context.

            And while we are it, Drum very specifically says that Southerners are not stupid.

            That’s the list, not the map. If the map only included counties of 500,000 plus only 3 counties in NC would be shaded at all.

            The color code on the red map doesn’t have very fine gradation, but it looks like all but a handful of counties are at least down to 50% travel, and almost all are under 75%.

            Pretty much all of the darker red counties would be classified as mostly to extremely rural.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            That graph is from the NYT. Drum didn’t make it up.

            You are correct that I misread what you are saying vis-a-vis the NYT in this instance, but IIRC, you have been fairly consistent in saying that the media intentionally misrepresents what Trump has done and said. I didn’t pull this idea from one single statement.

            For a long time Trump downplayed the risks and impacts of this disease. Conservative media outlets also downplayed it. Recent polling shows that 80% of Fox News viewers still think Covid-19 is being overblown.

            All of that has an effect. The kind of effect where the governor of Georgia claimed today that he only found out that asymptomatic people can spread the disease within the last 24 hours. Technically I think he claimed that “we” only found out within the last 24 hours, but that claim is even more wrong, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @acymetric:
            I was wondering how that point translated to the map. I was thinking they were doing some sort of estimation, but that makes sense.

            Pretty much all of the darker red counties would be classified as mostly to extremely rural.

            I don’t know about other states, but Greensboro and Winston Salem (Forsyth and Guilford counties) couldn’t in any way be categorized as rural. Guilford is one on that list of the highest travel.

            And huge number of the green counties and light green counties are also extremely rural, it doesn’t explain the difference. Some of the most rural places in America are green.

            Now, like I said to begin with, maybe there is some systemic bias in the data. But it’s not clear to me what it would be.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @HeelBearCub

            Thank you for the closest thing to an actual apology you’ve had when misstating my position. Accepted.

            Some in the right-wing media did downplay it.

            So did many in the left-wing media.

            It was right-winger Tucker Carlson who was on top of this first and convinced Trump to take it seriously.

            https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1242598358755180554?s=20

            I think more people on the right should take it more seriously, as I’ve said before here. I think more people on the left should take it more seriously, as I’ve said here.

            But I’m not here dunking on my tribal opponents who are actually having the worst major city outbreak in the entire world.

            Dunking on people who aren’t seeing an outbreak because they’re in rural areas is gauche.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Tucker Carlson did seem to play some role in convincing Trump.

            Past that, I don’t think Carlson was first to recognize the problem. All the reports on the virus early on reported that it did, in fact, first circulate in China in Wuhan, so he starts off first thing by lying. Tucker also promulgated the idea it was a Chinese bio weapon. So .. yeah. Not very accurate or helpful.

            I notice you didn’t address my point about your stance on coverage of Trump.

            I’m not “dunking on” people. I’m pointing out that there is an issue with how seriously people have been taking the spread of the virus over the last 3 weeks.

            Go back a few OTs and you can see it right here at SSC. People saying it’s completely overblown and no big deal, liberal hysteria.

          • acymetric says:

            Greensboro and Winston Salem aren’t rural, but the counties aren’t literally solely comprised of those cities. There are absolutely rural parts of Forsythe and Guilford counties. We might just have to agree to disagree on this, but having lived in Burlington for several years I feel pretty comfortable stating that as a fact. There are rural parts of Durham and Wake too.

          • acymetric says:

            And huge number of the green counties and light green counties are also extremely rural, it doesn’t explain the difference. Some of the most rural places in America are green.

            Oh, and I’m not looking at the green map. I’m looking at the 2nd (all red) map that shows % reduction in travel, which is a lot more informative than an arbitrary cut-off (2 miles of travel) on an arbitrary date (March 26). Knowing how much travel was reduced in an area is a lot more useful.

            Also have to wonder what the error bars here at the county level. There are ~5,000 samples per county on average, but I would guess some counties have more and some have a lot less.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @acymetric:

            There are rural parts of Durham and Wake too.

            Yes there are. So why the difference?

            Are these places more rural than Maine or South Dakota? There are rural places all over every state. We have to explain the difference between these areas. You aren’t making any actual argument.

          • AliceToBob says:

            @HBC

            And while we are it, Drum very specifically says that Southerners are not stupid.

            Wrong, he only says we’re not idiots. And the implication is that we wouldn’t be so non-idiotic if we paid more attention to the truth-infused media sources on the left.

            Drum:

            The map doesn’t look this way because people in the South are idiots. It’s almost certainly because they’re conservative and they watch a lot of Fox News. They also listen to President Trump. And Rush Limbaugh….

            Looks like an honest attempt by Drum to have a constructive dialogue with his outgroup!

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @acymetric:
            I will say that one source of the difference is that huge swaths of the rural Midwest and Mountain West seem to normally not travel more than 2 miles. You can see that if you compare the two maps. Lots of the areas of no change are also less than 2 miles traveled. So that’s part of the answer.

          • broblawsky says:

            @EchoChaos: you previously believed that it would be practical to reopen most of the country in early April.

            What media sources convinced you that that was reasonable?

            Do you still believe that social distancing measures and quarantines can be terminated outside of major hotspots in the next week or so?

            If not, why not? What convinced you otherwise?

            Thanks in advance.

          • acymetric says:

            I will say that one source of the difference is that huge swaths of the rural Midwest and Mountain West seem to normally not travel more than 2 miles.

            Doesn’t that undercut the idea that it’s a conservative thing? Rural areas in the Midwest and Mountain West aren’t exactly known to be liberal strongholds.

            Not necessarily related, but is it made clear anywhere what the gray lines on the 2nd map mean? I’m guessing it means “no travel” but it could also mean “not enough data” or something else entirely. Also, how are people that go for runs or hikes factoring into this? My runs and walks with my dog routinely go more than 2 miles, and I usually have my phone.

            One theory for why the rural Midwest and Mountain West were already traveling less: Rural areas in the south tend to be closer to some urban center or another, so you have lots of people living rural but commuting an hour plus to work in an urban or semi-urban area. By contrast, a lot of rural areas in the Midwest and Mountain West could be multiple hours from a major job center, so they are more likely to work at home (farming, etc.) or in the (small) community where they live. I don’t know how well that theory holds up, just a thought.

            I’ll also re-object to both the March 26 cutoff, and the 2 mile cutoff. It ignores basically all the existing shut downs (so people who had jobs still had to go to work…travel) and ignores the differences in prior travel behavior. How different would it look it the map were 3 miles? 4 miles? I live more or less “in the city” but I still have to go more than 2 miles to get to any store of significance.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @acymetric:
            That first map you are looking at is showing “change from normal”, so if conservative areas didn’t change from normal, and still manage to go less than 2 miles, it doesn’t undercut the idea that they aren’t changing normal behavior.

            The gray lined areas had an active “stay in place order” before March, 27th.

            Edit: And part of the idea here is that “stay in place” orders do matter, so the resistance to ordering them matters. That’s not ignoring the effect of them.

            Further edit:
            I suppose it’s also possible that the extremely rural areas not changing is an artifact of “not enough data”. You’d like that to be accounted for a different way, but it’s worth considering.

          • acymetric says:

            That first map you are looking at is showing “change from normal”, so if conservative areas didn’t change from normal, and still manage to go less than 2 miles, it doesn’t undercut the idea that they aren’t changing normal behavior.

            Maybe we’re looking at different sources? The map you’re talking about is the “second map”, showing change in behavior (using only a red scale). The “first map” is the one with green/yellow/red showing average distance < 2 miles by a certain date. Maybe that's part of the disagreement here.

            I'll also note that hardly any counties nationwide have seen 0 decrease in travel. Somewhere between 10 and 20 counties total (out of 3,007). Most have at least reduced travel by at least 25-50% which is not nothing. I don’t really like the way they made the key for the all red % change in travel map. The gradation in the top half makes it hard to see a difference between 40% decrease and no decrease. You have to look for the deepest red on the map to get a benchmark for no change, and then note that almost every county is lighter than that.

            The gray lined areas had an active “stay in place order” before March, 27th.

            No, according to the map itself the “outlined areas” (darker black outline around the state or county) means there was a stay in place order in effect. There is no mention of the diagonal gray lines, and not all outlined areas (places with stay in place orders) have the diagonal gray lines. The meaning of those gray lines is definitely ambiguous.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @broblawsky

            No, I do not think so, because the United States is not preventing people from hotspot areas from traveling. As I’ve said, we need to actually restrict interstate travel. Until we do, hotspots like New York will continue to reinfect the rest of the country.

            Note that China was able to reopen non-Hubei cities within a month, so this is possible. But instead of quarantining New York and letting the rest of us help them, we’re letting them infect everybody so the whole country needs to stay on lockdown.

            I have mostly gotten that information from hard-righties on Twitter.

            Both the mainstream right and left downplayed it well into March. There are as many links from Vox as from Fox saying “this isn’t a big deal”.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @acymetric:
            Let’s call them the (C)hange map and the (2)-mile map.

            The C map has all of its outlined areas also cross-hatched, by my reckoning. Pennsylvania, for example, looks like it’s an outlier, but it’s actually just nearly surrounded, and has substantial reduction in travel. I don’t see any complete outlines that don’t have cross-hatch.

          • Matt M says:

            Note that China was able to reopen non-Hubei cities within a month, so this is possible.

            It is unclear whether China did this because their quarantine efforts were successful, or whether they did it because they simply shifted policy and decided that massive economic shutdowns were not worth it.

          • Bobobob says:

            Wow, I’m impressed that so many SSC regulars live in NC. If this were the Before Time, we could meet for a drink.

            Extrapolating from my experience driving from Raleigh to the outer banks, compliance with quarantine should be directly proportional to the kinds of bumper stickers you see on pickup trucks.

            I imagine that all the major cities (Raleigh/Durham, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Asheville, Greensboro) are pretty much compliant, while rural areas are more of a problem. Closer to where I live, I wonder (for example) what the mood is right now in Clayton.

          • broblawsky says:

            Both the mainstream right and left downplayed it well into March. There are as many links from Vox as from Fox saying “this isn’t a big deal”.

            If the rightwing media and the leftwing media both equally downplayed COVID-19 within the same timeframe, why was partisanship such a strong indicator of coronavirus awareness?

          • EchoChaos says:

            @broblawsky

            why was partisanship such a strong indicator of coronavirus awareness?

            That’s from a few days ago, after the mainstream media had shifted from “not a big deal” to “the thing to hammer Trump for”, which is why it is partisan.

            I am talking about late January when Trump closing the borders was racist because this wasn’t a big deal.

            When Vox was posting “Is this going to be a pandemic? No.” at the same time Trump was actually closing the borders to try to stop it from becoming one.

          • Loriot says:

            Even back in January, relatively few people were calling the travel banrestrictions “racist”, and especially not, say sitting members of congress. It was hardly a mainstream position among “the left” as you might think due to outgroup homogenity bias and being informed of the most outrageous positions of your outgroup at all times.

            Compare the reaction to say, the travel ban that Trump instituted in his first week of office, which was widely decried by basically everyone (as well as being much more disruptive and having no legitimate policy purpose).

          • broblawsky says:

            That’s from a few days ago, after the mainstream media had shifted from “not a big deal” to “the thing to hammer Trump for”, which is why it is partisan.

            So partisanship on behalf of the right is stopping people who mostly consume right-wing media from taking the coronavirus as seriously as they should?

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Loriot

            I feel like I am justified in calling Joe Biden representative of the left.

            Joe Biden on January 31st: “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia — and fear-mongering to lead the way instead of science.”

            https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-coronavirus-story-is-not-just-another-story-about-trump/

            You are correct that Biden said xenophobia instead of racism. I accept the correction.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @broblawsky

            So partisanship on behalf of the right is stopping people who mostly consume right-wing media from taking the coronavirus as seriously as they should?

            Or it’s making the left overreact to it.

            Or both are reacting reasonably given differential danger. The left IS in substantially more danger than the right, because they more often live in dense cities.

            We won’t know which answer is right until we’re further into it. The answer is probably to shut down the cities and let the suburbs and rural areas stay in full business to keep them fed and alive until we can save them.

            What I am saying is “They are both probably right”.

            And I am annoyed at the media (right and left) making this partisan, because in doing so they’re making people who could be persuaded double down on bad positions because of partisanship.

            This is true of the left as well. New York stayed open too long because De Blasio wanted to prove some dumbass thing to Trump and was out there telling people to go to restaurants. New Orleans held Mardi Gras in the middle of a pandemic despite a Democrat mayor and governor.

          • Loriot says:

            Joe Biden on January 31st: “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia — and fear-mongering to lead the way instead of science.”

            You are correct that Biden said xenophobia instead of racism. I accept the correction.

            He was also not talking specifically about the travel restrictions. He called Trump’s record xenophobic, which is very different from what you claimed.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            And I am annoyed at the media (right and left) making this partisan, because in doing so they’re making people who could be persuaded double down on bad positions because of partisanship.

            This. If we want to have a partisan dunkfest, we can do it. I can go off on open borders types, urbanites, Dems/left media downplaying the virus in January/February and hyping up Chinese New Year festivals (AOC, Pelosi), Biden for apparently STILL being against travel bans, DeBlasio/NY for infecting us all, free traders for our lack of domestic medical supplies, and on and on and on.

            Or we could just…not. We could hold off on all the finger pointing until after this is over? Maybe?

            He was also not talking specifically about the travel restrictions. He called Trump’s record xenophobic, which is very different from what you claimed.

            I do not think that’s a plausible take on Biden’s speech.

          • albatross11 says:

            EchoChaos said:

            Both the mainstream right and left downplayed it well into March. There are as many links from Vox as from Fox saying “this isn’t a big deal”.

            Yep. This fits a more general pattern–the center against the fringes. My sense is that this is associated with visible elite failures. The center-left to center-right is pretty okay with the ruling class consensus/establishment view/neoliberal consensus/global war on terror/2008 bailouts/etc. The fringes on either end are in general unhappy with the performance of the establishment over the last few decades, and skeptical that the authorities have things under control and are managing things properly. That skepticism extends to ruling-class consensus policies.

            The ruling class/elites were mostly telling everyone not to worry about COVID-19. That was partly to prevent panic and enhance their electoral chances, but mainly it was honest ignorance and inability–they mostly are no more capable of understanding an epidemiological model than they are of dunking a basketball. The center-left and center-right heard their marching orders and obeyed, and cranked out “it’s a Chinese hoax” and “it’s just the flu” stories just like they really knew what the hell they were talking about.

            It blew up in their faces this time (though if the Iraq war is any guide, the people who got everything wrong w.r.t. COVID-19 will continue to be the respected experts in the future, at least as far as prestige media are concerned). But it’s extremely common that the people at the top are saying “no problem,” the prestige media sources print that story and exclude or ridicule people saying there’s actually a problem, and it turns out there was a hell of a big problem that wasn’t being reported in the US very much.

            At an individual level, the best response I know here is to find better sources of information. At a collective level, we need to find better ways of selecting people for leadership positions–the culture war, clickbait driven ideological conflict + reality show bit we do now to select leaders is demonstrably putting in the wrong kind of people to handle serious problems. And we need to work out how to get better “sense-making organs,” as Eric Weinstein puts it.

          • Matt M says:

            Or both are reacting reasonably given differential danger. The left IS in substantially more danger than the right, because they more often live in dense cities.

            This is worth repeating as well. I’m becoming pretty annoyed at the prevalence of social media posts saying something like “Can you believe those ignorant hicks in Wyoming still haven’t locked down yet? Haven’t they seen the numbers coming out of New York!”

            As if those are even remotely comparable situations whatsoever…

            The typical Fox News viewer probably is in less danger of catching/dying from this disease (and probably in more danger of suffering significant economic damage from lockdown measures) than the typical reader of The Atlantic. It makes sense that they would favor, and enact (where they have power), different policies.

          • Loriot says:

            There was a small town in Georgia that had a big outbreak, apparently spread through the local church. Being rural doesn’t make you immune to the virus.

          • Randy M says:

            Being rural doesn’t make you immune to the virus.

            I don’t think anyone here is going to say anything about immunity. It’s about relative risk and trade-offs. A lot is being asked to fight this plague and it matters precisely how dangerous it is in evaluating if it is worth doing.

          • Loriot says:

            I just think people aren’t appreciating how easily it can spread from city to city and town to town. You can’t really shut down some areas and not others nearby. The closest we’ve come to that is some remote towns in the Alaskan wilderness who cut off all contact with the outside other than resupply flights, but that’s not what people talk about when they call on red areas to keep the economy running.

          • Randy M says:

            I do think you are right about that, given that shutting down interstate travel isn’t really on the table, afaik.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Loriot / @Randy M

            That’s absolutely true. We’re going to remain locked down as a country much longer because nobody is taking the hard steps to actually lock down interstate travel.

          • broblawsky says:

            This. If we want to have a partisan dunkfest, we can do it. I can go off on open borders types, urbanites, Dems/left media downplaying the virus in January/February and hyping up Chinese New Year festivals (AOC, Pelosi), Biden for apparently STILL being against travel bans, DeBlasio/NY for infecting us all, free traders for our lack of domestic medical supplies, and on and on and on.

            Or we could just…not. We could hold off on all the finger pointing until after this is over? Maybe?

            You’re right. It’s just frustrating seeing people trying to rewrite history. Trump made mistakes; so did various Democratic political figures. Seeing someone erase one and emphasize the other, even as people are dying and the pandemic is spreading, brings out the worst in me.

          • The Nybbler says:

            That’s absolutely true. We’re going to remain locked down as a country much longer because nobody is taking the hard steps to actually lock down interstate travel.

            If you locked down interstate travel, when could you ever unlock it? Once you’ve locked down an area that’s virus-free you have to keep it locked down until there’s a vaccine or the virus is extinct. That could be the lifetime of the human race if the virus becomes endemic.

            Even these partial lockdowns aren’t doing anything but drawing out the pain and adding economic destruction. If every country could go the way of South Korea it would work, but it’s too late for that. Now South Korea is in the ugly position of being a vulnerable population in an infested world. Either they’re going to have to isolate themselves until a vaccine is available, or this thing is eventually going to get them.

          • Loriot says:

            Even these partial lockdowns aren’t doing anything but drawing out the pain and adding economic destruction.

            I think the shutdowns are slowing the spread of the virus, which is enormously helpful. There’s a reason SF isn’t NYC or New Orleans now, despite having more known cases than either a couple weeks ago. But the data will become clearer one way or the other in the next couple weeks.

          • Nick says:

            You’re right. It’s just frustrating seeing people trying to rewrite history. Trump made mistakes; so did various Democratic political figures. Seeing someone erase one and emphasize the other, even as people are dying and the pandemic is spreading, brings out the worst in me.

            FWIW I know how you feel. My friends have been telling me how the terrible Republicans brought this plague upon us. I don’t want to argue with them over it, but I don’t even know what balance of “nobody is blameless here” and “maybe we should postpone this topic” to strike without erasing one thing or taking advantage of another or just inviting the unproductive object level discussion I wanted to stop. I’ve just been trying to selectively avoid responding to political takes on it.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Just wait until we find ourselves arguing over whether Puerto Rico counts as “part of the United States,” depending on which side of some death threshold we want the numbers to be on.

          • Matt M says:

            Just wait until we find ourselves arguing over whether Puerto Rico counts as “part of the United States,” depending on which side of some death threshold we want the numbers to be on.

            This still isn’t as crazy as the whole “we report some numbers in absolutes, and some other ones in per-capita, depending on which political entity we want to praise or insult” thing that seems to be going on basically everywhere now.

          • Loriot says:

            People have already explained endlessly why in the early stages of an epidemic, it’s a lot more useful to report absolute numbers than per capita statistics. This isn’t a political choice, it’s a matter of reporting numbers that actually mean anything.

            Note that which choice is appropriate can depend on the context. For example, if you’re discussing how bad things would get in the worst case scenario (herd immunity) then stuff like per capita figures are relevant, since in that case, X% of the total population will be affected. But hopefully it won’t come to that.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Loriot

            I am pretty sure he’s talking about things like when CNN factchecked Trump saying the USA had done the most tests in the world by saying “no, it isn’t the most per capita”.

            This was made even more egregious because they had just trumpeted that we had the most cases in the world, which is true, but we’re far from the most per capita.

            That kind of swapping to only talk about the ways that hurt Trump are pretty visible if you pay attention.

          • Matt M says:

            I am pretty sure he’s talking about things like when CNN factchecked Trump saying the USA had done the most tests in the world by saying “no, it isn’t the most per capita”.

            This was made even more egregious because they had just trumpeted that we had the most cases in the world, which is true, but we’re far from the most per capita.

            This.

            And as far as I can tell, the right is doing the same thing, only in the reverse (bragging that we’ve “done the most tests” while dismissing that we have the most absolute cases because “well yeah we’re a much bigger country than Italy”)

          • acymetric says:

            The C map has all of its outlined areas also cross-hatched, by my reckoning.

            Yep, you’re right. Should have been looking on a bigger monitor, my bad on that one.

          • AliceToBob says:

            Or both are reacting reasonably given differential danger. The left IS in substantially more danger than the right, because they more often live in dense cities.

            Pew polling results that seem to touch on this issue. People living in urban areas are far more likely to view Covid-19 as a threat than those living in suburban and rural areas.

            link text

          • acymetric says:

            Which would make sense, since people in urban areas have to be in much closer contact to other people/strangers to do just about anything.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        You know what isn’t rural? Greensboro and Winston Salem

        And I’m not sure how the combination of no car and no supermarket within a mile makes it more likely you go 2 miles in a given day. But it’s an interesting correlation.

        • albatross11 says:

          My family has been observing the quarantine very carefully since it started. This has included a couple drives of 30+ miles, to get out of the house and go someplace remote and deserted and walk around outside. I’m sure this shows up in someone’s data as “those #$%^ East-coasters are ignoring the quarantine to go to parties” or something, but in none of those cases did we ever go within 6 feet of another human being while outside our car.

          The relevant question isn’t “did you travel more than 10 miles from your house,” but rather “did you interact with people outside your family/home in ways that could spread COVID-19. If the answer is “no,” then you’re doing everything right.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            The relevant question is what evidence do we see that the population is changing their behavior?

            Have you reduced your travel? I’m betting you have. That will shows up in the data, on net. When did you take these trips? On the weekend? They aren’t counting the weekends.

            You have to explain what makes the South different at a population level if you want explain the disparity, not point at the fact that you’ve gone out a couple of times.

          • albatross11 says:

            I’m not arguing one way or another about whether Southerners are doing worse or better at social distancing, I’m just saying that tracking how far people travel isn’t necessarily getting at what you really care about.

          • acymetric says:

            Is there a place that clearly explains what they’re tracking for travel distance? Is it limited to residents of that area? I’m assuming it is, and isn’t counting (for instance) people traveling through on interstates, or on planes/greyounds/trains and such, right?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            It’s “anonymous” (not really) cell phone data, so they’d base it on cell phone location data of people who look like they already live there.

        • acymetric says:

          Forsyth and Guilford counties definitely have some pretty rural areas outside of Winston Salem and Greensboro, respectively.

          And both look to be under 50% of previous travel amounts.

      • matthewravery says:

        Can someone explain what different conclusions I’m supposed to draw visually from the two maps? (I get that they’re plotting different things and that one of those things may be more useful.) Other than a better choice of color scheme for the gray-to-red scale (vice stoplight), I don’t really see a difference.

        Is it the large swathes of Idaho and Montana where two people live that I’m supposed to care about?

        • HeelBearCub says:

          The difference between map-change and map-2-mile is a (somewhat arbitrary) measure of current average daily distance traveled.

          The argument is that map-2 makes the South look arbitrarily uniformly bad, when it’s actually had reduction in average travel, just not nearly as much. A further argument is that the South is “more rural” and has to travel farther to do anything.

          I’m not sure why you would need to go farther in Rocky Mount than Allentown or Harrisburg, but that’s the argument.

          • The Nybbler says:

            I’m not sure why you would need to go farther in Rocky Mount than Allentown or Harrisburg, but that’s the argument.

            Because Rocky Mount (NC, I assume) is a small town which might not have everything you need within its borders, and Allentown and Harrisburg are cities that probably do.

          • acymetric says:

            Rocky Mount and Harrisburg are about the same size (so a reasonable comparison), Allentown is roughly double and probably not a great sample for comparison. The problem with comparing Rocky Mount with Harrisburg is that Harrisburg was already under lockdown orders. Obviously they’re going to be traveling less than Rocky Mount (who wasn’t).

            I guess we also need to decide what we’re trying to look at. Is it “are people following the lockdown orders and/or taking this seriously”? We can’t tell that from the maps because the cut-off date is basically the day before a lot of lockdown orders started going into place in NC and other Southern states, so not terribly useful. What was travel behavior like in (for example) PA just before the lockdown orders vs. NC just before theirs would be a better way to evaluate that. I guess even more useful would be comparing travel behaviors in the week following the orders in each location.

            Or are we just looking at “why is the south lagging behind in lockdown orders compared to these other states?” The answer to that is probably that NC (and maybe the south overall) had fewer cases and were not being hit as hard, so they did not feel the need to lock down as early. As far as this question, the data mostly just shows “people under lockdown travel less than people who aren’t” which I would expect to be self-evident. People not under lockdown are probably still expected to report to work.

            At this point NC has ~2,000 cases while PA has over 6,000, despite NC issuing their stay at home order 2 weeks later. If PA was getting hit harder it makes sense that they would lock down earlier and see travel reductions earlier.

            I think these maps, and the article, are trying to look at both and not doing a terribly good job at either.

          • acymetric says:

            One last (ok, probably not last) point I’ll make is that county maps are almost always misleading (just think back to 2016 election maps by county 😉 ). I would probably rather see state level maps.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @acymetric:

            At this point NC has ~2,000 cases while PA has over 6,000, despite NC issuing their stay at home order 2 weeks later. If PA was getting hit harder it makes sense that they would lock down earlier and see travel reductions earlier.

            PA didn’t order a state wide stay at home order until April 1st. Not sure where you are seeing that they were locked down 2 weeks ago. The articles I am seeing say PA was locked down county by county (and I’m not sure when the first one was ordered).

            At least by the NYT map, it looks like only a small portion of PA was locked down as of 3/26. Not sure if that’s a mistake on the map, or you are repeating your earlier mistake of thinking PA was outlined on the map when it was actually not.

          • acymetric says:

            PA didn’t order a state wide stay at home order until April 1st. Not sure where you are seeing that they were locked down 2 weeks ago.

            I was referring to this shutdown order. I guess it isn’t quite the same as a full lockdown, but I think it still applies since I suspect the majority of travel for residents within a state is commuting to work.

            I will use this to point out another apparent weakness of the map, that I hadn’t noticed before. Apparently they are only counting strict lockdowns and not shutdowns of non-essential businesses. Seems like that would be almost as important. ISTM that closing non-essential businesses statewide is ~80% of the way there to a full lockdown.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @acymetric:
            That’s a new piece of information. Thanks.

            Here is a running list of, I think only statewide level, actions in NC.

            In NC, on March 16th, Cooper had already closed schools statewide and banned large gatherings. I believe on March 17th restaurants were closed. By the 24th, that was extended to more businesses. But the full “non-essential” business orders were only extended coincident with stay-at-home on the 27th. So that is definitely a difference.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            As soon as Cooper closed the schools the weekend of March 14-15, most “optional” businesses shut down, too: things like dance studios and swim classes took that as their cue to voluntarily close. Most churches shut their doors, too. Near simultaneous to Cooper’s announcement (I can’t find which came first, but they were within a day of each other) the Bishop of the Charlotte Diocese excused all Catholics from Mass attendance.

    • Clutzy says:

      I know you have a debate raging with Echo, but this map is, at its core, misinformation. All it represents is, more or less, is the distance people need to travel to get to their essential services. Traveling 5 miles to a store poses no more risk to yourself and the community than traveling a half mile. Indeed its probably less damaging because you are probably in a car, while the .5 mile people are much more likely to be taking public transit, which is the petri dish of corona.

      • Del Cotter says:

        Who takes public transport to go 880 yards?

        • JayT says:

          Old people?

        • Statismagician says:

          People expecting to have to come back with more groceries than they can carry that far, or who’d have to cross a highway to get there, or who physically can’t walk half a mile for whatever reason but can get around the store on those little scooter thingies?

        • Clutzy says:

          90% of the people who use the bus route I used to get to work. This comes in 2 waves.
          First there are all these university students that use the buses to get from 1 part of campus to another. This is a 6 block or so walk, but the bus is always so full of uni students that they sometimes run a special bus that only goes on this shorter route. And sometimes I can’t get on the bus at the stop by me. On days I think it will be busy I walk an extra 3 stops down to ensure Ill get a spot because about 90% of the people will have offloaded by then.

          Second, when you get into the heart of the city people start getting on the bus to get to other places in the heart of the city. These people take the bus for 3 or 4 stops. Even at rush hour when the bus is slower than walking. Its absolutely insane.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        And why doesn’t this apply to other areas of the country? What’s special about mid sized towns in the South as compared to mid sized towns in Pennsylvania? What’s special about rural areas in the South as compared rural areas anywhere else?

        • Clutzy says:

          They farm very different crops for one. Their rural populations are very different (almost no poor black people in rural northern regions). From my experience even people in mid sized Midwest towns wont have to travel 2+ miles, while the south is generally less supplied. If we take where I stay in Nashville at an airbnb that place, an urban place, was still like 3.5 miles to the nearest costco.

  51. Le Maistre Chat says:

    What is the epismetic status of the belief that humans are the first intelligent species on Earth?

    “U–Pb zircon dates from five volcanic ash beds from the Global Stratotype Section and Point for the Permian–Triassic boundary at Meishan, China, establish a high-resolution age model for the extinction – allowing exploration of the links between global environmental perturbation, carbon cycle disruption, mass extinction, and recovery at millennial timescales. The extinction occurred between 251.941 ± 0.037 and 251.880 ± 0.031 Ma ago, a duration of 60 ± 48 ka. … Further evidence for environmental change around the P–Tr boundary suggests an 8 °C (14 °F) rise in temperature, and an increase in CO2 levels by 2000 ppm (for comparison, the concentration immediately before the industrial revolution was 280 ppm, and the amount today is about 410 ppm)”

    “In a well-preserved sequence in east Greenland, the decline of animals is concentrated in a period 10,000 to 60,000 years long, with plants taking an additional several hundred thousand years to show the full impact of the event.”

    “The extinction primarily affected organisms with calcium carbonate skeletons, especially those reliant on stable CO2 levels to produce their skeletons. These organisms were susceptible to the effects of the ocean acidification that resulted from increased atmospheric CO2.”

    “Each major segment of the early Triassic ecosystem—plant and animal, marine and terrestrial—was dominated by a small number of genera, which appeared virtually worldwide, for example: the herbivorous therapsid Lystrosaurus (which accounted for about 90% of early Triassic land vertebrates) and the bivalves Claraia, Eumorphotis, Unionites and Promylina. A healthy ecosystem has a much larger number of genera, each living in a few preferred types of habitat.”

    “In January 2011, a team, led by Stephen Grasby of the Geological Survey of Canada—Calgary, reported evidence that … massive coal beds to ignite, possibly releasing more than 3 trillion tons of carbon.” (Humans are estimated to have burned 641 billion tons since industrialization began.)

    “Scientists have found worldwide evidence of a swift decrease of about 1% in the 13C/12C isotope ratio in carbonate rocks from the end-Permian. This is the first, largest, and most rapid of a series of negative and positive excursions (decreases and increases in 13C/12C ratio) that continues until the isotope ratio abruptly stabilised in the middle Triassic, followed soon afterwards by the recovery of calcifying life forms (organisms that use calcium carbonate to build hard parts such as shells).
    A variety of factors may have contributed to this drop in the 13C/12C ratio, but most turn out to be insufficient to account fully for the observed amount.”

    • Bobobob says:

      My question is, for the last sentence…*how* insufficient? Do the (combined) factors account for 90 percent of the observed amount, 10 percent, one percent?

      (I was a science writer in a previous life, so I’m especially sensitive to the use of weasel words like “most.”)

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        My question is, for the last sentence…*how* insufficient? Do the (combined) factors account for 90 percent of the observed amount, 10 percent, one percent?

        That’s a perceptive question I don’t know the answer to.

    • broblawsky says:

      I think maybe you’ve been reading too much Lovecraft-influenced fiction.

      • Leafhopper says:

        I come down here to make a Lovecraft comment and find myself preempted.

        My guess is WMD from the Mi-Go/Cthuloid war.

    • matkoniecz says:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748

      The Silurian hypothesis is a thought experiment[1] which assesses modern science’s ability to detect evidence of a prior advanced civilization, perhaps several million years ago. In a 2018 paper, Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute, imagined an advanced civilization before humans and pondered whether it would “be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record”.[2] They wrote, “While we strongly doubt that any previous industrial civilization existed before our own, asking the question in a formal way that articulates explicitly what evidence for such a civilization might look like raises its own useful questions related both to astrobiology and to Anthropocene studies.”[2] The term “silurian hypothesis” was inspired by a 1970s Dr Who serial Doctor Who and the Silurians which featured a species called the Silurians.[1]

      According to Frank and Schmidt, since fossilization is relatively rare and little of Earth’s exposed surface is from before the quaternary time period, the chances of finding direct evidence of such a civilization, such as technological artifacts, is small. After a great time span, the researchers concluded, we would be more likely to find indirect evidence such as anomalies in the chemical composition or isotope ratios of sediments.[3] Objects that could indicate possible evidence of past civilizations include plastics and nuclear wastes residues buried deep underground or on the ocean floor.[2]

    • Well... says:

      To answer the bolded question literally, the epistemic status ought to be “most likely false”: going back at least a million years, our hominid and hominin ancestors almost certainly possessed great intelligence.

    • fibio says:

      What is the epismetic status of the belief that humans are the first intelligent species on Earth?

      Depends very much on how you define intelligence. By some metrics were aren’t even the only intelligent species on Earth right now (and by some others no species are actually intelligent). I think I might have argued here before that there’s no reason to dismiss all thoughts of previous intelligent Terran species, the hypothesis of sentient squids living in the depths of the ocean some hundred million years ago is plausible, if unsupported by current evidence. After all, any evidence for such a civilisation is both beyond our reach and so alien to our own it’s doubtful that we’d identify it as anything but natural processes. It is entirely reasonable that species nearing homo-sapiens intelligence spread across the globe causing mass extinction events, rather like our stone-age ancestors.

      When it comes to a peer precursor, by which I mean another sentient species on Earth that reached the industrial era, the evidence is quite strongly against such a thing. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence but the the biggest issue I have with the idea of a precursor is mostly the lack of previous exploitation. No oil fields seem to to have been tapped before us, there’s no evidence of ancient mines in tectonically stable locations and there’s no obvious moon-base or other orbital infrastructure. While the vast majority of such evidence would have been erased over geologic time we’d expect at least some examples to survive. We can find dung from the dinosaurs, there should be some sign of a precursor i-phone.

      There’s also an issue of what the hell happened to a peer precursor. They must of died out, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here, but what could have possibly killed them? War, famine, plague and natural disasters do not kill societies let alone modern industrial societies. Over the time scales we’re talking about an intelligent species could touch the stars and knock themselves back down to the stone age a thousand times before any monkeys started thinking about sharpening sticks.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        When it comes to a peer precursor, by which I mean another sentient species on Earth that reached the industrial era, the evidence is quite strongly against such a thing. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence but the the biggest issue I have with the idea of a precursor is mostly the lack of previous exploitation. No oil fields seem to to have been tapped before us, there’s no evidence of ancient mines in tectonically stable locations and there’s no obvious moon-base or other orbital infrastructure. While the vast majority of such evidence would have been erased over geologic time we’d expect at least some examples to survive. We can find dung from the dinosaurs, there should be some sign of a precursor i-phone.

        How do we date the zooplankton, algae, etc. that our petroleum comes from?
        What locations have been tectonically stable since the P-Tr boundary, which is where we’d need to look for xenoindustrial-era mines to support or undermine this hypothesis?
        How do we know that orbital infrastructure wouldn’t have been burned down to its molecules by re-entry over vastly sub-geologic time scales? As to the Moon: a literal peer civilization demonstrably wouldn’t have a Moon base. Maybe if we explored the Lunar surface fully we’d find a vehicle from a useless signalling event in their history?

        There’s also an issue of what the hell happened to a peer precursor. They must of died out, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here, but what could have possibly killed them?

        I don’t know. What could possibly kill us all?

      • matkoniecz says:

        We can find dung from the dinosaurs, there should be some sign of a precursor i-phone.

        Nope. Non-avian dinosaurs were dominating lifeforms for over 134 000 000 years. And

        As an example, for all the dinosaurs that ever lived, there are only a few thousand near- complete specimens, or equivalently only a handful of individual animals across thousands of taxa per 100,000 years. Given the rate of new discovery of taxa of this age,it is clear that species as short-lived as Homo Sapiens (so far) might not be represented in the existing fossil record at all.

        The likelihood of objects surviving and being discovered is similarly unlikely. Zalasiewicz (2009)speculates about preservation of objects or their forms, but the current area of urbanization is less than 1% of the Earth’s surface (Schneider et al., 2009), and exposed sections and drilling sites for pre-Quaternary surfaces are orders of magnitude less as fractions of the original surface.Note that even for early human technology, complex objects are very rarely found. For instance,the Antikythera Mechanism (ca. 205 BCE) is a unique object until the Renaissance. Despite impressive recent gains in the ability to detect the wider impacts of civilization on landscapes and ecosystems (Kidwell, 2015), we conclude that for potential civilizations older than about 4Ma, the chances of finding direct evidence of their existence via objects or fossilized examples of their population is small.

        https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748 The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?

      • Concavenator says:

        an intelligent species could touch the stars and knock themselves back down to the stone age a thousand times before any monkeys started thinking about sharpening sticks.

        Why stop at that?
        We all know about the Cambrian Explosion, right? Between 600 and 500 million years ago or so, large complex multicellular organisms appear, following a rise in seawater oxygen and the Cryogenian “snowball Earth” Ice Age, and spawn all the plants and animals we are familiar with.
        Well, it wasn’t the first time. A full billion and a half years before the Cambrian, there was the Francevillian Biota, a collection of more-or-less unclassifiable but certainly large and multicellular organisms that resemble much the Ediacaran forms that came right before the Cambrian. The Francevillian Biota appeared 2.1 billion years ago, right after… a rise in seawater oxygen and the Huronian “snowball Earth” Ice Age.
        Assuming an equal rate of development, there would have been more than enough time for the Francevillian Biota to have its own Cambrian Explosion, fill the seas and crawl onto land, create whole ecosystems on all the world, go through mass extinctions and radiations, spawn sapient species like us, and finally be destroyed by Azathoth-knows-what a full billion year before it all started again in the Cambrian.

    • Anteros says:

      I can’t answer your question ‘cos I’ve never heard of the word epismetic…

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Er, um, it’s Greek: epi- Metis, “over practical knowledge”. Yeah, that’s the ticket. 🙁

  52. Hefficurious says:

    I think that if we could keep long term care homes from exploding with COVID we’d have a better chance at slowing it down in the general population. Whatever the homes are doing now clearly doesn’t work. What would?
    – Completely limit in/out traffic by hiring live-in staff?
    – Dress all visitors and staff in virus-proof suits?
    ?

    • broblawsky says:

      Does having a small, isolated cluster of poor-prognosis individuals really significantly exacerbate the spread of the virus?

      • Hefficurious says:

        It’s a good question. Maybe it just makes the spread visible because they end up getting sick enough to be counted. Staff do seem to get affected a lot. But again, it could be just a particularly visible drop in the bucket.

      • albatross11 says:

        If having bad symptoms = being highly contagious, and if hospitals become sources of future infection once they have a big bunch of COVID-19 patients, then one nursing home could give you 50 very sick patients who end up in the hospital, overwhelming your hospital and infecting everyone else there.

        • broblawsky says:

          Based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of this paper, COVID-19 sufferers tend to be most infectious when the symptoms are at their mildest.

          • John Schilling says:

            Correct as described, but that paper is a study limited to patients hospitalized for COVID-19. So, probably not people walking around with a mild cough. If you’re coughing badly enough to require immediate hospitalization, you’re shedding more virus than if you were hospitalized a week ago and are now dying of pneumonia. But extrapolating that back to “you’re most contagious when you don’t even know you are sick” is not warranted by this data and contradicts most of what I have seen elsewhere.

          • Purplehermann says:

            My general understanding is that for people who have minor cases the peak infectiousness is before symptoms through the first week of symptoms.

            People with severe cases seem to be a different deal.

        • Garrett says:

          It’s fairly difficult to overwhelm a hospital for a long time unless the healthcare system as a whole is overwhelmed. If a hospital finds out that there are 50 Covid19 patients next door about to show up, they’ll work with other hospitals in the area and local EMS services to transfer the patients to various hospitals with space. It would likely be treated the same way we’d treat a mass-casualty event. Figure out your resources, assign a Transportation Officer and make it work.

          Depending upon the distance to the hospitals with space, the severity of the patients, surge capacity locally, it would either involve EMS transporting directly to the alternate hospital(s) or transporting to the local hospital for staging/evaluation and then subsequent transportation.

      • Purplehermann says:

        I understand that cases in homes do spread pretty quickly in and between homes, but they don’t seem like a particularly large bed of infection for the general population.
        They also die more quickly if they die, which is much more likely.

        So I’d guess that for keeping deaths down this is pretty important, for spewing the infection less so

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      Whatever the homes are doing now clearly doesn’t work.

      Don’t they? I’ve only heard of the exceptional cases where they’ve failed. Do you have cites indicating that many have failed?

      My in-laws are both in an assisted living facility that has gone into serious lockdown. I don’t know what the staff policy is to keep them un-infected, but my wife is not allowed to physically meet her parents at this point. I think it has worked so far.

    • albatross11 says:

      The best thing I can think of is to move minimal care staff onto the facility and make sure they stay there, and take the now-normal precautions for deliveries and such. No visitors, and have a protocol for isolating the other patients when the EMTs or doctors have to come–and do whatever cleaning is needed afterward.

      • acymetric says:

        The best thing I can think of is to move minimal care staff onto the facility and make sure they stay there

        I’m sure people will be lining up to take that job.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          If there’s one thing we have a lot of right now, it’s a shitload of money to dump into the economy, and a shitload of unemployed people.

  53. rumham says:

    Does anyone here think that the Kavanah accusations were treated responsibly by politicians and the mainstream media? If so, how do you feel about the Biden accusations?

    • Deiseach says:

      This is just going to flare up into a war again; there’s a pretty fair divide between “no the Kavanaugh accusations were made into political hay by a combination of vested interests and publicity-chasing opportunists” and “yes the Kavanaugh accusations were serious, credible and needed to be investigated like they were” sets of responses even on here.

      Same for the Biden one(s), though it’s a lot milder and more grumpy resignation on the part of one side that the mainstream media is not going to turn the same level or focus of attention onto someone of the favoured party, and dismissal of this being a storm in a teacup by the other side. I think everyone is burned out enough by now on this fight to not want to fight over Biden.

      • rumham says:

        I remember that there was a large split here on Kavanaugh. I was really hoping someone here would be consistent, or at least have a better argument for the disparate coverage and denouncement between the two than that she wants to bone Putin. I don’t really have any hope of non-partisan consistency anywhere else on the internet.

        I would note that on that thread most everyone seemed to agree that it was actually about abortion, but that was the obvious and much denied reading many people here had at the beginning.

        I think everyone is burned out enough by now on this fight to not want to fight over Biden.

        The Kavanaugh nomination fight? Or the #believeallwomen movement?

  54. johan_larson says:

    Let’s think a bit about how the response to COVID-19 could go wrong. Really, really wrong. As I see it, the realistic worst case here is the worst of both the suppression and mitigation strategies: we incur all or most of the deaths that would have happened under mitigation, and all or most of the economic damage that would have happened under suppression. And then we double down and maintain the quarantines longer and harder than necessary, just for good measure: a lot of businesses don’t bounce back, national finances are thoroughly thrashed from over-borrowing, there are real shortages of ordinary goods, and a lot of people end up unemployed in the short- and medium-term.

    Under this scenario, in the United States,
    – how many die?
    – how long are the quarantine measures maintained?
    – how high is the unemployment rate when it’s over?
    – how far has the national credit rating dropped?
    – how much has the effective GDP per capita fallen?
    – what lasting cultural or institutional damage has been done?

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      – how many die?

      A couple of million people in three waves, mostly Boomers. It’s as bad per capita as the 1918-9 flu but unlike that pandemic children and 18-40 year-olds are mostly spared, Gen Xers 41+ somewhat less so.

      – how long are the quarantine measures maintained?

      Tough call? Maybe they’ll be lifted everywhere by June 10, the second wave hits, and there’s a huge CW over whether to put us all under house arrest again.

      – how high is the unemployment rate when it’s over?

      Recorded as 30% for one quarter.

      – how far has the national credit rating dropped?

      Money printer goes BRRRR

      – how much has the effective GDP per capita fallen?

      30% before accounting for inflation.

      – what lasting cultural or institutional damage has been done?

      Do you really want me to speculate? More speculative = more pessimistic. I’m trying to keep my pessimism to a rational level: if I can be rational and patient I can maximize returns on my money.

      • Loriot says:

        I’m not so sure about 18-40 year olds being spared. A lot of them require hospitalization, which is equivalent to death in the worst case scenario where the healthcare system collapses.

        • albatross11 says:

          Also, even the people who never go to the hospital are incapacitated for 2-3 weeks with something like an extra-nasty case of the flu.

          • Leafhopper says:

            Not in every case—isn’t one of the big tracing problems the prevalence of asymptomatic spread?

          • Kaitian says:

            Not always. Symptoms seem to range from “literally nothing” through “sore throat for three days” all the way to “fever spike explodes your heart on day 8” and “slowly drown on dry land from pneumonia”.
            Your chance of worse symptoms goes up with general unhealthiness, but many people get lucky, and some get really unlucky.

            Many people will be incapacitated as you say, but many others could easily work through it if they didn’t have to worry about spreading it.

          • John Schilling says:

            Not in every case—isn’t one of the big tracing problems the prevalence of asymptomatic spread?

            Aymptomatic transmission does not appear to be prevalent. According to today’s WHO sitrep, there are to date no confirmed cases of truly asymptomatic transmission (by people who never went on to develop symptoms), but some unconfirmed field reports. Presymptomatic (usually 1-3 days before symptoms occur) transmission can occur, but is implicated in only a small number of case reports. Mostly, it is people who are visibly ill who are spreading the disease – if you’re doing contact tracing, yes ask those people who they were in contact with in the days before they develop symptoms, but probably no big deal if you miss a few.

            More generally, I think there is far too much focus on what is possible, compared to what is actually prevalent. Understandably, we’d all like to live in bubbles where it is literally impossible for us to contract this (or any other) virus, but that’s not going to happen. And, “It is possible that X can transmit COVID-19, so we must stop X or are doomed because we can’t stop X or should ridicule the outgroup’s non-X-addressing containment plan”, is making the perfect the enemy of the good enough.

            To beat COVID-19, it is sufficient to reduce transmission rates by a factor of three or so, sustainably. Reducing transmission by a factor of thirty, and then stopping after a month, sets us up for a rebound that’s as bad as doing nothing. So if there’s a theoretical mode of transmission that is practically relevant in only a few percent of real cases, the proper thing to do is probably to ignore it unless the countermeasure is a low-impact add-on to what you’re already doing about the truly prevalent transmission modes.

          • albatross11 says:

            The trick being to work out what measures are both sustainable and will reliably drop R_0 down below 2 indefinitely. Stay and home orders in every state are clearly *not* sustainable.

            Some stuff that’s low-cost and plausible for long-term sustainability:

            a. Fever checks

            b. Rules/norms against coming into work sick

            c. Everyone wears masks in public

            d. Everyone carries hand sanitizer, and it’s offered in all public places.

            e. Wiping down high-touch surfaces with disinfectant several times a day.

            f. Stores expanding online shopping plus delivery or bringing it out to your car.

            g. Telemedicine as a normal way to interact with a doctor/PA for routine stuff.

            h. Keeping big public gatherings shut down until there’s a widely-available vaccine. (I’m assuming we can afford not to have pro sports games, in-person concerts, conferences, etc., for the duration.)

            What else?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @albatross11:

            b. Rules/norms against coming into work sick

            People need money when they’re sick and paid sick leave was considered un-afforable as recently as February.

            c. Everyone wears masks in public

            This works, though we’ll all be wearing bank robber bandannas due to supply chain issues.

            d. Everyone carries hand sanitizer, and it’s offered in all public places.

            I haven’t seen hand sanitizer for sale.

            e. Wiping down high-touch surfaces with disinfectant several times a day.

            This looks like it’ll be hard when my current bottle runs out.

          • though we’ll all be wearing bank robber bandannas due to supply chain issues.

            Quite a lot of people own sewing machines and have cloth, if only old clothes they would be happy to throw away. Many of them have vacuum cleaner bags or other materials for filters. Producing something better than a bank robber bandanna is not rocket science.

            e. Wiping down high-touch surfaces with disinfectant several times a day.

            This looks like it’ll be hard when my current bottle runs out.

            As best I understand it, dilute bleach works, and a lot of people have bleach.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            People need money when they’re sick and paid sick leave was considered un-afforable as recently as February.

            Well, there’s “unaffordable” and then there’s “unaffordable.”

            We passed up lots of things because of the cost and then took a two trillion dollar bath.

            Both the left and right will get some of their expensive wishes out of this. The left will get some kind of paid sick leave. The right will get on-shoring of some industries as well as the ability to quickly turn on border screenings.

            All those things are “expensive” but will look like bargains if they can give us a few more weeks lead time.

        • 10240 says:

          A lot of them require hospitalization, which is equivalent to death in the worst case scenario where the healthcare system collapses.

          Do we know that? Numbers reported as “requiring” hospitalization most likely mean that doctors recommended hospitalization for those people. It can be because it reduces their risk of death from 5% to 4%, or from 80% to 20%, or from 99% to 90%. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them die if they are not hospitalized.

          • albatross11 says:

            My impression is that it’s hard to know what fraction in the whole population require hospitalization. I know two people in their 50s who have likely had this now (neither could get a test despite having matching symptoms and repeated requested), both got through it without needing hospitalization. One got someone to prescribe him one of the recommended treatments off-label, the other gutted it through on over-the-counter cold meds.

    • mtl1882 says:

      My speculation is pretty similar to Le Maistre Chat’s, but when it comes to “lasting cultural or institutional damage,” I think there will be a lot of changes, but in the long-term, it is hard to know what counts as “damage.” Disruption and change will definitely occur, some of which could be positive or at least not obviously bad. For example, I expect damage to the globalized supply chain framework, which has downsides, but I think the choice to domesticate key supply chains is a good thing well worth the costs.

    • 10240 says:

      If you want a worst case scenario for shits/giggles/not being cavalier about tail risks:
      – the people who say that symptomatic cases are not massively undercounted, as people who have symptoms ask for and get tests, are right
      – as are the people who say that most/all “asymptomatic” cases actually come down with symptoms a few days later
      – as are the people who say that 20% of the diagnosed cases need hospital treatment, in the sense that all/most of them die if they don’t get it
      – Italy’s healthcare system, with its 11% fatality rate (not counting those who are diagnosed but yet to die) is still nowhere near as overwhelmed as it would be if most of the population actually got it
      – due to a high R₀, 80% of the adult population (~250 million in the US) needs to have it for herd immunity (i.e. only 20% of the survivors won’t have got it),

      that makes ~42 million dead in the US.

    • WoollyAI says:

      We can’t judge the response until we have a better idea of what COVID-19 is capable of.

      For example, the realistic worst case scenario I know of is that COVID-19 reinfection turns out to be possible and common. There have been some reports of this for awhile but since (a) it would take months before we could reasonably expect to see reinfection and (b) only China has had this for months and no one trusts their data anymore, we have no way of knowing if COVID-19 is a one-time thing or if it will become a regular part of life, without any long-term vaccine or immunity just like the flu. We couldn’t reasonably expect to know until…June?

      If reinfection isn’t possible, then the CARES Act was probably a very good policy and the best tool the government had to prevent economic calamity. If reinfection is possible, the US gov basically took on a ton of debt it really won’t be able to afford to delay the full economic effects by a month.

      There’s a lot of other unknowns about COVID, like fatality rates, that make decision-making and judging decision-making very difficult.

      • Loriot says:

        Even if it turns out to be wrong in hindsight, delaying the disaster to buy time for more accurate data is still useful.

        • albatross11 says:

          If reinfection is possible a month after you recover and it’s no milder the second time around, then we probably change our whole way of running society to adapt to COVID-19 and do social distancing/quarantines/travel bans hard enough to actually stop the spread of the disease.

          • mtl1882 says:

            That would be the real game changer. Am I right in saying that no other known coronavirus leads to long-term immunity? SARs had a much longer immunity period than most, but antibodies peaked at about two years, though it seems at least some were present ten years later. If it lasts that long, some type of vaccination, given every so often, may be pretty effective in addressing it. But it would mean effectively ending most global travel, because a lot of countries will not have the resources and organization to have it under control. Well, technically, drastic quarantine measures could be required of all flyers, but that would greatly reduce the desire to travel.

            Or, we could go back to the way things were before the eradication of malaria. That illness also affects people to very different degrees, some not at all, some fatally, most with flu-like symptoms, and has limited immunity, such that you get continually reinfected over the mosquito season, though usually with less severity each time. There was some medicine available, and a lot of people fled mosquito-heavy areas, but people generally had to have strong immune systems to have lived to adulthood, and a lot of people just lived and worked while suffering chronic illness. It had a weird presentation where symptoms tended to be every other day.

          • Kaitian says:

            @mtl1882

            If people still had some SARS antibodies 10 years later, without ever being exposed to the virus in between, that’s a pretty good sign. Maybe we would need refresher shots every now and then, like we do with the TDAP vaccine, but it’s not the “no vaccine possible” scenario we fear.

            Once a vaccine is available, and the economy has recovered, travel should go back to almost normal levels. Travelers are generally reasonably healthy anyway, and so don’t have that much to fear from the virus even now. And poor countries will probably consider the small risk of a rich traveler bringing the disease against the high financial benefits of tourism, and will generally not place burdensome restrictions.

            Covid is different from malaria since it almost never causes severe illness in children. So even if we can do nothing else about it, death rates should eventually go down as most people have their first exposure in childhood, like today’s chickenpox and EBV.

  55. ana53294 says:

    How likely are the quarantine measures to withstand strict scrutiny in the US?

    An article in the Atlantic claims closing churches during the coronavirus would withstand scrutiny. I’m skeptical.

    Let’s assume for the sake of argument that a church challenging a shutdown order would receive the highest level of legal protection, a test referred to by courts as “strict scrutiny.” Under this test, the government would need to articulate a compelling interest, and its directive would need to be narrowly tailored and executed in the least restrictive means toward accomplishing its interest. That’s a very high standard, and one that is not usually satisfied. But the government is likely to meet it here.

    If gun shops are essential (because it’s a protected Constitutional right), churches should also definitely be essential. I can’t see how the government closing a church would withstand strict scrutiny. It seems quite questionable to me.

    I guess most states won’t even try to close churches that don’t voluntarily close (like most churches, mosques and synagogues have already done). But if they do, would it withstand judicial scrutiny?

    • Matt M says:

      I think the argument will be something like “We didn’t close the churches specifically, we just prohibited any and all gatherings over X people, the fact that some churches seem to think their religion requires such gatherings is their own problem, not ours!”

      So long as they can establish that they aren’t treating churches any worse than they’re treating the rest of society in general, I think they get away with it.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Yes, the 2A analogue to the churches in this situation isn’t gun stores, it’s gun shows.

      • Aapje says:

        There is an exception to the gatherings ban for churches in The Netherlands. Only the ultra-orthodox are taking advantage of that, though.

        • AlphaGamma says:

          Down here below the rivers, lots of small Catholic shrines seem to be open for people to pray privately and light candles (but I suppose that doesn’t involve gatherings). At least one major reliquary has been moved from its usual place in a museum into the nave of the church to allow people to pray near it.

      • mtl1882 says:

        But if people claim those gatherings are, in fact, required by their religious beliefs, isn’t that considered relevant? I’m pretty sure that it’s not at all a blanket defense if you do it to everyone and just happen to include churches–that sort of argument is quite easy to use disingenuously.

        Of course, it isn’t being used disingenuously here. I would prefer that churches not hold gatherings right now, and many of them have voluntarily stopped. But even in this situation, and even with our increasingly secular society, I’m surprised at how this is being enforced so strongly against churches. It definitely seems like something that could be effectively challenged. I don’t think it’s clear where the line is on a lot of this stuff.

      • ana53294 says:

        I think the argument “we force everybody to do it, not just that church” is the same as “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

        Our society and laws tend to make exemptions for religions. Quakers and other commited pacifists get exempted from drafts. Jews are accomodated so they don’t have to work on the Sabbath.

        Treating everybody the same, i.e., drafting everybody regardless of religious belief, giving all prisoners the same food, even if it includes pork, and not allowing specific exemptions in worktimes, head coverings, and other such things, is discriminatory against religions.

        Which is why I think that there is a good argument for masses to be exempt.

      • Christophe Biocca says:

        You’re using the “facially neutral” defense, which would normally hold (Employment Division v. Smith), but the backlash on that one made the feds and multiple states pass laws specifically saying that strict scrutiny applies instead.

        • brad says:

          A couple of points:
          1) Federal RFRA only applies to the federal government. The part that purported to apply to the states was blatantly unconstitutional and was struck down immediately.
          2) State RFRAs are interpreted by state courts in harmony with the rest of their state constitutions including any emergency provisions.

    • Erusian says:

      Probably not. It would be far too easy for a church to argue that it will just keep people six feet apart or that if the grocery stores can still be open with limited measures then religion should be too. Certainly the threat of retaliation by permanently closing churches is unconstitutional.

      But at any rate, most mainstream religions have been voluntarily complying. The Evangelical Conference has established new rules about praying from home. The Council of Catholic Bishops has reminded people they can already pray from home or online in certain circumstances, and this qualifies. Groups of rabbis have established entirely new theology to get around normally absolutely required religious rituals. And the Muslims actually have rules regarding attendance and plagues from Mohammed himself. If their local religious leader declares a place is plague-ridden most mainstream Muslim sects consider isolation a religious duty. Sunni extremists, like ISIS, have actually been gloating about how Iran’s lack of taking the plague seriously is not only a sign God doesn’t favor them but that the Shi’a are sinful and not real Muslims who do their religious duty.

      The churches that are still meeting are outliers and often not held in particularly high regard in the religious community. Joel Osteen has been the butt of Christian jokes as long as I’ve known about him. And more cynically, the religious right/the people with huge political pull have mostly been complying voluntarily. If the state uses this as an excuse to go after them too or to disadvantage religion generally, they will probably fight back. But if it’s just shutting down some tin pot megapastor who they didn’t like anyway… eh?

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Gathering weekly for Communion, including individuals who feel unfit for Communion (this subjective feeling ranges from “we have a ton of formal rules” in the Roman Catholic Church to “I just feel sinful most Sundays” in Ethiopian Orthodoxy) is usually a requirement but historic Christianity has more than 1900 years of knowing when to make exceptions, which you can either call the Holy Spirit or responding to blind evolutionary pressure.
        So yes, if the secular arm starts playing Chicken with the First Amendment rights of an odd pastor who’s not in any Communion, we’ll be concerned but not that concerned.

      • bullseye says:

        Groups of rabbis have established entirely new theology to get around normally absolutely required religious rituals.

        Why wasn’t this done long ago? This isn’t the worst plague the Jews have been through.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Having a large gathering is usually a misdemeanor. And arresting someone for that is usually enough to get the point across.

        I agree that there is absolutely no rationale for “we will close your church after the crisis is over.” It’s an empty threat (although empty threats can be dangerous to all involved).

      • Purplehermann says:

        @Erusian
        Sourcess for the rabbis please.
        There are certain practices which were discussed mostly rhetorically in the past which are now being used practically, but I’ve missed new theology

        • AlphaGamma says:

          Agreed- there has been all sorts of discussion about what constitutes a minyan (quorum required for community prayers). Some people living in neighbourhoods with a lot of Jews have apparently been going out onto their porches to pray, as each of them can see and hear at least one other person praying. And then there’s the discussion of whether it counts if you are seeing and hearing each other via Zoom or similar (only at the more liberal end of Judaism, especially regarding Shabbat and holidays). That’s the closest that they’ve come to ”new theology” that I’ve seen, and it’s more using existing theology to deal with new tech.

          Finally there’s the issue of Kaddish (the prayer for the dead), which is supposed to be said as part of a minyan on the anniversary of the death of a close relative. Here in the Netherlands, there has been a message from the residents of a Dutch-speaking Jewish retirement home in Israel (who are still praying together in a minyan, as they are all quarantined together), offering to say Kaddish for the relatives of Dutch Jews whose synagogues are closed.

          • Purplehermann says:

            First off, my phone ‘corrected’ my earlier comment to say rhetorically, I meant theoretically.

            Pretty much what you said. What counts as a minyan (quorum of ten or more men) has been covered before now, it is simply being put into practice (of course there are subtle and less subtle disagreements).
            Using zoom to allow other people to virtually join a minyan where there are 10 who are physically a minyan isn’t particularly controversial from my understanding, while zoom on Shabbat doesn’t sound like something any religous authority would say.

      • Nick says:

        When Ohio started issuing gathering bans, it had an exception for religious gatherings and gatherings for the purpose of expressing first amendment protected speech. Likewise for the stay at home order, p. 6. Plenty of churches closed voluntarily, of course, with my own diocese canceling all Masses.

        • Matt M says:

          My impression is that in most cases, the authorities have put a lot of effort into structuring their various orders so as to sound like absolute legal requirements, but to technically just be recommendations, so as to promote the maximum amount of “voluntary” compliance as possible.

          If you close down your church because you (incorrectly) think the government made it illegal for you to have church, you can’t go back and sue them later.

          That’s what they are shooting for. To scare people into compliance.

          • Randy M says:

            That’s what they are shooting for. To scare people into compliance.

            If they are shooting, I think it goes beyond mere recommendations!

          • ana53294 says:

            But if you think the government banned masses when it didn’t, how likely is a cop that gets a report from a neighbour complaining about the church that chooses to have mass, to know it wasn’t enforced?

            If something is open knowledge enough all the beat cops know it, church leaders will know it too. And when the cops think there is a ban, they are likely to force it at some point.

            Of course, I’ve heard many reports of illegal acts by rescuers after Kathrina, so it is possible that it’s all going to just get swept under the rug, like all police overreactions.

          • Matt M says:

            But if you think the government banned masses when it didn’t, how likely is a cop that gets a report from a neighbour complaining about the church that chooses to have mass

            The point is that 95+% of churches will stop having mass so long as they think it’s banned. And then you deal with the marginal ones on a case-by-case basis.

          • Nick says:

            I don’t know about other states, but I think in Ohio it’s not so plausible that people didn’t know. The orders are very short, and there was a live press conference at 2pm each time one was being introduced. I tuned in to the one where the weekly gatherings ban was signed, and if memory serves, DeWine mentioned the exception.

    • Deiseach says:

      This situation is playing out in Florida; megachurch pastor was asked not to hold service, went ahead in defiance of the new regulations, and has been arrested.

      See what happens here, I suppose?

    • brad says:

      The powers of isolation and quarantine were incredibly broad in English common law of the 18th century because of the Black Death. The early US constitutional cases are replete with casual references suggesting these powers passed to the states. There’s never been any gradual chipping away because there hasn’t been a lot of cases. A current majority of the Supreme Court is ideologically committed to at least a faint hearted originalism.

      All of that combines to mean that I expect state governments to win almost any plausible case they choose to stand firm on.

      • BBA says:

        Most “originalists” aren’t, not in the way you suggest. The 1st and 14th amendments have been found to override centuries of common-law tradition, both before and after the Revolution, in ways no modern judge would want to go back on. (Maybe Clarence Thomas in some cases, but his philosophy is to ignore precedent altogether and decide every case de novo.)

        And many of the relevant precedents on public health come from the era of smug elitist judges who used phrases like “three generations of idiots”, whom neither the left nor the right are fond of anymore. Given a sympathetic plaintiff and a poorly worded lockdown order, I can see a court siding against the authorities, and the longer the lockdown lasts, the more sympathetic the plaintiffs look.

        Not gonna happen this week, though.

        • brad says:

          We still have civil forfeiture because of the law of prizes was too firmly embedded in precedent to uproot even in the Brennen era. I wouldn’t so causally dismisses the impact of dicta from John Marshall that has never been overruled or even had doubt cast on it. Especially on the likes of someone like John Roberts that so consciously views himself as part of an unbroken chain.

    • Well... says:

      I’ve never heard of the gun shop equivalent of Costco though I’d be unsurprised to learn some exist (not counting the gun counter at Cabela’s or Field & Stream); all the gun shops I’ve been in looked like they probably had a maximum occupancy of 30 people, and while I was in them I don’t think I ever saw more than two or three other customers. Even the gun shows I’ve been to have been kinda sleepy, though I haven’t been to many and no really big ones.

      Churches, on the other hand, are places where large groups of people routinely gather and pack close together and do a lot of unusually strong exhaling and inhaling.

    • palimpsest says:

      The shutdown order violates many other rights that trigger strict scrutiny anyway. It’s basically putting everyone under house arrest without having committed a crime. Liberty, freedom of assembly, and freedom of movement have been recognized as fundamental rights triggering strict scrutiny.

      Churches don’t have any additional protection because, while banning church assembly violates fundamental rights, banning assemblies in general already violates those rights. That is, the shutdown absolutely must pass strict scrutiny anyway.

      Same for gun shops, it’s a political decision to keep them open, not fear of a 2nd Amendment challenge. A pastor in Florida has already been arrested for violating a shutdown order, though.

      I think when deciding if the shutdown is “narrowly tailored and executed in the least restrictive means toward accomplishing its interest” the courts will generally come out in favor of the shutdown if they feel the threat is real and the policy response is generally proportionate to the threat and rationally justified, which they will.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        .. no sane judge is going to rule quarantine measures unconstitutional in and of themselves, because being able to do that is so fundamental a state function, that a constitution which forbids it is not fit for purpose. Handing down the sort of judgement that triggers a new amendment in 22 days is not good for your career or legacy.

  56. rumham says:

    For a bit of lighter entertainment in these trying times, I present samurai fighting with jetpacks.

  57. Paul Brinkley says:

    [Posted to the wrong OT by accident…]

    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.

    • Vermillion says:

      I did! I think Carlin is fairly active on the Twitter
      (maybe just about history things) but I am not very active so I have no way of judging that really.

      It was a good episode, makes me wish he put them out more frequently, but it sounded like it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

  58. Le Maistre Chat says:

    I here present a terse summary of my study of human haplogroups. I’m doing Y-DNA first and mitochondria second, because the Y-DNA people put their data in a mostly-alphabetical cladogram and the MT people didn’t. Sexist!

    Male lines A (Khoisan and West African forager) and B (Central African inc. Pygmies) are earliest African.
    C-M130 is found at highest frequencies among indigenous people of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russian Far East, Polynesia, Australia.
    D is found at high frequencies only in Andaman Islands, Tibet, Hokkaido, Sakhalin, Kamchatka. It was dominant among the high-density Jomon foragers of Japan. (Ainu = 1/3 Jomon-1/3 Okhotsk-1/3 rice farmer).
    E1b1b1 appeared in Levant, was spread by Near East Neolithic colonists: North Africa, Ethiopia and Somalia 60-80%, Egypt 40%, Semitic-speakers (outside Africa), Cyprus, Sicily-South Italy and the Balkans 18-27%, except Kosovo 45%. Other E clades evolved in North Africa, E1b1a expanding with Niger river agriculture and later Bantu.
    F split from GHIJK in India.
    G appeared to the west and was spread by Neolithic colonists: up to 91% of 5000-3000 BC males from Central Germany, Alps, France, Catalonia. Now 5% there except Tyrolian Alps (40%), 5-13% Iran, 31% Georgia and up to 74% in Causasian minorities.
    H exists at 25-40% in South India and Roma, otherwise spread at 2-10% from Levant by Neolithic colonists (5500 BC Linear Pottery Culture, Spain) and much later Khmer.
    Basal IJ appeared in Iran (only place found today) >45,000 years ago.
    I appeared in Europe by 31,300 years ago, associated with male survivors of the Last Glacial Maximum, became the majority lineage of European foragers, now highest in Dargwa (NE Caucasian) 58%, Croats up to 73% (Herzegovina, Hvar island), south Sweden 55-60%, Norway 45%.
    J appeared between Yemen and Levant 43,000 years ago. Paragroup J-M304* is rarely found outside island of Socotra (Yemen). Clade J2 later spread by Neolithic colonists, presently Ingush (NE Caucasian) 89%, Crete up to 44%, down to 2-10% in Scandinavia and North European plain, Central Asia, Niger river, Indian-colonized SE Asia. Clade J1 is strongly associated with Semitic-speakers at decreasing frequency from Yemen (76%), e.g. Iraqis 33%, African Arabs around 20%: pastoralist origin?
    K split in India, K1/LT diversifying in place/spreading west, K2a (parent to NO) appearing somewhere between SE Asia and Omsk >45,000 years ago and K2b splitting into K2b1/MS (Melanesians/non-Andaman Negritos and 1/3 Australians) & P (ancestor of Native American Q and Eurasian R).
    L existed by 4200 BC, found at 33% in Chalcolithic south Armenia (3% in Bronze Age Bactria). It has highest concentration in Karnataka (68% in one tribe), Tamil Nadu and spread almost nowhere east of India: 25-28% in Balochistan, northern Pashtuns, Kalasha, 55% in Parsi priests, drops to 1-5% in Danubian Europe, east France, England, Ireland, Arabian peninsula, Egypt. T is found in isolated pockets that peak in SE India and north Somalia.
    N is North Eurasian: Samoyedic Uralic speakers up to 75-99%/Estonians and Saami 40%, Siberian Turkic peoples 27-84%, Tungusic-speakers up to 45%, Buryats 20-48%. Spread after Beringia disappeared. Uralic speakers arrived in the Baltic 500 BC.
    O appeared between Bengal and the Mekong 34-39,000 years ago, later expanded with rice farmers. Note that most Austronesian ethnicities are dominant O but Polynesian founders merged with C-M38 east of Indonesia.
    Q is widely distributed in Asia at rates of 2-10%, but 94% of Kets (Yenisei river near Altai), 66% of Selkups (Samoyedic), 60% of Chelkans (Turkic, Altai region). Oldest sample is >15,000 BC from Yenisei. 6 subclades founded the Americas: up to 94% of natives except in Alaska and much of Canada (80% Inuit and Na-Dene speakers besides Navajo). On the Asian side of the Bering Sea, 33% of Chukchi people, 39% of Yupik Eskimos.
    R is known to have existed in Siberia by the Last Glacial Maximum, but both R1a and R1b show young expansions. Most R1a men are R1a1a1, which itself split in two estimated 5,800 years ago, with Europeans and Indo-Iranians having different clades (yet Asian clade Z93 has been found from 6,000 years ago in Ukraine). From 2900 BC, 75% of Corded Ware Culture men had European R1a1a1, while Asian diversification correlates with Indus Valley population boom around 2600 BC: now highest in Poles and some Sindhi/Punjabi/Gujarati groups (60-72%). R1b1a is first found in Venetia 14,100 years ago and now strongly concentrated in Western Europe (where Iberia has unique R1b3), but present in 100% of Yamnaya steppe samples (3300-2600 BC) and a Kura-Araxes sample (4000-2600 BC Caucasian).

    • Vermillion says:

      And what’s your takeaway from all that?

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Working backwards on the cladogram:

        The presence of R1a in 4000 BC Ukraine, highly diversified in Bronze-Age-to-now India, and none recovered from the burial mounds of Yamnaya or presumed successor cultures (Andronovo, etc.) partially demolishes the belief of most Indo-Europeanists and the Indian Left that R1 distribution supports their pre-existing belief that IE and Hinduism were introduced by an invasive new element not a year earlier than 1500 BC. Hindu fundamentalists would prefer that it originated in India, but it looks more like a Western at-least-males element entered India around the time the wheel was introduced, which predates the Mature Indus Valley Civilization by about 700 years (~3300 BC in India as well as places as far off as Central Europe). In turn, this makes it look like Yamnaya and Andronovo were spreading a Central to Western European male lineage across the steppe after 3300 BC, though not to such an extreme as to prevent present Kazakhstan being deeply diverse.
        R being sibling clade to Q (Native Americans) is not shocking, but non-obvious and pretty cool. The closest clade to that pair peaking (60%) in the short, woolly-haired Aeta people was a big surprise. I had the impression that mainstream anthropological belief before this data was that Asian peoples the Spanish called Negritos were survivors of a southern Recent African Origin route and Caucasoids+other Asians+Native Americans had diversified out of the founders of the northern route.
        The correlation between Y-haplogroup O and the spread of rice farming looks surprisingly simple. The genetics of cultures out-competed foragers by adopting the Fertile Crescent package is much more complicated.
        I would have thought Finns (51-61% N), Saami and Estonians (40%) spread from the NE of Europe proper rather than their male lineage being close to people from tropical Asia.
        The fact that L is associated by most researchers with Neolithic farmers and its distribution looks like this feels like fodder for some radical new Indo-European theory where it’s associated with the Neolithic Revolution (like Colin Renfrew) but came from India and was spread more by priests than wholesale demographic change. Its sibling clade T is even weirder.
        The deep Paleolithic splits of I (Western forager) and J (Near East) from Indian K isn’t surprising, but it’s kind of funny that Paleolithic Europeans had their male lineage largely replaced by a mix of its sibling clade J, the older G, and descendants of an even older split that nearly pattern matches to most Black Africans[1]. And all this before another invasion brought the European demography of known history.
        The locations and minority frequency of D are an interesting surprise, because physical anthropologists used to try to link Australian Aborigines (2/3rd C, the basal Out of Africa male line) with the Ainu (1/3 D) as relics of robust H. sapiens sapiens who predated the modern Asian phenotype and then adapted to different environments in isolation. Not so much.

        [1]Who themselves look like descendants of Neolithic colonists (at least male ones), modulo the continued presence of A and B. The suggestion that E never left Africa until E1b1b did so just in time to explain Natufian farmer DNA while C and D men jumped out of Africa so fast that it’s hard to find traces in Africa rather than places like Tibet and Hokkaido (D) seems like discarding Occam’s Razor to preserve a subtle ideological dimension of the Out of Africa model.

  59. proyas says:

    How many lives–and as importantly, QALYs–is coronavirus inadvertently SAVING?
    -Lockdown means fewer people driving, and fewer road fatalities. Car accident victims tend to be younger people.
    -Reduced air pollution means fewer deaths from respiratory problems. The people who tend to die from this are old and/or have many preexisting health problems, so they’re in the same cohort that is hardest hit by coronavirus.
    -Mass quarantine is probably reducing the spread of other diseases, mainly the flu, that would otherwise be killing people.

    • baconbits9 says:

      Are these questions answerable? There will probably be a massive reduction in road fatalities now, but are we going to regain a large chunk of those on the rebound? If there is no rebound how many will we lose to suicide/substance abuse in the ensuing depression?

      • Statismagician says:

        No. There will be approximate answers available in the fullness of time; in the meantime feel free to speculate if it’s amusing to you, but it would be extremely irresponsible to make any policy or personal decisions based on this sort of theorizing until quite a few more facts are in.

      • Hoopdawg says:

        The data I’ve seen from my country (Poland) show significantly less accidents, but the number of deaths barely changed. People drive less, but empty roads make them drive faster, which raises the severity of accidents that do happen.

    • Fewer gang killings.

    • Dack says:

      A year of quarantine in and of itself is obviously less than 1 QALY. I don’t think you’ll be able to find a positive effect if you account for that.

  60. salvorhardin says:

    Another entry in the “ways people feel this crisis vindicates their existing convictions” series, take with salt appropriately.

    One of my crankier libertarian complaints over the years has been: the unwillingness, or inability, to credibly commit to refuse people care and let them die under some circumstances is a seed of tyranny. I’d argue this about the health care system where things could work more efficiently and effectively if we were willing to turn some people away even from ERs, and about various forms of other regulatory restraints on risk-taking behavior especially around food etc. And I would get variations on these responses:

    1. How heartless you are! Of course we can’t credibly commit to refuse people lifesaving care! What kind of monster would do that?

    2. How unrealistic you are! Nobody would take that deal and no society of actual humans would offer it. What kind of weird robots do you hang out with?

    3. How petty you are! Just because you don’t want to pay a few measly percentage points more in taxes or be denied raw milk, you want people to DIE????

    Well, here we are, and the entire population is basically under indefinite house arrest, and there’s a technically feasible opt-out people could in principle take via variolation: get infected, take your chances, receive a get out of jail free card if and when you recover. But to do that at scale, you’d have to let them sign a contract saying that it would be ok to deny them care if they did get life-threateningly sick with the COVID they deliberately infected themselves with. Plenty of people would conscientiously and reasonably take that deal. But we can’t credibly commit to enforce the contract– so indefinite house arrest for everyone it is instead.

    I don’t think this has a solution in the short term. But it does redouble my long term desire to advocate for a world with more institutional mechanisms to let consenting adults take calculated and disclosed risks, even large ones.

    • Randy M says:

      I’m not necessarily against this, though there’s not much chance of it happening. Expect responses alternating between “You can’t experiment on people” and “Wait, you have a cure and you aren’t giving it to everyone?”

      But here’s a fourth argument, similar to a point Scott made long ago. Expect there to be a lot of pressure on employees to take this treatment in order to keep and immediately return to their jobs. Especially lower income service employees. So now you are essentially forcing a large, sympathetic segment to get a somewhat risky treatment and agree to forgo medical care if it goes awry?

    • Statismagician says:

      I don’t disagree with the idea that our institutions are too risk-averse and too infantilizing, but you haven’t dealt with any of the objections you mention (or the obvious awful-incentives ones that Randy M mentions above) and this, specifically, is not a good case study to prove your point. It’s Anno Domini 2020, not 1720, and we have significantly better ways of dealing with both pandemic disease and economic disruption than we did. You can be at home more than usual for a few months while we ramp up PPE production and get a better picture of how this disease operates.

      • salvorhardin says:

        Well, the implicit premise is that the present situation at least answers (2) and (3). I.e. there are in fact nontrivial numbers of people, not just a few fringe weirdos, who would take the deal; and indefinite house arrest and forced isolation even from close friends are far more serious deprivations of liberty than the non-hypothetical cases we had to argue about before. (1) is harder to answer because it goes to basic moral intuitions– perhaps we libertarians are just wired differently in a way we’ll never convince anyone else to go along with– but at least now we have a stronger argument that “your unwillingness to be ‘heartless’ is causing you to be tyrannical instead.”

        Randy’s objection I see as more of an argument for a UBI or other mechanism that gives people less bad options, so when they do choose to take risks you can be more confident that they are doing so in an “euvoluntary” way.

        • Matt M says:

          I think that part of the problem is that right now, it’s only fringe weirdos who suspect that the house arrest and forced isolation will actually be indefinite.

          Most of the normal people I see on social media are saying “It’s just two weeks, what’s the big deal? After that you can have your precious parties and all the businesses will start up again and it’ll all be fine.”

          Once it becomes clear that no, they have no intention of letting us go back to normal in the short/definite term, I think you’ll see a lot more people complaining about the situation.

          • rumham says:

            I suspect Easter will be a turning point.

          • Randy M says:

            Once it becomes clear that no, they have no intention of letting us go back to normal in the short/definite term, I think you’ll see a lot more people complaining about the situation.

            Agreed, depending, of course, on how bad things look in the local hospital.

          • mtl1882 says:

            Exactly. This is my assessment, but no one seems to be able to get what I’m saying. I guess I’m a fringe weirdo. I asked my mom if she planned on not seeing her kids for a year, and she just said she’s going to hope that things are fixed in two weeks–“it’s no big deal, there’s plenty of good TV.” I have to believe a large number of parents of adult children will tire of that arrangement quickly, and many other such groups.

            I know several non-fringe weirdo people who would be willing to take that deal, and are out in public daily right now, but I don’t think that means much. Even if the person who gets sick sticks by their vow not to go to the hospital, their family members aren’t reliably going to be okay with it. Even many bystanders won’t be. There’s enough people bothered by seeing someone die in the street that it’s not feasible in a society where it doesn’t have to happen. You could find ways to do it indirectly to some extent, but it’s never going to be a clean contractual matter. Especially because there will be endless stories of how someone’s employer pressured someone to sign the document to avoid losing a badly-needed job.

            I don’t think it will be a formal process, but I think that many people will simply get restless. I don’t think these are nontrivial numbers—all of human history testifies to how much we value being social. My best friend is a super extrovert and very active, but with some health conditions that make her vulnerable, and I can tell she’s going crazy. Even though she’s working long hours from home, she was clearly at a loss and I just found out she adopted a dog (she lives alone). This of course will depend on one’s living situation, opportunities, personality, health, and values.

    • Purplehermann says:

      If we infected young healthy people (in areas where the cases aren’t exploding yet) with smaller amounts of virus we could give all of them health care (as far as I can tell). If all young healthy people were infected and everyone else went into full isolation for a bit the pandemic would be over i think

      The issue is less the refusing them healthcare, more the experimenting on people/ “you’re killing people on purpose” hysteria

      • albatross11 says:

        Variolation seems like it also poses some substantial risks for the surrounding community–one very plausible failure mode is that you end up with a bunch of contagious people who may decide to break quarantine, or who may get extremely sick and contagious and spread the virus to any guards/attendants helping them out. That is, you’re not just talking about me choosing to take risks with my own life, but also potentially with lots of other peoples’ lives. You can indeed imagine some world where 1000 volunteers get variolated in an empty prison and the guards shoot anyone who tries to leave (from way up in a watchtower) for the next 14 days, but that’s not very similar to our world, nor does it seem like the sort of thing that would fly in most libertarian societies.

        This seems quite different from allowing people to take risks with themselves. So here’s my proposal: Allow people to sign up for experimental vaccine trials, but use 20th-21st century technology instead of 12th century technology to do it. We can make experimental vaccines that aren’t ever going to give you the disease, so won’t impose any extra risk on the people around you if they don’t work out. The most likely failure mode is that they won’t actually provide you any protection–we can get a good read on that (but not perfect) by measuring antibody titers in your blood 2-3 weeks after vaccination. There are less likely failure modes that imply more risk to you: maybe there’s something about this vaccine that induces some kind of nasty autoimmune thing and makes you sick in a non-contagious way; maybe this vaccine somehow increases your susceptibility to infection or makes infections worse for you than normal. But this doesn’t add any risk for anyone but you.

        I’m not an expert on this stuff, but we have experiments where we find how to inactivate the virus via heat, chemicals, UV, or just waiting for it to degrade. Inactivated virus vaccines work this way, and they’re pretty old technology–if we can produce enough virus, we can try heat-inactivating it and injecting it with some adjuvant, and then check your antibody titers to see if you’re making antibody to the virus a couple weeks later. Or we can start making the spike protein from COVID-19 in yeast, purifying it, and injecting it+adjuvants into your volunteers’ arms. 2-3 weeks later, check their antibody titers. Or take an existing live-virus vaccine for an enveloped virus (they still make some live-virus flu vaccines, but I think not in the US anymore), and modify the vaccine strain to express the COVID-19 spike protein on its surface, make a lot of it, and inject that into the volunteers. Part of the trial here would be to work out how big a dose is needed to get an effective response.

        A real expert could probably work out many more ways to do this, and would know which were/weren’t practical to do quickly. But any of these would make like 100x as much sense to me as variolation, since we don’t actually know how to do that yet (how much dose is needed to get reliable protection without making the patients super sick, what route do we use to infect them, etc.?)

        • MTSowbug says:

          I think the allure of variolation is due to it requiring no R&D – you just need viruses, which are everywhere, and people to put them into. But I think albatross is right to support inactivated and recombinant vaccine trials – they require *nearly* no R&D. Heat, chemical, and UV inactivation are trivial to perform, with the question being whether the inactivated virus yields useful epitopes more than whether the inactivated virus is actually dead. Soup-to-nuts recombinant yeast expression is something I could do in a couple weeks as a lone molecular biologist and could do in just a few days as a dedicated team. And both of these approaches yield vaccines that are safer to administer to wide populations than variolation, assuming the experimental studies goes well and you want to go clinical. I wish people talked about these approaches more.

          In defense of the variolation approach, it takes less than a prison to ensure people don’t break quarantine. House arrest ankle bracelets would probably work.

          • salvorhardin says:

            FWIW I had indeed envisioned that people would get variolated in a specially repurposed hotel or similar and then police would make sure they didn’t leave without a certificate of recovery. AIUI there have been plenty of instances of buildings actually being quarantined this way, only without the voluntary entry criteria.

          • Matt M says:

            I’ve heard some people on Twitter propose we could use cruise ships for this. Recruit a bunch of volunteers to go out and try it. If it doesn’t work, oh well, sorry dudes!

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I suggested establishing plague-free islands for our at-risk populations (cruise ships to Guam!), but party islands for the purposefully infected is another route.

        • John Schilling says:

          I think the allure of variolation is due to it requiring no R&D – you just need viruses, which are everywhere, and people to put them into.

          It requires the same year or so of expensive testing as every other sort of vaccination, and that’s something like 95% of the cost. “Variolation” is not a magic word that makes the FDA go away while you roll out an untested medical treatment.

          If you have some other magic word that makes the FDA shut up and go away, use it on one of the other vaccines that people have already been working on for the past few months and are ready to start testing. Those are more likely to work and less likely to kill people if they don’t work. Variolation is about the most dangerous way to vaccinate people, and combining the most dangerous sort of vaccine with “It’s an emergency so we can’t afford to test it the usual way” is just insanely perverse.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            just insanely perverse

            Hey now, that’s the unofficial SSC motto.

          • salvorhardin says:

            This is a fair point: in the alternate world in which people were free to opt into variolation they’d also likely be free, and better advised, to opt into other things with a better risk/reward tradeoff. I’ll happily amend/generalize my original complaint accordingly to say that unwillingness to let people take their own risks has prevented us from doing those other things and trampled our liberty instead.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            “Variolation” is not a magic word that makes the FDA go away while you roll out an untested medical treatment.

            If you have some other magic word that makes the FDA shut up and go away, use it on one of the other vaccines that people have already been working on for the past few months and are ready to start testing. Those are more likely to work and less likely to kill people if they don’t work. Variolation is about the most dangerous way to vaccinate people,

            Isn’t this the Robin Hanson proposal? And isn’t he saying “I know variolation is the least efficient way to vaccinate yourself, but all the others require a medical professional, and the FDA won’t let them, so let’s go vaccinate ourselves”?

          • John Schilling says:

            so let’s go vaccinate ourselves?

            How, exactly? It is going to take a medical professional to deliver a known dose of SARS-CoV-2. If the plan is to just hang around in high-risk situations until you get infected, then note that this isn’t chickenpox with a 10+ R0 where just going to a party is going to reliably infect you. You’re going to have to spend a lot of time in high-risk environments, you’re going to spend a chunk of that time in the Schrodinger’s Virus state where you may not be infected at all or may be an asymptomatic carrier spreading it to people around you who didn’t sign up for this plan, and there’s a good chance that by the time you can be confident you have been infected you have in fact been multiply infected with a full-strength case of COVID-19 on the way.

            I’m not seeing a practical way for amateurs to implement this plan with any degree of reliability.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            How, exactly? It is going to take a medical professional to deliver a known dose of SARS-CoV-2.

            Maybe Robin Hanson could curate up-to-the-minute news on which restaurants have found a COVID-19 positive employee and everyone in the minimum-risk demographic pledges to order takeout from them ASAP to variolate their stomach and obey quarantine for 14 days?
            Just spitballing here.

      • Machine Interface says:

        Is there any evidence that “smaller amount of virus” actually makes a difference for this virus? I know that for some very virulent diseases, literally a dozen of virions will be enough to develop the disease in its full deadly form.

        We also don’t know that developping the disease actually procures any immunity to subsequent infection — based on other coronaviruses, it’s actually doubtful.

        It really seems like talks of “variolation” in this situation are a case of “we need to do something, this is something”. It seems at best extremely speculative.

        • albatross11 says:

          I think there’s some circumstantial evidence that health care workers exposed to large doses of inhaled virus get sicker as a result, or maybe get symptomatic illnesses where they would otherwise have gotten asymptomatic ones. But that could be lots of stuff–maybe it’s hard to catch by inhalation into the lungs but if you do it gets real serious very quickly, maybe there are many strains and being exposed to 30 sick people means you get the worst one, maybe there are many strains and the worst ones are the ones in the patients that come to the hospital, etc.

        • Statismagician says:

          Yes, this.

          We don’t know very much about this virus. We won’t for a while. Settle in and please try not to do anything which might plausibly make the annual flu somewhere between ten and a hundred times worse than it currently is, indefinitely.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I am one of the advocates here of “this should be on the table to discuss,” but mostly in the realm of “we should be discussing this so we can think about what we want to do next time.”

            It’s too late now to be purposefully infecting anyone with coronavirus.

          • salvorhardin says:

            @Edward Scizorhands
            Agreed. My point is that a freedom-loving society with a level of risk tolerance appropriate to dignified adults would have set this option up much earlier.

            @Statismagician
            The problem is that there’s no end condition for “settling in” (which, remember, is a substantial mental health risk for e.g. people who live alone and have existing mental health issues), and no particularly good reason to trust the institutions that have already screwed up so much about this to come up with a reasonable path out of it in a reasonable time. If someone with actual power to make it happen endorsed and committed to a plan like: https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMe2007263?articleTools=true

            I’d be much happier. But as it is, we’re waiting on known incompetents to suddenly become competent at their leisure, in order to let hundreds of millions of innocents get out of jail.

          • Statismagician says:

            @salvorhardin
            I think we can all agree that this is not an ideal situation and that it’s not being handled ideally.

            I’d also be much happier if there was a plan. However, I don’t think any plan can be responsibly committed to at this stage, simply because we don’t know enough about the virus. Possibly this will turn out to have all been a massive overreaction. But trying to make utility calculations about a new pandemic virus before we can answer basic questions like ‘how effective are which grades of PPE’ and ‘how deadly is it for which demographics’ and ‘can you be reinfected after recovery’ is, I think I say fairly, very obviously not a good idea.

            Hopefully and probably, we’ll find out that an existing drug is also a good COVID-19 treatment, or that one of the several extant trial vaccines works great with no serious side effects, or that simply giving everyone a stock of N95 masks and hand sanitizer and telling them not to spend more than a few minutes in close contact at a time is good enough and that we can do that given a few weeks to ramp up production, or whatever. Hopefully and probably one or more of these things will happen soon. In the meantime, I’m perfectly fine with erring on the side of caution as a society. If we’re very unlucky and/or things go very wrong, this will get into the annual flu reservoir at something like its current severity, which would be sufficiently bad to be worth preventing even though this is plausibly much more disruptive than it could have been with perfect knowledge and even though even slightly less-bungled early efforts could have done a lot to keep this from being necessary in the first place.

            I think this is probably a basic values disagreement we have. I’m definitely biased; I’m an epidemiologist by training, and I know a great many people working on this in some capacity or other – I can see how you got to your position, I just can’t come along with you.

          • salvorhardin says:

            @Statismagician
            Yes, a difference of values for sure. But: is there any point at all at which you would agree that we just can’t continue to live like this even if letting up might mean, as you say, that the annual flu now becomes 10x more deadly? Would it be worth continuing the present lockdown regimes for a year to avoid that? Two years? More?

            Absent a plan, I would settle for an answer to *that* question from people in power, so I could understand better to what extent they shared my values and vote, write letters, etc accordingly. If they say, and actually mean, “as long as it takes,” well, that says to me that they basically value others’ liberty and pursuit of happiness at zero, and it’s worth having them on the record about that.

          • albatross11 says:

            If we’re setting this up for next time, let’s set up programs to very quickly apply a half-dozen plausible approaches to making experimental vaccines and vaccinating a largish number of volunteers. There’s a reason nobody uses variolation anymore.

          • The Nybbler says:

            We can’t. Every human society capable of producing vaccines has a safety culture when it comes to such things, a risk management regime. Almost, but not quite, a precautionary principle. Anything that can be done must first be assessed on the axes of likelyhood of risk and severity of risk, and anything that isn’t zero in at least one axis, or low in both, must be analyzed and buried in paperwork in order to reduce risk.

            Note that the cost of this is intentionally not part of it. This is not cost-benefit analysis, it is risk management; safety is assumed to trump all cost. That there is a safety cost to doing nothing does not matter; that’s not how you’re allowed to think if you do this sort of thing.

        • Purplehermann says:

          There is some circumstantial evidence, and most people (even old unhealthy people) don’t die from it, so it doesn’t seem like a virus so virile that it doesn’t matter how much you’re exposed to.

          I am no biologist, let alone a virologist, but it seems that initial virus exposure does change how hard it is for the body to deal with it, just that some viruses are so weak/strong that it didn’t matter much.
          If someone in the field would like to explain things better that eould be great.

          Let’s hope there is immunity, and also hopefully tests are being done to check this…

          I am ok with waiting the ~2 weeks it should take to check that

      • Bobobob says:

        Remember the premise of Snowpiercer, where the government tries to fight global warming by introducing an experimental substance into the atmosphere and causes a new Ice Age instead?

        That’s how I feel about variolation.

        • Purplehermann says:

          Umm except the exact same substance is already in the atmosphere…

          Do you have a good (explicit) reason to feel like that?

          • Bobobob says:

            Do you mean the COVID-19 virus is already in the atmosphere? I feel like the analogy is breaking down.

          • mtl1882 says:

            Not Purplehermann, but that’s how I read the comment. If I understand variolation correctly, it would entail simply using the existing virus that is currently all around us. While that policy may turn out to be a bad idea, it hardly seems comparable to unleashing something unknown. If a lab announced it had come up with a virus that mitigates the effects of COVID-19 and recommended injecting people with it, then I’d be a lot more concerned about the unknowns of something like that.

      • mtl1882 says:

        Yeah, if I had to pick the best (realistic) policy independent of political feasibility/social acceptance, this is the option that I keep coming back to. I feel like this will essentially be what happens in the end, but in a far less efficient manner. In other words, waiting for the non-vulnerable to develop herd immunity in different regions over a period of time. Trying to minimize the damage through controlled exposure and separating them from vulnerable family members would seem to help a lot. It has obvious risks, but if I had to make a decision with the data we have available, this seems the most promising. It wouldn’t even necessarily require infecting them on purpose, but rather telling low-risk people to temporarily separate (and creating facilities to allow this) from others and go back to work, wearing masks to cut down on viral load, with facilities available to care for those who get infected and to confirm who is immune.

        Variolation does seem one of the more promising options. It absolutely does have risks, and would require people to be very serious about quarantine, which would definitely involve having facilities available. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be forced, but it would require being very, very clear with everyone that the strategy was not eradication (in the short term), and that you have to assume anyone could be infected and seal yourself off if you can’t take part in variolation.

        • Purplehermann says:

          The hope with low viral loads deliberately placed in safer areas of the body is to try making it less dangerous. As a bonus you know who is infected, and how many you infected. Hopefully no games of where’s waldo and exponential numbers.

          I view intentional infection as a positive

          • mtl1882 says:

            I agree with you (assuming it works as we hope it will and no miracle alternative arises). But I think it will encounter a lot of resistance, and be hard to coordinate. If I *had* to make a guess as to which scenario would realistically be the most effective way to handle this based on what we know now, I would choose some sort of controlled infection of the lower-risk. This is in large part because getting a safe, highly effective vaccine to most of the population within the next year or two, seems like a huge long shot to me. Of course it would be wonderful, but it seems unrealistic to bet on it. And a lot of people would get infected in the meantime, as the lockdown can’t last at this level.

      • Purplehermann says:

        There seems to be a consensus that this plan is pretty dangerous, and that experimental vaccines are safer.

        Why? Is there an assumption that most of these people won’t get the virus eventually anyway? Are experimental vaccines that safe (and likely to work)?

        On paper, people ages 11-39 had a .2% death rate (which was from wuhan, in areas where the outbreaks were handled better the numbers look lower) , this includes those with underlying conditions, and may still be too high because of asymptomatic infections (which would be proportionately focused in younger, healthier populations), and assumes no benefit from variolation.

        Let’s infect 100,000 and see what happens.
        If the statistics hold (which they shouldn’t, see above) 20 will die.
        If (almost) no one dies and serious cases are very rare, we have a ringer.

    • Dack says:

      commit to refuse people care and let them die under some circumstances

      This is happening under some circumstances. It is called triage.

      • salvorhardin says:

        So, yes, but:

        a) it’s basically never done as a result of choices people made, whether that be a choice to variolate or a choice to go without insurance. That is, we’re unwilling to let people take the consequences of their choices and therefore we refuse to let them make the choices we’d be unwilling to let them take the consequences of.

        b) triage criteria are not AFAICT properly and publicly preplanned, thought through, and debated; they’re made up more or less on the spot or else planned in an extremely hush-hush and still ad hoc manner. And part of the reason for this is that whenever you try to talk rationally about triage criteria you get a backlash, e.g. people claiming that commonly proposed criteria are “discriminatory”.

        • mtl1882 says:

          I think the fact that it is never done indicates it probably will never be done. Things are that way because enough people are uncomfortable with it to make it unfeasible. Part of this is because a lot of moral belief systems don’t contemplate such trade-offs–they’re based on notions of universal dignity or duty or honor, and also in human fallibility. Part of this is because choice is often inextricably bound up in circumstances, and we know people often make uninformed choices, which can tie into arguments about discrimination. People will quietly accept that sacrifices are made when resources are limited, but they won’t agree to it in advance in explicit language. People who are okay with this approach are relatively rare, and among those who do agree with it, there’s a good chance at least someone close to them doesn’t share their philosophy. In many cases, someone will call 9-1-1 and demand treatment.

          That is, we’re unwilling to let people take the consequences of their choices and therefore we refuse to let them make the choices we’d be unwilling to let them take the consequences of.

          I’ve seen situations in which this dynamic plays out, and I agree it can be a serious issue. However, in this case and in some others, I don’t think it is really that we are unwilling to let people take the consequences. It is that we view the person who risks getting sick as a social risk who might infect others and keep the virus going. Individual consequences often aren’t neatly confined. Our concern really isn’t whether the person is eligible for treatment. Even though we’re talking a lot about flattening the curve, I think most people cling to hopes of eradication. And I think in a lot of health-related cases, many people get far angrier about the risky behavior itself than about the costs of the healthcare system, but they translate this into complaints about resources. For example, if there was an option for people who smoked or were extremely overweight to waive their right to healthcare, some who complain about the impact on healthcare costs would be satisfied. Others would view an informed commitment to continuing the behavior as much more provoking, because they don’t really view it as up for debate to begin with. They want consequences because they think it will bring compliance with “appropriate decisions”–not decisions to become even worse off by foregoing healthcare. (I am not proposing such a waiver as a reasonable policy, only using it to illustrate the dynamic).

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      If you are really socially savvy, you could trick people into supporting letting someone die on the street using the current crisis. Point to members of your common outgroup doing quarantine-breaking, and ask if they should be barred from hospitals.

      Anyone discussing this issue is already below average on the “socially savvy” scale, though, so good luck.

    • Garrett says:

      On a broader topic, an awful lot of the costs in healthcare could be avoided by actions of the individual patient. But we’re trending towards less responsibility rather than more. See: all the restrictions of the ACA which substantially limit the a factors which can be used for setting premiums.

  61. AlexOfUrals says:

    Is there a fantasy(-ish) book, or failing that a movie, of decent quality where the protagonist is the dark lord(lady)? I mean both words in the strong sense, if some dark lord kinda helps along the way it doesn’t count, if everyone thinks they’re a villain but in fact all they do is fail introduce a minimal wage in their empire or refuse to go on a quest for free or some such, it also doesn’t count. Likewise if they do things morally atrocious by the real world standards but are praised as a good ruler in-universe like in the Bible.What I’m talking about is when the main character is viewed an unambiguously immoral tyrant both inside and outside of the universe, but the story still centers on them. And being a dark lord and the main character needs to be simultaneous for a decent part of the plot, not like Darth Vader in Star Wars or the Lady in The Black Company. I can think of a number of reasons why it won’t be an immensely popular trope, but the “serous” literature has e.g. The Godfather and American Psycho, sci-fi has the Warhammer 40k universe, and action books and movies of every genre are full of ruthless cutthroat protagonists, so I figure my request isn’t too far-fetched.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      What I’m talking about is when the main character is viewed an unambiguously immoral tyrant both inside and outside of the universe, but the story still centers on them.

      Paradise Lost.
      This request is going to be controversial because whosoever the story centers on is the hero, and readers are predisposed to see the hero as good (which Milton completely understood).
      For some reason it’s more common in realistic fiction to do this without the villain protagonist developing a fandom that sees him as good. You mentioned The Godfather, and Kit Marlowe did this all the way back in 1588 with Tamburlaine.

    • Business Analyst says:

      The Last Whitchking is a short story, from a collection of the same name, which tells the story of the last scion of a fallen mage line as he learns the dark arts and his lust for vengeance.

    • matthewravery says:

      The First Law series might meet your requirements, depending on what you think of the characters.

      Incidentally, your request is hard to answer without spoilers.

    • Steven J says:

      The excellent web serial “A Practical Guide to Evil” (https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/) borderline qualifies. The protagonist is definitely regarded as a villain both inside and and outside universe. She’s aiming for being the lesser evil, but doesn’t always succeed. She definitely has enough political and supernatural power to qualify as Dark Lady as of the latter books, and maybe qualifies as early as mid-first book (depending on how high you set the required thresholds). But she’s not the only Dark Lord/Lady in the series — she has to contend with the likes of the Dead King and the Dread Empress as well as the heroes. The universe runs on story-logic, and many of the characters (on many different side) are genre-savy enough to exploit this.

      Two blurbs from the story’s webpage:

      A Practical Guide to Evil is a YA fantasy novel about a young girl named Catherine Foundling making her way through the world – though, in a departure from the norm, not on the side of the heroes. Is there such a thing as doing bad things for good reasons, or is she just rationalizing her desire for control? Good and Evil are tricky concepts, and the more power you get the blurrier the lines between them become.

      The Empire stands triumphant.

      For twenty years the Dread Empress has ruled over the lands that were once the Kingdom of Callow, but behind the scenes of this dawning golden age threats to the crown are rising. The nobles of the Wasteland, denied the power they crave, weave their plots behind pleasant smiles. In the north the Forever King eyes the ever-expanding borders of the Empire and ponders war. The greatest danger lies to the west, where the First Prince of Procer has finally claimed her throne: her people sundered, she wonders if a crusade might not be the way to secure her reign. Yet none of this matters, for in the heart of the conquered lands the most dangerous man alive sat across an orphan girl and offered her a knife.

      Her name is Catherine Foundling, and she has a plan.

      • Statismagician says:

        Seconded, it’s a really excellent series.

      • Purplehermann says:

        It’s wonderful but i don’t think it matches the request

      • I’ve been reading it as a result of the recommendation here, and enjoying it.

        One point I think it illustrates, at least as far as I have gotten, is that “evil” has two rather different meanings. A number of major characters are entirely unscrupulous, willing to use any means at all to achieve their objectives, and the protagonist becomes increasingly sympathetic to that position as the story goes on. But at least some of them, including the protagonist, have good objectives. At one point one of the enemies of the Empire comments that the peasants of Callow are better off now than they were before Callow was conquered by the Empire.

    • Eric Rall says:

      Dune Messiah. The first Dune novel subverts the standard fantasy/space-opera formula and presents Paul as the virtuous Chosen One seeking righteous vengeance against the evil tyrants who murdered his family, only to turn into a tragedy where the personally-virtuous protagonist is unable to turn himself aside from a course that will lead to galaxy-wide death and destruction perpetrated in his name in order to establish a brutal theocracy.

      In Messiah, we revisit Paul who is now the Emperor of the Galaxy, with his Jihad sweeping out and ruining every world that refuses to bow down and worship him. The text of the book explicitly blames him for sixty billion deaths. He does have the universal adulation of his lieutenants and of his legions, but no more so than, say, Sauron did of his own followers.

      • Clutzy says:

        I would argue the reason Paul is the Villain of that story is not revealed until subsequent books where The Golden Path is revealed, and he turned away from that. Once he endured the spice agony the Jihad was inevitable unless he abdicated everything.

        • Lillian says:

          Rejecting the Golden Path is the single most heroic thing Paul ever did. Fate decreed that to save humanity he would have to turn himself into an inhuman monster and implement five thousand years of brutal tyranny, and he rejected it. He refused fate and prescience, deciding that he would not allow himself be the prisoner of his own visions again, never again. Humanity would either stand without him, or die without him, but either way they would be free.

    • rumham says:

      Frisky Dingo. But it’s a cartoon. The protagonist is called “Killface”.

      • AlexOfUrals says:

        Lol. I should probably check it out. Since you’ve mentioned cartoons, my own closest suggestion for my request would probably be Mr. Pickles.

        • rumham says:

          That popped up on Hulu the other day. I’ll have to check it out. If Frisky Dingo is made by the same people who made Sealab 2021 and Archer. There are jokes on Archer that you won’t even get if you didn’t see Frisky Dingo.

    • noyann says:

      The Sundering. Wikipedia:

      The books portray a conflict between light and dark, with many of the common conventions of fantasy fiction. The world and many of the characters of the novels are similar to those found in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, as Carey presents a similar story as a tragedy told from the “dark” side’s perspective. Though one side can be considered light, consisting of Elf-like creatures, Men, and Dwarves, and the other dark, with an army of Trolls, neither can be considered solely “good” or “evil”.

      Also LOTR: The Last Ringbearer.
      ETA: Wikipedia:

      Eskov bases his novel on the premise that the Tolkien account is a “history written by the victors”. Eskov’s version of the story describes Mordor as a peaceful constitutional monarchy on the verge of an industrial revolution, that poses a threat to the war-mongering and imperialistic faction represented by Gandalf (whose attitude has been described by Saruman as “crafting the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem”) and the racist elves.

      • Deiseach says:

        Mordor as a peaceful constitutional monarchy

        Uh-huh. Gotta love the Russians, natural contrarians. But a “city of poets”? Will ya ever get away out of that, boy!

        Nice idea, but if you’re going to mangle canon that much to create your own version, you might as well throw your hat at it and write original fiction from the start. Finrod Felagund did not have his ten loyal companions eaten by werewolves for this!

        • noyann says:

          Yeskov actually expands canon, imo. He sets the LOTR as the defenders of an age of declining magic (and doesn’t alter its description), against an uprising modern/enlightened/technological age.

          I didn’t get what you mean with “city of poets”? Will ya ever get away out of that, boy!. 🙁

          • matkoniecz says:

            He takes names and general geography and some decorations, mangles everything else. “orcs are more technologically advanced” was sole preserved part.

            I would describe it as satire/reversion. Certainly not an expansion.

            I didn’t get what you mean with “city of poets”? Will ya ever get away out of that, boy!. 🙁

            Barad-dûr, Sauron’s citadel, appears in chapter 2 as

            …that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians

            in LOTR its is described as

            “… towers and battlements, tall as hills, founded upon a mighty mountain-throne above immeasurable pits; great courts and dungeons, eyeless prisons sheer as cliffs, and gaping gates of steel and adamant…”

            .that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power…

            I remember reading it, it was interesting but claiming that “Yeskov actually expands canon” is ridiculous.

          • Del Cotter says:

            matkoniecz has addressed the cite to the work; the other part is Irish for “Get the hell out of here!” = “Come off it!”/”Cut that out!”/”I can’t believe you said that!”.

            “Will you ever/never” is common, I don’t know if “boy” is specifically a Cork expression.

          • noyann says:

            Thanks for the correction, and the quotes.

            What I remembered as a good idea was the expansion of the ages concept with the new upcoming post-magical age. But I apparently lost crucial details. I really read both works with too much time in between, it seems.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Piers Anthony wrote a series called Incarnations of Immortality, in which mortals find they could be tapped to fill the role of the seven great offices of supernatural affairs, such as War or Time or Nature. The sixth novel centers on a fellow who literally has to be Satan.

    • albatross11 says:

      In SM Stirling’s Change series, one of the main leaders is Lady Sandra. She’s utterly ruthless and cold-hearted, but also intelligent. Her decades of eliminating any threats to internal stabilty (mostly by sending assassins or having them disappeared via midnight knock on the door) mean that the peasants are safe in their homes, because nobody even *thinks* about trying to start trouble to gain power. Her amoral but rational governance ensures peace and prosperity for a few million people, but everyone is scared to death to cross her in any way.

      When a really evil realm threatens her country and its neighbors, her extensive networks of spies keep her informed of the threat, and her decades of forcing everyone to keep up their defenses and stockpiles of weapons and food means that when the evil realm invades, her realm is well-equipped to fight back.

      During the years before this threat arises, she collects and patronizes art and culture of all kinds, because she likes that stuff and thinks it enhances the prestige of her realm. She ensures that everyone gets schooling and sanitation and that the laws are enforced fairly (within the bounds of a feudal system, anyway) because that gets the most wealth and power and stability from her realm.

      The main sympathetic character in the series (eventually a king on his own) reflects at some point that he learned the most about leadership from his mother and from Lady Sandra, “the one wise and good, the other wise and wicked.”

      • AlexOfUrals says:

        That’s probably the closest to what I asked for, but again from your description she’s probably somewhere in 90th percentile of medieval rulers by how good she was toward her subject. I didn’t read it but I can bet that there’s exactly zero times where she e.g. orders to execute someone because they pissed her off, which is a common pastime among dark lords.

    • Leafhopper says:

      There Will Be Blood, possibly. The protagonist isn’t a classic Dark-Lord-style villain, but… well, watch it and see for yourself.

      • AlexOfUrals says:

        I did and loved it a lot, I even thought to include it as an example. But it’s not fantasy (and strictly speaking his body count is lower than your average fantasy hero’s companion have).

    • mustacheion says:

      How about Doctor Horrible’s Sing Along Blog? Its more about his rise to dark lord, rather than already being there, and the character is highly sympathetic, but also pretty committed to evil.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Maybe Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny.

    • littskad says:

      Glen Cook’s Black Company books may meet your requirements. While some of the protagonists aren’t the most evil people around, they aren’t good people, either. And some of the books have someone who formerly was the actual dark lady, and would certainly be willing to again if she could be.

      • littskad says:

        Moorcock’s Elric books might be considered along those lines, too.

      • AlexOfUrals says:

        Actually I’ve specifically mentioned this series as a counterexample 🙂

        @littskad
        Yeah that’s kind of close, but again – the action is set after he’s done with being a dark lord (at least in the books I’ve read) and in fact he’s good enough to hate and eventually quit this job.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Overlord light novels. Protagonist goes from playing an undead to actually being one (or a simulation of one – it’s pretty funny how he tries not to wonder if he still has a brain). Among the side-effects is holding a sympathy for humans, but no deontological inhibitions to killing them. So he’s on his way to being a pretty successful Dark Lord, usually using extremely unsavory means. It’s probably in the top both for body count and callousness bordering on horror.

      A lot of it is played for laughs, but there’s depth in there too. I like the relation between and his vassals – both are convinced the other is much better, and keep trying to stay relevant. The result is a feedback loop of progress.

    • episcience says:

      The two The Prince of Nothing series, by R Scott Bakker (start with The Darkness that Comes Before. The protagonist is unambiguously amoral/evil and manipulates many more-sympathetic characters to their deaths for his personal gain. They are definitely grim reading though (especially the last two books of the second series).

      • Nick says:

        I don’t know about the rest of the books in the series, but in the first book this is blunted by the fact that several of our viewpoint characters, Achamian, Esmenet, and Serwe, are not so bad.

      • Lillian says:

        Anasûrimbor Kellhus is utterly amoral, monstrously manipulative, and has no qualms whatsoever about destroying people to his own ends, but he is not an evil overlord. The first series does chronicle his rise to power, but it also chronicles his partial redemption through the power of love, as ultimately he decides to save the world because his wife happens to be fond of it. Then in the second series he’s not a point of view character any more, as the series focus shifts to his children, only one of whom is a sociopathic monster, and he’s just a kid, not the lord of anything.

        Prince of Nothing is a fantastic series that I strongly recommend in great part because of how different it is from most other fantasy. Also it’s gritty and edgy as hell and I’m a sucker for that kind of thing. If you like Warhammer 40k and A Song of Fire and Ice, you will probably like Prince of Nothing. However it does not really fit with OP’s request, though he may still enjoy it.

    • Chalid says:

      The Broken Empire trilogy by Mark Lawrence has the most evil protagonist I can think of and is exactly what you’re looking for. Largely about the protagonist amassing power in a world filled with other evils. Rot13 for violent content. Ur fnpxf ivyyntrf sbe ab ernfba bgure guna gung ur jnagf jung’f va gurz, ur unf crbcyr gbegherq sbe ragregnvazrag, fbzrgvzrf snveyl tencuvpnyyl. Va na rneyl puncgre bs gur svefg obbx ur unf pbafrafhny frk sbe gur svefg gvzr naq ernyvmrf gung vg’f npghnyyl tbg n ybg bs nqinagntrf bire encvat ur’f orra qbvat. Naq fb ba.

      It is a really interesting world and is very well-written. Recommended to anyone.

  62. baconbits9 says:

    One thing that always fascinates me about markets is the knee jerk reaction to news. Today futures (much more lightly traded than actual trading, but still) dropped ~1.5% on the announcement of 6.6 million new filings for UE. Now this is a very large number but it was also expected to be a very large number and the news itself shouldn’t change your opinion about the near future.

    • Beans says:

      I am pretty economically naive, but most of what I’ve heard throughout my life about how “the market” works has given me the impression that economics is just a weird branch of psychology, dealing with how entities think about money and the way that their actions with it are determined by their hopes and fears.

      • Economics isn’t about money, although money is a useful institution and one that makes economics a little easier to do.

        Economics, as I understand it, is about the implications of rationality. The central assumption is that the predictable element in human behavior is that individuals have objectives and tend to take the actions that best achieve them.

        • Well... says:

          The central assumption is that the predictable element in human behavior is that individuals have objectives and tend to take the actions that best achieve them.

          How well does this assumption hold up in reality? I could see it tending to be truer for big organizations that tend to do things slowly and carefully, and less true for individuals, particularly individuals of a less philosophical/introspective/gratification-delaying bent.

          • Matt M says:

            Technically speaking, I think what David should have said is something like “individuals have objectives and tend to take the actions that they believe will best achieve them.”

            Someone doing a rain dance is not behaving irrationally, if they believe the dance will, in fact, cause rain. The fact that they are mistaken is a different issue altogether.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Agreed with Matt M.

            I like Thomas Sowell’s definition: economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources with alternative uses. This necessarily involves how people reason about that allocation, but it does not involve all of reasoning (I think).

            But perhaps David believes it applies, or can apply, to all reasoning? I’m genuinely not sure. I do often find it useful to think about any reasoning by using principles I’ve learned by studying economics (incentive mismatches, thinking on the margins, comparative advantage, and so on).

            I modify the above assumption: individuals have objectives and tend to take the actions that they believe best achieve them.

            This implies a reasoning that works at higher layers of abstraction as well. Some people find that being very careful about mapping what is true is beneficial to their objectives. However, making less effort to separate truth from personal belief also serves an objective: to expend as little energy as possible.

            Consequently, everyone makes a tradeoff between being careful about the truth, and using up as little energy as they can while doing so. Some find the truth massively useful and even entertaining, and may decide to be scientists or mathematicians. Some find it impermeable, confusing, or irrelevant, beyond the simple truths such as needing food and shelter, and settle on other pursuits that provide those and then seeking pleasure otherwise. Still others find the truth useful, but learn how to manipulate its dissemination, find that useful, too, and this is where liars come from, but also writers, reporters, influencers, demagogues and some notable leaders. In all of these cases, there is a balance between effort and reward, with some people willing to expend most of their free energy on learning more, others finding it better spent on material gains, and often varying these levels over their lives.

            In the case of investors looking at unemployment numbers, there is no doubt a chaotic mash of some who don’t know, some who know the number but don’t trust it, some who trust it and are trying to play other investors, and so on.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Eh. “Revealed preference” pretty much just changes the definition so that it’s tautological. “People get what they want and we know what people want by examining what they get”.

            Yeah, that’s an extremely bastardized shorthand.

          • I discuss rationality in some detail in Chapter 1 of my Price Theory. It isn’t about reasoning and I don’t think substituting “what they believe” helps.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            [Rationality] isn’t about reasoning and I don’t think substituting “what they believe” helps.

            Hmm. I re-read that section just now. Are you referring to some of the very first intro section, plus the example of a computer learning to win a game, and the fact that people often do things without thinking consciously about them?

            If so, then it sounds like you’re including things under “tend to take the actions that best achieve them” that I had not, namely, subconscious or even programmed behavior.

            I’m trying to acknowledge a common dissent I hear among people who believe a lot of economic behavior isn’t rational. For example, they’ll describe people who steal, or who panic and create runs on banks. I believe you address cases like that in about the same way that I would (I think I even read some of them in The Machinery of Freedom) – generally, they are trading off among multiple simple objectives, and the observer isn’t taking all of them into account.

            Is that accurate?

            Now, I’m also saying that at least one of those simple objectives is at least one more step removed from whatever behavior is observed. Some time back, an individual achieved their objective of avoiding effort by electing not to learn more about how to achieve other objectives they had. The present result might be, for example, praying to the gods for a great harvest, but not learning how to rotate crops.

            Do you think that’s a useful way to think about scenarios where people behave apparently irrationality, or is there something about this that will later confuse me?

            (That price theory book is still on my to-read list, btw – I even bought a copy IIRC on my Kindle…)

          • For example, they’ll describe people who steal, or who panic and create runs on banks.

            Why would that be irrational? The thief would probably be better off if nobody stole, and the person who panics might be better off if nobody did so, but neither of them controls other people, so what they do may well be rational.

          • Well... says:

            The part of David Friedman’s statement I quoted that I’m most skeptical of isn’t whether people take, or try to take, actions that achieve their objectives; it’s whether most people actually think in terms of objectives, or if they do, know what their own objectives are. Because most people are complex and nuanced and multifaceted and contradictory and terrible at clear introspection, if such a thing is even possible.

          • it’s whether most people actually think in terms of objectives

            I said nothing at all about how people think, only about how they act.

          • Well... says:

            Right; what I’m saying is that I’m not confident we can necessarily infer something like “objectives” from observing how people act.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            One of the frustrating things about Econ is that it redefines common terms, and then uses them ambiguously.

            Get an economist and an account talking about profit, and see if it comes to blows.

          • Well... says:

            To expand on my previous comment, the example I have in my head is kids taking the marshmallow test. An economist might observe that little Mikey eats the single marshmallow rather than wait and get ten marshmallows, so the economist concludes that Mikey’s objective was something like “get a marshmallow as soon as possible” or “maximize short-term sugar intake” or something like that, but it isn’t really correct. Mikey was very clearly told he’d get ten marshmallows if he could only wait a few minutes, but for whatever reason he wasn’t able to resist some unconscious primordial urge to eat what’s right in front of him right then and there. That has nothing to do with Mikey’s “objectives”, at least not in the sense they normally might be useful to talk about. Instead (so the psychologist might say), it has to do with various internal and external influences that pull or nudge Mikey toward this or that behavior.

            Mikey grows up and takes out a line of credit to put a $6K flatscreen TV in every room of his house. Scale this up to a whole population, some significant portion (maybe even a majority) of whom would have failed that same marshmallow test as kids. Economists will look at this consumer behavior and draw conclusions about people taking actions that fulfill their objectives. To me this still seems very, very shaky.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Mikey grows up and takes out a line of credit to put a $6K flatscreen TV in every room of his house. Scale this up to a whole population, some significant portion (maybe even a majority) of whom would have failed that same marshmallow test as kids. Economists will look at this consumer behavior and draw conclusions about people taking actions that fulfill their objectives. To me this still seems very, very shaky.

            I don’t understand why this is shaky, you are predicting the person’s behavior which seems like its the valuable metric you want.

          • GearRatio says:

            Mikey grows up and takes out a line of credit to put a $6K flatscreen TV in every room of his house. Scale this up to a whole population, some significant portion (maybe even a majority) of whom would have failed that same marshmallow test as kids. Economists will look at this consumer behavior and draw conclusions about people taking actions that fulfill their objectives. To me this still seems very, very shaky.

            Part of the problem here is you are ignoring costs and rewards Mikey experiences. Mikey stares at the marshmallow he wants and can’t eat and feels discomfort; he likes marshmallows, he dislikes waiting. He’s in a negative state he wishes to end.

            In the same way, I’ll sometimes buy a diet coke at a convenience store at a large mark-up as compared to waiting and buying larger quantities of diet coke at a supermarket later. I do so because having what I want when I want it gratifies me, and this gratification has a value to me. You may not approve of that value but it doesn’t erase it.

            It would be cheaper and easier for any person to buy some combination of cheap ingredients that provide a relatively complete set of micronutrients, protein and carbohydrate, blend them raw, and drink them in the absolute minimum amount of time possible and then go about our day. We’d save money and time. But we’d only do this if we arbitrarily set the value of gratification from food to 0, and in real life nobody does this.

            What you are doing is implicitly saying “Mikey’s instant gratification has a value of 0, because I say so. I also say that “having to wait” has no negative value. Since I said these things and take them as a given, Mikey’s actions make him irrational; economics assumes he’s rational, and economics is thus junk science”.

            If economics was claiming it perfectly understood every motivation of every person and because of this could accurately every action that every person ever took, it would be another problem with economics. I don’t know any actual economist who does this, though.

            I think when you don’t arbitrarily set things people very evidently want to get and things they very evidently want to award to a value of 0 and don’t have an isolated demand for rigor of “If you say people have motivations and it’s possible to predict their behavior from them you must be able to do so, right now, at 100% accuracy or this is a junk science” then most popular criticisms of economics fall away.

          • Nick says:

            @GearRatio
            Who said Mikey was happy with his decision to eat the marshmallow? Maybe he regrets it as soon as he grabs it. If I’d followed an impulse like that, I certainly would have.

            You’re comparing it to an example where you’re clearly happy with the choice of a diet coke now for a little markup. Maybe you’re not so happy when you’ve been trying to quit smoking for weeks now, but every time you visit that convenience store you see the cartons behind the counter, and you told yourself to stop going but forgot, and now you’re walking out of there with a carton again even though you were sure you wouldn’t….

          • Well... says:

            I’m not saying Mikey’s grabbing the marshmallow has a value of 0, I’m saying it doesn’t prove that it has a value of 1 to Mikey, probably not even of 0.5. But according to the definition of economics David Friedman provided, it seems like economists would treat it as a 1: “Mikey grabbed the marshmallow, therefore he just really wanted the marshmallow, no matter what he says he wanted or what we think he should want.” Maybe they do this with apologies and caveats, but reality still strikes me as way more complex and less straightforward than “we can understand people’s objectives by observing their actions”.

            Addiction really puts the murkiness of these things into sharp relief. I suppose I would say the murkiness (or at least complexity) of objectives/costs/influences on an individual addict’s economic activity seems to me like it’s not much less murky/complex for non-addicts.

          • One of the frustrating things about Econ is that it redefines common terms, and then uses them ambiguously.

            I think redefining is true of most sciences. “Organic,” I think, gets redefined by chemists, then reredefined by health food types — starting at the middle of that, I like to say that the only non-organic food I know of is sodium chloride. “Energy” and “force” have much more specific meanings in physics than in ordinary speech. “Significant” has a different meaning in statistics than in common speech.

            The alternative is inventing new words — but then they get borrowed incorrectly outside the science. Consider the common use of “exponential.” Or “paranoid.”

            I don’t what terms HBC thinks economics uses ambiguously. The fact that analysis based on the rationality assumption sometimes treats individuals as knowing everything and sometimes as rationally deciding what information is worth its cost doesn’t seem to me ambiguous, any more than the fact that physics problems sometimes do and sometimes do not take account of air resistance.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Economists would just say that your “preference” is to remain addicted and have a cigarette now over the possibility of breaking your addiction at some point in the future.

            They don’t really care that this isn’t how people in general define preference. They just want to be able to model the economy, so they define it in ways that economists find useful for making economic models more accurate. They don’t really care whether a theoretical person quits smoking.

            They’d also be happy to model an economy where Bupropion is state subsidized for anyone who wants to quit smoking. But they’d model it as changing peoples preferences, and the success or failure of the program would depend on how much it changed those preferences.

          • Jake R says:

            I don’t think anyone is saying that people always have coherent objectives that can be inferred from their actions, which always rationally pursue those objectives. The central tenet of economics is that when you model people as if their actions are the rational pursuit of coherent objectives, you get a better system for predicting behavior than any other behavior predicting system. It’s obviously still pretty far from a perfect behavior predicting system.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            And then you leave out the “as if” when talking about people and say that they are rational actors who have objectives and take the actions that best achieve them.

            You slip back and forth between the two modes in conversation. An economist understands the implications, but when you talk to someone who isn’t using the words the way an economist does, it causes confusion to use the terms with only the implication that we are talking about modeling behavior “as if”.

          • GearRatio says:

            @well…

            I’m not saying Mikey’s grabbing the marshmallow has a value of 0, I’m saying it doesn’t prove that it has a value of 1 to Mikey, probably not even of 0.5. But according to the definition of economics David Friedman provided, it seems like economists would treat it as a 1: “Mikey grabbed the marshmallow, therefore he just really wanted the marshmallow, no matter what he says he wanted or what we think he should want.” Maybe they do this with apologies and caveats, but reality still strikes me as way more complex and less straightforward than “we can understand people’s objectives by observing their actions”.

            Addiction really puts the murkiness of these things into sharp relief. I suppose I would say the murkiness (or at least complexity) of objectives/costs/influences on an individual addict’s economic activity seems to me like it’s not much less murky/complex for non-addicts.

            I have three issues here:

            1.

            I feel like you are still discounting a bunch of the motivations. It’s not just the marshmallow that Mikey wants; it’s also to not wait. It’s also to not feel the pain of temptation. Mikey, fully informed on the consequences and trade-offs, takes the marshmallow.

            He’s not choosing between one marshmallow and eight marshmallows, full stop irrational, he’s choosing between one marshmallow now, no waiting, and no immediate psychological discomfort and eight marshmallows. To still go “this is categorical irrational behavior” in a way that carries weight in an argument, you have to discount everything but the 1 vs. 8 component.

            2.

            You imply he might say he doesn’t want to take the one marshmallow; so? Where it matters to economics, or anybody, he indicates he very much did want to by taking the marshmallow. Economics is trying to predict what he will do, not what he says he will do or really wants to do or a dozen things that don’t affect his behavior at all.

            I wish I could get back every cent I ever spent on convenience store food above and beyond what I’d spend at a bulk-purchase place, but when it comes down to it I want immediate gratification more than I want to save a dollar or so per soda.

            To the extent economics says “GearRatio and Mikey both value things besides quantity and factor those into their decisions”, they are in the right here, unless I’m very much missing something.

            3.

            I don’t think addiction makes things murky in the way you are saying it does. The part where the addict wants drugs a whole lot doesn’t make him not rational in the way economics means.

            Drugs (or pain avoidance related to drugs) are example-addict’s terminal value; he will trade in his whole life for them. Safety for my family is mine; I’d trade my whole life for that. It happens that I don’t have to trade in my whole life for a reasonable level of those things, so I don’t. The example-addict does, so he does.

            Besides that, our expected behavior is the same. If the drug addict could get the drugs he wants without trading in his whole value, he would (see: many alcoholics). That this choice is not available does not render him irrational in his consumption. The example addict would take more or better quality drugs if he could get them with the same resources, all things the same; the fact that he can’t doesn’t make him irrational. I’m glad that housing isn’t illegal or destructive so I can get a reasonable level of housing-satisfaction and safety-satisfaction for not-all my resources, but this doesn’t make me more rational; my terminal value is just cheaper and there’s more competition in my terminal value’s market.

            I can get around the similarities between me and the addict only by discounting desire and gratification; I can say “well, it’s irrational for him to want it so much”. But that’s arbitrary – we know why he wants that so much, and we can use that to accurately predict his behavior as “will buy as much high as he can for his money with the information available to him, taking into account his extreme sense of urgency. Will do anything in his power to get more money”. And that’s what economics cares about; he doesn’t do actual irrational things that can’t be predicted, like buy less drugs for the same money, or buy lower quality drugs in the same quantities for the same money.

            It sounds like I’m being snarky, but I’m not trying to be. Without discounting desire from the calculation, I don’t honestly see how I’m any more rational for spending money to do want I want (give my kids a reasonable level of safety) when I could live in a dangerous slum for cheaper, or any more rational for having an XBox when I could have read books for free.

          • Well... says:

            I’m not saying Mikey’s taking the marshmallow is irrational because it fails some simplistic test I’ve arbitrarily given him; it’s irrational because that’s kind of what the marshmallow test is supposed to mean. Kids who fail it have statistically worse life outcomes, also associated with things that can be proxied as lower rationality.

            I get that economics involves simplifying (a whole lot of) complexity for the sake of predictively modeling it, and maybe I’m misunderstanding the way people, when they speak Economician, use terms that might otherwise be familiar. But I guess I got , uh, “triggered” by the word “objectives” because I sense that the mind is so much cloudier and shiftier a place than economists treat it as.

        • Ventrue Capital says:

          @David Friedman:

          When I taught economics (at a 4-year state college) I explained that “Finance is about money. Economics is about *choices*.”

          And, yes, @Beans, it involves a *lot* of psychology. The difference between orthodox economics and more-advanced economics like Behavioral Economics and Public Choice is that the latter don’t assume people are always perfectly rational.

          • Public Choice theory assumes rationality in the same sense as other parts of economics. It doesn’t assume perfect information. As in many other contexts, if information is costly it may be rational to make your decisions on imperfect information.

            Perfect information models are often a useful first step, but that’s all they are.

            Behavioral economics is a more interesting case. One can interpret it either as a theory of predictable irrational behavior or as a theory of rational behavior for an agent who has to allocate his limited supply of attention.

            I don’t think it is more advanced than conventional economics. Anything new provides a way of writing publishable articles. But are there any interesting and important problems that could not be solved before and can now be solved using behavioral economics?

            I have been arguing for some time that it ought to be used to try to understand macroeconomics, since most macro models implicitly assume that individual actors are making consistent mistakes. I haven’t noticed anyone actually doing it, but then I might not.

      • matthewravery says:

        The study of economics and “the market” are different but sometimes related things.

        I tend to agree with your assessment as it relates to financial markets. Animal spirits and all that.

      • Matt M says:

        Ludwig Von Mises titled his economic magnum opus “Human Action,” and devoted the first 100+ pages to explaining praxeology, which is essentially the science of human action. The Austrian school tradition basically looks at economics as a method of helping us explain why people make the decisions they make. The introduction of prices and money often makes this explanation easier to conceptualize, but the same logic can be used to help illustrate non-monetary decisionmaking as well.

      • baconbits9 says:

        I am pretty economically naive, but most of what I’ve heard throughout my life about how “the market” works has given me the impression that economics is just a weird branch of psychology, dealing with how entities think about money and the way that their actions with it are determined by their hopes and fears.

        I would agree with this, except you have to drop the ‘weird’ part, its probably the most normal branch of psychology.

      • Business Analyst says:

        I always thought of it as the study of incentives.

        • albatross11 says:

          There are aspects of economics that would still be true of aliens with wildly different psychology than humans. Comparative advantage, diminishing returns, something like the Solow growth model, the law of supply and demand–all that stuff seems like it would be true for almost any species of individual decisionmakers trying to deal with scarcity in the real world.

          • Ventrue Capital says:

            Comparative advantage would not be true of a bunch of identical robots, or the units of a hive mind, in an environment of uniformly-distributed resources.

            It’s possible to imagine situations, or species, in which the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility doesn’t apply.

            However, I was merely playing devil’s advocate.

            In my D&D campaign, the laws of economics definitely do apply. Comparative advantage, for example, explains why there is trade between various cultures and species. Humans, Dwarves, Undead, Reptoids, and Beastfolk have much different abilities to produce various goods and services. Even the Elves, who (apparently) are better at *everything* than *every* other species, trade with the others, because of comparative advantage.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            In my D&D campaign, the laws of economics definitely do apply. Comparative advantage, for example, explains why there is trade between various cultures and species. Humans, Dwarves, Undead, Reptoids, and Beastfolk have much different abilities to produce various goods and services. Even the Elves, who (apparently) are better at *everything* than *every* other species, trade with the others, because of comparative advantage.

            Cute.
            What are the economic effects when different species go to war?

    • Mathematicae says:

      If the markets were expecting a large but substantially lower number like 4-5 million instead of 6.6 million, a negative reaction shouldn’t be that strange.

      • baconbits9 says:

        The strange thing is having an expectation in a situation where you have no prior experience. The markets, more or less (from a rational expectations perspective) should have understood that the number was fairly opaque and not meaningful (you could argue that is exactly the reaction we got with the daily swings though).

    • AG says:

      I feel like it’s “electability,” but with money. Only a small proportion of people are genuinely reacting in this way, but everyone around them anticipates that everyone else will react a certain way, and so react to take advantage of the number movement if they can.

      It’s like how pumping stimulus into the market during the recent crash may have just incentivized people to keep selling, get their money’s worth out of the downturn.

  63. zenojjones says:

    I’m continuing my series looking into pre-war Appalachian mining communities and the struggles they faced. This section is on the region’s serious flirtation with communism/socialism and how it might have been a firewall of church and God kept the Appalachian region from falling into the hands of the godless proletariat boogeyman.

    Part 3: Dark as a Dungeon- Mining in Appalachian Kentucky

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      Interesting essays. I just read all three. But so far you’ve made Appalachian coal country as being consistently very poor and hellish. I hope you explain somewhere why people came there to work, and why they didn’t leave.

      • zenojjones says:

        Thanks for reading!
        Unfortunately it was very poor and hellish, and that’s kind of the point. As a result people have not stayed there, the population of Harlan County is less than half of what it was in 1940 and most remaining citizens are not miners.
        There was a pride to being a coal miner, which made many stay up through the 40’s as they fought for better conditions and pay. You have to remember that these places are very remote and leaving wasn’t exactly that easy. We’re talking the period leading up to WWII. Hell, most radio signals couldn’t make it through the mountains. The only towns in these counties for a time were coal towns. It was all encompassing. Family, community and a lack of ability to raise any money at all due to the company scrip system and some other predatory financial practices helped keep people there. You get used to the conditions you’re in, and until you know what else is out there, it’s hard to leave.
        Sure it’s easy to say “to hell with this, I’m leaving”, but you are literally penniless. The last time you up and left, accepted a train ticket for you and your family to a better life, you were brought to a coal camp where real money wasn’t used, news from the outside world was purposely kept out, but they gave your family a roof to live under.
        The whole situation was very tragic and an appalling abuse of human rights.

  64. eliasgoldberg says:

    Eating at restaurants often is very bad for you and results in a decreased life expectancy. The coronavirus has caused restaurants to shut down across the world and is forcing an entire generation to learn how to cook. Some percentage of the population may change their long term eating habits as a result. To what extent must the coronavirus change the eating habits of the world population for it to result in a net gain for life expectancy?

    • matkoniecz says:

      is very bad for you and results in a decreased life expectancy

      Is it actually a substantial effect? Are there any at least half-reliable estimates?

      • eliasgoldberg says:

        Googling “restaurants unhealthy” returned a plethora of articles. Here’s one:

        https://academic.oup.com/jn/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jn/nxz299/5696668?redirectedFrom=fulltext

        • matkoniecz says:

          Looking from the title and abstract claims to describe low quality of food at restaurants in USA. It is not appearing to compare them with cooking at home, what may be of similar or worse quality in USA.

          is very bad for you and results in a decreased life expectancy

          requires (a) homemade cooking to be better (b) better in way affecting life expectancy in detectable way

          Note that nutrition science studies hard field and we are missing proper tools to even rate healthiness of diet.

        • Skeptical Wolf says:

          Googling “restaurants unhealthy” returned a plethora of articles.

          The same is true of googling “home cooking unhealthy’, “exercise unhealthy”, “music unhealthy”, and “googling for random thing plus the word unhealthy unhealthy”. The internet is full of people who are happy to tell you what’s unhealthy. I usually find the ones that can distinguish between a tuna roll, a chicken salad, a Big Mac, and a 3 pound plate of BBQ to be more credible.

    • Kaitian says:

      How many of them are cooking healthy meals, and how many are just alternating between putting chicken nuggets and fries in the oven and cooking pasta with pesto?

      Conversely, how many people are eating much fewer fresh fruit and vegetables because they’re trying to limit shopping trips?

      I’d expect the effect of the lockdown on public health to be pretty negative overall, except that social distancing is probably reducing all kinds of infections.

      • baconbits9 says:

        The first couple of weeks I imagine people who previously didn’t cook much ended up eating a lot of easy meals like pasta, but I would expect them to start branching out more as this goes on longer if they aren’t limited by shortages.

        Gardening seems to have picked up a large amount of interest, with some seed sellers out of stock and having March orders fail to drop off. My guess is that will stick for a notable fraction of the people who start with the rewards that can come with it.

        • Kaitian says:

          I agree that gardening will become more popular, but I doubt most people will grow anywhere near the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables they’d buy otherwise.

          I’ve personally ordered some strawberry plants because those might be in short supply this summer if migrant workers can’t come into the country. It remains to be seen if this will result in any strawberries for me.

        • Skeptical Wolf says:

          My guess is that will stick for a notable fraction of the people who start with the rewards that can come with it.

          Are the rewards you’re referring to the enjoyment of the act itself, or something related to the output. I can see people trying a hobby discovering they like it and sticking with it, but I’ve found that for people who value their time, gardening is a dominated strategy for acquiring fresh produce (herbs/seasonings are a potentially different story).

          Is there a large population of people who have the combination of land, free time, and disposable income necessary to set up a garden, but no access to a farmer’s market or crop-share?

          • baconbits9 says:

            The combination of the two. There are many hobbies that are enjoyable but produce nothing, while gardening can be enjoyable and productive.

            but I’ve found that for people who value their time

            Gardening will never be cost effective for people who don’t like it, but as a displacement for more expensive hobbies it can nicely valuable.

            Is there a large population of people who have the combination of land, free time, and disposable income necessary to set up a garden, but no access to a farmer’s market or crop-share?

            I find farmer’s markets and crop shares to be pretty terrible. Farmers markets charge a premium for slightly above average produce, and crop shares are good for people with very average tastes.

            (herbs/seasonings are a potentially different story).

            The biggest difference (for us) is in specific fruits. Fresh figs are by far my favorite but they are awful to pick/package and ship, so when local places do have them (rarely) they are $8 a pound for not so great figs. Otoh our two fig trees (take up maybe 20 sq ft between them, and require little maintenance) give us 50+ lbs a year of high quality fresh figs. Our tomatoes are far better than the best store tomatoes and generally better than farmers market tomatoes, and we get tens of pounds of them a year easily. For much less effort than going to the store 4x a week we can have fresh greens 7 days a week. Our grapes continually get a fungus every year which keeps their productivity down so most of them get eaten by our kids, probably a few pounds a year, but the amount of effort we put into them isn’t substantially more than we would put into anything in our yard (ie grass, shrubs) instead of fruiting plants.

          • Skeptical Wolf says:

            I find farmer’s markets and crop shares to be pretty terrible. Farmers markets charge a premium for slightly above average produce, and crop shares are good for people with very average tastes.

            This must vary quite a bit from area to area. In my locality, farmer’s markets tend to be cheaper than grocery stores for notably superior produce. And the crop share I participated in gave us both a lot of choice and a lot of variety (kale and garlic were there as fall-backs every week, but we also ended up with okra, rutabaga, apple varieties I’d never tried before, and different types of beans and squash basically every week). I don’t know exactly what you mean by “average” tastes in this context, but I suspect in involves less variety than I experienced. But on the other hand, I live in the northern mid-west, so my city is literally surrounded by farm country. On the other hand, I know people who spend more on their tomato plants than their cars who have never come close to the results you describe in that area.

            …our two fig trees…

            I had not considered tree fruits when thinking about gardening. My mistake. Do you remember when you put those trees in how long it took before they started producing useful quantity/quality of fruit?

          • how long it took before they started producing useful quantity/quality of fruit?

            You didn’t put the question to me, but I have planted quite a lot of fruit trees. Time to harvest varies. For plums you might get a token harvest by the second year, something significant a few years after that, and similarly for peaches and apricots. I planted my fig tree a long time ago so don’t remember how long it took.

            Citrus is considerably slower — more like five to ten years before you get much, and similarly for avocado.

          • baconbits9 says:

            This must vary quite a bit from area to area. In my locality, farmer’s markets tend to be cheaper than grocery stores for notably superior produce.

            I am sure there is a lot of regional variation. If I drove 20ish mins west I would get much better produce from a quality/cost standpoint, so this is fair.

            Quality wise the initial quality is much better, but for a once a week farmers market (the only thing within a 25 min drive for us) means you are buying 2-3 days of good produce and still shopping about the same amount or eating 5-7 day old produce which is basically then similar or worse than grocery store produce (some exceptions like apples etc).

            I don’t know exactly what you mean by “average” tastes in this context, but I suspect in involves less variety than I experienced.

            For example my wife hates onions and I dislike asparagus. Spring CSAs for us meant giving away ~1/3rd of the share at that time of the year just for those two particular tastes. Now we have 3 kids so I am sure if we started again we would probably find it even less even.

            Do you remember when you put those trees in how long it took before they started producing useful quantity/quality of fruit?

            We started our figs from cuttings and I think year 2 we got some fruit and year 3 a decent amount of fruit. I think we are year 6 or 7 now and we seem to be at a plateau of quantity (though following a harsh winter and late spring its a lot less, and a mild winter and early spring more, but its the weather now that sets the range not the age of the trees).

            Our grapes were 2nd year fruiters, as were the Nanking cherries (similar to the grapes with small crops that the kids just pick and eat but almost no maintenence). We have an apple and pear in their 3rd years which haven’t fruited yet, 4th year cold hardy kiwi that we think will fruit this year. Gooseberries/currants/honeyberries gave a decent crop in their 2nd year (last year), raspberries and strawberries good 1st year fruits. I think those are all our successes and things that look to be soon successes. Failures: blueberries (repeatedly) and not a failure yet pawpaws but they are 10 years to get fruit and you can’t tell if they are soon to die or about to burst into growth for 2-4 years and we are in year 3.

      • eliasgoldberg says:

        I think the theory is that restaurants portions tend to be larger, with higher saturated fat and salt content than portions people prepare for themselves. So, while people who used to eat garbage in restaurants may now be eating garbage they cook themselves, at least they will tend to eat smaller amounts of garbage with less salt on top.

        I think a lot of people underestimate just how much healthier home cooked food is. Regarding your pasta example, I had two servings of whole grain linguini and a serving of pesto sauce for dinner a few nights ago, at 440 calories. That’s hardly healthy, but it was still far less caloric than anything I personally would have eaten at any of my nearby restaurants.

        • baconbits9 says:

          The other thing is that eating out generally means a lot more sitting than eating at home, even for low effort frozen foods.

        • Skeptical Wolf says:

          Regarding your pasta example, I had two servings of whole grain linguini and a serving of pesto sauce for dinner a few nights ago, at 440 calories. That’s hardly healthy,

          Is 440 calories with little protein or produce a normal meal for you? Are you consistently eating at least 4 times per day? Did you enjoy eating that meal (flavor/texture)?

          • eliasgoldberg says:

            You’re right, it’s not a normal meal for me. Usually for dinner I eat about 120 to 240 calories of meat (fish, pork, chicken, or turkey), 100 calories of frozen veggies (broccoli, asparagus, or green beens), and 100 calories of carbs (“baked” potato or rice). Still around 440 calories at most, but better balanced, I think. I enjoyed the linguini because of its novelty, and because I didn’t want to cook anything more complicated that night, but I take your point that that meal would get old very quickly.

            I usually eat three meals per day, plus two snacks. My breakfast is usually about 350 calories of eggs, turkey bacon, and toast with jam. My lunch is usually a 300 – 400 calorie sandwich or 200 – 300 calories of canned soup. My snacks are usually 200 calories or so of nuts and berries, or a 90 calorie protein bar, or a quartered 80 calorie small apple with 90 calories of peanut butter on top. I also have about three cups of coffee per day, with Stieva (0 calories) and 20 calories of half and half per cup.

            So on my most caloric day, I consume around 1,650 calories.

            The reason I thought of this question in the first place is because back in mid December I switched from mostly eating at restaurants to mostly cooking for myself at home. I did this to save money, but so far I’ve gone from weighing 240 pounds to weighing 212. When I first started eating at home, I wasn’t counting calories or limiting myself to any particular kind of food, or any particular amount of food (although, full disclosure, my dietary options are severely limited by my abysmal cooking skills.) My only general rule of thumb was that it had to be food that I cooked myself; microwave dinners didn’t count; and if I feel hungry, I should eat. Once I noticed my weight going down, I started paying attention to calories and realized that my body seemed perfectly satisfied with much less than 2000 calories per day.

            Over time the number of calories required to make me feel full has increased by about 200 calories per day, from about 1,450 to where it is now. It also sporadically increases sometimes for no reason I can discover. I’ll go a few days where I feel compelled to eat close to 2,000 calories per day, which I do, and then my body seems to settle down and my appetite decreases again.

            My assumption is that as my body weight slowly decreases, my appetite will slowly increase until I hit some weight that my body considers normal and then I’ll be in homeostasis.

          • rumham says:

            @eliasgoldberg

            It also sporadically increases sometimes for no reason I can discover.

            That’s some genuine genetic lottery winnings right there.

          • Dack says:

            @eliasgoldberg

            Never trust a skinny cook?

        • AlexOfUrals says:

          restaurants portions tend to be larger,

          It’s not quite so, restaurant portions just tend to some average, and home cooked portions are tailored to one’s personal preferences. If you prefer to eat below that average (which seems true from 440 calories meal), they’ll be larger. For someone who needs/likes larger portions, restaurants portions will be smaller than home cooked.

          However it’s probably true that restaurant portions will be slightly above average client’s preference (they have an economic incentive to be), and have more salt and various unhealthy toppings on them.

          • JayT says:

            I think when you eat at home you’ll server yourself the amount you think you need, and then if you want more you’ll go back for seconds. At a restaurant, that amount is set, and it’s probably set at too much for most people. However, there is a tendency for people to eat what is in front of them, so I would guess that, on average, people leave restaurants fuller than after a home cooked meal.

            Also, there’s no free refills on soda at home. That could easily trim a few hundred calories off a meal.

          • Matt says:

            Also, there’s no free refills on soda at home.

            In my home there are infinite refills. But I do have to get off my butt and go get them.

          • JayT says:

            Infinite paid refils though. I think for a lot of people they won’t open a second can of pop, but they would gladly drink three 32 oz cups of it when the server is constantly refilling.

          • Anthony says:

            In high-rent areas at least, restaurant portions increase in size because food is cheap, while labor and rent aren’t. So when they have to raise prices, they can increase portion sizes nearly proportionally.

            Many restaurant serving sizes are enough for two meals – people who eat reasonable portions can either share an entree, or pack about half to go for lunch or dinner the next day. Or you can use your trip to a restaurant as an opportunity to pig out.

    • I’ve seen a similar argument about a positive effect of the current pandemic in the context of flu. The argument is that the precautions people are taking to avoid the new coronavirus result in a reduction in annual flu deaths that more than cancels the deaths so far from the new virus itself.

      • HowardHolmes says:

        Also if coronavirus kills a person who would normally have died with annual flu this counts as a save for the virus.

    • AlexOfUrals says:

      Most restaurants, at least here in the US, still work for take out/delivery. Why those people won’t just order exactly as often as they went to a restaurant before?

      • Jon S says:

        Many people are avoiding takeout or even delivery to reduce their interactions with people/objects outside their home.

        Part of the benefit of restaurant meals is the whole restaurant experience, not just the food. While the food is the main product, I would expect people to substitute to home cooked meals at the margin.

      • eliasgoldberg says:

        If people were ordering exactly as often as they went to a restaurant before, then nobody would be worried about restaurants going out of business and hundreds of thousands of restaurant employees wouldn’t have filed for unemployment last week.

        • JayT says:

          Well, the waitstaff would still mostly be out of a job even if people were eating out just as much as before. I don’t think they are though, because a lot of people are also low on money, so eating at home is more attractive for that reason.

    • Skeptical Wolf says:

      … is forcing an entire generation to learn how to cook.

      There are two independent problems with this statement, and I’d like to address them separately.

      1. The coronavirus shutdowns are making this a terrible time to learn to cook. People are prevented from gathering in non-family groups. Stores are commonly sold out of common ingredients. Visiting several stores to find missing ingredients or just take advantage of selection and price differences is strongly discouraged. Specialty shops that sell seasonings and cookware are closed.

      While it’s a terrible time to learn to cook, it’s an even worse time to learn to cook healthy meals. Produce of all sorts (fresh, frozen, canned, dried) is harder to get. People are encouraged to space out their shopping trips to a degree that severely restricts the use of several healthier ingredients (fish, for example). Kids are at home. Stress levels are universally elevated.

      2. You seem to be assuming that people eat at restaurants due to some combination of moral and intellectual failings (hence why “forcing” them to learn is a good thing). This is not only uncharitable but also inaccurate. Food decisions involve a lot of trade-offs between cost, enjoyment, nutrition, and convenience. Restaurants provide valuable options for people managing those trade-offs, and many people find themselves in situations to benefit from those options and rationally choose to avail themselves of them.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        The coronavirus shutdowns are making this a terrible time to learn to cook. People are prevented from gathering in non-family groups. Stores are commonly sold out of common ingredients. Visiting several stores to find missing ingredients or just take advantage of selection and price differences is strongly discouraged. Specialty shops that sell seasonings and cookware are closed.

        While it’s a terrible time to learn to cook, it’s an even worse time to learn to cook healthy meals. Produce of all sorts (fresh, frozen, canned, dried) is harder to get. People are encouraged to space out their shopping trips to a degree that severely restricts the use of several healthier ingredients (fish, for example). Kids are at home. Stress levels are universally elevated.

        This. How are they supposed to learn anything about cooking when you’re told to plan most meals around no fresh ingredients and it can be hard to find such staple shelf-stable ingredients as rice?

        • eliasgoldberg says:

          Produce of all sorts (fresh, frozen, canned, dried) is harder to get.

          Because more people are buying it and cooking it, because all the restaurants are closed.

          • Skeptical Wolf says:

            Regardless of the reason, it still makes learning to cook harder. Most people who don’t learn to cook from their parents learn by starting with a recipe, getting the ingredients, and following instructions. Right now, they have a hard time doing that because they can’t consistently buy ingredients or tools that they’re missing. Improvisational cooking and substituting for missing ingredients are both more advanced skills, perfectly valid solutions for people who already have the proficiency but not a realistic option for people who are still at the “watch youtube video to learn how to deglaze a pan” stage.

            Also, the vast majority of households with 4-5 people are already cooking at least semi-regularly. The people being forced to learn to cook are almost all going to be people who live alone. Sharing what you’ve cooked and seeing people enjoy it is one of the main rewards of cooking (and thus one of the main incentives to learn) but it is currently unavailable to anyone that doesn’t have a household to feed. This is further complicated by the fact that in many areas (this may not be true in San Francisco, for example), a novice cook will need to spend more on ingredients than they would on at a restaurant in order to get a comparably enjoyable meal.

          • Rebecca Friedman says:

            @Skeptical Wolf

            This is further complicated by the fact that in many areas (this may not be true in San Francisco, for example), a novice cook will need to spend more on ingredients than they would on at a restaurant in order to get a comparably enjoyable meal.

            What areas are you thinking of? I learned to cook in college (went in being able to make scrambled eggs and chocolate chip cookies, but not much else), and living first in a small college town and then in a major non-Bay-Area city found cooking much, much cheaper than restaurant meals – and except for the time I accidentally quadrupled the volume of my onions and then burned them, better quality.

          • Ventrue Capital says:

            @Rebecca Friedman:

            found cooking much, much cheaper than restaurant meals – and except for the time I accidentally quadrupled the volume of my onions and then burned them, better quality.

            My tastes are such that quadrupling the quantity of onions (or garlic) tends to raise the quality of the recipe. I’m not sure that burning it would reduce it. 😀

          • Rebecca Friedman says:

            @Ventrue Capital

            To be fair, I’m not sure it actually lowered the quality below the level of the local restaurants; the rest of the recipe worked, and it was for a favorite dish which was why I was making it, despite it being, as it turned out, a little above my skill level at the time. It certainly didn’t come out as I’d hoped, but it was edible and it had vegetables, and it tasted otherwise right, so…

            (That said, I don’t actually like onions. I just like onion flavoring. So… not my ideal mistake to have made.)

            If you do like onions and garlic that much, why not quadruple them? They’re good foods for the current situation, keep basically forever in the refrigerator and a long time even outside it. And they come in 10lb bags for surprisingly reasonable prices.

          • Loriot says:

            Also, there are economies of scale to cooking. If you cook for yourself, you need to expend much more time and effort, or accept eating leftovers most of the time, which don’t taste anywhere near as good, and you don’t get much variety.

          • or accept eating leftovers most of the time, which don’t taste anywhere near as good

            Depends what they are leftovers of. Lots of things are as good the second day, some better.

          • Aapje says:

            I you really like onions, you can try making a classic Dutch dish: hachee.

            It’s a beef and onion stew, although it is excellent with chicken as well (of course, the chicken has to be cut down in smaller bits as well).

            Note that the braised red cabbage is optional. If you like onions enough, you can just eat the stew with potato (mashed or not).

          • baconbits9 says:

            Also, there are economies of scale to cooking. If you cook for yourself, you need to expend much more time and effort, or accept eating leftovers most of the time, which don’t taste anywhere near as good, and you don’t get much variety.

            There are a lot of ways to make leftovers a different meal. I’ll make a brisket and we have sliced brisket on day 1, then an entirely different meal day 2, then taco night with diced brisket on day 3, the leftovers from day 2, then a meat pie with the last of the brisket on day 5.

        • Anthony says:

          Apart from a few initial disruptions for about a week when the shelter-in-place started, there haven’t been that many supply issues where I live (Alameda, near Oakland). The one thing that seems hard to find, besides toilet paper and sanitizers, is flour.

          I just bought a ten-pound bag of rice at a nearby Asian grocery, because my daughter prefers cooking with something specific that’s not normally available in ten-pound bags in Safeway or Trader Joe’s. It looked like they were out of one or two specific kinds of rice (out of ten or so), and some of the sizes weren’t available. If you’re learning to make rice, the stuff that’s available at Safeway or TJ’s is fine.

      • eliasgoldberg says:

        You seem to be assuming that people eat at restaurants due to some combination of moral and intellectual failings (hence why “forcing” them to learn is a good thing).

        This is absolutely false. You’re reading between the lines something that is not there.

        • Skeptical Wolf says:

          I must be hyper-sensitive to this sort of thing based on other things I’ve been reading. I apologize. I should have asked a clarifying questions instead of adding my assumptions to your word choices.

      • JayT says:

        Is it true that produce is hard to come by? That hasn’t been my experience. The main foods that are in short supply around here are rice, pasta, eggs, and meat. Those are arguably things people should be eating less of anyways.

        • Skeptical Wolf says:

          I’ve taken two trips to my (normally very well stocked) grocery store in the last 3 weeks. The following is an (incomplete) list of what was completely sold out both times: potatoes, lettuce (fresh or packaged), bananas, citrus fruits (all types), sweet potatoes, carrots, spinach, squash (any type), green beans, frozen vegetables (all of them), frozen potatoes.

          You could buy apples, onions, and some questionable-looking carrots in the produce section. If you wanted frozen plant matter, you had your choice between grape popsicles and deluxe frozen pizza. The canned section was pretty picked over, but still had some useful things in off brands. Ironically, the meat section had everything except lean ground beef and chicken thighs.

          We ended up driving a lot further than I would have liked to find a store with actual produce in stock.

      • albatross11 says:

        Learning how to cook at home requires time–evenings when you can devote an hour or two to cooking an unfamiliar thing, rather than shuttling kids to events on opposite sides of the county, or rather than getting home from work at 7 because traffic was bad, or whatever. This is one thing that a lot of people have now, that they didn’t have before. Also, unlike regular weeknights, right now, the whole family will be home when the meal is done every single night–nobody’s at a Scout meeting until 9, or at basketball practice until 7, or whatever.

        Further, finding recipes to use what’s in the cupboard and fridge rather than running to the store to get new ingredients is a good way to expand your set of recipes that you’re comfortable cooking and your family will eat. The store has no veggies but cabbage, carrots, and turnips? Well, I guess it’s time to break out the cookbook and figure out how to make something new….

        • Statismagician says:

          Just so. I think that what a lot of people mean by ‘cooking’ is actually kind of backwards – pick a recipe, go buy the ingredients, follow the directions. Learning how to make something good out of what’s around is a much more useful skill.

          • noyann says:

            I call this my recipe of last resort:
            1. List what is in fridge & on shelf.
            2. Copy list to search engine, hit enter.
            3. Look through results until something tasty.
            4. Follow recipe.

          • Skeptical Wolf says:

            Learning how to make something good out of what’s around is a much more useful skill.

            Improvisational cooking is great, but you need to know your way around a kitchen and a pantry before you can start developing it. I would absolutely agree that people who already have basic cooking skills may be pushed to upgrade to intermediate ones (or at least expand their recipe book). My point was that this is not a good time to be trying to acquire basic cooking skills.

          • Statismagician says:

            Fair point. I admit I’m having trouble modeling what ‘literally does not know how to cook’ looks like.

          • Skeptical Wolf says:

            I’m having trouble modeling what ‘literally does not know how to cook’ looks like.

            Cooks and cookbooks use a lot of domain-specific verbs for particular preparation methods. A large part of not knowing how to cook is not knowing what those details are or being able to fill in any gaps.

            Or, as a more concrete example, it’s trying to make cornbread, getting to the part of the recipe that says “whisk dry ingredients together”, not knowing what “whisk” means and not thinking “it probably just means use a whisk to mix them together” because you don’t have a whisk in your kitchen.

          • JayT says:

            I think that is part of it, but most people at least know what a whisk is and can guess what they are supposed to do in that situation.

            What I’ve mostly observed from people that don’t know how to cook is that they will make bad mistakes on things that are actually more difficult than people who know how to cook realize. Something simple like sauteing can be easily ruined if you have the heat too high or low, have too much or not enough oil, or if you put in too much or not enough seasoning.

            The other common mistake I’ve seen is people making substitutions that really don’t work.

          • Loriot says:

            This reminds me of all the comments I got when I talked about my experiments with roasting potatoes in a previous open thread.

            Cooking is hard and takes a lot of work.

          • albatross11 says:

            There are cookbooks that try to explain this stuff–often marketed at kids. We have a cookbook that’s something like “Good and Easy” that is a bunch of stuff anyone can do with the right ingredients.

            But yeah, if you need to throw together something with a weird mixed bag of ingredients, it’s easier to do that if you’re already a pretty decent cook.

        • As I may have mentioned earlier, worries about fresh vegetables resulted in my trying cardoon recipes until I found one that three of the four of us liked. That’s an extra week to two weeks of vegetables when and if we run out of what we got from the store.

    • Loriot says:

      Given that people can’t even make up their minds about whether saturated fats are good for you, I highly doubt there’s any reliable evidence about the effect of restaurant dining, other than if it had a *large* effect, we would have noticed by now.

      • Rebecca Friedman says:

        Um… haven’t we?

        Nutrition I can’t speak for, but all restaurants except sushi restaurants cause my weight to go up; eating at home instead for almost all dishes causes it to go down. My impression from talking to people is that most people self-tracking observe the same effect, though of course that’s all anecdotal.

        Still, for at least some value of we…

        • rumham says:

          I’ve been taking in at least 65% of my calories in saturated fat for the last 2 and a half years. My weight is down and my cholesterol has never been better.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        When I go out and try to eat healthy, it’s pretty difficult. Portion size, yes, but also selection – basically the only remotely diet-friendly thing in the menu is salad.

        What you want to eat are 1. low caloric density foods, which have bulk so you don’t stay hungry and 2. veggies and fruits. Note how they’re basically the same thing.

        At restaurants you just don’t find many meals like that. Fruits are mostly on top of ice-creams and other desserts, and veggies – you’re lucky if they have a side dish of steamed vegetables or broccoli. That’s about it.

        So it’s not that steak and mash potatoes are inherently unhealthy – it’s that they’re the only choice, and they have very very high caloric densities. You can’t possibly eat reasonable calories and feel full.

        • Loriot says:

          What you want to eat are 1. low caloric density foods, which have bulk so you don’t stay hungry and 2. veggies and fruits. Note how they’re basically the same thing.

          In a previous open thread, I talked about how eating apples often makes me actually feel hungrier.

  65. johan_larson says:

    Let’s talk about removal spells in green in the current MTG expansion.

    If I am playing mono-green, and want to destroy an opponent’s creature outside of combat, these seem to be my options:
    Chainweb Aracnir – flying creature
    Mystic Repeal – enchantment creature
    Nylea’s Intervention – flying creature
    Pheres-Band Brawler – fight one creature
    Plummet – flying creature
    Return to Nature – enchantment creature or artifact creature
    Warbriar Blessing – fight one creature

    These all seem a bit restricted, though in fairness there are a lot of enchantment creatures in this set. In limited, it seems there are three ways to go:
    – avoid mono-green, and break into red or black for removal spells
    – prioritize Plummet, Return to Nature, and Warbriar Blessing (the common removal spells)
    – accept that you’ll be low on removal, and the game is going to be about creature combat
    What’s way to go here?

    • Aharon says:

      I think the main way to go is “avoid all green”, and break into another color – I don’t have experience playing sealed, but in drafts, whenever I tried to make mono-colored decks, they weren’t as strong as two-colored ones.

      The second one is prioritizing suboptimal cards – There are 151 creatures in the current expansion, of which 27 fly, so prioritizing plummet is a bad option. Return to Nature is better, since it has 52 potential targets, warbriar blessing is best. I’d actually prefer mystic repeal over return to nature, since there are only two artifact creatures.

      If you’re dead-set on going mono-green, I’d probably go the Mono-Green way and try to include warbriar blessing and mystic repeal as removal.

    • gudamor says:

      You’re forgetting a couple of important ones:
      Vivien, Arkbow Ranger – even better with death touch creatures like Questing Beast
      Meteor Golem – only really an option if you’re Green Ramp

      Wait, I just noticed that your list is only Theros cards. Are you talking about Limited (sealed or draft)?

      • johan_larson says:

        Yes, this is for limited, particularly draft.

        • gudamor says:

          Prioritize Entrancing Lyre.
          Given the prevalence of Enchantments and Enchantment Creatures, you should also draft Mystic Repeal. Also consider splashing for removal.

        • Tarpitz says:

          Yeah, as per below but shorter: don’t draft mono-green in Theros Beyond Death (or really almost any limited format – Eldraine was a big exception).

    • Randy M says:

      These all seem a bit restricted

      This is a part of the design philosophy of the game. Green has the best and most efficient creatures, so it has the worst creature removal. This is to reward/encourage you to branch out, though by doing so you have a shakier mana base.

    • Tarpitz says:

      Green is supposed to be bad at killing creatures. Mono-green decks aim to win by having such an edge in creature quality in the key turns of the game that they can win by ignoring or blocking their opponent’s creatures, not by killing them. Cards like Wicked Wolf that actually amount to good removal in green are more-or-less design mistakes.

      I’d need to know a bit more about the context you’re playing in (is Theros Beyond Death cards only a stipulation for your casual playgroup?) to know what to suggest. Here is a mono-green stompy deck from last autumn’s Standard format to give you an idea of what such a deck might look like. Obviously a one-set version will be far weaker.

      If I had to brew TBD mono-green, I think I would start with something like this:

      4 Destiny Spinner
      4 Nessian Hornbeetle
      4 Nessian Wanderer
      4 Setessan Champion
      4 The First Iroan Games
      4 Renata, Called to the Hunt
      2 Nylea, Keen-Eyed
      3 Nessian Boar
      4 Warbriar Blessing
      4 Setessan Training
      22 Forest
      1 Labyrinth of Skophos

      Sideboard (this will vary hugely based on your metagame, but it’s a starting point):

      3 Soul Guide Lantern
      3 Shadowspear
      1 Entrancing Lyre
      3 Arasta of the Endless Web
      3 Mystic Repeal
      2 Klothys’s Design

      Having written all this, I realise you were talking about limited, in which case the answer is simply that you should almost never be mono-green (though Warbriar Blessing is actually a very good limited removal spell in the context of the format). The vast majority of draft environments are designed to support primarily two-colour decks. Theros Beyond Death incentivises you to skew more heavily towards one of the two colours your playing than most formats do (I’d guess a typical TBD manabase is 10/7 or even 11/6 rather than the more normal 9/8) but you should still nearly always be two colours. In the course of however many Bo1 drafts it’s taken me to hit mythic on Arena twice, plus however many Bo3s I’ve played online and in paper for fun, I have drafted zero mono-coloured decks. I don’t say it’s never correct (and it’s probably correct in real life more often than on Arena) but I would be staggered if it was correct as often as one draft in a hundred. As a newer player, by far the best heuristic you could adopt would be to never do it.

    • Jake R says:

      As others have mentioned this is a deliberate design philosophy decision. Green has the best enchantment and artifact removal, and the worst creature removal. Additionally green is supposed to be all about its creatures, so what removal it has (other than anti-flying) is focused around having a creature bigger than the opponents creature.

      Green creature removal is almost always either a “fight” spell or a “bite” spell. That is, either target creature fights target creature or target creature deals one-sided damage to target creature. These spells can be powerful and efficient creature removal but the idea is that they’re completely useless if you don’t have a creature out.

      Warbriar’s Blessing is the common creature removal for this set. It’s pretty average as far as green creature removal tends to be, and as usual it’s probably the best green common (competing with Voracious Typhon). It’s an enchantment which is a bonus in this set and the +2 toughness means your creature is likely to survive the fight. Compare it to Rabid Bite, which is one-sided damage but does not stick around giving your creature +2 toughness.

  66. Iago the Yerfdog says:

    Political Economies Very Different From Ours, Because I Just Made Them Up:

    The Osthrokites were a fairly standard feudal society until someone came up with anarchism and it spread like wildfire. One revolution later, there are no more lords or serfs. The thing is… nobody bothered to think of new arrangements of property like capitalism or socialism to go with anarchism. So now all real estate is considered the inalienable property of whoever was living on it at the time of the revolution. Your children can either parcel up your land when you die or move to unoccupied territory and claim it, but once they pick a plot, it’s theirs and their descendants for good.

    (I was going to add a country that didn’t recognize self-ownership and where there was a vast market in shares of ownership for people, but ultimately it wasn’t very different from our own political economy. Take that as you will.)

    EDIT: Thought of another one, although it’s more of a legal system:

    Pantalia is a polytheistic direct theocracy: everyone obeys the will of their gods as revealed to them personally. Those who worship a similar set of gods tend to congregate together in order to avoid conflicts with those worshipping very different gods. Acolytes of deities of justice can act as arbiters in cases where the wills of various gods conflict; such an arbiter will hear both cases, then commune with their own deity to discuss and decide the matter.

    • bullseye says:

      If an Osthrokite seizes land by force, I suppose the neighbors would band together to expel the thief (since they no longer have lords for traditional law enforcement). But why would the neighbors prevent a sale of land? Were land sales an unpopular feature of the system they overthrew?

      • Anthony says:

        I could imagine that in a “standard feudal society” for the peasants, the land wasn’t theirs to sell, and if your lord sold his land (and your labor), it was probably because he’s in financial difficulties because he wasn’t ruthless enough and he’s selling to someone significantly more ruthless.

        That, and “we fought for our land – you can’t just let someone else have it”.

      • Iago the Yerfdog says:

        My understanding is that manors were considered the inalienable property of the lord, and even he wasn’t free to sell it off. Ironically, conquest would arguably be more acceptable.

  67. matkoniecz says:

    Is anyone aware about game/tool that would simulate a story of a settlement?

    For example a village growing, turning into a city.

    Without interaction from a player, settlement growing on its own. So unlike SimCity where everything is planned by a gamer.

    I am looking for more realistic/complicated simulation than in OpenTTD or in WorldBox that have some simulation of settlement but extremely simple.

    I am not looking for map generator of a single snapshot, I want a growing settlement. So Dwarf Fortress and any “generate a static map of a city” programs are failing this requirement.

    I am aware about http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/simblob/economy.html with an useful documentation. But basically all design decisions and used technologies mismatch what I wanted, also project appears to be dead and abandoned.

    I am asking as I wanted to play/watch and maybe tweak something like this. My current plan is to write my own program as an entertainment, but I would be happy to join an existing project if it exits.

    ——-

    Also, is anyone interested in something like that? I wonder whatever it would be worth publishing or whatever I am one of 5 people on Earth that would consider village/city growth screensaver (maybe with minimal optional gameplay elements) as something interesting.

    • Oleg S. says:

      I’d love to watch something like this

      • matkoniecz says:

        I will appear in one of this threads once I will have something interesting to show 🙂

    • dweezle says:

      I don’t think i know of anything that fits those specifications, the hands off element is probably the most constraining. I think my strongest suggestion would be Cities:Skylines. There is no technological progression/settlement phase and you have to place roads and zone residential/industrial areas but after that the buildings all build and upgrade themselves (or rather are simulated being built/used). Its very visually pleasant and for a very hands off experience, has user made content such as pre made cities for you to just look around.

    • Lambert says:

      That’d be cool. Document the process well in case Tarn Adams is looking for hints.

      In mildly related news, the english government has been working on making their GIS data publicly available. And someone made a perl script that downloads the relevant data and turns it into a minecraft world. C:S heightmaps can also be made using those data.

      Also the UK has a bunch of good out-of copyright maps (https://maps.nls.uk/geo/find/#zoom=13&lat=51.52244&lon=-0.09142&layers=102&b=1&z=1&point=51.50731,-0.10668for example). You might be able to use these to check the verisimillitude of your models (or to train them, if you want to go down that route).

    • emiliobumachar says:

      Tangential: if you’re one of only five people on Earth interested in it, and you do it, what’s wrong with publishing it to the other four? It’s not like you have to buy ads, put it up on GitHub or another free publishing platform, and, you never know, you might just create all the interest that you wished existed.

      Even very crappy working code can be run as is, and is a much better starting point than scratch for someone else to polish up if they want to.

      Of course, it’s entirely okay to try to sell it for money if you think that’s worth a shot. But the alternative should not be keeping it in your drawer forever.

      • matkoniecz says:

        I though about publishing as in “release a playable executable” / “deploy an app on app store” that would require a bit more effort than just pushing git repository.

        And it would not be free. In case of Google Play – it is one time payment, in case of access to apple store (for an iPhone app – it is 100$ every year) – https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/ .

        Of course, it’s entirely okay to try to sell it for money if you think that’s worth a shot. But the alternative should not be keeping it in your drawer forever.

        Yes, Github would be likely a good idea. Still, at this moment I am at extremely early stage, nothing actually interesting for others is existing.

    • gudamor says:

      What about making an AI play one of those games for you? Even random actions could be interesting if all you want is to watch.

      • matkoniecz says:

        That would be perfectly fine, but I failed to find anything with good enough AI + game combination.

        For example OpenTTD + one of AIs (for example one that I have written) would be technically matching, but its realism level would be ridiculously low, as this game has different priorities.

  68. Oleg S. says:

    Does anyone know why California has zero patients recovered from COVID-19?

    Worldwide if you combine dead + recovered you get number of active cases 13 days ago. In US and Europe is also 13 days. If you follow this 13-days rule, in California there should be some 753 recovered patients.

  69. proyas says:

    A question for anyone who knows about woodworking, lumber, and wooden deck care:

    I recently bought a metal utility trailer to tow behind my car, and now I need to build low “fences” around the edges of it so cargo doesn’t skid off of it and onto the road if I slam on the brakes or turn too sharply. I found some old 2x4s that I thought were fine for building the fences. However, the wood is old, was wet when I got it (it had been lying on the ground), and got even wetter when I washed the mud and debris off of it. Does the fact that the 2x4s are not bone dry undermine their use in this project? I read elsewhere on the internet that it takes months for 2x4s to dry out.

    I want to paint the 2x4s with Behr Waterproof Wood Finish to protect them from the elements so the fence will last for as many years as possible (I also used this chemical on my wooden deck). Can I do that now, even though the “cores” of the 2x4s are wet? Won’t I be trapping moisture inside forever?

    I’d like to get the 2x4s preserved and the wooden fences built by the end of this month. I don’t want to wait many months for them to get bone dry.

    (I suspect I am overthinking this.)

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Don’t use the wet wood. It will be a pain in the ass to use, probably is already damaged, and could even introduce risks. Don’t waste money on painting the wet wood, as it won’t stick anyway.

      2x4s (that have been kiln dried) are dirt cheap at the local hardware store or lumber yard. Pressure treated 2x4s are a little more expensive, but they will resist rotting even if they are standing in water, but you most likely don’t need that, depending.

      The most important thing is the proper design and build of the fences. You really want to make sure they don’t fail under load, letting your cargo go flying into traffic at highway speeds. Make sure you know what you are doing there.

    • Eric Rall says:

      Do you know how long they were lying wet on the ground? Untreated lumber in direct contact with soil is very prone to rot, especially if its at all wet. If they’ve been there for any length of time, I’d refrain from using them in case they’ve already started rotting.

      In any event, definitely don’t use plain old douglas fir lumber for soil-contacting parts of the fence. I’d use pressure-treated wood, or at least a naturally rot/termite resistant wood like redwood or cedar, for the posts and the bottom rail of the fence.

      Edit 1:
      For your original question, it’s probably fine as long as the wood doesn’t feel or look wet. Most exterior paints and finishes are designed to allow the painted surface to breathe, so moisture would be able to escape. Just double-check by reading the fine print of the paint label.

      Edit 2:
      I read your post too fast and missed that you were talking about a “fence” for a vehicle, not the kind of fence I was thinking of.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      (I suspect I am overthinking this.)

      Not really. The main question is how long has it been wet. You can wash it as much as you want, it’ll dry in a couple of days – it’s the inside that’s important. If it’s been staying on dry land for a couple of weeks, it’s ok. If it’s been staying in mud or if it caught more than a light rain, less so.

      Also, main problem with wet wood isn’t that it’s weak, unless it’s very old (I mean years). Young wood still has resins in it which protect it from rot. Problem is that when it dries there’s a good chance it will bend. This may or may not be a problem for you – you definitely don’t want to make furniture, for example. But if you’re willing to take a small chance and don’t have OCD, you can risk it even with less dry wood. Btw, young wood qualifies as “wet” – if you want to avoid chance of bending, you either buy it pre-dried (more expensive) or leave it over the winter in a shed.

      But again, it depends a lot on your standards and OCD. Personally I’d have no problem using young wood, and I wouldn’t mind if if recently caught a rain or two. If it’s old on the other hand (like recycled wood from another construction) I’d be a lot more careful about structural integrity. Definitely wouldn’t use wood that’s been exposed for years, unless it was treated. For example an untreated fence can be broken by hand in about 10 years.

      • Anteros says:

        I agree with much of this. A lot depends on just how fussy/ocd you are. And if you really want the fences to last a long time, just go out and buy yourself some pressure-treated kiln dried 2x4s for a few dollars and you’re good to go. Also, if you’re doing that, you can buy exactly what size of wood you’re looking for. You won’t need to paint it with anything for longevity and you can use the time you’ve saved to make it aesthetically pleasing.. Good luck!

    • Dack says:

      What are you planning on hauling? You probably don’t need a “fence” Get some netting, bungees, and ratchet straps. There’s lots of ways to tie stuff down.

  70. Mark V Anderson says:

    I have written the beginnings of a bad song about the fearsome virus. Or maybe it could be called a limerick. I don’t plan to do anything with it; it just seemed a fun thing to do. If the virus is sentient, it will fade away in embarrassment. I haven’t tried to be highly accurate in everything I wrote. I’d love to hear further verses to add to this. The less taste the better.

    The Plague of Twenty Twenty

    1st verse:
    The terrible plague of twenty twenty
    Struck us swiftly without a glitch
    Economy was great and we had plenty
    Now we throw the dead in the ditch

    Chorus:
    Covid, covid, covid, covid!
    Buy up all the toilet paper
    Stay back! Keep your social distance
    And don’t give me your sickly vapers!

    2nd verse:
    It occurred in year four of Donald Trump
    Who said it wasn’t worse than mumps
    Many others said to stay at work
    Including the mayor of New York

  71. Beans says:

    I am a tenant in a one bedroom apartment with chronic plumbing issues, and I am obviously stuck inside until the plague lets up. The frequency of issues is increasing lately, probably since everyone is always home in the building, clogging up the system. The management usually sends over a plumber quickly if there’s a serious problem, and I’ve been able to live for a day or two in the past by peeing in the sink and going to the grocery store for more serious business. But the sink sometimes is also affected by the clogging, and popping over to the store is not really viable these days.

    If prompt maintenance becomes impossible due to you-know-what and if these issues become too frequent to allow reasonable living conditions, I am wondering what my rights as a tenant are. I am not interested in paying to live in an apartment that cannot be properly maintained, I’d rather break my lease and move somewhere else if I have to, if my legal rights permit something like that. I am in Massachusetts, if it matters. Does anyone have any insight about this?

    (No, I’m not causing the problem. The plumber routinely finds wads of floss and non-flushable wipes in the pipes that I do not use. He thinks they must be washing down from higher floors, if they aren’t mine, which they aren’t.)

    • Well... says:

      I am not a lawyer, and I don’t know what the law says in your state, but I’m pretty darn sure you do have some rights here. There are definitely free ways to at least talk to lawyers in your state about this. Law schools sometimes have free legal clinics; right now I don’t know what the status of those is, but it’s worth looking into. Churches are another place that sometimes offer free legal clinics. Worth a phone call at least. If that fails, I’m sure there’s some place online where you can find a lawyer in MA who specializes in this type of law to at least verify what your rights are.

      Also, document as much as you can with photos, testimonies from other tenants, the plumber, etc. And hang on to any messages you get from your landlord. Once you find out your legal options, and if you decide to pursue legal action, that stuff will come in handy.

      By the way, you should start using floss. Just don’t flush it down the toilet.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        Never thought about floss as unflushable. Wonder why the US has such a big clogging problem, I never hear about it here. In my life I’ve seen exactly two clogged toilets: my apartment when I cleaned up and try to flush A LOT of paper towels (that’s when I learned that toilet paper is designed to break down in water but paper towels aren’t), and a hundred year old toilet that hasn’t been used for 20. But apparently in US happens once a year. @Plumber, maybe?

        • AlphaGamma says:

          I have heard that flush toilets in different countries work differently– Americans tend to use siphonic toilets, while washdown toilets are more common in Europe.

          Siphonic toilets use less water and are quieter and easier to clean, but are also more likely to block.

        • Del Cotter says:

          Just because you never hear about it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. For instance, London has acquired an international reputation as “those guys that get fatbergs”, the assumption being that it’s a non-issue elsewhere. This is far from the case, it’s just that London started the conversation.

          Generally speaking, please restrict use of your city’s sewer system to the four Ps: pee, poo, puke, and TP. The latter is specially designed, other forms of paper are not welcome. However, your garbage collectors will thank you for bagging the human-contaminated stuff you don’t flush, in bags with a knot in. So make-up, sanitary towels, wet wipes, floss, cotton balls, and cotton buds.

          The benefit to you is lower bills, as you’re not paying for so many busy workers, collapsed sewers, and broken electric pumps.

          Also, try not to use those toilet sanitisers that hang over the bowl. You might try to be careful, but the plastic parts can slip down into the system. And I nearly forgot to mention fat oil and grease. It’s the combination of the latter with the scaffolding provided by the aforementioned plastic, that makes the fecal beaver dam from Hell.

          Sooooo, What Happens After You Flush?

    • matkoniecz says:

      1) unable to use toilet should be failing below minimal health regulations, housing regulation, fitness for habitation, sanity

      2) complaining to landlord in writing is likely to be a good idea – more likely to be seriously treated, you have some kind of proof. Documenting this in writing may allow you to for example recover rent for period when your apartment was not habitable (or may not, see final line).

      3) https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massachusetts-law-about-landlord-and-tenant “State sanitary code chapter II: minimum standards of fitness for habitation” is very likely to be useful – found via https://duckduckgo.com/?q=USA+Minimum+Housing+and+Health+Standards+Massachusetts&t=canonical&ia=web

      “(B) Every provided toilet shall be connected to the water distribution system (See 105 CMR 410.180) and to a sanitary drainage system (See 105 CMR 410.300) in accordance with accepted plumbing standards.”

      seems fitting

      4) “I’ve been able to live for a day or two in the past by peeing in the sink and going to the grocery store for more serious business” – that is not normal, that is not OK (assuming that you are paying more than 5% of minimum wage).

      I am not a lawyer, I never visited USA

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      If the landlord refuses to fix it promptly, you can hire someone to fix it yourself and then deduct the costs from your rent. https://www.mass.gov/info-details/tenant-rights#rent-withholding-

      A toilet that won’t flush is a major repair if it’s your only toilet https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/renters-rights-book/chapter7-2.html

      It sucks that other tenants are messing up the plumbing. But it’s your landlord’s problem to deal with, not yours.

      If either you or the landlord does something significant — him changing your locks on you, or you refuses to pay rent — the courts are going to be slow to respond.

      • matkoniecz says:

        Good find.

        > If the landlord refuses to fix it promptly, you can hire someone to fix it yourself and then deduct the costs from your rent. https://www.mass.gov/info-details/tenant-rights#rent-withholding-

        Sadly, required “The local Board of Health or other code enforcement agency has certified that the present conditions endanger your health or safety” is also likely to be slow/suspended.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Yeah, enforcement from both sides is going to be slow. 🙁

          A local real-estate lawyer would know what is actually enforceable these days, and what isn’t. You may be able to do a telephone consultation.

        • acymetric says:

          From what I have seen/read, “promptly” tends to be pretty loosely interpreted by the courts. It is definitely worth following up on to see if there is anything to do, but if the landlord is getting it fixed within a week (maybe even two) I’m not sure the courts are going to intervene.*

          *I am also not a lawyer, and like I said it is still worth checking to see what your rights here are I just wouldn’t get your hopes up.

    • Bobobob says:

      Where is Plumber when you need him? I thought he would have commented on this thread by now.

    • Beans says:

      Thanks for your thoughts. I have concluded that my best bet in the short term is to document when I get a nasty sewage overflow, send sternly worded emails to property managers with the pictures attached to get them aware that there’s a chronic issue, and arrange for the possibility of a health inspector.

      The thing is, it seems that the management is already basically doing what an inspector would force them to do: fix the issue within 24 hours, as the regulations state for sewage issues. The problem is that it keeps happening and so every couple weeks, I’m boned for the day.

      This seems to be a complex problem that dealing with in a better way would probably require some actual legal advice and some escalation on my part. But given that my lease here ends in a few months, and that the courts are closed for non-emergency issues, that’s probably not worth it.

  72. Frangible Waterbird says:

    Today may or may not be an especially interesting day to visit the SSCD server.

    I realize I am making this PSA(?) well into the day (at least in timezones near me) so… apologies about that; I just found out, myself!

    Oh, among other things on the SSCD server, there is an EA/Ethics/Religion channel atm.
    so interested people could test that out!

  73. j1000000 says:

    Is anyone a bit creeped out by the fact that this open thread has so much non-corona discussion? At first I was relieved and excited, then I realized it’s because we just all accept this as life now.

    At the end of The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin’s fictional Sean Parker says “We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the internet.” I remember I thought that was cringey when I first saw it. For the past couple weeks I’ve felt like it’s completely true. Something about my current way of life feels like The Matrix. I’m honestly not sure if when this is all over I’ll even want to go outside more or see people in person.

    • Bobobob says:

      My nine-year-old daughter just cut my hair. You can get used to pretty much anything.

    • Kaitian says:

      I guess we’ve had all the thoughts we could have, proposed all the quick fixes we could think of, found our quarantine groove. Notre all we can do is wait for things to get worse and then, eventually, better again.

    • You know how virtual reality has been a thing for a couple years but nobody has really gotten in to it? It will turn out that a pandemic is the killer app.

    • Clutzy says:

      Is anyone a bit creeped out by the fact that this open thread has so much non-corona discussion? At first I was relieved and excited, then I realized it’s because we just all accept this as life now.

      Meh, its probably because people are tired of talking about it, there are no new developments of consequence, and there is basically a dedicated corona thread in the mask thread.

  74. hash872 says:

    Why did the United States not break up into separate nations pre-Civil War? I’m not just talking about the Confederacy, but Texas staying independent or another Western state splitting off, far from Washington’s control. It seems a pre-1860 US had several good ingredients for separatism:

    1. Tension between state & federal control literally from day one of the country (really before day one). Individual states were accustomed to a high degree of separation at first (they had their own currencies, militias, etc.) While this did start to abate, it can’t have been too far from anyone’s mind.

    2. High degree of ethnic diversity & high immigration rates, which couldn’t have really helped federalism or nationalism. (Remember that the US was essentially an open borders nation for much of the 19th century). For example, imagine if a large number of German immigrants clustered in one area, and a large number of Irish in another nearby. Tensions would seem to be natural, maybe some escalating violence between sides, and then separatism would start to make sense. Remember, Europe was convulsed with wars for 1000+ years at this point, so two totally separate ethnic groups singing Kumbaya and joining the Great American Melting Pot together would be the exception to what was ‘normal’, not the rule.

    3. Relatively weak federal control, and lack of a professional military as we’d understand it today. A conscript army might not be particularly enthusiastic about a prolonged, bloody series of battles with say the Independent Republic of Idaho.

    4. To go along with the last point- vast distances & weak infrastructure to transport troops. The US must’ve seemed huge to Europeans, especially going out West. How efficiently could a conscript army really mobilize out past the Mississippi? (How would Washington DC communicate with remote troops effectively?)

    5. High gun ownership rate, hardiness, & general independence of the types who would settle the West.

    6. More powerful Great Power nations probably interested in at least meddling in American (meaning the continent) affairs. They could sell weapons to belligerents, set up new trade routes, Russia might be interested in at least trying to seize small parts of the West Coast, etc. Remember that the British were still the premiere world power at this time- perhaps they’d given up on re-integrating the East Coast, but they couldn’t fund a little trouble out West?

    So, given all that- why did the US stick together? I suppose post-Civil War you could say that separatists had seen Washington’s resolve and wouldn’t be eager to test it. But- pre-1860, why did America become one huge country?

    • Randy M says:

      More powerful Great Power nations probably interested in at least meddling in American (meaning the continent) affairs.

      This is more likely a reason to stick together than a reason to break up, unless those great powers were way savvying than they were in reality.
      That is, states did not want to end up being a puppet of a foreign power just to escape the likely more aligned grasp of Washington.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      There was something approaching military conflict between federal government and the Mormons. Generally you need some ideological, ethnic or religious basis on which to form a splinter faction.

    • matthewravery says:

      Not a historian, so take this as wild speculation:

      – External threat, in the form of GB (1812) and indigenous people made it useful to stick together
      – Elites liked being able to trade with each other
      – As long as the Feds aren’t messing with you, why go through the hassle of separating?
      – American myth-making was (presumably) already going strong, and the story of George Washington and our rebellion against the Tyrant George is a compelling one!

    • JayT says:

      Well, there is Canada and Mexico, so it’s not like everything in North America was the US. Also, it was just hard to get to the West, and the US had the best combination of resources and distance to claim it, and if anyone else tried to claim it instead they would have had to fight the US to keep it, think Spain with California,.

    • Erusian says:

      1. Tension between state & federal control literally from day one of the country.

      Tension which was best expressed by winning elections. The US system isn’t set up to prevent conflict but to manage and channel it into remedies allowed by the system, such as winning legitimate control of government.

      2. High degree of ethnic diversity & high immigration rates

      I don’t see how this is relevant. What are you imagining, that the Irish were going to get together, seize Boston, and try to declare independent Ireland? Why? They got what they really wanted: Boston went from being one of the driest cities in the Union to being famous for its beer. Because they won elections.

      3. Relatively weak federal control, and lack of a professional military as we’d understand it today.

      There’s a difference between a limited and a weak system. The US government pretty much always won disputes with the states, or if it lost it lost because that faction won elections (which isn’t defecting from the system). The US system left significant powers in the states but it wasn’t weak. The US won its equivalent of Confederation Poland. Also, the lack of a professional military didn’t stop the raising of forces.

      4. To go along with the last point- vast distances & weak infrastructure to transport troops.

      The US was actually better at mobilizing local military forces than its competitors, especially in a defensive capacity. In fact, the dynamic of early battles was that American forces were kind of crap but the US could (given a little time) always bring superior numbers to bear. The 19th century British raided the US coast but always retreated rather than stuck around for an occupation because they knew this. When they made a serious attempt to invade in the west and create buffer states, they were crushed so thoroughly that the US wiped out virtually every British ally in the west. The US system was bad at projecting force until the Civil War but it was amazing on the defensive. Indeed, this was part of the Confederacy’s calculation in seceding: they benefited from the strong defensive system and thought the North would have America’s usual bad track record at offensive warfare.

      5. High gun ownership rate, hardiness, & general independence of the types who would settle the West.

      I don’t see the connection. What part of becoming a state would threaten your gun ownership or ability to be a homesteader? This is long before there would be things like regulations or an ag department to bother you.

      6. More powerful Great Power nations probably interested in at least meddling in American (meaning the continent) affairs.

      See point 4. Further, the US system is specifically set up to make direct foreign meddling hard.

      • hash872 says:

        What are you imagining, that the Irish were going to get together, seize Boston, and try to declare independent Ireland?

        As mentioned, I could just see different ethnic groups further out West naturally splitting into ethnic communities. All the Germans choose to live here, all the Irish live here, the Scandinavians are over there, etc. Add in a little violent conflict and we’re on the path to separatism pretty fast- especially without a strong federal presence/law enforcement. This is referring to less-policed, less developed states west of the Mississippi, not one of the original 13 colonies.

        To kind of reiterate what I said originally- how is it that, after 1000+ years of warfare, European immigrants came together in a new country and mostly got along? It was pretty out of character.

        Edit to include: Ethnic groups, strife & separatism are pretty normal, well-recognized phenomena in other countries. It’s no big leap of logic to note that ethnic groups frequently like to live together, don’t like to live with Other Groups, and then breakaway movements form off of that.

        What part of becoming a state would threaten your gun ownership or ability to be a homesteader?

        Meaning that the average male was pretty ready for violence & separatism- they already had the guns, were a pretty hardy group, etc. Refers more to preparation for conflict.

        Basically I just feel like the onus is on someone to explain why a geographically vast, ethnically diverse, violent, independent population founded on giving the middle finger to centralized authority somehow stayed together to become one country, versus splitting apart.

        Edit to include: Like, to be more specific- why didn’t a breakaway Utah happen? An ethnically homogenous, maybe Catholic, breakaway state out West? How exactly would a pre-1860 federal government wage warfare thousands of miles away from DC where there were no roads, etc.? I think these are interesting questions to ask

        • Clutzy says:

          There wasn’t great homogeneity in the people who settled Texas and California from America (the two big states you theoretically could have separatism as a result of). Maybe if Californian settlers were 95% German then that sentiment would have existed.

        • FLWAB says:

          As mentioned, I could just see different ethnic groups further out West naturally splitting into ethnic communities. All the Germans choose to live here, all the Irish live here, the Scandinavians are over there, etc…

          To kind of reiterate what I said originally- how is it that, after 1000+ years of warfare, European immigrants came together in a new country and mostly got along? It was pretty out of character.

          The short answer is they did split into ethnic communities, and they didn’t get along. During the age of large European immigration there was a lot of friction and conflict. There were riots against immigrants, the Know Nothing Party, an enormous amount of what we might now call “racist” views against different European nationalities, and widespread discrimination. And different immigrant groups did band together. You still have the Pennsylvania Dutch communities that date back to some of the earliest German immigration into the US, and Irish, Italians, Russians, Polish, and Scandinavians tended to stick together and form their own communities. The upper Midwest is full of town thats were predominantly Scandinavian for several generations, for instance. And while many people know about Little Italy or the Irish neighborhoods of New York, there were also many small towns dotted across the country that were ethnic enclaves.

          If you’re wondering how this didn’t lead to places breaking off or splitting apart, just listen to Erusian. The American system meant that on the local level ethnic groups could self govern very broadly without outside interference, and on a larger level it allowed new ethnic groups to participate in the system, gain some power, and get skin in the game that meant it wasn’t worth rocking the boat too much. It also helped that we had more than enough room: if you’re tired of Anglos throwing bricks through your window in New York city, you can start your own town out west if you’re willing to work the land. And given enough time and with new waves of immigrants people stopped caring so much about Irish and Italians and Polish and cared more about the Chinese or the waves of African American migration into the cities. After your people have been around a few generations it all kinda blurs together anyway. But trust me, there was a time that an Irish family moving into an Anglo neighborhood was as big a scandal as a black family moving in was in the 70’s.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            It also helped that we had more than enough room: if you’re tired of Anglos throwing bricks through your window in New York city, you can start your own town out west if you’re willing to work the land.

            “I’ll start my own town! With blackjack, and farmers!”

        • Erusian says:

          Your issue is that you believe your counterfactual is “natural” and the reason it didn’t happen needs explanation. This simply isn’t so. Conflict has causes, a lack of conflict can be due to causes restraining the conflict. But it can also be due to a lack of causes for conflict.

          Like, there were culturally homogenous regions. Why does this naturally lead to secession? You just kind of assume it would have and ask for an explanation why it didn’t. Why would it? If you were a German farmer and you’d occupied a bunch of land with your compatriots, why would you then seek to secede? What would drive you to take that action? What do you, as a community or individual, get out of it?

    • Anthony says:

      Asabiyyah from the Indian Wars.

      The United States of America’s borders didn’t change from 1819 to 1845, and didn’t change much from 1803 until 1845, but the area that recognized the government of the United States steadily grew during that time, and it took quite a bit of inter-ethnic violence to accomplish that. Once the French were out of the picture (mid 1700s), the Indians had a difficult time playing off different European ethnicities against each other. To the extent that was still theoretically possible, it didn’t work well because almost all Europeans near the frontier were willing to cooperate with each other against the Indians.

    • Del Cotter says:

      Others have suggested America was more fractious than the impression you have of it, I suggest Europe is less fractious than the impression you have. You may be over-crediting American national myths of “those Europeans, they can’t get along together like us!”

      Europeans mostly do rub along together historically, it’s just that the wars that happen every few centuries make juicy reading. America too has had large internecine wars every few centuries, it’s just had fewer centuries. (don’t make the mistake of counting Native Americans as an external population, they’re Americans too, and they may have an opinion on whether the history of America is one with fewer ethnic wars)

      Now take the history of Britain from around 400AD. It had immigration from a hodge-podge of separate ethnic groups, who initially felt no connection with each other, and separate colonies. Then they went from Jutes, Frisians, Saxons, Angles, Scots and other groups you’ve never heard of, to (leaving Scots aside for a moment) “Anglo-Saxons” (a historian’s term no one used at the time) to “Angle-kin” or “Angle-ish”. Some of that was because they wanted to emphasise their common identity vis a vis Native British, called “Wale-ish”. Their separate colonies evolved from many to fewer, the Heptarchy, then to one, England. Out of many, one, sound familiar? Some of that was making common cause against Danish immigration, and resisting Danish kings like Canute.

      Their language went from many languages to what we now call English, then standardised more. As late as Caxton’s time a Yorkshireman couldn’t buy eggs because Kentish people didn’t understand he wanted what they called “eyren”. The growing nation acquired Scotland to the North, and Scots began to shade their Angle-ish dialect to be less Scots and more English. The Walish learned English and so did the Irish, and now we are a much more homogeneous population of rowdy alcoholic tea-drinking sarcasts than you would have found in the past.

      You can tell the same story in France, where the old language of the Troubadors is still remembered in the region name of Languedoc (“the language where they say “yes” differently”). Spain, where Catalan is more French-shaded than Spanish. Italy, where modern standard Italian is a recent artificial overlay on the older languages of Italy. Germany, same. Europeans tend more to melt together than split apart, you just notice it when they fight or split.

      • matkoniecz says:

        it’s just that the wars that happen every few centuries make juicy reading. America too has had large internecine wars every few centuries, it’s just had fewer centuries.

        Recent decades had low level of wars in Europe, especially in Western Europe. But earlier history had wars far more frequent than “every few centuries”.

        • Del Cotter says:

          We will never know how many wars the United States would have had in the 1600s. It’s a counterfactual, which leads to the danger of mistaking a difference in continent with a difference in century.

          • matkoniecz says:

            AFAIK also after USA Revolutionary War there was more armed conflict in Europe than in USA.

          • Del Cotter says:

            I think you misunderstood what I intended when I wrote:

            Others have suggested America was more fractious than the impression you have of it, I suggest Europe is less fractious than the impression you have.

            I wasn’t aiming for a goal where Europe gets a better score than America and I win and do a touchdown dance.

          • Del Cotter says:

            I just checked my dictionary, and “fractious” doesn’t seem to have a meaning I thought it had, “tending to break up, break apart, or cease to cooperate”. At all. Sorry about that, I thought it did. (of course I knew the usual meaning, “tending to make trouble or quarrels”) I bet “refractory” doesn’t work either.

            With that in mind, let me try to reword what I originally wrote:

            Others have suggested America tended more to break up than the impression you have of it, I suggest Europe tends less to break up than the impression you have.

            Europe, out of many, has not completely become one yet. But it’s closer to it than it was hundreds of years ago. The trend has been one of merger, not independence.

          • But it’s closer to it than it was hundreds of years ago.

            But farther than two thousand years ago.

          • Anthony says:

            Del Cotter, the English settlements in North America had a *lot* of wars in the 1600s, and the 1700s. Most, but not all, were against the Indians.

            George Washington started the Zeroth World War in 1754 – a war which didn’t end until 1815.

          • Anthony says:

            @David Friedman – and farther than 20 years ago.

          • Del Cotter says:

            I thought about choosing an earlier century for the reasons you know, but went with 1600s and “United States”.

          • Ventrue Capital says:

            @Anthony:

            George Washington started the Zeroth World War in 1754 – a war which didn’t end until 1815.

            “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen!”

            On the other hand, Frederick the Great bears a lot of the glory as well. “The evils produced by his wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown, and in order that he might rob a neighbor whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.”

  75. FLWAB says:

    I’m sick of COVID conversation, so in an effort to talk about anything else…how about a discussion of ethics?

    In C.S. Lewis’s essay “Delinquents in the Snow” he writes the following passage:

    According to the classical political theory of this country we surrendered our right of self-protection to the State on the condition that the State would protect us. Roughly, you promised not to stab your daughter’s murderer on the understanding that the State would catch him and hang him…the classical theory morally grounds out obligation to civil obedience; explains why it is right (as well as unavoidable) to pay taxes, why it is wrong (as well as dangerous) to stab your daughter’s murderer…
    No one, I hope, thinks Dr. Johnson a barbarian. Yet he maintained that if, under a peculiarity of Scottish law, the murderer of a man’s father escapes, the man might reasonably say, “I am amongst barbarians, who…refuse to do justice…I am therefore in a state of nature…I will stab the murderer of my father.”

    So the question becomes, if the State does not serve justice then is it morally wrong to take action into your own hands? We certainly decry vigilantes because they often mete out injustice and have a history of punishing the innocent. They also, by definition, don’t give the accused due process. But is there a situation in which you would agree that vigilante justice would be a morally correct action? Does it depend on how well the system as a whole works, even if in your individual case the result was unjust? Is there a tipping point?

    Lets even back it up a bit. The Lewis’s essay itself began with a complaint about how some local teenagers stole some valuable items from him and the local judge let them off with a small fine, despite them being repeat offenders. Lewis wrote “When the State ceases to protect me from hooligans I might reasonably, if I could, catch and trash them myself…but of course if I could and did I should be prosecuted. The (judge) and her kind who are so merciful to theft would have no mercy on me…” Do you think that if the State does not punish criminals severely enough it will naturally lead a breakdown in trust for the system, and then directly to a rise in vigilantism? I often see people discuss whether the point of our justice system is to deter criminals or rehabilitate them, but you could also argue that the primary point of our justice system is assure the people that justice is being done: that people are getting what they deserve, that the rules of society are fair and enforced, and thus are worth following and agreeing to.

    • Randy M says:

      But is there a situation in which you would agree that vigilante justice would be a morally correct action?

      Morality of vigilantism increases proportional to the accuracy of your perception of the facts, likelihood of there being no second-order effects like retribution against an innocent, unlikelihood of state justice, and the proportionality of the punishment inflicted.

      An equation that, sympathetic as I am to it instinctually, means taking justice into one’s own hands is very rarely advised on epistemic grounds if there is any chance of state justice, but once that breaks down completely, it becomes a moral good.

      • FLWAB says:

        Very reasonable. Now, lets say that a family member of yours was murdered, you saw the perpetrator commit the crime with your own eyes, yet someone he ended up walking even though the justice system is otherwise working alright. Disregarding practical concerns (like getting caught and prosecuted yourself) do you think it would be moral in that case to punish the man who did it yourself? Or would the need to preserve the societal norm that we do not take justice into our own hands make the act immoral regardless?

        • acymetric says:

          I think there was an episode of The Practice about this.

        • Randy M says:

          do you think it would be moral in that case to punish the man who did it yourself? Or would the need to preserve the societal norm that we do not take justice into our own hands make the act immoral regardless?

          That’s one of the second-order effects that I had in mind. My impulse is definitely to take matters into my own hands, but I think I’ve been convinced by prior discussion here that this is not a rational response all things considered.
          Doesn’t mean I know what I would do in that place.

          Also, to be clear, there’s a difference between “retributive vigilantism” and “preventative vigilantism”, ie, catching someone in the act and acting to stop it. Comic book characters called vigilantes are often doing the second, which is generally moral excepting in the terribly common in reality situation of being rather inept at doing so without harm to self or bystanders.

          • acymetric says:

            I don’t think rational and moral are the same thing…seems like the rational thing and the moral thing are going to differ as much as they are the same.

          • Randy M says:

            I don’t think rational and moral are the same thing

            This deserves more discussion, but generally I’d say pursuing moral goals by irrational means is at best counter-productive ignorance excusable only by one’s lacking cognitive faculties, and more likely reckless negligence deserving of approbation.

          • Anthony says:

            Randy M – you say “pursuing moral goals by irrational means is [bad]”, but is it bad to rationally choose to not pursue a moral goal, because of the costs/likelihood of failure/etc ?

          • Randy M says:

            That’s sort of the implied converse, isn’t it?
            Basically, don’t do things that won’t work just because it’d be nice if they, somehow, did.

        • Tatterdemalion says:

          Now, lets say that a family member of yours was murdered, you saw the perpetrator commit the crime with your own eyes, yet someone he ended up walking even though the justice system is otherwise working alright. Disregarding practical concerns (like getting caught and prosecuted yourself) do you think it would be moral in that case to punish the man who did it yourself? Or would the need to preserve the societal norm that we do not take justice into our own hands make the act immoral regardless?

          I think that even then, you shouldn’t engage in vigilanteism, not because the evidence available to you is not sufficient to justify confidence in it being the right thing to do, but because your (generic your, including my) ability to analyse evidence is not sufficient to justify confidence in it being the right thing to do.

          I think that a) situations this clear-cut arise extremely rarely, but more important ly b) if you were to examine all the situations where someone believed they were in a situation this clear-cut, even then you’d find a high proportion of cases where there were reasons why stabbing the person they were contemplating stabbing was morally wrong.

          Now, if I had clear and specific reason to believe that that person was going to stab someone else, beyond just “they did it once, so clearly they’re a stabby sort of a person”, that would put a very different complexion on things – I think that there are, very occasionally, circumstances where preventative (as opposed to retributive) vigilanteism is the lesser evil even for fallible mortals. But I’m not sure vigilanteism is the best word for that, and it’s certainly not a central example of it. And even that is only very, very occasionally justifiable – generally I think that it’s more important not to do harm than to prevent it, on both deontological (I don’t want to live in a world where masked surgeon-assassins roam the night carrying off transplant donors whose bodies will save 10 lives each) and utilitarian (people tend to massively undervalue harm they will cause and overvalue harm they expect to prevent) grounds.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        Another problem with vigilante justice is that people have loyalties. Suppose you kill someone because they committed an unjustifiable murder.

        But, it’s absolutely true that you killed someone’s brother, and that the surviving brother either thinks there were serious doubts about why you killed their brother, or just doesn’t care. You injured the family and that’s a good enough reason to go after you.

        Having an over-arching system in charge of dealing with murderers prevents cycles of retribution.

        • Having an over-arching system in charge of dealing with murderers prevents cycles of retribution.

          In the famous relevant case, the Hatfields and McCoys, the conflict between the private parties ended with one person killed on one side, the three people responsible killed on the other.

          It was revived by the governor of one state sending a posse into the adjacent state, without permission from its governor, to arrest some of those responsible for the second set of killings. That resulted in additional violence in both directions, producing most of the killings in the “feud.”

    • edmundgennings says:

      I am inclined to think that a decent amount of violence is acceptable against criminals while they are in the commission of a crime that is in part warranted by the deterrent value of this violence but is not punishment as such. For example I support police shooting someone who knifed a guy and then is running away despite instructions from the police to stop running. I am hesitant about the spread of this to private agents but some amount is fitting.
      However as for think that in vigilante justice, in order to be done morally, the actor must be acting not as a private agent but on behalf of the whole community. Ie we are stranded on island and someone murders someone else. The community of the plane crash survivors and the implicit or explicit leaders of it could morally execute the murderer despite not being a state. There might have been a number of cases like this in the Old West.

      • Randy M says:

        Actually in the plane crash scenario, I’d say they were indeed acting as agents of the state, albeit a small, transitory, impromptu one.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      I think this is an issue where far view and near view will say different things, and you should listen to far view.

      I think that “I will not engage in vigilanteism even when it is clearly the right thing to do” is a policy that will result in you doing the right thing more often, and failing more gracefully when you don’t, than “I will engage in vigilanteism when and only when it is clearly the right thing to do”.

    • rahien.din says:

      The justice system is essentially an incentive system : if you do X, you get Y. Probably Y is something like utilons-of-justice (UJ) mumble mumble benevolence mumble mumble agency. There is some kind of instrumental/institutional good that the judge divvies up.

      We can then consider the justice system in light of Holmström’s theorem :

      No incentive system for a team of agents can make all of the following true:
      1. Income equals outflow (the budget balances)
      2. The system has a Nash equilibrium
      3. The system is Pareto efficient

      Hi agents, here’s three, pick two. This yields three possible optimized situations :

      A. {~1, 2, 3} Callous
      Fair distribution of UJ and a system that is strategically stable, but, overall we are either too cruel (budget deficit of UJ) or too kind (budget surplus of UJ). Situation A probably only exists in the form of “too cruel,” because a too-kind justice system resembles a nonexistent justice system.

      B. {1, ~2, 3} Coasian
      Overall the right balance of cruel and kind and a fair distribution of UJ, but, the system can get hacked by one actor altering their strategy. Meaning, situation B is impersistent.

      C. {1, 2, ~3} Capricious
      Strategic stability and overall the right balance of cruel and kind, but, we are either too more kind or more cruel to someone than they deserve.

      IE, there are only two Holmström equilibria – unfair to all, or unfair to some. Thus, we have to pick between a callous justice system and a capricious justice system. Somehow, somebody is gonna get hosed. But two out of three is better than zero-to-one out of three.

      What’s more, in order for UJ to be a real utilons-of-justice currency, their distribution can’t be Pareto inefficient. Any unfairness will devalue them. Our only real choice is {~1, 2, 3}. Society is workable if we all bear the burden together.

      On to vigilantism.

      The question presumes that vigilantism would force the system back to Pareto efficiency via an agent altering their strategy. So, that’s a starting point of {?1, ~2, ~3}. This just seems like a justice system that is out of balance – it needs to achieve fairness or stability.

      So the vigilante will strike out in favor of fairness, trying to achieve {1, ~2, 3}. But Holmström tells us that they will not be able to preserve that situation, as {1, ~2, 3} will transition to callousness or caprice. And the trouble is that one cannot achieve the stable goal of {~1, 2, 3} via reciprocity.

      Reciprocity begets reciprocity. How does the last losing side know when to stop? If they were trying to achieve fairness, then they would limit their final reciprocal action to achieve that even-handedly callous stable goal – but that would be something other than reciprocity. And if that side always had that clear goal in mind, they would have just done it at the outset. There wouldn’t have been a conflict to begin with.

      Most likely, the ultimate winner will tilt the system in their favor, IE, {~1, 2, 3}, devaluing the currency of justice. So if we want a system that is overall fair and stable, vigilantism is probably not the answer.

      This is why everyone hates the government and/or we need a government to hate. Ideally, it’s stable and even-handedly callous. Therefore everyone dislikes it about the same – the government itself is an agent within the Pareto-inefficient Holmström meta-distribution of “dislike” utilons, and it probably gets more of those “dislike” utilons than it deserves. But we need it to, because that permits an approximate inter-citizen {1, ~2, 3} Holmström equilibrium of governmental goods and services.

    • We certainly decry vigilantes

      Back when I was at the University of Chicago law school, I discovered a shelf of books in the library dealing with the Committee of Vigilance in San Francisco, the famous and, I think, original vigilantes. As best I remember, about half the books were pro-vigilante, half anti.

      The view of the pro-vigilante books was that the local law enforcement was corrupt, among other things deliberately letting a murderer escape from the jail, and that the Committee of Vigilance was a reasonable and successful response to that. It eventually closed down, but the people in it ended up, again as I remember, running the city government for quite a while thereafter, which is at least weak evidence that a majority of the citizens approved of what they had done.

      • albatross11 says:

        My impression is that vigilante justice is usually bad in a place with a more-or-less functioning justice system, because the formal justice system is likely to do better at justice and deterrence than the vigilantes are. OTOH, in a place without a functioning justice system I think vigilante justice is all that’s available, and may be providing a public good.

    • matkoniecz says:

      “if the State does not serve justice then is it morally wrong to take action into your own hands?”

      In extreme cases? It certainly is acceptable. See for example German occupation of Poland during WW II or Russian occupation during and after WW II or $INSERT_OTHER_EVIL_EMPIRE_HERE.

      But I would consider “local teenagers stole some valuable items from him and the local judge let them off with a small fine, despite them being repeat offenders” to not raise to such level (though attempts to change judge/law would be likely a good idea).

    • Purplehermann says:

      My feeling on the matter is that there is and should be unofficial justice where the legal system doesn’t take care of things.

      People should know that consequences for breaking the law aren’tentirely dependent on the judge.

      This can take the form of social shunning or retributive assault, and that’s fine.

      At the same time it is probably best if most people are level-headed, law abiding people so we don’t get break downs of society or feuds.

      Maybe social shunning generally, with one hot head per group/ family who would make sure the “bad guy” gets what is choking to him if it comes to it.

      I would probably take justice into my own hands if I was pretty sure no one else connected would go vigilante, if there were a hothead I’d probably opt to be a voice of reason in case of a return vigilantism

  76. Aapje says:

    Yet more Dutch fixed expressions:

    ‘Een kat in de zak kopen’ = Buying a cat in a bag

    Being duped into buying something with problems.

    ‘Hij heeft een klap van de molen gekregen’ = He got smacked by the windmill

    He is stupid or insane. The sails of non-elevated traditional Dutch windmills sweep close to the ground, so getting hit was a serious risk.

    I said sails because these windmills commonly have a lattice framework upon which sailcloth can be fastened, where a greater quantity of sail allows the mill to turn with weaker wind. The sails typically have a wooden or metal spar at the front. So if you are hit by a sail, you are not hit by sailcloth or the lattice framework, but by a strong spar of wood or metal.

    ‘Ezelsbruggetje’ = Donkey’s bridge

    Mnemonic. This is taken from the latin pons asinorum and may refer to a story by Pliny the Elder describing how donkeys refused to cross a bridge if they saw water under their feet, requiring a bit of help to cross.

    ‘Voor niets gaat de zon up’ = The sun rises for free

    This is not free.

    ‘Helaas, pindakaas’ = Unfortunately, peanut butter

    Too bad. A relatively new expression invented by school kids in the late 80’s, which makes no sense, but it rhymes very nicely.

    ‘Ik kan er geen chocolade van maken’ = I can’t make chocolate out of it

    I don’t understand it at all.

    ‘Je weet nooit hoe een koe en haas vangt’ = You never know how a cow catches a hare

    There may be an unexpected solution to your seemingly unsolvable problem. Can be used smugly, where you know that the problem will be solved (perhaps by yourself), but the other person is left despondent for now. The expression refers to a 1898 incident where a farm hand saw a cow kick and then impale a hare.

    ‘Ben je van de trap gevallen?’ = Did you fall down the stairs?

    You got a drastic haircut.

    ‘Weten waar Abraham de mosterd haalt’ = Knowing where Abraham got the mustard

    Being worldwise. In old Dutch, ‘mutsaard’ means firewood. The old Dutch Bible describes Abraham as collecting ‘mutsaard,’ which got misunderstood as mustard.

    ‘De kogel is door de kerk’ = De bullet passed through the church

    A decision has finally been made. Possibly refers to the ancient habit of sparing churches in battle, keeping the fighting away from it if possible. So if the battle got so close to the church that bullets flew through the church, it was a long and difficult fight that was close to over.

    ‘Iets onder de knie hebben’ = Having something under the knee

    Having mastered something.

    • EchoChaos says:

      ‘Een kat in de zak kopen’ = Buying a cat in a bag

      Being duped into buying something with problems.

      English equivalent is “Buying a pig in a poke”?

      • Beck says:

        I was thinking it matched up with, “Somebody sold you a pup.”

      • Del Cotter says:

        There is a subtle difference: the English version references what you thought you were buying, a tasty piglet. What you got was a cat the con merchant found in an alley.

        The English version gets extra weird points for using a word almost no modern English speaker now knows means a bag. In Scotland and Northern Ireland it means a paper cone of chips, and by extension an ice cream cone.

      • FLWAB says:

        English equivalent is “Buying a pig in a poke”?

        It is! A poke meaning a bag, and the expression itself referring to a well known scam where someone would sell you a piglet in a bag, but when you opened it you found that it was just a stray cat in there. Which is also the origin of “Letting the cat out of the bag.”

        EDIT: Ninja’d

      • Aapje says:

        @EchoChaos

        I’m not familiar with that one. According to Wikipedia, “a pig in a poke” refers to buying something where the quality is unknown. In Dutch, we would then say that you bought it ‘blind.’

        So this seems to be more of a warning to always inspect before you buy, while the Dutch expression refers to someone having been duped.

        Apparently, both “let the cat out of the bag” and the Dutch saying refer to the same confidence trick where you bought a cat in a bag, rather than a piglet. However, the English saying focuses on a secret being revealed, while the Dutch saying specifically refers to being duped.

      • Alejandro says:

        Spanish has a related equivalent from the point of view of the seller, “dar gato for liebre” = “to give a cat for [= instead of] a hare”.

      • bullseye says:

        Would that con actually work? I’d think the cat would make obvious cat noises.

        • Del Cotter says:

          It might be an urban legend (the call was from inside the house!) That wouldn’t stop it being widespread.

        • Aapje says:

          Snopes decided that it is false, although they fail to explain why a gazillion languages seem to specifically refer to buying a cat in a bag.

        • JayT says:

          I would assume that you thought you were buying a dead piglet/rabbit/whatever intended for consumption, but the tricky merchant instead put a dead cat in the bag.

          That wouldn’t explain why you wouldn’t just check the bag before buying it, but maybe it was the case for people that were buying in bulk?

          • Aapje says:

            Or the market was high trust, with mostly local sellers who couldn’t afford a reputation hit, which was taken advantage of by drifting grifters.

          • Del Cotter says:

            The saying means “don’t be a fool, check the bag”.

    • The Nybbler says:

      ‘Een kat in de zak kopen’ = Buying a cat in a bag

      In English, “Buying a pig in a poke”, same meaning, though this saying seems regional. Some Internet site swears this is not related to “letting the cat out of the bag” (revealing a secret).

    • DarkTigger says:

      ‘Een kat in de zak kopen’ = Buying a cat in a bag
      […]
      ‘Ezelsbruggetje’ = Donkey’s bridge
      […]
      ‘Ben je van de trap gevallen?’ = Did you fall down the stairs?

      We use the same in German.

    • FLWAB says:

      “Did you fall down the stairs” made my day.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      ‘Ben je van de trap gevallen?’ = Did you fall down the stairs?

      You got a drastic haircut.

      Do you mean getting actual hair follicles trimmed, or did you just define one idiom using another idiom?

      • The Nybbler says:

        I believe it refers to the severing of the keratinous extrusions of said follicle.

      • Del Cotter says:

        Literal hair cut. English has “dragged through a hedge backwards” but that can just be morning hair, not a recent visit to a barber with an unfortunate outcome.

        I’ve been thinking of colourful phrases of England. Boy do a lot of them revolve around ocean-going sailing ships.

    • Robin says:

      ‘Ben je van de trap gevallen?’ = Did you fall down the stairs?
      You got a drastic haircut.

      We could say in these circumstances:
      “Den Prozess gewinnst du.” = “You’ll win this lawsuit.”

      ‘Helaas, pindakaas’ = Unfortunately, peanut butter

      Is it used ironically, in a “sucks to be you” meaning?
      In German: “Schade, Schokolade”

      ‘Voor niets gaat de zon up’ = The sun rises for free
      This is not free.

      “Umsonst is nur der Tod.” / “Umsonst ist noch nicht mal der Tod.”
      “For free is only death / not even death”

      • Del Cotter says:

        “So sad, too bad”

        “See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya”

        “Hard cheese” and more vulgar versions of this unsympathetic sympathy.

        • Del Cotter says:

          I notice the Dutch word for peanut butter is “peanut cheese”.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            @Del Cotter:
            I’ve heard that this is because of a law (not necessarily still in force) making it illegal to sell anything as butter that wasn’t based on milk.

            The dairy industry was and is very important in the Netherlands, but I think most of the butter smuggling before the customs union was out of the country into Belgium and Germany. And then there was the night of 31 July 1963 in Elten, where the town was handed back from the Netherlands to Germany, complete with a huge number of trucks loaded with butter!

          • acymetric says:

            Peanut Cheese sounds incredibly unappetizing.

          • Aapje says:

            The law was intended to prevent people from falsely selling margarine as butter. Quite a few other countries and states had such laws, many of which were harsher than the Dutch law. For example, margarine had to be artificially colored in New Hampshire to prevent people from selling it as butter.

            Interestingly, the first known mention of ‘pindakaas’ was in 1872, in a Suriname newspaper, where 4 bottles of pindakaas are exported. Then in 1873, a German missionary in Suriname wrote an Negro-English to German dictionary, where he translated a food item as ‘Pinda-Käse,’ so also peanut cheese. However, this was a block of mashed peanuts, which was sliced. This appears to have been sold as ‘pindakaas’ in Suriname for a long time.

            It’s not clear why the Dutch chose this name for peanut butter.

          • Del Cotter says:

            Changing the subject, I was looking to make some sort of joke whose punchline would be ‘Helaas, Sinterklaas” (Santa Claus to Americans) but while researching it I was stopped short by the tradition linking Sinterklaas with mandarin oranges.

            I don’t think anybody in England has any idea of the connection. If a child asks why we put a mandarin, clementine, or satsuma orange in their stocking, the adults scratch their heads a bit and come up with some story about wartime rationing, then point out that it’s a good practical way for the grown-ups to gain precious sleeping minutes on Christmas morning (that’s why it needs to be a self-peeling variety).

      • Aapje says:

        @Robin

        “For free is only death / not even death”

        That one is a much darker…

        • Some of these sound like they could be Yiddish phrases. Of course, Yiddish is a mostly German dialect, but I saw such things as characteristic of Ashkenazi culture — at least as it comes through in Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish.

  77. Well... says:

    Anybody pull off a good April Fool’s prank this year?

    It’s my favorite holiday, but most years I don’t remember to plan a good prank so I end up not “celebrating”.

    • MisterA says:

      The only good one I have seen is that r/AskHistorians is doing Am I the Asshole? style posts as historical figures.

    • Viliam says:

      I originally planned to write a blog about how people who died from coronavirus in Spain are now raising from their graves… but decided that this would be quite bad taste.

      Then I wanted to settle for writing a blog about (fictional) new government regulations for Easter folk traditions (trigger warning: ritualized violence) in light of coronavirus: seriously sounding but completely inappropriate advice on how to properly sterilize the decorated eggs, etc.

      But… given the amount of work and how annoying my kids are when they can’t go to playground or visit their grandmothers, I ended up doing nothing. The sad part is that I can’t even recycle my ideas the next year.

      • bzium says:

        The sad part is that I can’t even recycle my ideas the next year.

        That’s way too pessimistic. There could always be another deadly pandemic a year from now! 😀

    • Radu Floricica says:

      The only good taste coronavirus-related prank I found was a voice recording shared on whatsapp (that’s how news goes around, including newest regulation, usually a bit faster than official channels). It started saying that there’s something big happening on 31 March, definite 100% confirmed, no way it’s not going to happen: after March 31, no matter what we do, April 1st will come.

  78. AG says:

    The articles about DIY masks are ramping up faster than production of the real thing, and most of them say that T-shirt cotton is usable. But what about existing face coverings, such as bandanas, scarves, ski-masks, or balaclavas? The latter two are often marketed as “breathable material.” Does that make them better, worse, or about the same as a T-shirt cotton facemask? Can you stick a paper towel in there to up the protection?
    At the least, they still serve the “stop face-touching” function.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      Advantage of cotton masks is that they can be washed on an appropriate temperature (60 degrees Celsius according to most sources), allowing for their reuse.

    • JayT says:

      I’ve been wondering, would it work to just stick some cotton balls up your nose and then make sure you don’t breath through your mouth?

      • FLWAB says:

        Give it a try and you’ll see why it’s not advised.

        (I’m pretty sure if you can breathe through them at all you’re going to end up with a lung full of cotton fibers).

      • b_jonas says:

        An air filter in the nostrils, not necessarily out of cotton, is the solution of the spacers in Asimov’s books, yes. It’s first mentioned in “The Caves of Steel” chapter 9 by Mr. Sarton, but “The Naked Sun” mentions it too. I’ve no idea if they would work in reality too.

  79. johan_larson says:

    The Chinese government may be under-reporting the extent of the COVID-19 pandemic in China:

    China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.

    The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret and declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.

    I guess the question is why they would do that. Everyone knows they got hit first, and hit hard. Would a multiple of 2, say, change anything?

    • Matt M says:

      The same reason totalitarian regimes lie about all kinds of statistics. Because they can, and because it makes them look better/more effective in the eyes of both their own subjects and the rest of the world.

      • baconbits9 says:

        The lies often happen due to the bureaucratic set up and no one wanting accountability. No one wants to be the guy reporting the worst statistics, so they fudge as much as they think they can, then they pass them on up to the next guy who doesn’t want to be the regional manager with the worst statistics so he fudges, eventually the chairman up top gets bogus numbers and goes around saying things are fine and getting better, which he does so ‘truthfully’.

        • bean says:

          And thus was a great empire brought down.

          I mean the Soviets, of course. This is exactly what killed them. Gorbachev opened up the system a bit to try to figure out what was actually going on, and the whole thing came crashing down.

          • matkoniecz says:

            Hilariously, Polish–Soviet War in 1920 had similar situation. Due to combination of

            – severe punishments in the Soviet army for failures
            – effective code-breaking and interception of messages by Polish army

            it was claimed that Polish command had more accurate reports about situation in Soviet army that what was available to the top of Soviet leadership.

        • tygg3n says:

          I was thinking the other day that what makes ineffective corporations ineffective was their similarity to authoritarian states. I didn’t know how to describe it most effectively, but I think your description hit the mark pretty well.

          • DarkTigger says:

            This is defenitly part of it. I once heared an andecdotal report how the accounting department of bigger certain international cooperation did the last earnings report of an pretty influantial former CEO.
            So they went into worked hard for some weeks, and went with an report to their boss. He lookes at it and returned it saying: I can’t give that to my boss. So they went back and cooked the figures a little (we Germans use the term schönrechnen=to calculate something beautiful). Until their boss excepted it. So he went to his boss, who said, “I can’t give that to the CEO like this” and they cooked the figures still he was pleased.
            So the report went to the CEO’s assistant, she looked at it and said “I can let you in with that, but don’t complain to me if he shouts at you.” So next round of making the figures look better.
            THAN they brought that to the CEO, he looked at the numbers and flipped. Shoutet at them, and send them back for “recounting”. Long story short at the end of that the coorperation had their “best year ever”, just before said CEO went into retirement.
            If you look at stuff like this you wonder how it is possible that it takes often so long before something important breaks.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            tygg3n,

            Robert Anton Wilson talked about the SNAFU principle– that people will not tell the truth to those who can punish them.

            You can end up with all the knowledge at the bottom of the hierarchy and all the ability at act at the top.

            SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up) suggests a military context, but as discussed in this thread, the pattern can appear in any punitive environment.

          • Loriot says:

            Reminds me of a post I once read about a consultant for failing game companies who talked about his experiences. He said that the employees usually know what’s wrong. The main purpose of a consultant is to listen to the employees and then repeat that information to the CEO.

          • Tenacious D says:

            Your comment made me think ofthis episode of EconTalk, discussing Coase’s paper on “The Nature of The Firm”. The podcast (and original paper) go over the question of why firms are “islands of conscious power” in an otherwise decentralized, bottom-up marketplace. The conclusion Coase came to was that some types of activities must have lower transaction costs within firms compared to on the open market, but,

            Naturally, a point must be reached where the costs of organizing an extra transaction within the firm are equal to the costs involved in carrying out the transaction in the open market

            I assume one of the diseconomies of scale when it comes to transaction costs within firms is the tendency of information to take on a rosier hue as it passes through hierarchies.

        • albatross11 says:

          +1

          If each local boss makes things look 10% better than they are to his boss, the guy at the very top will have a *very* rosy view of the world….

          • The same mechanism works in reverse. If your agency/firm/political faction wants to believe that X is a problem, where the consequences of X depend on a chain of data and reasoning, each person in the chain slants his estimates a little in the desired direction, so the final conclusion is slanted a lot. And since each person assumes the rest of the chain is telling the truth, each is reinforced in his belief of the evils of X, which encourages him to slant his part of the evaluation to make sure people realize how bad X is.

            Many here can probably figure out the particular example I am thinking of, but I expect that other people skeptical of other accounts of other X’s can find their examples.

    • Statismagician says:

      If they’re not willing to share enough data to prove this isn’t just known underdiagnosis of minor cases and different etiological standards for cause of death, I’m not sure why I should care. Anonymous US intelligence officials should have negative credibility at any point past about 1945.

      • Anteros says:

        My distrust of anonymous US intelligence officials is vastly greater than of the record keepers of Chinese hospitals.

      • LesHapablap says:

        Yeah, a ‘classified’ report leaked by anonymous intelligence officials that just happens to be entirely on message with the administration’s criticism of China?

        • Loriot says:

          Apparently, the classified intelligence briefings were telling Trump that China was lying back in January, long before he started taking the coronavirus seriously. So I doubt it was due to any influence on his part.

          • LesHapablap says:

            If that’s the case then the numbers they were lying about where at the initial spread, so not necessarily relevant at all to the numbers out now

          • Loriot says:

            I know that any lies in January aren’t relevant now. I’m just pointing out that intelligence reports that China is lying likely happened in spite of the president, not because of him as you suggested.

      • Jaskologist says:

        On the one hand, US Intelligence is saying that China lied, but on the other hand, there really is good reason to think that China lied!

        For the record, I said this way back in 5 days ago. I point this out primarily because I want to claim a spot in the Mistakes section when Scott admits that the US did not surpass China. I’ve been here for years and still haven’t claimed that particular Achievement.

      • Chalid says:

        Right. Could an equivalent Chinese case be made that America is lying about its epidemic? We are not testing asymptomatic people. We’re not testing people who are already dead so we are undercounting deaths. Guidelines are (or were as of a week ago) that we avoid testing people with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 except in cases where a test result would significantly change the course of treatment.

        There are good reasons for all these policies – anyone who has been paying any attention to the world knows that the US is severely short of tests, so we’ve got to ration them somehow. China could well have had similar problems. I’m perfectly willing to believe that China was *also* up to much worse stuff too, but I don’t see how we learn anything new about that from the information presented.

    • broblawsky says:

      I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

      • broblawsky says:

        To respond with greater seriousness, there are two possibilities here for how this could have happened:
        1) The central party in Beijing mandates that local officials minimize the number of cases in their districts, resulting in deliberate under-reporting in a way that undermines the central party’s goals;
        2) The central party in Beijing mandates that local officials report real numbers back to Beijing while publishing ‘official’ numbers in state propaganda organs, in order to minimize public panic and save face both locally and internationally.

        Either seems equally likely to me.

        • BBA says:

          And note that in case 2, there’s still pressure on each official to underreport the “real” numbers to Beijing to make their districts look better and increase their chances of advancement.

          So there are two sets of books, both cooked, and a leader who wants accurate information needs a whole separate information-gathering apparatus…so there are three sets of books, all cooked, and so ad infinitum.

        • Chalid says:

          I wonder what governments *weren’t* prey to #1 in some form. China definitely was – Tyler Cowen pointed out an obvious example back on March 10. #1 is probably a universal problem in running organizations. You could see articles pointing toward similar problems in the US as well, and probably lots of other places though I don’t know the politics elsewhere so well.

          • matkoniecz says:

            I wonder what governments *weren’t* prey to #1 in some form.

            None, but it may range from “we get distorted but useful info” to “we get fanciful tales unrelated to reality” and “our data is 99% lies and we failed to notice that”.

    • Well... says:

      I guess the question is why they would do that.

      As an April Fool’s prank of course.

    • Jake says:

      From an extreme tinfoil standpoint, if the Chinese government had numbers showing that even their strong containment efforts did nothing to stop the spread of the disease, and yet the eventual outcome was not as bad as originally predicted, due to existing immunities in a large portion of the population, previously thought not to exist, then releasing numbers appearing to show that the virus could and should be contained may lead other governments to also shut down, causing economic harm to the rest of the world at China’s gain? I highly doubt this is what happened, but something along those lines could be a potential reason why numbers are being reported incorrectly that goes beyond just trying to make themselves look better.

      • Desrbwb says:

        That is all to plausible. Or at least a less severe version, it’s more likely to be propaganda rather than economic warfare. If by supressing their numbers China ends up with lower numbers than the rest of the world ‘China weathers storm much better than barbarian West, praise Xi for the benign control of the CCP!’ is what’ll play domestically, and even a bunch of foreign media will probably run with it.

        • rumham says:

          and even a bunch of foreign media will probably run with it.

          Well, we know for a fact that the US’s will. And it’ll be backed up by the WCHO

      • Cliff says:

        I don’t think China would gain. They will be devastated economically as well if their trading partners are devastated.

        • Matt M says:

          Yeah, all else equal, “economic depression in the US” will not be a good thing for a whole lot of China…

  80. roflc0ptic says:

    Among software developers, rumor is that functional programming is great. It makes you ethically superior. It fights global warming. They recently modified the 10% giving pledge to say, I solemnly swear to give 10% of my income to charity, or proselytize functional programming.

    Unfortunately, this rumor is not true. Functional programming is bad. Case in point: Functional programming is ruining my life.

    I’ve been working as a software developer for about 10 years, and discovered functional programming 3-4 years ago when, through accident of circumstances, I started a Scala software shop in Tampa with another guy who was a haskell buff. “It couldn’t be worse than Java”, I said to him.

    I started off using lightly – “Futures, yeah, I recognize those from javascript. But the syntax is weird. Why is it called a for comprehension, this is totally different than python.” “Either? Why would I want to use that? Why can’t I just check if it’s a string or an int?” “Option? So *that’s* what they mean when they say null is a billion dollar mistake.”

    But it started getting more intense. We needed to write a rule engine and Apache UIMA wasn’t cutting it, so our resident FP expert took a week and wrote a pattern matching language using parser combinators. WTF are those, I thought, and after sufficient curiousity, I started figuring out the answer.

    From there, I read “Programming Languages and Types”, dimly understanding it, but getting the breadth of the thing. I learned about algebraic data types, and monads, and applicatives. I craved more, and dove into ever more exotic flavors. My relationship with my girlfriend started to suffer. I learned about free monads, and GADTs, and recursion schemes, and started writing my own language, implemented my own FRM. Comonads, EnvT. The world was my monoid in the category of endofunctor.

    These last parts were a struggle to learn because there weren’t resources, and one day the thought struck me, clarion and true, that I should quit my job and write about it. We’d had great success – we grew from a shop of 4 to… what, probably over a hundred now. 94 last I heard. But it was time to go. I marshalled some savings, made a plan, and sent in my resignation. On my last day, I bought a bottle of lagavulin 16. The next day, I flew out to an FP conference.

    At the conference I had great and weird time. Talked to some interesting people, got enthusiastic responses about my writing topic, met the dreamy Buck Schlergis, which was like meeting a slightly taller and more capable version of myself. Spent time with a conference crush from years prior who had recently started taking testosterone, and had a couple of really unpleasant, boundary pushing interactions. Got spun out (“triggered” is probably the germane term here), hid in my hotel room. Left.

    I went home, and tried to write. I got maybe 30 pages done. I didn’t establish a routine, and kept finding myself getting lost, and expanding the scope of what I wanted to do. “And then I’ll write how to do it with ADTs, then I’ll do it with recursion schemes, then I’ll do it with functor oriented programming!” All individually realistic, achievable goals, but executed poorly. Instead of making effective incremental progress, I scope crept the project to death.

    Related, through the course of this, my dad was dying heavily from primary progressive aphasia, a dementia that features general cognitive decline, but leads with slowly destroying facility with language. As my life became consumed with trying to organize increasingly abstract symbols, he was losing the ability to comprehend the most concrete ones.

    Eventually my reserves were getting low, and (as part of a side plot) I started a project with a friend for tracking and studying billionaire philanthropy. A year ago, I got a contract python job.

    And it’s been kind of terrible. At first it was interesting to learn a new codebase, learn a new organization, try to corral process into shape – start using Jira, jenkins, automate deployments and backups. You know. Reasonable stuff.

    But now I’ve done that, and I’m just… managing myself and another guy writing python on a legacy codebase. When a vendor updates an API, and stuff breaks, diagnosing the issue is pointlessly frustrating. Writing code without clarity about what any given function returns is so silly. Dealing with trees without good abstractions for dealing with trees is so frustrating. And there’s no way to fix any of the problems, because the language won’t allow you to articulate any of the solutions. Like my father, knowing he wants a salt shaker but unable to summon appropriate words, we’re left helplessly miming, or settling for adjacent or questionably related concepts – ocean, boat, upside down.

    At the bottom of it, the real problem is (obviously) none of the software composes. Did you know that most of the software in the world is written, not as a single function that composes elegantly and provably, but as an amorphous blob of ideas and abstractions, enforced by nothing but gumption and people? A world built on ravening madness. And all evidence says it basically works alright.

    I want to quit my job again, perhaps to try to write again. My dad succumbed last July, ravening mad, terrified and angry. Maybe this time I’ll be better able to contain the scope, and settle down and work based on coherent and fixed plan, incrementally writing and publishing an unambitious book about an arcane interest.

    What I really want is peers and betters in this tiny niche interest. Tampa is sorely lacking, unless I want to become a “data scientist.” I’ve been eyeing this haskell job in Boulder. The middle of a pandemic probably isn’t a great time to try to relocate, but then, who would do less for love.

    • eyeballfrog says:

      Did you know that most of the software in the world is written, not as a single function that composes elegantly and provably

      It’s not clear to me why I would want, say, a word processor to be a function. What are the arguments? What’s the return value? If we’re allowing constructions like void f(void) (in C terms), it seems like we’re just calling it a function for the sake of doing so.

      • James says:

        Not a big functional programming zealot, but my understanding is that things like i/o (taking keyboard input, displaying to the screen) are considered ‘side effects’ to your pure function. Side effects are allowed in functional programming, but they have to be explicitly demarcated and handled. Weighing up the pros and cons of this is left as an exercise to the reader.

      • roflc0ptic says:

        The answer to your question here is that we don’t care that the entry level function is a proper function. You’re quite right: It isn’t. As I understand it, this is a known theoretical problem that people just shrug at and move on. The type equation of most programs is something dumb like: IO[Unit] => Unit, which is equivalent to void f(void). It’s a mostly useless type signature.

        The concern here is that you want every constituent piece of your function to be a proper function, and for each constituent piece of compose coherently. You want to segregate out the parts of your code that do logic from the parts that handle IO, and combine them only in ways that are coherent. It shepherds you into writing correct programs.

        I haven’t written any word processors, but a real life functional solution will probably use streams. You’re listening for input events. Somebody hits a key. You’ve got a stream which receives these input events, and delegates responsibilities to other streams. Eventually somebody signals the global state to update. This signals a stream to request the global state, and on receiving the global state, delegate the task of updating the UI to other streams.

        I don’t imagine any of sounds wildly surprising: you could/would implement a word processor pretty similarly in C. The difference here is that, at every step of the way, you get to make a bunch of your assumptions explicit and have them verified by the compiler. Streams are a type that composes. The compiler will tell you if you’ve forgotten to handle certain event types. There’s no way for your code to ever directly interact with your global state, preventing you from enacting race conditions.

        All of this flows from using function composition as a guiding principle.

      • eigenmoon says:

        You might want a word processor to be a function for the same reasons React is the most popular web framework: it is cleaner and simpler to construct a pure immutable state of the world than update the state part by part and pray that the updates don’t mess each other. This doesn’t even have to happen in a pure functional language (although those do exist, like Elm or Purescript).

        The type of such a function would be something like IO (). This means that you can take the function as an expression and evaluate it using beta reductions, and sometimes it will take the form f(action) which means you need to take this action and continue evaluation, and sometimes it will take the form lambda event: f(event), which means you must wait for an event to happen and supply it as an argument. (This is a simplification of how an IO monad works.)

        But don’t this interactions make the function impure? Not really. A strategy to play chess can be a purely mathematical object despite doing moves and waiting for opponent’s moves. This is very similar; you could say that a word processor as a function is (mathematically) a strategy in a game between the computer and the user.

      • A1987dM says:

        What are the arguments? What’s the return value?

        int main(int argc, char *argv[]);

    • johan_larson says:

      I suggest you walk away from Haskell unless you flat out love it. As far as I can tell, Haskell should have remained an interesting toy, a theoretical exercise in extreme programming language design. It shouldn’t be used for actual software development. And you know, it pretty much isn’t.

      Functional programming does include some powerful ideas. Pure functions with stateless processing are often a good solution. And they sure are easy to test. But the Haskell fraternity built a monstrosity on top of this notion. Far better, I say, to look for ways to use these ideas in a more conventional language. Or if that isn’t enough, try one of the List or Scheme variants, which are far more tractable.

      • James says:

        Or if that isn’t enough, try one of the List or Scheme variants, which are far more tractable.

        I’ve only just started using it, but clojure seems like some kind of sweet spot between theoretical purity and pragmatic actually-used-in-industry chops.

        • Iago the Yerfdog says:

          I really like Clojure, but I have to say:

          I kind of feel like the concept of “functional programming language” has changed significantly since LISP was introduced, and if it had been designed today we wouldn’t call it that.

          “Side effects? Dynamic typing? Macros?!?” scream a hundred thousand Haskellers as they drop dead from the sight of something so unclean.

      • Iago the Yerfdog says:

        I think true functional languages are essentially DOA at this point. Neither Haskell or F# have made anything like the inroads hoped for them, and most new languages are even less pure than F#.

        That isn’t to say the functional programming has failed. Pure OOP languages like Smalltalk never really caught on, either. What we’re left with is a set of useful ideas and lessons learned, and really that’s all that could have hoped for. The same thing is happening with FP, I think.

        • eigenmoon says:

          Neither Haskell or F# have made anything like the inroads hoped for them
          Sadly, yes. To put it in perspective, ML has appeared in 1973.

    • Iago the Yerfdog says:

      Outside of AI, functional programming has always kind of been a solution in search of a problem. Functional purists tend to have difficulty admitting just how much overhead — computational and cognitive — is involved in writing pure functional code. Like OOP, FP is a tool for managing complexity by moving it into the type system. The main difference is that where OOP makes it easy to design a type system that’s almost right but disastrously wrong, FP makes it hard to design a type system that’s anything less than perfect. (I exaggerate, of course, but that’s how it feels.)

      Also, Haskell’s laziness results in it being almost impossible to determine the order of the time and memory complexity of algorithms, and can even allow IO monad functions to execute in an otherwise pure context. So there’s that.

      • roflc0ptic says:

        Yeah, talking to haskellers at Lambda Conf, many of them were/are grappling with the cognitive overhead of stuff like monad transformers, and moving away from them. Of course, at least one prominent participant had the slogan, “Simple Programming Languages for Simple People”, so at least some part of the population’s response to the cognitive overhead complaints rounds off to “fuck ’em”. Not particularly inspiring.

        I honestly find my current python codebases to have a high cognitive overhead because of the lack of static typing. It’s just shuffling a bunch of shit between APIs and databases, and I have no indication of what datatypes are at play until something breaks. Conceptually it’s all bone-headedly simple.

        I get the sense that Scala really hits the sweet spot between comprehensibility and correctness, but the language is so big, it’s hard for me to feel responsible pushing other people to learn it.

        • johan_larson says:

          The cognitive load of Haskell is a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it really is a difficult language to work with. I’ve used something like ten programming languages now, and monads are easily the most counter-intuitive programming language concept I’ve ever encountered. I don’t think I ever quite mastered them. But on the other hand, if you do find someone who can work effectively in the language, you should probably hire them, because they’re really sharp. The language itself may just be all the hiring bar you need.

    • danridge says:

      I apologize that I cannot offer much help with career advice, other than to say that your post made me want to read an entire novel (or memoir) about a young man’s journey from functioning human to functional programmer, set off against his father’s decline. I shouldn’t ask for this or advise you to write it though, as I am familiar with programming, functional and otherwise, but many people are not, including many programmers, so the market for such an endeavor would be terribly small.

    • zardoz says:

      Functional programming is definitely one tool in the toolbox, and sometimes it’s a very powerful one. One example is Apache Spark. You can easily write a powerful Spark query that can be parallelized across multiple machines (because each stage is side-effect free). The individual stages of the computation can be easily recomputed if something fails without recomputing the whole expression, and so on.

      The downside of functional programming is that sometimes it’s hard to understand what someone else wrote. Or even what you wrote, a few months later. There are also some people in the FP community who love code golfing, sometimes even when it blows up the asymptotic complexity of what they’re trying to do.

      But now I’ve done that, and I’m just… managing myself and another guy writing python on a legacy codebase

      I’ve never really enjoyed writing Python either. The program never really feels correctly written– it’s just a quick hack. I think a lot of scripting languages are like that.

      What I really want is peers and betters in this tiny niche interest. Tampa is sorely lacking, unless I want to become a “data scientist.” I’ve been eyeing this haskell job in Boulder. The middle of a pandemic probably isn’t a great time to try to relocate, but then, who would do less for love.

      To be honest, I’m not sure if “data science” is a real career or not. It seems like they took the data analyst position and gave it a sexier job title. The routine stuff that people do is mostly around cleaning data, preparing business reports, running linear regressions, writing Python scripts, excel spreadsheets, and so on. The “science” part is a small part of it, from what I hear.

      There’s also what you might call the Dilbert principle, where sometimes management doesn’t want to hear your conclusions. It’s a lot like being an economist. You use advanced math, but mostly by turning the crank on existing software or spreadsheets. And the conclusions can be highly political, so there’s always pressure to come up with “the right answer” based on the very dirty and incomplete data.

      I think you just need the right programming job. Look for interesting problems to solve, even if the stack you use to solve them is “boring,” rather than boring problems solved with an “interesting” stack. You’ll know it when you find it.

      • The downside of functional programming is that sometimes it’s hard to understand what someone else wrote. Or even what you wrote, a few months later.

        This reminds me of the old description of APL as the world’s only write only language.

        Apparently there is now another one.

      • eliasgoldberg says:

        To be honest, I’m not sure if “data science” is a real career or not.

        I think “Data Scientist” has become the new “System Engineer.” Just a very generic job description that suddenly tens of thousands of people have acquired out of nowhere. The job could mean anything. Some employers expect candidates to have doctorates in mathematics. Some expect candidates to be pretty good at making charts in excel.

    • Robin says:

      The little bit of Haskell I learned long long ago changed my way of thinking, so it was worth it, even if I don’t use functional languages any more. Now the concepts have been sneaking their way in mainstream languages, e.g. C# (via LINQ) and C++11. Lambda expressions abound, you can even do some sort of currying.

      At the bottom of it, the real problem is (obviously) none of the software composes. Did you know that most of the software in the world is written, not as a single function that composes elegantly and provably, but as an amorphous blob of ideas and abstractions, enforced by nothing but gumption and people? A world built on ravening madness. And all evidence says it basically works alright.

      You mean the Big Ball of Mud pattern? Indeed, it is used a lot, and it works fine until it fails spectatularly.

  81. eyeballfrog says:

    A friend of mine is looking to get into beekeeping. However, a problem arises–what’s the best way to get bees? Swarm capture seems to be one option, but it requires finding a swarm, and it’s unclear how easy that is. Ordering bees online seems like it should be an option, but he’s not sure where to order from. Any beekeepers here who can give advice?

    • Statismagician says:

      Ordering bees online is the way to go. There’s probably a local or state beekeepers’ association and you should talk to them, because there are all sorts of complications in mailing a bunch of bees and if my beekeeping friend’s stories are anything to go by, bee-related shipping problems are to be avoided.

      • Well... says:

        I briefly considered doing this. For me the steps would have been:

        1. Build a hive (for me this was really the fun part, and the main reason I was interested)
        2. Order a queen online

        I thought I heard that if you install the queen, the rest of the swarm will naturally come, but that could be wrong. Also, I think you have to buy a beekeeper suit and other stuff like a smoker or whatever. For me that, plus the time, was too much investment just to get some local honey. I easily found other woodworking projects.

    • JayT says:

      The one beekeeper I know got his first swarm from another beekeeper, so it seems like an easy way to go would be to just find some locals that would be willing to share or sell.

    • Matt says:

      My dad kept bees for years, and I helped him sometimes. Known beekeepers get notified about swarms that are pests. (That is, someone finds that a hive has occupied some portion of an outbuilding or something and wants to be rid of it and will call you) My suggestion is to offer to help a hobbyist beekeeper capture a couple of swarms if he’ll let you keep one eventually. Once you have a hive, you can encourage swarming by not expanding the size of the hive as the number of bees increases. Then you find the swarm and capture it, and you’ll have two hives. Repeat until you have as many hives as you can handle.

  82. Clutzy says:

    Does anyone know the accuracy to which old timey movies like Cool Hand Luke depict prisons from that era? Cool Hand Luke is supposedly set in the 1950s and the prison is entirely foreign to a modern one. Sure there is the cruelty of the warden and boss which would never fly today, but neither would the prison. They are allowed to openly smoke and basically police themselves. Everyone sleeps in the same room, there is a chaingain where they are given sharp tools and occasionally get to drive heavy equipment. Obviously such a prison today would be a bloodbath.

    OTOH we have depictions of Alcatraz, which is supposed to be this prison for uber criminals who are a high risk, but its basically no different than your run of the mill prison.

    Was this design change real, or fictional? If it is real was it driven by the 80s crime wave?

    • Garrett says:

      One question: are you comparing different levels of prison security? Current minimum security prisons (eg. Club Fed) might have dorm-like sleeping arrangements because everybody’s there for white-collar crime.

      • Clutzy says:

        I am thinking of several things. First is the lack of security. Second is the lack of separating the prisoners. Third is the entrusting the prisoners with very dangerous tools.

        Even in Escape from Alcatraz, a max security prison for its time, the prisoners are allowed to go to a wood shop and can bring metal back to the cell!

    • edmundgennings says:

      There was definitely a shift in prison culture due to the rise of prison gangs which was caused by a number of things that also changed prison culture directly.

  83. Corey says:

    In prior OTs there’s been a background assumption that shortages would end if prices were allowed to float freely (sometimes it’s government fiat preventing rises, sometimes PR because people hate paying more for a thing than someone else paid).

    How true is this in current circumstances?

    There are some circumstances where we know the market will never clear, e.g. gasoline during a hurricane evacuation – supplies are going to sell out no matter the price. This is probably also true of PPE for the time being.

    I’d guess hand sanitizer is easier to scale the supply of (it’s happening) and so we may not need to ration it. OTOH N95 masks seem to be tougher (blown polypropolene) so maybe we’re stuck with rationing there.

    • Jake R says:

      There are two arguments for letting prices float freely: supply and demand. You seem to be asking about what happens if supply cannot easily be increased, or not quickly. I’ll just say it can be really impressive what people can do with the right incentives. We’ve already seen distilleries convert to making hand sanetizer just for the PR, imagine what they could do if it was selling for $25 a bottle.

      There’s also the demand argument. How much someone is willing to pay for something is the best approximation we have available of how much they want it. Allowing prices to rise to the market level serves the same function as rationing. Nobody is buying $25 hand sanetizer on a whim.

      But the best argument is that you can’t really fix prices, you can only change the currency the price is paid in. If someone somewhere is willing to pay $25 for a bottle of hand sanetizer and the store is charging $4.50, someone will buy it out and resell it at the higher price. In this case the cost is being paid not in money but in legal risk and social shaming by people who don’t understand economics.

      • albatross11 says:

        I’d distinguish between:

        a. Shortages caused because you’re actually short of something widely needed. This is true of hand sanitizer to some extent, and much more so of N95 masks. We suddenly need a lot more than we had or could quickly make, so there would be a problem even with free-floating prices–it would just manifest as “N95 masks are obscenely expensive” rather than “N95 masks can’t be found.”

        b. Shortages caused because of price controls/reluctance to raise prices. Toilet paper is probably suffering from this–if every roll of TP cost $2, people wouldn’t hoard them.

        • baconbits9 says:

          b. Shortages caused because of price controls/reluctance to raise prices. Toilet paper is probably suffering from this–if every roll of TP cost $2, people wouldn’t hoard them.

          I stopped by the market at a local farm yesterday and they had individual rolls of TP for $2 for sale.

        • Jake R says:

          This seems like a difference in degree, not in kind. There are price controls on both N95 masks and toilet paper, as well as every other product in the form of anti price-gouging laws. Demand has risen much faster than supply. Therefore either prices will rise or there will be shortages, the question is which is better. The only difference between toilet paper and masks is the demand increase of masks makes sense.

          My theory is that in the early days some local news shop was desperate for pandemic stories and sent a reporter down to the grocery store to see if they were out of anything yet. Reporter sees they’re a little lower than usual on toiler paper, shrugs, and writes it up. Fear of shortages leads to hoarding leads to actual shortage.

          • Lambert says:

            Also TP is bulky and cheap (low cost density?) so it doesn’t make sense for shops to carry massive inventories all the time.

          • edmundgennings says:

            And if price increases where permitted legally and socially and this was known there would be less vulnerability to this shortages induced by fear of shortages. One could have price increases driven by fear of price increases, but that more naturally limits itself.

          • simon says:

            My theory is that in the early days some local news shop was desperate for pandemic stories and sent a reporter down to the grocery store to see if they were out of anything yet. Reporter sees they’re a little lower than usual on toiler paper, shrugs, and writes it up. Fear of shortages leads to hoarding leads to actual shortage.

            Before there were toilet paper runs in the west, there was one in Hong Kong, I recall it was blamed on people starting rumours that there was a supply issue. Here is a link I found just now which says much what i recall from another source. Presumably, knowledge of this run lead to the subsequent runs in other countries.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            A prepper blog, shared here I believe, talked about Wuhan running out of TP, so don’t forget to stock up (responsibly, don’t hoard).

            It’s also hard for stores to keep up with sudden demand. It’s super-bulky compared to the profit margin (think of how many two-liters or how many cans of pringles you can have on the shelf of a 24-pack of TP). It usually gets tossed into shipping trucks last wherever there is space to fill because it’s non-perishable.

            Given what I’ve learned about the grocery supply system, people who bought up supplies at least a few weeks early were doing strictly a pro-social thing: our supply system has a lot of stuff and moves a lot of stuff, but it’s still limited in its throughput. People who got ready early (and didn’t try to “top off” their hoard or anything once the panic hit) allowed stores to take care of some pressure early.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            A prepper blog, shared here I believe, talked about Wuhan running out of TP, so don’t forget to stock up (responsibly, don’t hoard).

            I wasn’t right-wing enough when that data came out. 🙁
            I was so not a prepper that I couldn’t convince Mr. Chat to spend a couple hundred extra dollars on things we still had 2-month supply of on a Costco trip after there were COVID deaths in the US.

        • sharper13 says:

          What’s missing in your “a” case is that if prices can increase, that provides an incentive for people to create stockpiles of emergency materials in advance with the idea that they will be able to sell them when a disaster hits, even if that involves additional transportation at higher cost.

          Right now we are suffering from the fact that there wasn’t enough of a way for someone who had the idea of an oncoming pandemic to profit from it. Therefore, the information which could’ve been communicated early via price signals was missing.

          For example:
          People who are able to anticipate disasters earlier (I saw it coming!) can take actions ahead of time which will mitigate the impacts. The way they pay for those actions is to increase prices, currently banned.
          People who plan ahead and prepare for disasters, by stockpiling essential items, ready to go, serve those who aren’t prepared. They’re rewarded by increased prices.
          Anticipatory higher prices can also signal farther in advance when a disaster is more likely, alerting others sooner, who can then prepare.

          All of these types of activities, when legally allowed, end up not driving up prices massively, but moderately. That’s because if everyone is allowed to engage in them (rather than only on the black/gray market), then the returns, like other businesses, attract more people to do them until the return on time/resource/monetary investment is in line with the risks and the rest of the economy. But we also get more masks, generators, and gasoline when and where we need them to be.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            That’s a nice theory that fails spectacularly when someone in the C-suite notices you can increase quarterly profits and cash reserves by not building up reserves that usually aren’t profitable. Five-ten years down the line when that frequent investment in stockpiling for tail risks would have payed off, that CFO has moved on elsewhere having been payed a bonus for doing exactly what they were supposed to do.

    • Matt M says:

      There are some circumstances where we know the market will never clear, e.g. gasoline during a hurricane evacuation

      I don’t think this is true. At least not in economic theory. It may be practically true that there are no gas stations on Earth who would be willing to charge a high enough price to allow the market to clear. But in theory, there is, in fact, a price high enough that lots of people wouldn’t pay it.

    • baconbits9 says:

      There are some circumstances where we know the market will never clear, e.g. gasoline during a hurricane evacuation – supplies are going to sell out no matter the price.

      This isn’t particularly true. Almost always there are other supplies available but not at the current price. In the example of hurricanes there are typically full gas stations out of the range of the large populace that if you could just get there you could fill your tank. However if you hold prices at $3 a gallon then there is no incentive to just fill up enough to get to the next set of full stations, so everyone fills 100% up and that drains the local reserves, which means a bunch of cars that have capacity to fill 200 miles away can’t get to those stations.

      • John Schilling says:

        If you’re not paying for Hurricane Gasoline(tm) in extra dollars, you’re paying for it in extra time – time spent looking for the gas station that isn’t sold out, and/or time spent waiting in line at that station. The problem with this is, it’s the same cost whether you’re a housewife looking to put five gallons in the family car for a shopping run, or a contractor looking to put fifty gallons in the truck that will be used to deliver vital construction supplies. Worse, the housewife may place a lower value on their time – it’s an opportunity to be out of the house and away from the noisy demanding kids (or husband), and they don’t have ten critical construction jobs on their schedule.

        This is likely to result in a lot of minivans with full tanks on the grounds that maybe they’ll have to evacuate the family to the next state without being able to buy more gas, and a contractor with a truckload of vital supplies and a busy schedule spending his afternoon trying to make his last five gallons last long enough to find a station that hasn’t been sucked dry.

    • J Mann says:

      I wouldn’t say that shortages would end with free floating prices, just that they would be reduced. (In part because shortages isn’t very well defined.)

      Hypothetically, let’s take three cases.

      Case 1: The stores sell buy hand sanitizer at $0.75/bottle and sell it at $1. Anyone who is willing to pay $1 or more for hand sanitizer can get it, and anyone who is only willing to pay $0.90 can’t, and there is plenty on the store shelves.

      Case 2: (No price gouging): The stores pay $0.75/bottle and sell it at $1. But most people value it at $5. Result: hoarding – knowing that they may not be able to get any tomorrow, everyone buys a month’s supply at $1 until there isn’t any more. The stores get more as supply permits, but the shelves are empty.

      Case 3: (Free floating prices): The stores pay $4/bottle and sell at $5. Result: there is more available because (a) at $5, some of the early hoarders are willing to sell some of their supply, and (b) its now economical to switch more plants over to making hand sanitizer. Shortages are less likely because when new sanitizer goes on the shelves, hoarding in more expensive for people, even if they’re worried that they won’t be able to buy any next time they come to the store. With luck, we reach a virtuous circle where people see hand sanitizer on the shelves and don’t hoard, believing that they’ll probably be able to buy some more when they run low, ideally at a lower price. (On the other hand, people will resent that the store and manufacturers are “getting rich” on the back of a tragedy, and arguably you encourage the initial hoarding if hoarders expect to be able to sell their sanitizer).

      I can’t guarantee that at a free floating price, there will be hand sanitizer on the shelves, but it’s a lot more likely because the high price (a) discourages hoarding, (b) encourages previous hoarders to sell, and (c) encourages more supply.

      • matkoniecz says:

        there is also case 3b: someone quickly bought entire supply of hand sanitizer at $0.75, sells at 20$ per bottle. Sold only 1/4 of supply, but still earned plenty of money.

        Note also that at least some of initial hoarders traveled across small towns and bought entire supply, shop by shop. Destroying work put into moving them to a shop, increasing transaction costs.

        Free floating prices still make perfect sense in a longer term, as it makes more likely that new production will appear.

        But as you noted, initial hoarding remains a real problem.

    • BBA says:

      There’s a dozen states without price gouging laws, and some others whose laws are only applicable to certain commodities like gasoline. Instead of arguing about what would happen in Econ 101 spherical cow land, how about we take a look and see if toilet paper is any more readily available in the “enlightened” areas like New Mexico than in the nasty statist hellholes like Texas. My suspicion is that the differences are insignificant and the laws are mostly for show.

    • emiliobumachar says:

      Allowing prices to rise allows outsiders to produce with improvised thus inefficient means of production.

      Pivoting a factory on a dime to make something else is hard, but often doable by the experts for sufficiently loose definitions of “on a dime”.

      Pivoting a factory on a dime to make something else that’s cost competitive with the factories designed and built to do that something else already is impossible. It’s like trying to build a car from junkyard parts to run in F1 races. And old prices will reflect the cost savings those old factories were achieving.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      For a non-theoretical view, here is Forbes.

      “Most of the masks are leaving the country,” he told me.

      That is not the case in countries that have cracked down on exports, he added, but as of now the U.S. is allowing many types of medical supplies to leave the country even as states and hospital systems are expressing desperate need for masks and other PPE.

      By the end of the day, roughly 280 million masks from warehouses around the U.S. had been purchased by foreign buyers and were earmarked to leave the country, according to the broker — and that was in one day.

      To his knowledge none of the masks had been purchased by buyers in the U.S.

      Sure, in the long run, sustained higher mask prices would mean more masks would be available. But in the long run “we’ll all be dead”.

      • simon says:

        But the masks are leaving the US because the foreign buyers are paying for them. If the local buyers were able to mark up at the retail level, they’d be able to pay for them too.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          These are brokered sales that are marked up already, and the hospitals are trying to buy them from those brokers. Everything is already flowing to the place of “the most money the quickest”.

          What you are really saying is that the hospitals may eventually be able to buy them from the overseas buyers at an even bigger markup, if those buyers happen to be speculators. That calculation wouldn’t change if the buyers were US speculators. Those US speculators wouldn’t reserve their stock for US healthcare (unless the government forces them to by restricting sales to US buyers).

          It is possible that some of those buyers were speculators, but given the worldwide demand for masks, I would expect that most of these masks were bought already designated for health systems elsewhere. Regardless, the speculators aren’t adding any masks into the market and they don’t make masks more available. They just make the existing supply of masks available to those who can pay the most money the quickest.

          • MVDZ says:

            inb4 someone says: ah but verily then these high prices lead to a ramping up of production, so the speculators help!

            Sure, but you could’ve skipped all those steps and had a government mandate a decent price and certain production quotum for producers that feel up to task (or decided by the government if no one feels up to the task). That way you would’ve saved time and a whole lot of taxpayer or insurance money. Government intervention just works extremely well when you know exactly what you need for a certain timespan, such as during war or an epidemic.

            Also, most people don’t like profiteering off of misery, which is why war profiteers are some of the most despised people in wartime. I challenge anyone here to defend why such speculators, or even just producers who charge extortionate prices because they can get away with it when people are dying without their stuff, aren’t humongous assholes.

          • rumham says:

            @MVDZ

            I challenge anyone here to defend why such speculators, or even just producers who charge extortionate prices because they can get away with it when people are dying without their stuff, aren’t humongous assholes.

            Have you not been reading any of the threads here on hoarding and incentives? What exactly is an extortionate price?

          • baconbits9 says:

            I challenge anyone here to defend why such speculators, or even just producers who charge extortionate prices because they can get away with it when people are dying without their stuff, aren’t humongous assholes.

            The reason that most people in Western countries are dying right now is because they were born into a system that allows for this sort of behavior generally. They were born with high life expectencies, avoided masses of diseases, generally had access to food, shelter and boatloads of luxuries. You, me and almost everyone else owes their current existence to a long chain of risk taking, profit seeking, arbitrage figuring ancestors- many of who individually may have been assholes, but collectively shifted the world to a time and place where a disease with a 2% mortality rate is a huge freaking deal rather than a regular shit thing you just deal with while trying to avoid the really scary diseases.

            I’ll defend those aholes against a bunch of people who had no idea that this was coming, have no idea how to directly address the issues and have no idea where all this is going, yet somehow have to moral clarity to assert that thing would work fine if they were just able to make the rules for a situation they have not one clue how to approach.

          • MVDZ says:

            @rumham
            If a producer can’t justify higher cost by for instance ramping up production via new machinery, hiring new staff or retraining and replacing existing staff, then multiplying the price several times over is extortionate. It’s profiteering, and pretty wrong, because people will die without their products so they are in no position to refuse. Apparently they thought the pre-crisis price was a fair price to offset profits and cost. Any major rise is just greed. As pointed out by HealBearCub, speculators don’t do anything to increase supply. Therefore, assholes and useless.

            @baconbits69
            Yes, there is a general case to be made for the profit motive. You’re saying ‘all of history included assholes, and resulted in a decent society. Therefore assholes good in this specific instance.’ I can’t really see how, if the assholes don’t speculate, there is not a better outcome. And as I say above, higher prices are fine if they can be justified as an investment. Otherwise, just profiting off of misery.

          • rumham says:

            @MVDZ

            If a producer can’t justify higher cost by for instance ramping up production via new machinery, hiring new staff or retraining and replacing existing staff, then multiplying the price several times over is extortionate. It’s profiteering, and pretty wrong, because people will die without their products so they are in no position to refuse.

            And they don’t die from people hoarding at a lower price? And before any comment on the government setting maximum amount purchases, how well did that work in Venezuela?

          • baconbits9 says:

            Yes, there is a general case to be made for the profit motive.

            No, not the profit motive, the general ‘you don’t have any goddamn clue* how we got to the status quo that meant long, generally healthy lives for people at the lower end of the economic ladder’ reality. The general observation that we certainly wouldn’t be here if there had been a strictly maintained order where oddball behaviors, and specifically oddball behaviors in a crisis, had been consistently repressed. Not one person has any god damn clue how to fix the situation, and so we need many attempts, many different people and groups working out solutions as stuff evolves. Some of that behavior is going to look wrong and bad to the majority, some of it will look wrong and bad in hindsight, and all kinds of various shades of grey.

            *you as in we, as in no one has a strong grasp of how we got to be this wealthy outside of some broad heuristics.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            If you’ve got one of those spherical-cow governments which foresee shortages and head them off before they happen, then you don’t need to bother outlawing price-gougers– the chance for them to operate will never arise. You might as well keep a few speculators around as a backstop, just in the ever-so-unlikely event that the state’s usually-perfect foresight ever fails it.

          • albatross11 says:

            Some large fraction of people in the world have an urgent need for N95 masks, surgical masks, gowns, and other PPE. It’s utterly unsurprising that people are bidding for that stuff from all over the world. Maybe some of that is speculators, but the demand is overwhelming, so I suspect that mainly this is happening because we urgently need about 10x the number of N95 masks we have.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Everyone here is missing the real thread.

            These particular speculative price increases don’t really lead to increased production. They don’t presage a long term demand for this level of mask need. The kind of need that would make it profitable to take the risk of a capital expenditure to actually increase productive capacity.

            In fact, speculative pricing actually takes net mask purchasing budget out of the mask use market. The speculators can’t turn the profit around and invest it in further mask manufacture.

            Absent some sort of assurance that their risk is indemnified, why would novel mask manufacturing take on the startup costs?

            So, to the extent that there are large capital and time outlays needed for novel capacity, the incentive here is only for some small amount of increased capacity, based on relatively cheap repurposing of existing manufacturing capacity.

          • sharper13 says:

            The ability for prices to increase is what would have made it potentially profitable for someone years ago to decide to create extra mask production capability in advance, or to stockpile masks in the “good” years, with the idea that a disaster would come along and allow them to profit from them.

            Might even pay someone to create more flexible factories (at the added cost of those) in order to be able to pivot to make various emergency supplies.

            You can argue that no one would ever do that, but generally where there is potential profit, someone will figure it out at some point and do it. Sadly, the current legal regime prohibits market solutions to disaster shortages.

          • baconbits9 says:

            These particular speculative price increases don’t really lead to increased production. They don’t presage a long term demand for this level of mask need. The kind of need that would make it profitable to take the risk of a capital expenditure to actually increase productive capacity.

            This is not true. For example with massive price increases possible a company that manufactures masks can more easily justify a larger stockpile of inventory which will then be available for the next crisis.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @baconbits9:
            That only makes sense for stockpiles that have some sort of predictable use time frame. The last time we would have needed masks at the same level was 1918. There aren’t a lot of business incentives to hold a stockpile for an event that’s a once in a century type event.

          • baconbits9 says:

            That only makes sense for stockpiles that have some sort of predictable use time frame. The last time we would have needed masks at the same level was 1918. There aren’t a lot of business incentives to hold a stockpile for an event that’s a once in a century type event.

            The incentive is relative to the scarcity of the event and the price increases associated with the event, which is why you have to allow really big price increases in really rare events.

            You have also made it a falsely binary choice, there have been enough recent events, like the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s, that would increase stockpile value if companies are allowed to ‘gouge’. Would they have covered 100% of the shortage? No, but they would have eased the initial problems while production was ramped up and likely either did, or would have, alleviated major issues.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I asked before and don’t think I got a response: how long does it take to build up a supply?

            Maybe with a two-month lead time, we can make craploads of PPE. So as soon as a weird new virus appears in any country, we can build up a big lot of it, and if we don’t need it, well, it was a cheap insurance and we can spend it down.

          • actinide meta says:

            “There aren’t a lot of business incentives to hold a stockpile for an event that’s a once in a century type event.”

            Nonsense. I doubt that global pandemics are in fact once-per-century events in our current, high-population, high-travel world, but I’ll engage with the hypothetical by assuming a 1% chance of a pandemic per year. Lets say masks cost $0.75 and can be stored for 10 years. Then each year a stockpile costs $0.075 in depreciation and let’s say $0.0375 in capital cost per mask, for a total of $0.1125 per mask. So to break even a “dumb stockpile” would have to sell masks for $11.25.

            The “negative beta” risk of this project is actually valuable to investors (it loses money normally, but makes money in a pandemic when restaurants and the travel industry aren’t doing so well), so probably the capital cost could be significantly lower. You could also sell options to end users to buy the masks at normal prices in a pandemic and use that income to cover some of your costs. Let’s guess capital cost can be cut to $0.02.

            The masks are presumably just as good in year 9 as in year 1, so unless you are stockpiling more than 10 years of normal world usage you can sell them to end users for $0.70 after holding them for a long time. This cuts your depreciation cost to $0.005/year, so you are now looking at a pandemic mask cost of $2.50.

            The masks won’t all be needed instantly. So it’s most likely inefficient to stockpile for the full usage needs; instead you could prepare by a mix of stockpiling to cover the initial usage spike and having idle production capacity, with a redundant supply chain organized for disaster scenarios. Probably the most efficient way to create idle capacity is to design production lines for dual use (with some nonessential purpose), which will make them a little more capital expensive and inefficient than single use lines for the nonessential product but not as expensive as building completely idle capacity.

            Moreover in an emergency even production capacity never designed for some purpose can be repurposed. But it will never be as efficient as purpose built capacity before the emergency, so this can only be done when prices have gone up.

    • WayUpstate says:

      Pricing is at the heart of any market economy and price ‘setting’ rarely (never?) works out – witness the lack of price transparency in our health care market. Anyway, I can’t state it any better than Pierre Limieux on EconLog – https://www.econlib.org/when-free-market-prices-are-banned/

  84. nkurz says:

    I’d like to hear some discussion of the risks of “touching your face”. My assumption was that this was intended as a shorthand for “don’t spread the virus from your contaminated fingers directly to your mucous membranes by licking your fingers, picking your nose, or rubbing your eyes”, but others seem to be interpreting it literally as “don’t scratch your cheekbone”. This comes up often when people talk about the potential dangers of wearing masks, suggesting that frequent adjusting of a mask might be more dangerous than wearing no mask at all. This seems like a misinterpretation to me, but maybe I’m wrong. Which interpretation is correct, and what are the actual risks?

    • albatross11 says:

      From what I’ve read (Disclaimer: I’m not an expert), the virus needs to get to a mucous membrane to infect you–it can’t go through normal skin. That more-or-less means eyes, nose, or mouth. (Assuming you’re not touching subway seats and then sticking your finger up your a– or something.)

      So what I think is going on is that touching your face brings the virus closer to where it needs to go to infect you. If you get it on your cheekbone now, and then later rub your eyes with clean hands, you’re liable to rub the virus into your eyes as well. But I’m very happy to hear from someone who knows more!

      • Well... says:

        For whatever it’s worth, unless people have been farting into it I would expect the center of a subway seat to be cleaner than the edges, which people touch with their hands.

  85. Bobobob says:

    April Fools! It was all just a prank, this COVID-19 thing. You can go back to your regular lives now.

    • albatross11 says:

      Wow, it’s a good thing–I was almost out of toilet paper!

    • fibio says:

      Aww, I was just getting used to working in my underwear.

      • bullseye says:

        Why are you wearing underwear?

        • rumham says:

          Cause it’s difficult to rent a steam cleaner right now for the couch?

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Well you should wear underpants in the normal position when you go out, and another pair on your lower face if you can’t buy masks. Those, a pair of shoes, and gloves should keep you safe.
          Granted, stores may irrationally deny you service for not wearing a shirt (the “no shirt, no shoes, no service” signs). I suggest a pink crop top for this purpose, especially if you’re a man. This should help with keeping other humans more than 6 feet away.