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George Will weighs in on voting-by-mail https://archive.is/CKvTs
Post-Brexit:
“Charter plane full of Romanian fruit pickers will land at Stansted tomorrow to fill farm labourer vacancies”
That’s what many wanted right? Immigration with a purpose. Workers who aren’t coming in and immediately going on the dole. Seems to be working.
Yes, insofar as immigration was an issue in Brexit, it was largely about the country’s ability to *control* who gets to immigrate, not about stopping people entering entirely. Although regarding the fruit situation, I’m not sure why they don’t try getting some of the people currently stuck at home in quarantine out into the fields instead of flying in workers from Eastern Europe.
Mainly because desk worker != farm worker.
As of 2014, an EU immigrant would have to wait 3 months before claiming JSA etc., can only claim JSA for 3 months with “compelling evidence of a genuine prospect”, and can’t claim housing benefit. If there was a large contingent of Brexit supporters who only cared about unemployed immigrants claiming benefits and not immigrants coming to do unskilled labour then one would have expected there to be lots of discussion about tightening these restrictions further, but I don’t remember any.
And of course, any hypothetical Brexit supporter with such views would (charitably) be taking a deontological approach to policy rather than any sensible cost-benefit-based one, given that EU (and non-EU) immigrants claim fewer benefits than native Britons in relative terms, and cost very little in absolute terms.
And what of asylum seekers? Do they not qualify as immigrants all of the sudden?
It seems that they have much different rules. Unless free food, housing and medical care isn’t considered being on the dole now. Please note, housing is not cages, but a flat in town.
I just don’t think that this particular article is the post-Brexit gotcha that you think it is. If asylum seekers were treated under the rules you posted, it is feasible that Brexit wouldn’t have occurred.
Brexit supporters think asylum seekers should be allowed to work? That’s news to me!
Suppose you were cooking for a very large and very international group, and your assignment was to prepare comfort foods: dishes that are familiar, sort of homey, and popular. How many dishes would you need to prepare to satisfy all or nearly all? (You have permission to ignore the really hard cases, like people with multiple allergies, extreme religious sects, and fringe dietary disciplines like raw-food vegans. Those are someone else’s problem.)
I expect you could satisfy most of Canada with spaghetti bolognese, and that would cover the north-east United States as well.
Make good bread, and you cover most of northern Europe. Serve it with butter.
What, no poutine?
I don’t think poutine counts as comfort food for most Canadians. It’s more like a special treat.
How familiar do they need to be? Being generous with the US…
Katsudon would cover all of Japan and the West coast.
Biscuits and gravy would cover the Midwest and south.
Dumplings would cover China, Korea, Indochina, Russia, Eastern Europe and half the Stans
Tortillas with rice and beans would cover Latin America
Chicken, rice and yogurt would cover the Middle East
I don’t think “comfort food” is quite the same as “stereotypical dish from each region”.
No, but every regional comfort food will be a dish from or ingrained to that region. In some sense every regional comfort food will by definition be stereotypical of the region….
Not hearing a specific objection either
I spent many years in the American midwest (many of my relatives are native to it) and I never encountered biscuits and gravy there, either in restaurants or in homes.
I did in the South, though, which I never had an opportunity to have biscuits and gravy until going to. It’s great and I want more of it.
Yeah, that’s a Southern thing that migrated up into the border states, you don’t see it north of about St. Louis natively.
I think if you widen “spaghetti Bolognese” to “spaghetti with meat and red sauce”, it covers the entire US. The only variation might be the precise nature of the meat and sauce, and even that differs more by household than by region in my experience. Most people aren’t that picky as long as it’s good.
I’m going to have to think for a minute to explain exactly why, but I don’t really think spaghetti is a “comfort food” for most people, it’s just a generic food that lots of people eat. The bar for comfort food is a little higher.
Easy and cheap to prepare at home (assuming store-bought sauce), enjoyable to eat, with plenty of carbs and fat. Eaten frequently, including a lot in childhood. Those are probably my criteria. It’s tough to speak for “most people” though, other than anecdotes, unless someone has data.
Steak and fries.
Burger and fries. Just buy McDonalds if you want a safe bet.
Vegetable stew with good white bread. Some meat is ok, of course.
Bread, butter and salami.
I think every one of those is universal and familiar. I’d actually be curious if there’s a place on earth where it’s not so.
All that beef might not go over well in India (the others oughta work).
Well… you said you were curious, so…
Steak and fries does not appear in any non-American cuisine I’m familiar with. (Non-American cuisines I am not familiar with include English, German and French, though.)
McDonalds may have penetrated into a lot of foreign countries, but I doubt it qualifies as comfort food to most people who live there – leaving aside the subset of Americans who really dislike it (see previous “OK, has anyone never eaten a Big Mac?” thread). Of non-American cuisines I am familiar with, one has meat patties and I know of one recipe vaguely related to fries, but no evidence that they’re served together. And that’s stretching, since the cuisine in question is “historical Islamic” – probably no representatives at this gathering! (Though modern Middle Eastern probably has meat patties; don’t know of any fries outside American fast-food versions, though.)
Vegetable stew is closer but the seasonings vary a lot; I’m not sure you could do one pot that worked for everyone. Notably Chinese, Italian, and Japanese versions seem really different from each other. That said, while I won’t say it doesn’t exist, there’s no cuisine I know well enough to definitively state “this does not have vegetable stew” for broad enough definitions thereof.
(Especially if you count, say, lentils as vegetables.)
There are probably places where bread is not universal and familiar – cuisines often seem to pick between bread and rice – but they’re again harder to find. Ditto butter. (Though note that people who consider a loaf of sourdough versus naan versus lavash comfort food may be hard to satisfy with one loaf.) That said, I would not expect salami to be universal; some sort of dried meat maybe, but there’s an amazing diversity of types of dried meat.
(Sorry for late response! Only you asked, and the expectation that fries would count as comfort food for not just most Americans but most people struck me as really bizarre.)
I first read it as “don’t appear in American cuisine” and had a very shocked face. I think in most of Europe countries at least fries are universal unhealthy-but-tasty side dish. And I’d expect them to be wide spread all over the world as well. They’re the archetypal carbs&fat, fried&salty. Very cheap, and very easy to make.
I think we’ll mostly debate on what “cuisine” is – if you want to include traditional ones … sure, there’s no french fries in traditional Romanian either, but it’s still one of the most popular foods here. If you go back far enough you end up with a world where no ingredient was universal, except meat. So… chicken soup? 😀
Good point on bread – many cultures don’t have raised bread, especially middle eastern. And speaking of them and meat patties, that’s basically what Kebab is – patty fried and served plain. Only the shape differs.
I’m still sticking to my guns on the vegetable stew. Sure, many cultures differ a lot on specifics, but that’s probably because we want to focus on what’s different. I bet you never go to a Japanese restaurant to order Nikujaga (literal translation meatpotato), but it’s still a very popular home cooked food.
And speaking of McDonalds, they fill different niches in different countries. In Romania they were initially positioned as high end restaurants and stayed that way quite a while. Did you know in Netherlands you can order milk and McDonalds? And whatever you do, don’t enter one in Istanbul – I don’t think I’ve seen a more dirty place in my life. And I tried two just to make sure.
The Belgians claim to have invented it (as well as having invented fries in the first place)
Chicken soup is probably as old as the cosmos (OK no – as old as chickens) but no, I wasn’t actually proposing going back to a hundred-years-ago version of the cuisine! That said, I am leaning on comfort food as something more than “this isn’t completely unfamiliar.” I haven’t visited most of the world, but I don’t think I saw fries in India, and I know I didn’t in Italy (except in this one very nice little middle eastern place, but I don’t think the Italians viewed gyro sandwiches as comfort food, even though it was much closer to my idea of it than most of what everyone else was eating). I wouldn’t expect them in Chinese or Japanese cooking either; I don’t remember them in French, but I was a kid and distracted by apricot croissants (which I still have to learn to make), I could easily have missed them.
I think you may be thinking European – I’m weak on most European cuisines, except Italian – and I may be thinking global? Ah, speaking of which…
They’re only cheap if oil is cheap; nothing deep-fried is cheap if oil is expensive. (I haven’t made french fries, note, but I have made various semi-deep-fried things – mostly fritters – and it costs a lot of oil; I’ve been told regular french fries are similar.) I don’t know how cheap oil is in, say, rural China or India. French fries also just… you know that thing Scott wrote about Universal Culture as an all-devouring eldritch entity? French fries are definitely part of Universal Culture. But I’m morally certain if you went to a random village in China and asked for them, you would get a lot of funny looks. It hasn’t finished devouring yet.
I promise I am not claiming that steak and fries are not American.
(Quite the reverse.)
I grant this! At least for the kind you’re talking about. If you served someone who grew up with hamburgers a kebab, do you think he would see it as comfort food? I’m having trouble telling because I didn’t really grow up with either (though kebabs are closer).
Nope, but I would if they had it; it looks tasty. And I do order curry stew, which is very good. But I don’t think an Italian would recognize it as comfort food, and I don’t think a Japanese person would recognize minestrone as comfort food. Put another way: you could probably find meat and potato stew in very many cuisines, maybe all common ones. But I really do think spicing matters. I can jump from “andalusian lentils cooked with coriander and pepper are comfort food” to “etheopian yellow lentils cooked with turmeric and salt are comfort food,” but “indian red lentils cooked with LOTS OF HOT PEPPERS” is a step too far. And there are non-hot spices that still make a big difference in taste. So… I agree with you on basic ingredients, but I think you’re underestimating spicing.
(I’d grant you 2-3 pots for that, just not one.)
I am duly warned! (Though if I ever go to Istanbul, I think I will be too busy trying to track down modern Adasiyyas to pay too much attention to the McDonalds. All the descendants of my early-cookbook recipes might be there!) I did not know that about the Netherlands. Was the quality actually better* in Romania than in the US, or was it the same recipes?
(*Yes, I admit it, I am one of those people who won’t touch McDonalds. Maybe it’s better outside of airports, but I’ve never been that tempted to find out.)
The idea that anyone American thinks beefsteak and chips is not only American, but never not-American, helps partially explain anti-English cooking prejudice. Americans inherited English cooking, kept some parts and lost some parts. The parts they kept, they call “American”; the parts they lost they probably lost for their own reasons. If they ever regretted the loss, they’d have corrected it. But they still call pizza “Italian”.
Southern cooking, i believe, could satisfy the wants of almost any people.
For those who enjoy fried fatty salty meats we have you covered, for veggies boiled pickled or fresh we got ya. noodles we are weak on i must admit, but biscuits and breads provide your starchy desires.
i could eat soul food everyday, probably take a toll on my health tho
Japanese curry is pretty great comfort food that appeals to a whole lot of people – basically a very flavourful thick stew, usually on rice. I’d wager (not very much) it would appeal to the majority of the world, and it’s going to be familiar-ish to anyone who eats stew and carbs, especially with a bit of curry flavour, which is several billion people.
I used to make this a lot. Every American I ever exposed it to liked it. It’s very mild and friendly and satiating, hard to find an issue with.
Well, now you’ve met one that doesn’t. It’s not bad, exactly, but it’s easily the least good form of curry I’ve ever had.
It’s not a comfort food if people start out with “I’ve never had anything like this before; I wonder if I will like it?”, even if they ultimately decide they like it. And rice stews are I think unusual enough that I think this will be a common response anywhere outside East Asia.
Lot of the subcontinent as well – it’s recognizably a curry, despite having special characteristics. South + East Asia is over three billion people.
Spag bol gets you the vast majority of Brits, too.
I don’t know much about Canada, but as a resident of the north-east US, I am totally unfamiliar with what you’re presupposing here. That’s like, a reasonable and basic dish, but not something I’ve ever heard uttered adjacent to the term “comfort foods”. I think it’s commonly eaten because it’s not that hard to prepare and come out tasting ok, making it something like a second-tier convenience / quick dinner option, but not something that comforts you.
(I kind of despise that dish because I cannot eat spaghetti without splattering it all over myself, but I recognize that that is my problem and not a reflection of the general population’s opinion of it.)
Maybe the spaghetti thing comes down to whether you like spaghetti (people who think it is a comfort food) or you just tolerate it (people who think it isn’t like me).
I like spaghetti, but I don’t think I’d consider it a comfort food.
Pizza. Pizza is the most popular, most internationally recognized food in the world, and you can customize the sauce and toppings pretty easily to satisfy regional tastes. More of the hard work than you’d think is being done by the crust; if you get that right, everything else is easy, and you can make a bunch of pizzas quickly with the right kind of oven or grill.
I’m not sure pizza is homey enough to be comfort food. It’s good, sure, and popular. But I associate it with special events and parties rather than regular eating. Mom made pizza at home maybe once a year, and it wasn’t very good.
In Cherryh’s Foreigner books, which I have been praising of late, the alien Atevi enthusiastically adopt human pizza into their cuisine — although some of the toppings they use are probably lethal to humans.
Here’s what I’m thinking.
Make a pot of rice and a pot of short pasta – fusili or something, I think spaghetti is generally a mistake.
Make a savory bean-based stew and a spicy-savory meat-based stew, and a spicy-citrus meat-based stew. I’d do broadly garbanzo & black beans+various vegetables and spices, sausage with tomato+onion+wine+chili flakes, and lamb or goat with hot peppers+orange+lime respectively, but details are very flexible.
Provide ladles, slotted spoons, bowls, and tortillas. People can assemble things as they like; I think this will get most people something they’ll be happy with, and you can do it with a pot and a cast-iron saucepan plus serving dishes, all in a few hours if you absolutely have to.
How’s everyone’s apocalypse? I’ve been mostly enjoying it, personally, but I’ve been lucky so far.
This is a taxonomy of neuroscientists that’s lovingly precise, maybe too much shop talk to be as funny to most people as it was to me, but I laughed my ass off. (I didn’t write it)
https://medium.com/the-spike/the-neuroscientist-a-field-guide-ac15bb47372f
this is hilarious!!
I was reading the link, and it mentions “append[ing] the suffix neuro-“, and obviously it’s a prefix not a suffix, but it got me thinking, can you append a prefix? I feel like appending strongly implies adding something to the end, and maybe it strictly means that, I actually noticed that the use of the word append seemed wrong to me before I noticed suffix used instead of prefix; but also, ‘prepend’ seems like the kind of word that no one uses. Anyone have strong feelings on this?
Oh, and as for the apocalypse…I guess that waiting in a line to go into the grocery store messes with my life less than having to work does under normal circumstances, so I’m going to say it’s a net positive for me so far. Getting a lot more done this way.
Not having thought about it I would have said “append”. Oxford gives, “add (something) as an attachment or supplement”, so I would say it can be safely used. I do feel a bit of tension though if I think about it, seems like it’s most often used for at attachment at a later position.
The dominant direction of “append” seems to be down, with the thing appended hanging there as if on a hook.
Let’s not tendpre that pendaping fixpres is possibleim.
Not so bad, really. I’m in software, so I can work quite well from home. And this way I have no commute.
The biggest pain for me is shopping. Long lines to get in and out are a nuisance.
I’ve only had to wait in one line thus far, but I’m a little out of a downtown area. I’ve been exercising a lot, getting a lot of work and non-work projects done, seeing my family way more than usual… it ain’t that bad.
Sorry for letting my turn expire in Go. It was a busy few weeks, got distracted.
I’ve not had any lines, but I’m not in an extremely urban area.
Filling up a shopping cart with 8 days worth of food is pushing the physical capacity of the cart and my car. I will probably fall back to every 7 days and feel successful if it stops other family members from running out to pick up “essentials.”
If my kids were in school/daycare this would be much easier, and personally I don’t like working from home, or never getting any distance from my family to make my heart grow fonder for them. But even as my wife and I are going a bit crazy trying to
keep up the appearance of(remote) work while still parenting and administering the kids’ (remote)busyworklearning curricula, we still both have good jobs and there are lots of other things that make this a much better scenario than it could be (and is for some people). So I can’t complain.To provide an example of how trivial any complaints I might have are, the biggest casualty of this for me has been my sleep schedule and weightlifting: having no me-time during the day means I hoard it at night between 9 and midnight when I should be going to bed. That impacts how much sleep I get, which has obliterated my workout routine. (I haven’t worked out in like 3 weeks now.)
I’ve been exercising reasonably steadily, in fact I’m in much better shape now than I was two months ago. So it’s been nice in that regard, unlike your case. And I’m in a place where it’s quite reasonable to just go out for walks, as there’s likely to be virtually no one outside, so I can get a little distance when needed.
Work is almost the same at home, the only real issue is I have to occupy a fair chunk of space with computers and other electronics. Which, fortunately, I have.
I echo a lot of this. I have a list of hassles, but I know I’m blessed to have so few.
Really tired of having my wife and kids in another state. But other than that, I’m fine, since I’m still going in to work.
?? Did your wife never get back from that trip you said she went on? 🙁
No, and I’m not certain of our reasoning, but it is as follows: Suburban Idaho seems a lot safer for her than southern California, being a few years removed from chemo and thus immunocompromised. And the children have much more space there than here, where everything is closed and we have no yard.
But as this drags out, the separation is getting to be a more significant cost.
That really sucks, man. Hope you folks manage and she stays safe.
FWIW your reasoning sounds right to me, despite the sub-optimality of the situation.
Appreciated on both counts. I can put up with it, but the thought it is potentially unnecessary makes it harder, ya know?
It’s been annoying and frustrating, but not physically or economically threatening. Working almost entirely from home at full salary and essentially no risk of unemployment, some annoying frustrating inefficiencies where a FTF meeting would have saved a lot of confusion. Diet blander than I’d like due to persistent shortages in the grocery stores and lack of restaurants. Exercise extremely limited due to closure of hiking trails, etc. Social life gone from limited to essentially nonexistent.
Biggest annoying frustration is being able to see how much of this could have been alleviated, and how much more confidence I would have in the future, with just a little more thought on the part of federal, state, local, and corporate leadership. But it’s all one-size-fits-all solutions by people who aren’t making any real effort to plan more than a month into the future, I’m afraid that’s not going to end well, and I can’t do much but watch from the sidelines.
Furloughed (and a pay cut for the next quarter if/when we get back), which is a slow burn increasing stress levels.
Aside from cancelling a few European talks at the beginning of it, fine. I’m retired and have no small children, and my older son and wife visited us yesterday with my one year old granddaughter, so I even got a baby fix. I spend most of time at home anyway, much of it on this blog. Missing restaurants is a minor negative, but makes it easier to hold my weight down, and since three of the four members of the household cook, we manage to feed outselves just fine. Ordering things for delivery has been a bit of a problem — we are currently out of skim milk, and I’m the only one willing to drink the 2% shelf stable milk that I managed to get — but we stocked up, and Staples provides us diet coke (in cans) on demand. I have now given talks online in Georgia (the country of) and the Balkans (Liberland), taught a class at Brown and participated in a faculty meeting. If I want to go outside I can do yard work.
I can see that it’s a big problem for many other people, both those actually sick and those confined or unemployed, but not, so far, for me.
I’m doing fine. I’m working from home full-time (I used to go to the office two or three times a week), and I work for a federal agency at no risk of being cut. I got sick on the very day they stopped letting people eat at restaurants, and I was sick for a couple of weeks, but I think it was just the flu.
Paul Graham famously wrote:
But then I saw an interview with a flat-earther in which he said that his was the most mocked belief. Does it make people mad? Is it a good counterexample to Graham’s argument?
(A unique false statement are not likely to be believed. But if there is a group of people who hold the belief, it demonstrates that the belief has some ability to propagate. I’m not convinced that flat-earthers actually believe what they say, but the meme propagates even if it doesn’t reflect a belief.)
I think I agree with Graham’s first claim but not his second – statements that I worry might be true are more likely to hurt or distress me than ones I’m sure are false, but the ones that are most likely to anger me are obvious falsehoods that I worry people will believe.
I don’t think that mockery is a good measure of anger – very few people actually get hot under the collar about flat-earthism.
Agreed. It probably helps to remember that “annoyed” and “angry” are two very separate things.
Agree about flat-earthism, but for another example Nu Atheists get pretty mad at creationists but I don’t think they’re secretly worried that Answers In Genesis is right.
I think flat earth beliefs do make people mad, mainly because the people who profess them claim to do so completely seriously. But I don’t think people are mad that someone believes something wrong, but rather that someone has the audacity to believe something so clearly and obviously wrong.
Believing in a flat Earth is offensive not because it’s incorrect, plenty of things are incorrect, but because it’s so obviously incorrect that it constitutes a blasphemy against our civic religion of enlightened scientism or what have you.
I don’t know if I’d say flat earth is obviously incorrect. People believed the earth was flat for a long time. Without the introduction of certain rather sophisticated ideas, and long-distance travel/communication, I’d say the natural, intuitive position is that the earth is flat and that the sun rises up from the ground in the east and sinks down into the ground in the west each day.
I dunno, I think round-ish Earth has been the scholarly consensus since about 500 AD or so, especially among astronomers and (particularly naval) cartographers since they’re the people where it really matters. I think widespread expert flat-eartherism is one of those Victorian look-at-the-poor-benighted-savages things.
And you could find it much earlier even than that, like in Plato and Aristotle. Wikipedia even claims of ancient geodesy,
I would expect that serious Flat Earth believer would be widely mocked, but without making people mad. What matches this quote.
And anyway, mechanism presented here is anyway obviously only one of many mechanisms that cause people to react strongly. For example PTSD, strong reactions to jokes with fecal/erotic/threatening contents may make people mad via other mechanisms.
Flat-earthers don’t get cancelled. That tells me they are squarely in the “harmless eccentric” category.
If your boss finds out you are a flat-earther, the worst that will happen is that you will be ridiculed by your co-workers. If your boss finds out you have an actually unorthodox belief, you will get fried, because not firing you is illegal. That’s how you know that an idea is heretical in the Current Year.
Yup. “Behind The Curve” (the documentary about flat-earthers) was fundamentally a comedy. Documentaries about the Klan might have funny moments in which the viewers are invited to laugh at the silly beliefs of the Klansmen, but these movies will almost always be fundamentally serious.
I saw a photo of U.S. National Guard troops building a coronavirus field hospital, and something seemed “off.” I looked at it more closely and realized not one of them was wearing the horrible, turquoise “Universal Camouflage Pattern.” And then it hit me that I hadn’t seen photos of any U.S. troops wearing it in many months.
Has UCP been fully phased out of the U.S. military, or are some units still wearing it?
Are people in the USAF still wearing their “as-bad-as-UCP” getups?
The Army was the primary user of the UCP, and they phased it out last year. But per wikipedia, a number of state orgs still use it.
Bureaucratic thought experiment:
What if you homeschooled your child until 9th grade. Around November 1st your child decides he’d like to go to public school, so you enroll him. While he is there you take a generous amount of “family vacations.” Thus, he gets the transcript and grades and extracurriculars and I don’t think there’d be an asterisk saying he wasn’t there before November 1st.(I’m assuming the school operates on the semester system) While being spared from some of the wasted time that public school entails, time he could take to either enjoy his life or put to more productive use, studying for AP tests or learning to game the SAT.
Then you do the same in 10th grade, 11th grade, etc.
What would happen?
Can he still get passing semester grades despite missing the first quarter or so of the year?
If so, I think you beat the system.
When I missed a month of school the school was insistent that I be held back even though I had completed the work and was ahead of my peers when I returned.
It seemed like Alexander was suggesting transferring in half-way. If he means also skipping out most of the time, yeah, that will get difficult. There’s probably ways to do it, though, depending on the state, but they probably require you to be upfront about it.
He was suggesting transferring in half way through freshman year, and then taking chunks of time off from school for “family vacations” in the following 3.5 years (it is implied by my reading that the family vacations would be fake and just an excuse for the son not to attend school, but I don’t think it is one most schools actually accept).
Don’t most schools have attendance requirements mandated by law? (As in, the school’s funding gets docked if there are too many absences, so they put in place draconian enforcement limiting how much students can be gone on vacation.)
And the school definitely wouldn’t allow transferring in halfway through the year every year, while I’m skeptical that they would even allow just a half-year without an asterisk, if but only through the transcript showing how many classes they took.
I think that a better option is to take the maximum number of absences a year for 9th and 10th grade, and then get them into a dual-enrollment program where they’re basically already living on campus.
Is you state/district unusually lenient with this? I can’t remember what the maximum days absent was when I was in high school, but it was certainly much less than what you have in mind.
Additionally, even if you could pull off taking blocks of time away from school, it isn’t going to provide you kid with the normal high school experience. He’ll be the weird guy who’s always missing school. As far as extracurricular, most of them require regular participation and he won’t be able to do that when you’re faking vacation.
I suspect that the goal here is to avoid the high school experience but provide the high school transcript which signals to future schools/employers that the kid is “normal” as opposed to one of those weird home-school kids.
I don’t think so. From the OP:
The kid was the one that wanted to go.
My impression, when our home unschooled kids were looking at colleges, was that the problem was not that they were seen as weird but that the colleges had a standard procedure for evaluating applicants, and it didn’t work for ones who had no high school grades, high school teacher recommendations, or the like.
For anyone reading this who is in that situation, I can report that Saint Olaf’s was the one school in our experience that appeared to take being home schooled as a positive.
My Greek professor went to St. Olaf, and she would mention this to us when she talked about her school.
While he is there you take a generous amount of “family vacations.”
What are the truancy laws where you are (hypothetically) living? Exactly how much “family vacation” time are you taking the kid out of school for? What is the school’s position on letting the kid sit exams/graduate based on attendance?
In Irish law:
So if you were taking the child out for more than X days a year (outside of recognised holidays), I would expect the school and/or truancy agency to take an interest, and “Oh we go on a lot of holidays” may not be an acceptable answer for absences.
Vanity Fair has promo pix for the upcoming Dune movie.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/04/behold-dune-an-exclusive-look-at-timothee-chalamet-zendaya-oscar-isaac
Patrick Stewart will always be Gurney Hallek.
“Harness and unleash energy”? Whut? Not optimistic.
Well, none that I can think of. But if it strikes them as a really important and praiseworthy thing to mention… Well, not optimistic.
Bravado warriors? OK, maybe the whole problem is just that the Vanity Fair writer is clueless.
Because one of the bonds that Paul and Chani have is that they both lost their father to the Harkonnens. That is a fairly minor quibble, that can be changed to ‘they both lost a parent to the Harkonnens’, the real question here is
Why are there so few female characters in his cast to begin with? The Lady Jessica, Chani, Alia are all major characters who are all portrayed as strong, capable women. Or you could flesh out the Reverend Mother or Irulan and give her a larger role, and there are a handful of other options (though getting weaker there as you go deeper), so why do you need to transform a character to get enough women?
This is already planned to be a Lady Jessica-centric film. Per other comments from Villeneuve she is the protagonist and given much more agency in the current script, with Paul as deuteragonist, and then Paul will have a larger role in the second movie. That’s not a horrible choice given the decision to split the book into two films, if this first film stops with Cnhy naq Wrffvpn penfuvat va gur Qrfreg be gurve svefg zrrgvat jvgu gur Serzra.
Given that’s supposedly the plan, and as you said the presence of Chani, Alia, Gaius Helen Mohiam, the Fremen Reverend Mothers, etc., the Kynes’ genderswap certainly seems a bit odd. That said, it doesn’t actually hurt the story, IMO, and is far less concerning than the other stuff being talked about downthread.
The two potentially large effects that I thought of over night are
1. Liet is a shadowy figure for the Atredies early on, intentionally making him a woman probably means increasing the role among the Freman and showing it, taking that out for the audience.
2. It breaks some of the structure when Jessica and Paul join the Freman, Stilgar specifically says that they won’t follow Jessica if she beats him because she is a woman. Having Kynes as a woman makes that statement kind of silly.
The way I recall it, Stilgar said they wouldn’t follow Jessica because she wasn’t of the desert and thus implying she wouldn’t have the knowledge to be a good leader.
“For Villeneuve, this 55-year-old story about a planet being mined to death was not merely a space adventure, but a prophecy.”
Did anyone else read that book and come away thinking “planet being mined to death” was even a thing that was happening, never mind that it was what the story was about?
“It was a distant portrait of the reality of the oil and the capitalism and the exploitation—the overexploitation—of Earth. Today, things are just worse. It’s a coming-of-age story, but also a call for action for the youth”
Yeah, that’s not the book I recall reading. Spice=Oil, OK, but maybe not so much in 1963 as today. Call for action from the youth, not so much.
Yeah, considering the spice arises from an organic planetary process and is a renewable resource this seems like a pretty shit interpretation.
They’re shipping the native biomass off-planet; I could see that becoming a problem if they overdo it. But I don’t recall anything like that coming up in the books.
Also, IIRC, Kynes’ big plan to destroy the native ecosystem and replace it with something friendlier to humans is bad only because it deprives the Fremen of the harsh environment that makes them strong.
Herbert was a conservative, and you’re going to have to change things to make the story liberal. I don’t think that’s a bad thing; the movie doesn’t have to copy the book exactly. But they should be honest about it.
But Bullseye, remember that the Fremen are the ones who believe in and support Yvrg Xlarf’ cyna gb greensbez Neenxvf. Gurl fvzcyl zbqvsvrq vg gb cerfreir cbegvbaf bs qrrc qrfreg va beqre gb cerfreir Funv-Uhyhq, naq orpnhfr “Tbq znqr Neenxvf gb genva Gur Snvgushy” naq gurl srne ybfvat gurve rqtr naq orpbzvat fbsg jvgubhg gur raivebazrag gb xrrc gurz funec.
When I read that I had a vague flicker that maybe the Harkonnens were trying to eradicate the sandworms, not realizing gung gurl jrer gur fbhepr bs gur fcvpr. But it’s been a long time since I last read it.
I havent even read your rot13 but I can assure you the Harkonnens were not that clever.
They are a depiction of an enemy that seems illogical and weak, but still is formidable. The reality is the Harkonnens win a small victory in most timelines, because Paul dies. But even then they probably still lose because Shaddam and Irulan kill them all. They are puppets. Puppets of the emperor and the Bene Gesserit.
I’ll be honest, my biggest hope for the Dune movie is that it will be a smashing, phenomenal success that makes people more interested in joining me for the fantastic Dune board game. I don’t really care how it gets there — it will probably be years before I get around to watching it.
I like the costume design and the casting, but nothing else.
Apparently John Conway passed away. Does anyone have any favourite cellular automata to share?
The Star Wars rule is amazing. You can play with it here: http://robinforest.net/post/cellular-automata/ (though it’s better with a larger grid; if the grid is large enough it usually takes a very long time to stabilize)
Game of life implemented in the game of life
No patterns, but…
The biography Genius At Play by S. Roberts is well written and gives an overview of his work*. Life — he wouldn’t want to be remembered by this alone (it annoyed him to be only ever associated with it). A great and playful** mind.
RIP.
*Once when teaching, he painted a bike’s wheels, rolled it once in a curved path over a large paper, and then asked the students which way the bike was headed (and prove it, of course). (Yes, it’s on the web, but unfortunately with solution.)
ETA: **Hackenbush. Sprouts. (BTW that’s stuff kids can play over the net with their friends.)
Tetris.
Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science has some rather phenomenal examples of cellular automata in the chapter 2 (check that half-diagonal rows-and-half-random-mess at p. 29-30) and chapter 3 (that curtain thing at p. 67!)
Oh, God, I just found out about SmoothLife.
For 1-d CA, here’s a neat example of using a genetic algorithm to come up with a density classifier: http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~evca/Papers/evca-review.pdf
Thanks for sharing, everyone.
PSA: for folks who have been all like “I would volunteer for helpful large scale COVID studies on young healthy people even if they involved significant risk,” here is a low-risk thing you apparently can now volunteer for:
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-begins-study-quantify-undetected-cases-coronavirus-infection
Summary: email clinicalstudiesunit@nih.gov to sign up for an antibody test study if you’ve never been diagnosed with COVID before. If accepted into the study, they’ll phone you to confirm eligibility and consent, then mail you an at-home blood sample collection kit, which you use and mail back. You won’t get your personal test results right away because the point is to get aggregated data, but you apparently can request them after awhile, so you do *eventually* get a free antibody test out of it if you want. That appears to be it. Seems like an easy way to do your bit, so I signed up.
How does at-home blood collection work?
I’m curious about this as well. I assume some sort of self-contained finger-prick device? But for that to create a sample viable enough for clinical trials would imply that… some sort of Theranos-like device has actually been perfected after all?
The issue with Theranos’s system was that they were trying to measure things that cannot accurately be measured from a fingerprick blood sample, from a fingerprick blood sample.
And that they didn’t have decent microfluidics, so defaulted to a micropipetting system with diluted samples.
There are already tests which can be done with a finger-prick, like blood glucose testing. And, IIRC, blood typing cards which work with a finger prick work based off of some antibody magic. So I don’t see why this couldn’t work.
Per NIH, they’re using this sample kit; you prick your finger, it suctions out an appropriate sample, and you mail it back to them for pooling and analysis.
Thank you! I’ve applied to enroll in the study. To my surprise, the method for doing so was apparently sending an email; I pity whoever has to filter the spam from that inbox.
Conspiracy time! This is burning a bit hot right now, and I’m wondering if people here saw it. What’s your take on that ?
Cheers!
Please don’t post links without actual descriptions.
He didn’t even have the common courtesy to link us to “Never gonna give you up” by Rick Astley. I expect better from my unlabeled links.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Happy now?
C’mon, it’s 2020. Get with the times.
@toastengineer I feel like I really want to link the original for those unexperienced in its majesty, but I also feel like in a just world I would be banned for posting that link. My advice is, if you are comfortable with extremely frank descriptions of cowboy on cowboy carnage and want to hear something largely unlike anything you’ve heard before, search Ram Ranch on youtube.
The great thing is that the more you look into Grant Macdonald, the more inexplicable the whole thing becomes…
I gave it about 25 minutes. It’s a boring thesis: the government is involved in Hollywood. Wow, who’da thunk.
A whole 25 minutes? You’re made of sterner stuff than me! I lasted about forty seconds in then started skipping through and still can’t decide if it’s genuine tinfoil hat “the government is controlling us all via mass media, the money and technology to make the world a better place is there but shadowy elites want to control us!” conspiracy or some kind of carefully-crafted tongue-in-cheek mockumentary about “ha ha those idiot conspiracy types!”
Either way, I don’t care.
I thought it was suspiciously well-produced! 😛
Youtube shows more than 5.2 million views for that video. I wonder if you and Deiseach count as two additional views. I’ve clicked on it twice and not watched a total of 5 seconds. (Second time just to see how many views it has) I wonder if I count as 2 views.
I’m wondering what the legal mechanism is for the US federal government to limit oil production? Now that Trump has negotiated with OPEC/Russia to cut back millions of barrels of production / day, how does he go about doing that? I assume he has the ability to reduce production from Federal land/ocean through the BLM, but is that how it works? Will oil producers on state/private land be allowed to pump as much as they want or is there actually a legal precedent by which the federal government can impose production restrictions across all oil producers in the US? I wouldn’t think so and I didn’t see anything from a cursory internet search, but perhaps there is some law allowing this. Would the federal government have the power to limit the production of other goods/resources, like can they limit how much corn is grown if they enter some pact with foreign governments? I would think such a thing would have to go through Congress at the very least.
I don’t know about the current law, but the government has certainly imposed production quotas before. They used to do it all the time for agricultural products.
Yeah, this one was bothering me. I don’t understand how Trump expects to be able to legally do this, or why OPEC+ is taking his offer seriously.
So after searching some more I answered a few of my questions. First the federal government does have the constitutional authority to limit the production of various goods under the Interstate Commerce clause, this precedent was set in a Supreme Court decision [1] regarding the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 which limited the production of a wide assortment of crops.
But after reading through this overview of Oil/Gas regulation [2] it doesn’t sound like there are currently such restrictions on Oil/Gas. The Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 made it illegal (with some exceptions) to export any oil/gas produced in the US, but that was lifted by Congress in 2015. The Department of Interior and BLM can restriction production on federal lands, and given how much offshore oil there is today that might be enough for the Executive branch/Trump to hit the reduced quotas they agreed to. But I don’t think they currently have the power to limit production on state/private land. That largely falls under the purview of each states regulatory agency, notorious example being the Texas Railroad Commission which was basically the OPEC of it’s day. There might possibly be some backhanded way using EPA regulations that could force production cuts across the board, but I find it hard to believe that Trump would use such a mechanism.
So it seems like the realistic options for Trump would be to cut production on federal lands or try to go through Congress to enact a nation wide quota.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
[2] https://content.next.westlaw.com/Document/I466099551c9011e38578f7ccc38dcbee/View/FullText.html?contextData=(sc.Default)&transitionType=Default&firstPage=true&bhcp=1
I don’t expect it to be enforceable, but the oil industry may well go along with it voluntarily. Given the current low price of oil, lack of storage capacity and cratering demand, it’d be foolish not to cut back on production.
Yeah – the domestic oil industry is going to be cutting back quite a bit of production regardless of what Trump does.
This is just another example of the government opportunistically taking credit for something the private sector was already doing anyway.
That would be a violation of the antitrust laws.
United States v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co. (1940) is more on-point than usual.
FDR organized voluntary output cuts in the domestic oil industry to raise prices under National Industrial Recovery Act. When the Act was ruled unconstitutional, the oil companies continued their voluntary output reductions. They were charged criminally and convicted, and the Supreme Court upheld their conviction.
Under current law, coordinated output cuts not mandated by law are still forbidden under both federal and state laws in all 50 states. Violators are subject to criminal and civil penalties, with jail time being fairly common. Under civil law, people who pay higher prices are entitled to triple the estimated overcharge as damages.
Trump could pardon the federal violations, but not the state violations. So no oil company is going to join a voluntary effort coordinated by Trump to cut output. (Unilateral output cuts are OK, but coordination is the whole point of Trump’s efforts.)
Couldn’t they just tax it into oblivion?
No. It’s already price-cut into oblivion. A tax (which would require agreement between the house, senate, and presidency) would add nothing new to the economic pressures.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-syndromic-surveillance-04132020-1.pdf
NYC hospital system’s numbers for people 1) visiting and 2) admitted for flu/pneumonia-like system is really sharply dropping. Still a way to go to hit the baseline, though.
Is this due to shelter-in-place measures or herd immunity?
There’s no way to tell with the data available; we’d need a good sample of antibody tests at the minimum. That graph is very interesting, certainly; IF there was a COVID peak for those age 0-17, it was earlier than any other (but there may have been no such peak). The peak for those 18-44 distinctly leads the peaks for those older, which more or less line up. This could mean a slower but deadlier course of disease in those older, or it could mean those 18-44 tended to get it earlier.
If we assumed either a 1% IFR, or a .5% IFR, and 20 days from infection to death on average, can we look at
a) when and what lockdown measures were put in place
b) number of COVID deaths per day
c) total herd population
That should be able to tell you if herd immunity has taken place, assuming a 1% IFR, and assuming a .5% IFR, right?
If we assume some IFR we can get a guess at infected population, but we have a pretty wide possible range for the IFR. Also we don’t know the herd immunity threshold (so even good antibody tests aren’t really sufficient to answer the question); the models give us numbers assuming some R0, but we also don’t know R0 (later studies have been revising this upwards) and I’m not convinced those models are useful in real populations anyway.
@Atlas
Part of ‘The Narrative’ is that Western people live in much more of a democracy than they really do.
What you are noticing and what people like Klein and Yglesias fail to notice and in fact participate in, is this false narrative where people are told that their vote matters much more than it does.
Note that truly addressing this requires one to address more than just the absence of a supermajority, but also the deep state, the deep non-state, the political power of the courts, etc.
Democratic supermajorities will become more common though, not less, as Dems’ share of the votes increases due to demographics. There’s a reasonable chance of a Democratic supermajority arising any time the Democratic Presidential candidate is substantially more popular than the Republican one.
People like to say “the Emerging Democratic Majority” never happened, but it did. Republican Presidential candidates can’t win the national popular vote anymore. It’s only happened one time in the past three decades, and that was fairly narrowly, with an incumbent President in wartime. It’s just that the Democratic majority isn’t quite large enough to overcome certain federalist features of the Constitution yet, but momentum is in its favor.
People have been gambling on demographic change for decades. IMO, it’s a fool’s game. It might help in the short term, but in the long term, partisanship is pretty stable. At best it means the parties need to occasionally realign themselves, as happened in the last four years.
If partisanship was stable in the way you imply, we’d still have the Whig party.
Party alignment is stable until it isn’t. Pandemics don’t happen, until they do.
There hasn’t been any sort of fundamental realignment of the parties in the last four years.
Whites without a college degree went Republican, educated Suburbanites went Democrat. That was a pretty big change that cause a lot of seats to change hands.
It seems like every election, one party or the other confidently predicts their victory if past demographic trends continue, only to be sorely disappointed. I know that happened in both 2012 and 2016.
OK, I don’t actually know the answer to this question, but I have a guess. In how many Presidential elections has this been true for, oh, the last 50 years?
I think there is a long term trend that union influence has waned, which has meant slow changes in voting patterns. But that was a slow shift. You notice it when electoral votes suddenly change, but it’s not as if this hasn’t been happening for quite a while.
@Loriot:
How did that happen in 2012?
Hillary lost in 2016 but she did so with a resounding popular vote win. There’s a reason occurrences like this have historically happened rarely — it’s an unstable situation. It requires razor-thin margins to hold steady in an ever-changing world.
Our party system looks more competitive than it is for this reason. Republicans have won the EC 3 times since ’92 but the popular only once. This is what transitions look like, but it should be clear by now which way things are transitioning.
People can discuss realignment, but if another realignment is able to make the Republicans competitive again (i.e., if the Democratic Party doesn’t ultimately become a sort of “Party of Power” like United Russia, the PRI, or LDP) this realignment will have to be bigger than all the others — it will ultimately require nonwhites to vote Republican in large numbers. It’s wrapped up in issues of identity and assimilation, not just who has the better ideas, and if it happens at all it may take 20-40 years for that reason.
Getting a slightly larger minority of the popular vote than the #2 candidate is not a “resounding win”. Really, it’s not even a win at all, except in the sense that “got more touchdowns than the other team” is a win in American football.
@Wency
Hispanics voted more pro-Trump than McCain or Romney and are approaching George W. Bush numbers of support for him.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/feb/26/donald-trump-wins-over-hispanics-despite-strict-im/
As Hispanics become more assimilated, they are starting to vote like their white counterparts, which, given their class, is relatively Republican.
From February, which is an eternity ago in electoral time, but if Trump wins or loses 2020, it won’t be because massive numbers of Hispanics voted against him en masse.
It is entirely likely that the Republicans become the party of the working class more and the Democrats the party of the suburbs more.
“Resounding” might have been too strong a word choice, but it was over 2 points, a lot bigger than Gore’s win over Bush. My point is it was large enough that it could not be considered “practically a tie”, and almost as large as Bush’s win over Kerry, the only Republican PV win in this generation.
So the Democrats in a bad year do about as well as the Republicans in their best year, other than in geographical distribution of the votes.
@EchoChaos:
I think you outline what’s probably the most likely scenario, if the Republicans are to be competitive. But I think the barriers are a lot taller than the Karl Roves, etc. envisioned. I don’t have the stats in front of me, but my understanding, last I checked, is that 3rd+ generation Hispanics don’t vote even remotely like the white working class. And a fairly large share of Hispanics are still immigrants. So if convergence and assimilation are to happen, a lot more time is needed.
It took 40 years after John Adams’ tenure for a Whig to be elected President. You could argue there was JQ Adams, but he was technically not a Whig at that point and could barely be considered “elected”. I don’t know how long it will take, but I don’t think we should be surprised at all if there are 40 years of Democratic Presidents.
As for Trump, it’s a near-certainty he’ll win the white vote, if the election is even vaguely competitive. The election may turn on what whites do, but it’s not as though nonwhites aren’t playing a role here. If he wins the upper Midwest again, it will be by a razor thin margin, and every demographic will be relevant to it.
@Wency
I did say “more like”, but that’s fair. They are still more Democrat by a decent margin, but they don’t need to for Republicans to win and win big. If Republicans get 40-50% of all Hispanics regularly, Democrats don’t have a chance in Florida, Texas or Arizona and California becomes a swing-ish state.
Hispanics actually voting like the white working class would mean Republican landslides forever (we’d own California, Texas and Florida indefinitely with New York in play).
The big difference is actually linguistic: https://www.people-press.org/2016/07/07/6-hispanic-voters-and-the-2016-election/
Among Hispanics who primarily speak English, Hillary only won 48-41. That’s the end of the world for Democrats nationwide (bilingual Hispanics and Spanish-only went 80-11 Democrat).
This is why Democrats push for bilingual education, btw.
But it’s a losing battle. Despite the push, Latinos are far more English-speaking than prior generations and looking to become more so. And English-speaking Hispanics are pretty open to Republicans.
I think it’s more like “racking up more total rushing yards than the other team.” Nice stat to have, no doubt, but it’s not how we actually keep score.
@Conrad Honcho
I think the point is that it’s one of the ways to score but not the only one.
You usually win when you get more touchdowns, but since field goals exist, not always.
Right. It’s possible to lose a game 9-7, when you score 1 touchdown and your opponent scores 0.
@Matt M
Or in this case, 8-7 because you got a touchdown, the opponent got two field goals and you then fumbled the ball past the endzone for a game losing safety.
Sports metaphors!
Yeah, but that was pretty much all attributable to California, which (not to put too fine a point on it) has had Motor Voter since 2015 has been half to two-thirds vote-by-mail for even longer, and has had open primaries (which drastically reduce the number of Republicans even on the general election ballot) since 1996. Running up the California vote count for a Democratic Presidential candidate is child’s play, even if you stick to legal things like ballot harvesting.
Would I like it faster? Sure, but as government infrastructure projects go, this is like the moonshot.
Sure it is.
How many miles of de novo barrier do you think have been constructed?
Are you doing the really lame gotcha where we pretend replacing vehicle barriers that any pedestrian can crawl under or fall over, in high traffic areas already zoned and cleared for barriers, with 30 foot high steel walls doesn’t count as “new?” Because…reasons?
Re: accelerated covid-19 vaccines. A key reason for the long timelines of 12-18 months seems to be the Phase 3 part of the study, where vaccinated subjects go about their lives and their frequency of contracting the virus is observed. An obvious step to accelerate this would be a challenge study, where the test subjects are intentionally exposed to the virus to test for the efficacy of the vaccine. There are some prestigious people calling for such a trial (https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiaa152/5814216), but AFAICT this is not yet mainstream.
In a certain sense, I am *very* surprised by the need for this discussion: Shouldn’t we expect China to be doing all that is possible to quickly develop a vaccine already, including (maybe ethically dubious) challenge trials? Yet, all of the vaccine discussions I have seen implicitly assume that we need to develop a vaccine in the West, and wait for at least 12 months do so. Is it because the West feels like it cannot trust China both with their safety data of the vaccine and the geopolitical power it could bring them?
Even more surprising to me, some news articles about Chinese vaccines talk about the need for finding volunteers abroad since not enough new infections are present in China for statistical power, from which I gather that even China is not considering a challenge trial
You’d give the control group a saline injection and tell them to go forth and get COVID-19. A goodly portion of these people will die or infect their loved ones based on that advice. The CCP, I’m sure would have no moral qualms about it.
Well, the ethics of it are a separate point, so I hope this will not derail my original question, but anyways:
Among healthy young volunteers, the death rate is lower than 0.1%. Since presumably such a challenge trial would have to be done for not one but several vaccine candidates, you would be looking at roughly 10(candidates) *2 (control + treatment group)* 50 (group sizes) * 0.1% = 1 expected death, not taking into account good supervision and treatment of the subjects (deaths are generally not good for pr) Of course, all subjects would be isolated during that time (even just for scientific purposes), so no infections of loved ones.
You tell them they won’t infect their loved ones because you give them two weeks’ room and board at a quarantine hotel. The whole point of a challenge trial is that you don’t need that long timeframe when they’re going about their daily lives.
Yes, there’s some risk of death. Probably not that much since you’re presumably taking healthy young volunteers who’re at low risk of complications, and you’re presumably putting them front-of-the-line for medical care given their contributions to society. I would personally volunteer to take it, and I expect you can find a few hundred other healthy young volunteers across America let alone the world.
If you’re deliberately infecting people to test whether the vaccine works, you’re trying to reduce infection rates by 99%, not 50%. Do you really need a control group to notice that effect?
Yeah, pretty much. The challenge test requires deliberately infecting people in a laboratory setting, and you need to be confident that your laboratory technique approximately matches real-world exposure. If not, you may wind up “challenging” your vaccine with a much-too-high dose that no vaccine could protect against, or a much-too-low dose that wouldn’t infect anyone even with no vaccine. But if you plan your experimenting right, you can probably use one control group for multiple vaccine trials.
I guess you’d need four groups:
– vaccine + corona
– placebo + corona
– vaccine + no corona
– placebo + no corona
because you’re trying to determine one of three possibilities:
1. Vaccine protects against corona
2. Vaccine does nothing
3. Vaccine makes you more vulnerable to corona
I’m not sure you could ethically source people for the placebo + corona group. Maybe if you recruit people living with corona patients, but you’d have to be quick because the illness doesn’t last that long.
That’s the part I thought was least complicated. Take 1000 random medics in Italy, Spain, or whatever regions is most affected at the moment (we have a pretty bad one in Romania as well – isolated, but bad), and give the trial vaccine to half. See infection rates in 2 months.
Hopefully there won’t be that kind of hot spot by the time the vaccine is ready for that trial. But imagine there are, and you do what you suggested, and it turns out the vaccine makes the infection worse*, you’ve just killed a bunch of medics where they’re most needed.
* This has been a problem in previous attempts to vaccinate against other corona virus types: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement
I know utilitarian reasoning isn’t particularly popular in government (and almost taboo in politics) but hopefully we can at least use it here. If you have an estimated 10% chance of making the infection worse, and 60% chance of making it go away, it’s still a bet worth taking even without having to factor in the benefits of having a vaccine. It’s a net advantage for those tested. Sure, it has a statistical component, but it doesn’t change that it’s the correct decision.
If on the other hand, you have something like 10% chance of extremely bad reactions and 60% chance of going away, this might end up upping expected deaths. In this case you have a real ethical problem, in the sense that those tested are at a disadvantage. As long as the odds aren’t too bad you can still do this using (informed!) volunteers.
As for hotspots disappearing everywhere… I wouldn’t worry about that. The world is big, and there’s bound to be places where things yoyo around.
You also need to test for side effects, and there’s no obvious way to accelerate that, so it’s not obvious how much you gain from speeding up the testing of the efficiency.
One of the nightmare scenarios is widespread deployment of a vaccine with no short-term side effects, but that, say, causes cancer in 20% of those who take it 10 years down the line. 10 years testing isn’t realistic, but the longer we can afford the better.
That last bit is close enough to a tautology as to be utterly pointless.
For the part before that, we obviously haven’t been testing vaccines for ten years. So we ought to have pretty good data on how often vaccines have no short-term side effects but cause cancer ten years down the road. The answer is, what exactly? What percentage of vaccines, out of all vaccines ever, turn out to cause cancer or whatnot ten years down the road. Are there any at all? Clearly the number is one small enough that we are willing to accept that risk for vaccines far less urgent than this one, so why bring it up at all?
We can do rational risk assessment. We can say, “based on our prior testing of many vaccines, we estimate that after X months of testing there is a Y% chance that a still-unknown side effect of severity Z exists” and balance that against the risk of going without a SARS CoV-2 vaccine. Or we can do fearmongering of the form “Here is a Bad Thing that could occur, therefore we must take every measure we can possibly afford to prevent this particular Bad Thing”. You sound an awful lot like you’re arguing for the latter.
DES (diethylstilbestrol) caused medical problems, of which the most serious was a form of cancer, in the daughters of women who took it, I think about ten to twelve years later. The frequency of the most serious was variously estimated at from one in 250 to one in 10,000 of the daughters.
The sellers were found liable, which strikes me as a clearly unjust decision, since we really don’t want drug companies to withhold a drug until they have tested it for 12 years on many tens of thousands of people, checking not only those who took it but their descendants as well.
People who signed up for the validation study presumable signed waivers that kept them from being able to sue. Would that mere peons who actually need the drug could sign such waivers as well.
I don’t know the details either, but Wikipedia mentions a plethora of adverse effects found in animal testings with monkeys and rodents. Could the company have done such studies before selling the medicament?
The conspiracy theories were right: the Earth really is flat and everyone from geography textbooks to airlines have been lying to us. The question for you is: why? What is the conspiracy getting out of all this that could justify the investment of so much effort?
Giving everyone opportunity to signal their conformism?
The conspiracy theorists claim it’s all a coverup of embezzling the NASA budget. This strikes me as an incredibly stupid explanation due both to the holes in what it does cover, and its lack of covering everything.
One would also suppose, in that case, the NASA budget would be a whole lot larger.
And coverup being more expensive than entire NASA budget.
I must say that people believing this have surprisingly high opinion about honesty of politicians or overestimate how hard is to embezzle funds in large organizations.
This reminds me of my favorite video on the topic of faking the Moon Landing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE-tpiAiiHo
I know I’m fighting the hypothetical, but my question is: how?
Shouldn’t there be travel points where the air travel time is way off, and where sea and land travel is impossible for people not in on the conspiracy? Is there really a line you could draw through the Pacific that would allow such a conspiracy not to be immediately obvious whenever someone tried to take a plane flight to the next closest island?
(The following is steelmanning the theory for fun, not an actual argument)
The version of flat earth I’ve seen makes it a disk with the North Pole in the center and Antarctica around the rim. This actually matches the global flight network pretty well, since there are actually pretty few intercontinental flights in the southern hemisphere. Of course, there are still a few of them, and their timetables would be a problem for the theory, but you could say that a) the powers that be are running a few routes with secretly-supersonic jets to aid their cover-up, or b) these flights are listed on airline websites but don’t really exist, anyone who says they took one is lying, are you really going to fly from Johannesburg to Perth to find out?
Thanks, appreciated!
I guess this would make it impossible to cross the South Pole, but not many people are likely to do that, and as you say, it would greatly magnify flight times between any 2 points far south of the equator. (I assume you say that Australia, Africa and South America are basically their reported size, but that the distance to fly between them is phenomenal). I assume there are enough people in the far South that they would notice it, but since I don’t know any of them, I guess I can’t prove it without some work.
That said, anyone who was actually convinced of this theory could prove it by taking a few flights from Peru to Australia, possibly with some calls to friends to verify times. (Assuming that the conspiracy can’t suborn any Flat Earther who attempts this.)
One of the big implications there is that the Clipper Route would not have worked, so records and accounts of it must be part of the cover-up. Likewise, Capesize supertankers must be capable of much greater speed than they admit to: I expect they use a variant of the same engine technology that allows American CVNs their rumored top speed of 50+ knots.
Weird version of a Truman Show with only me or only a small number of people being duped seems workable.
Nearly all population being successfully duped about this makes no sense.
I saw a video once that said if the earth was shaped like a disc, gravity would be different. You’d be able to stand straight up at the north pole but as you traveled “south” (outward toward the rim) you’d naturally incline forward more and more, like you were climbing a hill with increasing slope, until you got to the edge at which point you could stand horizontally, along the same plane as the disc.
IIRC flat-earthers say the earth is constantly accelerating at 1g but I don’t think that counteracts this effect. (I might be wrong.)
I suppose if the earth was shaped like a giant concave lens, so it was flat on top but concave on the bottom (i.e. the north pole is “thin” and the outer edge is “thick”), it might counteract the gravitation effects I described. Same if the ground under the north pole is composed of a material that’s way less dense than the ground under the southern latitudes. I’m not intimately familiar with flat-earth theory but as far as I’m aware no flat-earther has proposed either of these ideas.
But anyway, every musician knows the earth is sharp, not flat.
Add rotation around N-pole to counteract the central point of gravity effect.
I don’t think flat-earthers claim the earth is spinning around the north pole. (In flat-earther models of earth, the earth is stationary and the sun and moon move in a circle in the sky.) Also, if a flat-earther made this claim he’d have to also explain the lack of coriolis effects when objects move north or south.
lack of coriolis effects
Oh.. Good point!
Didn’t Pratchett, too, miss this in his Discworld? I don’t remember it being mentioned. But then, there was no travel fast enough in his world to notice, and crossbow shots were too short, so he needn’t bother?
In my opinion a flat-earther should already have to explain the existence of coriolis effects when air masses move north or south, and the way that changes direction depending on whether the air mass is initially north or south of the equator.
I don’t study flat earthers: in the north-pole-is-the-centre-of-a-disc model, what do they say is the significance of what we all call “the equator”? It looks to me as if it would be a completely unremarkable region, with no reason to mark it with a line. For that matter, when sailors had the ceremony of “crossing the line”, how do flat-earthers think the sailors knew when to hold the ceremony?
Just typing that makes me realise all over again how little interest I have in finding out.
It would, as long as the earth itself is of negligible mass. If the earths normal gravity is low enough the effect you describe wouldn’t be noticeable by lay-people (and the experts are obviously all in on the conspiracy).
That’s not super implausible, btw, if the earth was a disk with a thickness of 10 km, it would only have 0.4% of the mass of a spherical earth.
(It would have to be made of some really bizarre materials in order not to fall apart or crumble into a sphere, though)
Flat earth theory assumes that all physics (starting with Newton, if not earlier) is false. A flat-earther who claims otherwise doesn’t understand physics.
I thought most of the arguments posed by flat-earth were based on their own “scientific” observations and reasoning. For example, “rays of light coming through clouds do not appear to be parallel, therefore the sun is much closer than Big Globe wants you to think”: they are ignorant about physics, but they don’t claim physics is false.
China and Taiwan are really on opposite sides of the Earth: you can only get to China by going east and you can only get to Taiwan by going west. States following the One-China policy must therefore insist that the world is round to make the policy marginally more plausible.
The conspirators anticipated this question and left it unanswered intentionally, as a puzzle to distract everyone from their real agenda.
It’s easier than having to explain how and why magic exists which creates a pac-man like space on the Earth (allowing straight-line travel between disjunct lands).
They didn’t even find out until traveling to outer space, and neither the Soviets nor the Americans knew how to break this truth to the world. The most plausible scenarios are a simulation, or an active God, and these nations born on the power of mankind would lose too much acknowledging either possibility.
Note here that the geographers (at least surface geographers) and airlines don’t have to lie, as they don’t know any better.
There lie beyond the edge of the Earth unmentionable horrors; the more people know/think about them, the stronger they get and the more they are able to encroach on our world. Therefore, it is best that people not know Earth has an edge at all.
They’re not THAT unmentionable. For instance, to one direction there’s a continuously-playing production of _Annie 2_.
It all goes back to Ptolemy – see, believing in a round Earth and spherical orbits produces more rounded people with smoother lives kaballistically. The astronomers were trying to help us be our best selves, and government got in on it when it became clear that round-earth-believing people were more docile citizens.
Will the next few months be a good time to finance a used car? The only thing I can say with confidence is that I am not economically literate enough to answer this question with certainty, so I’m asking the relatively (and in some cases absolutely) expert people here.
If I were to guess, I would expect that it would be easier to get a really good deal on a used car right now (assuming you find someone willing to interact with people enough to sell a car) but that you might have more trouble than usual getting good financing.*
*However, I’m not an “expert”.
What’s your reasoning?
Many people lost jobs or are in serious financial trouble and are more likely/desperate to sell cars.
It makes more likely to get a really good deal.
Exactly. Car dealerships (in places where they are open) are also probably not doing much business at the moment either, making it more likely that you can haggle them down on price.
As to why financing might be more difficult, my (again, un-expert) impression is that lending is tightening up in general, and car loans are only a little bit safer than unsecured loans because cars depreciate so quickly.
Suppose a car sold for 5,000$ six months ago, 3,000$ today, and 5,000$ in six months. You own that car, now, and want to sell it at some point. What do you do? If you’re desperate, you might sell it now. What do you do if you’re a car buyer/seller? You buy and take it off the market. This explains why the price never gets down to 3,000$ in the first place.
Of course, don’t take my word for it, look up local prices and compare to Kelly Blue Book values.
Only works if you have cash, low overhead and no solvency issues. Used car prices dropped a lot in 2008-2009, and it took basically 2 full years plus cash for clunkers to get it them back to pre recession levels.
Cars mostly depreciate with millage, but they still depreciate just with age which means you need either a huge margin or a short time frame for those types of buy and hold strats to pay off.
Maybe a good time to get a good deal on one of the expensive auto-toys, like a Porshe or something?
Are you sure that you financial position (emergency fund and employment stability) is good enough?
Adding more expense may be problematic in case of things getting worse.
Economically: I wouldn’t tie myself to any long term commitments right now, but as far as they go a prudent used car is closer to acceptable (of course if its a necessity for you to keep earning money right now then that is different). I have never financed a car though and I don’t know what the lenders recourse is beyond repossession, so that is an iffy statement by me.
Politically: Car companies are still fairly favored by politicians and I would expect a future stimulus bill to include car buying incentives. The last one killed people looking to buy used cars for a few years, and I would expect this one also to be aimed at new car buying.
Financing wise: I don’t know about the used car market but the new car market is offering some spectacular (looking) deals, up to 7 years financing with 0% interest for the whole term, and a few ‘looks to good to be true’ deals (Kia Sorrento with $4000 cash back, 4 month deferral on first payment, 75 month financing with 0% apr… though looking that is probably the super base model, often under-powered, though should be functional).
Proverbially its a buyers market this month, if you are going for it I would be ready to haggle aggressively.
Wouldn’t a stimulus aimed at new car buying create a lot of used inventory from people trading in or otherwise getting rid of their old cars, and thus lower the price of used cars?
Not if it is combined with intentionally destroying functioning cars, like the previous one.
This. Cash for Clunkers was designed to benefit the car manufacturers, which meant hurting used car buyers. Used cars are competition for new cars.
Did 5-10 y/o relatively fuel-efficient SUVs in good condition count as “clunkers”? Looking at the Wiki page, it seems like most of the SUVs we’re looking at surpass the maximum combined average fuel efficiency of 18mpg, so people wouldn’t be scrapping those but instead would be trading them in. Besides, Toyota and Honda SUVs retain their value relatively well so in some cases it might be better to trade it in than to scrap it and take the rebate even if it qualifies as a clunker.
The program created a shortage of used cars, more than half a million used cars were destroyed, which pushed up the prices of the remaining used cars for several years after.
So you’re saying an overall shortage of used cars spills over and affects the demand for particular used models there isn’t a shortage of.
I imagine I belong to a certain class of car-buyers who…
– Only buy used cars
– Are reluctant to buy anything other than relatively fuel-efficient Toyotas and Hondas, which hold their value relatively well and mostly aren’t the types of vehicles that qualify as “clunkers” anyway
– Want cars they can do their own basic maintenance on (so no hybrids or EVs or stuff that’s only a couple years old)
– Are not swayed by the flash/newness, warranties, big yellow stickers, etc. offered with new cars
Among people in that class, there is probably fiercer competition (i.e. greater willingness to pay) for reduced supply of the aforementioned used Toyotas and Hondas. But we’re not a huge cohort; wouldn’t the government incentives to buy a new car relieve the bulk of the remaining competition for used Toyotas and Hondas?
No, because people who were going to buy a new car anyway used the program. If you were going to buy a care sometime in the next year or so you might stretch and try to buy now. From the wikipedia on the CARS act
Basically it was just 370,000 used cars that normally would have hit the market over the next year or so were instead destroyed and recycled. That swamps any other differences in tastes effects.
From prior research I’ve done on this (although it may vary state to state):
If the lender repossesses your car, and sale of the car does not cover the remaining balance of the loan, they can sue you for the balance (and subsequently get a court order to garnish your wages or levy your bank account). Whether they would do so or not probably depends on the lender’s own policies, how large the remaining amount is, and possibly the jurisdiction.
Thanks for the answers so far. It looks like I should have provided background info and been more exact:
– I need a bigger car to accommodate a growing family.
– Although nothing is ever guaranteed, my financial/employment situation is good right now and likely to remain stable as best I can reasonably tell. I have what I consider a comfortable amount saved as well, in case of emergency.
– I don’t want to wait until late summer when I will be crunched for time and under pressure.
– My wife and I have already narrowed our selection down to a few widely-available SUVs that meet our budgetary and vehicular requirements. This means a used Honda or Toyota, with a likely payment of ~$200-250/month for 60 months. (I only include this detail to make it clear that we won’t be able to pay for the whole thing in cash, but we’re also not going to be buying anything exorbitantly pricey.)
– We are quite comfortable haggling.
I am merely trying to get a handle on whether, from a “how’s the market gonna be”/”what kinds of deals should we expect to see”/”what will interest rates be like” perspective, it’d be better to get out there and buy the car NOW NOW NOW or whether I should wait a couple months.
People may be guessing, some of them successfully. But it is still a guess, though may be be an educated one and better than random guess.
People may claim to be sure about market movements. This people are lying. Even if they guessed correctly, they were still lying about “it is certain that XYZ”.
And situation is so unpredictable at this moment that anyone claiming to predict this is suspicious at best.
My estimation would be that right now is the best time from a price/deals/interest rate perspective to buy a car in the past 10 years. However I would also guess that there is going to be a huge amount of variability based on the financial situation of the sellers and their estimation of the near future. Some people are going to be holding inventory expecting a near term turnaround and some people are going to be desperate for cash flow. If I was shopping now I would do two primary things
1. Visit multiple lots to get their offers, more than usual.
2. Sound them out for differences based on the size of your down payment. The more cash strapped ones are more likely to give favorable terms for more upfront, and their reaction might give you a clue to their situation.
A reason why you might want to wait, a major economic downturn would probably mean the repossession of a lot of vehicles.
Here is the used car sales price for the CPI back in the GFC bottomed in April 2009 and started its ascent in July 2009 which was the official start month of Cash for Clunkers.
Your advice in 2 is not consistent with how a typical car dealer works. Most (substantially all?) car dealers do not actually finance loans on the vehicles they sell, even though they are happy to give you that impression. Your down payment and subsequent loan payments go to a bank. The dealer might hold the down payment for a day or two before the lender pays them for the vehicle, but that’s not going to be a major factor for a dealer except if they are in an acute crisis.
I would not bring up financing until the end of the transaction (which is standard car buying advice), and I would not expect a better deal for offering a larger down payment.
I’m happy to be corrected here, car buying is definitely not in my wheelhouse but speculating wildly is.
Is this true for used car sales through a dealership as well?
In my experience, yes.
If you are buying a new car now and have good credit, I’d try to take advantage of the absurd financing terms that are now on offer (0% APR for 72 months!). Of course, you also want to negotiate the price down as much as possible as well, but these don’t have to be in conflict.
The dealer will try to combine the price and financing into a single discussion because it increases opacity and therefore gives them levers to retain value at the buyer’s expense. Talking down payment up front opens the door to that, and I think it would be difficult to avoid falling into the typical traps if you start there.
The standard advice is to politely but firmly refuse to play the dealer’s game of combining price and financing. Negotiate the price (and other non-financing terms like options). Leave open the possibility that you will finance even if you’re sure you will pay cash. You’ll get a better deal from the dealer if they think you’re financing through them, in part because the dealer also makes margin on the loan (maybe not at 0% APR, but in normal times at least…).
The advice to get multiple quotes is spot on. I would only add that you do not want to go to the lot to do that. Get the quotes over email. It’ll be easier for you, and the dealers won’t be able to do their usual stalling and hard sell tactics. The “email department” at a typical dealer operates on a different incentive structure that’s much more volume oriented than the in-person sales staff, which works to your benefit. A dealer that won’t quote over email and insists you come in person is a huge red flag, and you’re generally better off not doing business with them in my opinion.
This seems appropriate to put here
That is, there was a lot of debate in the Democratic primary about, say, the differences between Warren’s, Biden’s and Sanders’ health care plans.
That’s two different things, though: one is “why pick Candidate A over Candidate B?”, which is why all the debate (functionally, if they all have the same policy on Postage Stamps, what’s the reason to pick one over the other? If Lizzie, Joe and Bernie all agree stamps should be purple, why have Lizzie and Bernie running against Joe?)
The second one is then “When you have picked your candidate, what are their chances of actually getting those policies through?”. Different matter, and my cynical stance is “Less than a snowball in Hell’s chance, because if you’re old enough to vote you should also be old enough not to believe campaign promises”.
Nice to see that in this time of international crisis, some things never change:
I don’t know what the moral of this story is, apart from “scummy people will always be scummy” but maybe it’s worth bearing in mind when discussing matters like “why don’t we just order in necessary supplies without all this red tape about specifications and the rest of it?”. Unfortunately, not everyone is operating in good faith.
Before this is over, someone is gonna get lined up and shot.
I’ve come across my great-grandfather’s journals for the years 1916-1930. He was a Virginia and North Carolina sharecropper, and has a great deal to say about such things as hog prices, tobacco yields, and who in his farming town was sleeping with whom. He also has some observations about the (unprecedented, as far as he knew) pandemic flu of 1918:
For context, everyone in his immediate, and very nearly everyone in his extended family was taken very seriously ill except for my great-great-grandmother, who was either very lucky indeed or who was simply better at dealing with her illness than anyone else.
I have a lot of thoughts arising from this diary, but the first to mind is the degree to which we have things better than his generation, even with all this considered. It could be so very much worse.
Yup. I’ve thought of that often.
In 1918, older adults may have had partial protection caused by exposure to the 1889–1890 flu pandemic, known as the “Russian flu”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
Maybe this is how your great-great-grandmother did better.
What are the odds that Medicare-for-All would be passed if Sanders got elected President? 10%? 1%? Less? Regardless, the odds would still be higher than 0%, even if only marginally so. And 0% is roughly the probability that we’d have under Biden or any Republican President, since they don’t want Medicare-for-All to pass and would veto any bill proposing it. (Well, technically Congress could always override the veto, but that makes it even less likely. If there’s only a 0.1% chance under Sanders, it’d drop to a 0.01% chance under a President strongly opposed to the policy.)
The same applies to Trump’s wall. Maybe he only had a 0.1% chance of getting it built, but that’s still better than the odds that Kasich or Clinton would’ve given. (Except for the part about Mexico paying for the wall, which was always a literal impossibility regardless of who got elected President or what the makeup of Congress looked like. Maybe if Trump had access to Ceti space eels he could’ve made it happen.)
What was wrong with the plan to pay for it with taxes on remittances to Mexico?
Various well-moneyed groups oppose such taxes: https://imtconferences.com/taxing-remittances-us/
Any taxes sufficient to fund a border wall would be sufficient to fund entrepreneurs developing blockchain remittance tools which avoid these taxes and teaching their use to immigrant workers in the US.
And once those tools are developed:
And without blockchain it would be even cheaper and easier to do this!
Well for one thing, that wouldn’t be making Mexico pay for it. That would be placing a tax on Americans in order to pay for the wall, which is anthema to Republicans except when said Americans are of Mexican descent, apparently.
At any rate, for whatever reason that was so politically unpalatable that Trump decided not to do that despite two years of complete control over the government.
Just to make the debate over mail-in voting and pandemic-related voter suppression even more confusing, liberal challenger Jill Karofsky unseats Daniel Kelly in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.
Did refusing to postpone the election boost turnout in blue areas, or did it persuade people who wouldn’t have otherwise voted for Karofsky to vote for her? Or was turnout just naturally high enough that coronavirus fears couldn’t suppress it?
Or was turnout just naturally high enough that coronavirus fears couldn’t suppress it?
Maybe people were going so stir-crazy that they seized the opportunity to legitimately leave their houses! You’d have to look at previous elections to see what voter turnout was like, does anyone have any idea of the numbers involved (because that Vox article is doing nothing but make me wince; this choice quote from the lady – “I will not concern myself with what partisan right-wing special interests and politicians would like the outcome of cases to be” – doesn’t reassure me about her judicial impartiality and no, I wouldn’t be any happier with a right-wing judge-elect making the same comment about “left-wing partisan interests”. You’re supposed to rule on the law, not on “what do my political opponents want/not want?”).
They say she got 53% of the vote as against the other guy’s 47%, but no numbers like “what was the actual turnout, what is the usual turnout, were numbers up or down?”. Plenty of scaremongering about voters forced to choose between their health (and letting a red-fanged Trump nominee win), though.
538 says that turnout was down.
Turn out in Milwakuee itself was 59% of previous levels, but the suburbs were around 80%, IIRC. And that includes record levels of mail voting.
At a guess, the whole thing was so overtly Evil Scheme that a fair number of people voted D just to kick the people responsible for the whole thing in the teeth.
Was it an “overtly evil scheme”, though? Honestly I don’t even know. The media clearly did their best to frame it as the usual “evil republicans”, but one thing I find infuriating is that in all the breathless left wing media takes on that issue, I saw virtually no discussion about the actual legal questions involved. That says to me that most people reacting to that story have dangerously shallow thinking that never make it beyond “end result aligns with my preconceived notions”.
My rough understanding is that the legal question was: could (a) the Governor or (b) the Courts take action to postpone or extend an election if the legislature refused to do so?
I’m open to the answer to that question being “no,” but that leaves the blame mostly on the (majority Republican) state legislature, who refused the Governor’s request to postpone the election. It seems like the (democratic) Governor didn’t help things by apparently waiting until the last minute to really call the question, but maybe he was trying to negotiate earlier and being rebuffed, and in any event, the Legislature apparently had the power to change the electron rules and refused.
Thanks, this is good context. It’s really just the media framing of court decisions in general that bothers me. The actual underlying principles and legal questions are treated as irrelevant and the only thing that matters is whether the result benefits the ideological goal. To my eyes, the left is much more guilty of this, but that’s just my own biased perspective and both tribes seemingly engage in it without any self-awareness as far as I can tell.
It makes sense to treat the issues that way since the Supreme Court tends to vote along party lines on hot button issues anyway.
I think that sort of thinking is precisely part of the problem, and has basically given up on the rule of law in any meaningful sense. If that’s all it comes down to, then it’s a short leap to all of society turning into proud boys vs antifa clubbing each other in the streets, and I really, really don’t want that.
The specific branch of the gop occupying thev Wisconsin legislature have rather forfeited any presumption of good faith when it comes to elections.
it is one of the most extreme gerrymanders in the US, and on top of that, when the democrats won the governorship, they instantly set about gutting that position of all authority. Respect for the intent of the people is not something that they traffic in.
The courts are hard to call, because (a) the questions are very technical and (b) since they apparently all split perfectly along party lines, it’s hard to tell if the right answer legally was on one side or the other.
The Wisconsin Republican legislature, on the other hand, are IMHO reprehensible and I’m glad they didn’t get what they want.
It’s still a bit baffling to me why the Republicans would think this would favor them. A first order approximation of the people who I would expect to avoid the polls in favor of absentee voting would be older people with an established address. I would also expect that demographic to be biased Republican. And those are the people that the Republicans are disenfranchising.
Since I really don’t see any benefit for them in this, I think this might actually be a principled decision. Right-wingers that I know tend to invariably believe in widespread election tampering efforts by the left, and think improving election security is more important than avoiding disenfranchisement (at least on the margin at the moment.) I think the restrictions on absentee voting and whatnot might be due to that analysis, rather than thinking that this disenfranchisement would favor them electorally.
Corvid had overwhelmingly resulted in the closure of urban polling centers. They had good and sufficient cause to think it would help them. Except it was, as I said, a really blatantly Evil Scheme.
OK, I hadn’t heard about the polling place closures, only the absentee ballot issues. Looks like Milwaukee and Green Bay both had massive reductions in polling places, but no reduction in Madison.
Yeah, that makes the general narrative a lot more plausible.
The “hot button issues” caveat makes this harder to settle but the SC dynamics are a bit more complicated than merely following party lines: https://empiricalscotus.com/2019/04/03/kavanaugh-conservative/ for example shows that Kavanaugh is more often in agreement with Breyer than with either Gorsuch or Thomas.
What percentage of the uncounted absentee ballots were over 65 white voters? How many uncounted ballots were there? More generally, what was the relative turnout of this demo vs. the normal expected turnout?
Hard to formulate a theory of what happened until you have some numbers on actual “turnout”.
If possible, I’d love to see a breakdown of the early submitted vote by mail ballots vs later submitted, too.
That would definitely be interesting in trying to construct the likely outcome of some counterfactual. It’s not all that material to the question of “Why did the actual election that occurred come out as it did?”
You can know who requested ballots later, but you won’t be able to know how they voted. I doubt you could even get a reliable exit poll signal on this. But if you just want to know demos, that should be possible, depending on what data Wisconsin makes public.
In any case, I would not be surprised at all if their was a strong signal about the outcome simply based on who actually ended up casting ballots that were counted (i.e. what amounts to turnout).
It should be noted that there were multiple competitive Democratic primaries also on the ballot (the election was held a week ago and the count temporarily suspended for bureaucratic corona-related reasons; but Biden vs. Sanders was on the ballot and still a going concern, as was the Democratic primary for Mayor of Milwaukee), and so Democrats generally may have felt more enthused to turn up than Republicans did. Someone who came purely to vote for Bernie, or Joe, or who cares who gets to be Mayor of Milwaukee would’ve come and then thrown a vote to the liberal candidate since they were already there.
Turnout was fairly comparable to the most recent state Supreme Court election, which was a nailbiter conservative victory. This was a 10-point liberal win.
Even if that were true, the conservatives were quite confident of victory and seemed to think that extending the voting period would help Democrats. This margin is a brutal one in a state that was a sine qua non of Trump’s victory in 2016; if it is taken without any salt (which it shouldn’t be), it suggests that the national environment has worsened for Republicans since the 2018 midterms.
(A frequent comparison in conservative circles has been made to the 2012 Wisconsin recall election, in which Democrats attempted to oust very ideological anti-union Republican Governor Scott Walker over the summer in a special election but lost by 7 points, leading to confidence that Romney would go on to beat Barack Obama. That didn’t pan out, not in Wisconsin or elsewhere. So there’s still plenty of time for the mood to shift.)
Presumably you would have said the same about Obama’s healthcare policy positions. Yet here we are.
Yes, MFA isn’t likely to pass, but in the hypothetical where Sanders wins the presidency, it’s highly likely to go through committee in the House, might very well pass, and it might even get debated in the Senate. All that without a filibuster proof majority.
Or, the next Congress might decide that they are done with the filibuster altogether. It’s only a rule of the senate, not a constitutional requirement.
Do I think that’s likely? No. But I wouldn’t have thought a 60 vote majority was likely in 2007, either. Unlikely things happen all the time, just less often than the likely things.
Party platforms and campaign promises are a vector far more than a point.
The senate really, really needs to get rid of the filibuster.
This is not a partisan stance, it is simply a fact of life that the filibuster renders the senate completely impotent no matter who holds it.. and this does not result in do-nothing government, because as a practical matter, do nothing government is an abhorrent vacuum of power, instead what the filibuster creates is government by president and courts.
Which is a goddamn terrible idea.
> it is simply a fact of life that the filibuster renders the senate completely impotent
Cool! What’s the down-side?
Presumably
The filibuster is the only thing that has stopped the country from going full on Tyranny of the Majority (or Minority). No thanks!
… oh, for. Two things. The senate, and congress as a whole, is, by its very structure, already anti-majoritarian. Anything that can pass both by straight majority must have a majority of the actual population, and a majority of the states behind it.
Gluing “two thirds of the states behind it” onto the process via a procedure rule is a dire violation of the intent of the constitution, and further it is a recipe for decision paralysis.
This does not protect you from the tyranny of the majority in any way, because the government must be able to make decisions, and a branch that has lost the ability to do so will get ever more irrelevant.
So what the filibuster does is vest the power to actually do things in the presidency and the courts. Do you like and enjoy 9 old lawyers in robes doing all the legislating that matters with no possibility of loosing elections when they do something stupid?
Is the imperial presidency something you are comfortable with? Then by all means hold onto the filibuster because so long as congress only passes laws stating that water is wet, those tendencies will continue to accelerate.
I broadly agree with Thomas Jorgensen here. I too would prefer a world where the only laws that got passed were the ones with a supermajority. I’ve often wondered what would happen if for example a president just vetoed everything for four years (it would probably be very bad in some way, but I can dream). But that’s not the alternative we’re presented with. What we get instead is an entire generation that can only point to Obergefell as the government doing anything they care about in their lifetime. Right now the alternative to tyranny of the majority is tyranny by 5 unelected Harvard lawyers. And when they pass a new law it can only be overturned by 2/3 of the House, 2/3 of the Senate, and 2/3 of the state legislatures. That doesn’t sound very democratic to me.
I’m a bit confused here. What does the impotence of the Senate have to do with activism by the courts? I don’t see that either strength in the Senate of weakness makes any difference in this. I would prefer less activism in the Supremes, but I don’t think the Senate is at all relevant to this.
You can make a stronger case for the presidency, since the executive branch might feel it needs to take action when the legislature fails to do so. But I don’t think even this is mostly true. The reason the presidency is so strong is because the House and Senate has passed a lot of legislation to allow the White House to do what it wants. If you get rid of this enabling legislation, then the White House can’t take action. It actually is a possibility that when every politician is raring to go make some change, it simply isn’t legal for them to do so. That is my dream; when politicians do nothing in response to problems. In 90% of these cases, the result would be improved.
@Mark V Anderson
This is my subjective impression, and I would love to be wrong. I want a president whose legislative agenda is “veto everything.” You run him I’ll vote for him. But in my lifetime, capitol hill is a place where tax dollars are mysteriously vanished out of existence.
Presidents come into office with lists of things they want to do and they occasionally get them, like the Bush or Trump tax cuts, or the ACA. Even if those things were technically passed by congress the president gets the credit.
Obergefell is the big one though. I worry that to a lot of people, it’s like the grinding gears of government were suddenly fixed overnight. Never mind that state legislatures were legalizing gay marriage one after another. It almost certainly would have been legalized in another 10 years anyway. I worry that the impression that left was that if you really need something done, don’t bother with your congressman, go to the courts.
I think Justice Scalia said something about how people used to say, when they saw something they didn’t like “There should be a law.” Now they say “That’s unconstitutional.”
@Jake R
Is the US turning into the Catholic church, but with various ‘true’ interpretations of the Constitution, rather than the Bible?
Yeah but this isn’t anything at all new. I think the peak of leftist judicial activism was the ’70’s. Roe v Wade was the big one, but also there was the beginning of disparate impact, no religion in the schools, and I think some other stuff. Obergefell seems like an outlier to me, harkening back to the ’70’s, and confusing to me that it happened in a supposedly more conservative court. But I haven’t yet read the case, so maybe it makes more sense than my first impression as being simply a case of lefty activism. Although not as harmful as the ’70’s cases, since we were moving in that direction anyway. In any case, we do seem to have fewer of those kind of cases in this millennium, so I don’t think you can point to recent political trends as a cause of judicial activism.
The Switch OS update that dropped today (10.0.0) added the ability to remap the buttons on a controller. Which means I can finally use my 8BitDo M30 Bluetooth controller with the SEGA Genesis Classics collection.
Previously, neither the controller nor the game allowed enough customization to make the controller’s A button be the game’s A button, and so on. I bought both before I realized this.
For anyone interested, here’s the mappings you need to fix that: L > X, R > A, X > L, A > Y, Y > R
Mind you, this means you have to hit X+Y instead L+R to start the game once it’s loaded, use C to select, X to favorite games, and work out a few other conversions for the collection’s main UI. The payoff is that the actual games now Just Work.
There are better ways to play Genesis games, but I’m glad that this way also works now.
Also, if you’re playing Megaman Zero, definitely swap the bumpers (L and R) with the triggers (ZL and ZR). Makes it way more comfortable to play.
How can I see what version the Switch is running?
When I play Megaman X, I need to make R the fire button each time. A platformer can’t have me using my right thumb for jump and fire and dash.
Go to System Settings, all the way down to the System page, then the version number will be displayed right under the System Update button. It should say “Current version: 10.0.0”; if not, just hit the update button and the system should update.
After the update, the remapping will be available under the “Controllers and Sensors” page.
The border wall wasn’t fanciful – that is quite doable, and it could have been completely done by now if Trump had been willing to do some horse-trading with Congress. The fanciful part was Trump’s claim that Mexico would pay for it.
Because the average voter knows nothing about policy and is only barely paying attention, so the winning move is to shout whatever will tickle your supporters’ lizard brain the most.
Delta will now board flights from the back.
https://twitter.com/NY1/status/1249661107251208195
This better be one of those things we don’t revert after the virus passes or else I’ll need to release another virus.
It’s interesting because the current (previous) seating policies are highly non-optimal for boarding times, which does cost the airlines serious money through lower efficiency, but apparently they decided that they could make more money by charging some flyers extra money to board early.
How often is boarding/deplaning passengers the long pole for airlines to turn the plane around? If refueling, maintanence checks, or loading/unloading checked bags and othe cargo takes longer than getting the old passengers off and getting the new ones seated, then speeding up boarding wouldn’t save the airlines a dime.
Most flight I’ve been on, I seem to recall the plane sitting at the gate for a nontrivial amount of time after the passengers had finished boarding, which at least suggests something else is the long pole.
I have no personal knowledge, I’m just going by an article in a Popsci magazine I read once talking about someone proposing a more efficient method of boarding planes. The article claimed that boarding delays were a significant cost to airlines, but obviously, it would say that.
The theoretically most efficient boarding method (assuming a narrow-body jet, but there are versions of it for wide-bodies) is IIRC to board all window seats first, then all middle seats, then all aisle seats. This means that nobody has to wait in the aisle, blocking it, as the other person in their row puts their stuff away before sitting down.
There are two problems with this. One is that to work optimally it requires people travelling together to board separately. You could probably make exceptions for families with young children etc, but passengers still might not like it.
The other is that with the way people seem to take more and more hand luggage, the overhead bins might well all be full by the time aisle-seat passengers get to board.
Technically the most efficient method is much more complicated and would require something like 50 different boarding groups. Which, of course, could only be implemented in a spherical cow world where people perfectly obey orders. This video is an excellent and entertaining look at the efficiency of various boarding methods.
The behavior of most airlines incentivizing against checked luggage is another piece of evidence in favor of boarding not being the long pole. Charging for checked bags incentivizes substituting carry-ons for checked bags, which slows down boarding but speeds up cargo loading and unloading. This loses time for the airline if boarding is the long pole, but saves time if cargo is the long pole.
I always thought the checked baggage thing was just short sightedness, but that makes sense.
Incidentally, I’ve never heard the expression “long pole” before. I guess you learn something new every day.
The ostensible reasoning here has been about overall plane weight, not loading times.
That’s also plausible as a factor. I expect handling costs are also involved: fewer bags mean you don’t need to spend as much on ground crews to load and unload the bags and get them to the appropriate connecting flight or baggage claim.
There are other incentives against checking bags. All it takes is for someone to lose their checked bag to a bad transfer once and they’ll probably never do it willingly again, but also people with a strict schedule or just plain impatient won’t want to wait for the baggage claim, as some airports take over an hour after leaving the plane for the carousel to get the first bag.
Yep. In most cases, the airline would have to pay me $50 before I’d ever consider checking a bag. It adds somewhere between 1-2 hours to the total travel time associated with a round trip flight, easy.
@Loriot:
> Incidentally, I’ve never heard the expression “long pole” before.
I’ve never heard it either. Searching, it seems to be short for “the long pole in the tent”, meaning the linchpin. And it shows up in the “MBA Jargon Watch”: http://www.johnsmurf.com/jargon.htm.
I’m skeptical of most “improved boarding methods”. They work great if you’ve got a bunch of competent, attentive people. If you’ve got people who are tired, bored, distracted, not terribly proficient in the language being spoken or saddled with children, then you have problems. If you’re running a seriously delayed flight out of a major tourist destination, you have utter chaos. And no, you can’t really customize by situation, because passengers and gate agents value consistency.
As for letting elites board first, those are the people who pay the bills at the airline. Of course they care more about those people than you.
Edit: As for incentivizing against checked bags, it could also be a case of them wanting more room for air cargo.
I’ve heard it mostly in software engineering project management contexts, where it’s used to refer to the longest-duration chain of tasks that need to be completed sequentially. The significance is that the “long pole” task chain sets a floor for the overall time to complete the project, so if you’ve got the other, shorter task chains running in parallel, you want to monitor the “long pole” tasks more closely for unexpected delays and prioritize those tasks over other things the same people could be working on.
I don’t get it. Shouldn’t be the rows farthest from the doors first? Or do Delta’s planes only have doors at the front?
I’ve flown a fair bit inside America and I don’t think I’ve ever been on a plane where there are any seats forward of the boarding door.
Do people not board at the back door? I’ve flown in Europe on low-cost airlines, and on a typical 737 or A320 we board at the front and the back door. Lately the boarding pass usually says which door is closer to your seat. Looking it up, it looks like it’s not that common, and mostly a low-cost airline thing; I didn’t realize that it wasn’t universal.
I’ve never seen back-door boarding on a US domestic flight.
Tom Woods has been sending out a bunch of EMails lately about how real ICU numbers seriously undershoot what models told us the casualties from the pandemic would be. What’s up with that? Is he just fulla beans or what?
Uh, isn’t all that common knowledge? The models *are* severely over-estimating the impact of COVID, and they *did* assume social distancing would be in place…
Nobody who didn’t already believe this is ever going to be convinced, though.
If it makes you feel any better, last week (or maybe the week before? They’re all running together…) I posted that I was “cautiously obedient” about the whole lockdown thing and would re-evaluate as more data came in. I’m now leaning towards “not worth it.”
The earlier IHME model not only vastly overestimated deaths, it estimated that New York State and New Jersey ran out of hospital beds (not just ICU beds, but those too) in March. People in authority were still taking it seriously when every testable prediction it made was utter nonsense. They later amended it so it was only somewhat wrong (but it was STILL wrong in the past). What respectable source reported on how wrong this model was? Closest I could find was The Gateway Pundit. This is not quite as disappointing as the time I went searching for someone noting a story was an obvious hoax and found only Stormfront talking about that, but it’s up there.
The IHME “model” is more of a line drawing game with university backing. It’s about as valid as Trump’s sharpie on the weather map, and should not be taken seriously.
The lower (95%) bound from IHME’s 25 March prediction was 34K deaths. The mean was 73K. Those numbers bounced up and down a lot in the first week to 10 days because of high-impact data coming in and major revisions to their model. If we end up around 60k, I won’t kill ’em. They were going purely empirical and had extremely little data to go on outside of Hubei. Should they have not published their model until they got more data and had more time to make the methodological improvements they eventually did? Perhaps. I certainly think they didn’t account for epistemic uncertainty enough.
And they did make a ton of improvements in subsequent days. Part of that is because places like Italy and Spain turned a corner (giving them many more effective data points about when outbreaks can peak) and part of it is because of legit changes to their model.
Frankly, I think they’ve been wonderfully transparent and thorough in their explanations of their methods, their adjustments, and their rationale. More folks should act that way. Modeling is hard, especially when you have such a paucity of data. And it’s not like I’ve seen anyone else who did better.
Generally I’d be tempted to say yes. I wouldn’t really trust a word from the “other libertarians would kill their own grandmothers to host a cruise as great as mine” guy, he comes across as the worst sort of middleweight political grifter.
But in this case, I’m not even sure what you’re asking exactly. The average model has been revised downward, he’s right about that much. But it’s not the “gotcha!” he thinks it is. There have always been worst-case models and best-case models, and the average model is exactly that, an average. If things end up turning out more like the best-case models predicted, then the average gets adjusted. That’s just the way science works, so trying to spin it into “lol scientific establishment just got #rekt” is ignorant at best and deliberately misleading at worst.
It’s like when right-wingers or disgruntled leftists talk about how all the political analysts who expected Hillary to win in 2016 must’ve been complete idiots who had no idea what they were talking about. If the analysts say that one candidate has 75% odds of victory and another has 25% odds of victory, then the second candidate winning doesn’t mean they were wrong or that their formula is off, it just means that an unlikely-but-not-that-unlikely outcome happened. Yet people still use it as an excuse to laugh about how “Nate Silver totes got BTFO’d” or whatever.
But they’re not. They are turning out nearly an order of magnitude better than the best-case models.
“Order of magnitude” is just the table stakes when predicting exponential growth. Consider the following simplistic model: deaths are dependent on number of beds and number of severe cases, which itself depends on R_0. In both cases the dependencies are super-linear. We’re not really used to having models that are this thoughtfully constructed and still having this much uncertainty in the outcome. I think the nearest comparison is the Drake equation.
@KieferO
Then the error bars need to be larger. When you say “best-case” you mean it’s at the extent of your error bars in a positive direction. Worst case likewise at the end of your error bars negatively.
The problem is that the error bars are unreasonably small and the model has seriously misjudged the disease.
I would also accept that the models were correct but Trump’s response exceeded the best case by so much that it saved millions of American lives, but I doubt most of those promoting the models would love that conclusion.
There are a ton of variables we don’t know, and a lot of the best data that’s come out so far has come from the places that have had especially serious problems. Cruise ships where a few people had COVID-19 and the worst anyone suffered was a bad cold probably didn’t get intensively studied. All that probably makes all the models pretty noisy.
The best-case estimate was 100,000, which has now been lowered to 60,000. That’s not “nearly an order of magnitude.” The 240,000 figure was always the worst-case estimate. Also, keep in mind that both the original 100k-240k figure and the new 60k figure are for COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. by August, not for total COVID-19 deaths ever.
This is shifting the goalposts. The predictions for each individual state are bound to be even messier than the predictions for the U.S. as a whole. And the errors haven’t all been in one direction; there are some states where the estimates were actually too low. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, for example, the revised estimates predict almost five times as many fatalities as the original estimates did.
Do you actually believe this is an accurate description of what happened?
@LadyJane
First, lowering it by 40k is half an order of magnitude. That’s well within the ballpark.
More importantly, I am talking about hospitalizations, not deaths. That was the major concern of everyone, that we were going to run out of hospital space and see a massive death spike because of that.
The IMHE prediction on April 1st (less than 2 weeks ago) was nearly 250,000. We’ve got 20% of that. I think that calling 20% “almost an order of magnitude” is a reasonable statement.
I think COVID is a big deal. Anything that hospitalizes 50,000 people matters quite a lot and we should deal with it seriously. That doesn’t make the models good.
The choices are this or “the models were biased very high”. You pick your favorite.
Trump’s response has been above average among Western countries. Not great, but nothing to be ashamed of.
I’m not exactly sure why people think things are over.
Because things went crazy and now feel like they are settling down.
@HeelBearCub
I do not think things are over. I am saying that the models for what it would look like TODAY are off by orders of magnitude.
https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1249773699005394944
12,000 versus 567 is roughly two orders of magnitude.
@Echo Chaos:
How many doublings is it to get to 1 order of magnitude? To get one order of magnitude greater than estimated?
The early portions of the growth curve are very sensitive to small changes in initial conditions.
Do you know what I see in those charts? A growth curve that looks very much like what was expected, but that luckily started growing later than was assumed. You make some assumptions about how many undetected cases there are in a state and, phew, luckily they weren’t quite as far along.
That, or you will need to figure out what makes Tennesse and Georgia different than the UK, Germany, and everywhere else.
@HeelBearCub
By the way, please try to put EchoChaos as one word, it helps me searching for people talking to me.
Between 3 and 4 doublings. 3 doublings is 8 times, just under an order of magnitude, 4 doublings is 16. At the current doubling rate of COVID anywhere but NYC, that means they were off by at least a week, perhaps two.
But to be clear, those aren’t “way out predictions”. The original is from April 1, less than two weeks ago. We had a pretty good idea of how many current hospitalizations existed on that date to predict from.
And note that they agreed that their model of April 1st was garbage because the model of April 5th, a mere four days later, was revised down an order of magnitude from 15,000 to 1,500 and was STILL too high by 2x.
They are still showing Tennessee’s peak as coming sometime in the next week, to be clear. This isn’t that Tennessee is earlier in the curve, it’s that the height of Tennessee’s curve was VERY wrong.
Heat and humidity is a big one. They’re more rural/suburban, etc.
But I don’t have to justify it, I’m just pointing out that the models have been regularly on the very high side, not providing models of my own.
@EchoChaos:
It’s ony 1 doubling to be within 1 order of magnitude of the prediction.
To be one order of magnitude over the guess is about 8 doublings.
The predicted models change as behavior changes impact spread rates. We have a hard time directly observing changes in behavior, and even more guessing how those observed changes have impacted spread rates, so our models are going to change as we get a lagging indicator of how overall spread has been infected.
This is unsurprising.
What it doesn’t mean is that, if we stop social distancing, the virus won’t spread.
Edit: And noted about the specific typing of the name
@HeelBearCub
The IMHE model already assumed full social distancing. Maybe we’re just extra social distancing. 🙂
I agree with that. You seem to be reacting as if I’m saying “drop all social distancing and open the country”. I’m not. But those who are acting like these changes aren’t enormous are doing the argument a disservice.
To be clear, I am.
At the level of government involvement at least. Individuals and private organizations should probably still make efforts to engage in social distancing. But forcing them to do it is inappropriate.
So public schools open back up with their mandatory attendance requirements?
(You can hate those things. Fine. But it’s still the system we have right now.)
I mean I feel like this is a bit unfair, because I don’t favor mandatory attendance at public schools in the first place.
But yeah, sure, why not. If you as a parent don’t like it, pull your kids out and homeschool, private school, online school, whatever.
Thanks. I acknowledge the unfairness of the question, but it still needed answered, since it’s what we’ve got.
. . . Huh, y’know, a lot of other things are so in-flux right now, and people are very willing to let a number of things slide because of the virus, that we could get a system of “public schools are back open, but attendance can be done virtually, depending on your risk tolerance.”
@EchoChaos:
Well, here is at least part of the answer.
My emphasis.
And Florida seems like a pretty good counter-argument to the idea that heat and humidity would keep R0 low enough that you can ignore the need to take drastic action.
Seems to me that if social distancing is outperforming all the models by a lot, and we know that compliance is shoddy (based on evidence gathered by our eyes at the store), then there is another factor at play that the models have not anticipated.
One thing to consider (perhaps), given the high number of celebrity and athlete cases, is that flying was a particularly superb method of spreading.
Isn’t that already an option?
My understanding is that there are fully online private and public schools where you can get a valid high school diploma.
The simplest explanation would seem to be “the disease isn’t nearly as bad as they thought.”
@Clutzy
Perhaps the models assume compliance would be even shoddier than it is?
We have plenty of evidence, in body bags and mass graves, that this simple explanation is false.
@Matt M
My own hypothesis is that the disease is in most circumstances very poor at spreading with an R0 of barely over 1, so a large portion of the spread is super-spreading situations. Airplanes, public transit, choir practice, and probably some others which aren’t known yet. Possibly super-spreading _cases_ as well. So you see it spread really fast at first, but then the super-spreading opportunities are saturated or are prevented by the most basic of the social-distancing requirements, and R0 collapses.
This doesn’t explain Singapore and Tokyo, however.
@HeelBearCub
Sure, I understand how models work. I’ve done modelling before at a professional level. It’s certainly good news that social distancing is so effective.
But the question of “how accurate are the models today that were off by tens of thousands dead a week ago?” remains. Especially when we are using them to guide a multi-trillion dollar economy.
Florida seems like pretty solid evidence that heat and humidity do matter a fair bit, although certainly not enough to ignore the virus. Despite a very late and very partial shutdown relative to the rest of the country and despite a large, older population, they have relatively few deaths, comparable to California, who DID lock down aggressively and early.
We will see if the few states left that have not instituted lockdowns see dramatically different rates.
I don’t like this explanation. It doesn’t account for how easily C19 spreads in certain environments that we know are classic disease spreaders, like planes and retirement homes, but the flu doesn’t spread nearly that well at those places.
But, it doesn’t seem as susceptible to spreading in filthy overused supermarkets as we would expect when compared to its spreading in the Airplane.
One obvious guess about why previous models of spread of the disease might be wrong is that they’re built on the behavior of people before most folks were worried about catching COVID-19.
Let’s assume that the virus mostly gets transmitted by close contact and surface contamination: droplets flying from my nose and mouth into your face (mostly big droplets that don’t go more than a few feet unless I’m coughing, sneezing, yelling, or singing), or those same droplets getting on my hands and then getting on doorknobs and elevator buttons and straps you hold onto while riding the subway, and then you touch those things and rub your eyes or something.
In January, in most of the world outside East Asia, most people were going about their normal life. Hanging out in crowded bars and cafes, going to concerts and conferences, flying across the country or across an ocean, hugging and handshaking and kissing their friends and acquaintances, scrunching into a subway car or elevator, sharing a cab, crowding next to each other in the grocery store or bank, going to the doctor’s office for minor stuff, etc. People with colds that weren’t too serious (and sometimes people who felt pretty lousy) were reporting into work or going to school, because that’s what was expected of them. Nobody was wearing a mask, few people were carrying around hand sanitizer and using it all the time, etc.
In that environment, the virus could spread really well. Asymptomatic infected people and somewhat sick people hugged and breathed and sang their way around town, spreading droplets full of virus everywhere they went. Lots of people caught it from the guy who looked kind-of pale and ill when he rode the elevator with them, or the guy they shook hands with a couple minutes after he sneezed into his hand, or the lady sitting at the table next to them at the cafe who had a bit of a cough but otherwise seemed okay. R_0 was high.
Then, everyone started realizing this virus was bad news. We can see this in statistics–restaurant bookings and airplane passengers suddenly evaporated. You could also see it in day-to-day behavior–all the stores suddenly ran out of hand sanitizer because everyone realized they needed some to carry around and use all the time, people started avoiding public transit, etc. Lots of people started keeping 6 feet of distance from strangers.
Right away before anything else had happened, R_0 fell. Close enough contact with strangers for big short-range respiratory droplets to end up landing on your face or going up your nose became much more rare. Contaminated surfaces were less likely to be touched and people were more likely to wash their hands afterward. More people started trying to order their groceries delivered or have them brought to their car in front of the store.
That wasn’t 100%–in most schools and many workplaces and most public transit, 6 feet of space is hard to achieve, and some people didn’t care about the virus. But enough people started doing it to make the virus spread a lot more slowly. Whatever R_0 your model was using based on the pre-Corona-panic world was going to be a big overestimate of the post-Corona-panic world.
This also suggests one reason why Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore may have done better than most western countries at slowing its spread–they took it seriously, both because of the experience of SARS a few years ago, and because the stuff happening in China got more attention from the public and seemed more relevant to them than it did to most Americans and Europeans. That by itself didn’t stop the virus, but it may have slowed its spread by quite a bit. Perhaps enough that testing and tracing could work.
It’s a little like the way that we spent a gazillion dollars on post-9/11 improvements to airplane security, but the most important change happened when everyone realized hijackers were going to crash the plane and kill everyone on board, so they must never be allowed into the cockpit no matter what they did or threatened.
I know one other source of error in some of the models is that they assume random mixing in the population. Really, people have smallish groups they mostly interact with, and then have a few other random interactions. If you go to the same coffee shop every morning, then the same office every weekday, and go to the same church at the same time every weekend, but also every now and then go to a concert or basketball game or something, most of your exposure is to a relatively small set of people. You will almost certainly never be directly exposed to most of the people in the city you live in. That kind of structure of associations might explain stuff like why the disease seems to have spread much faster in some specific communities (blacks in NYC, orthodox Jews in a couple NYC suburbs).
Note that this random-exposure model is probably a better fit for:
a. City dwellers who use public transit.
b. Frequent travelers
c. People working in public facing jobs like being a doctor, public transit employee, retail clerk, Uber driver, etc.
d. People who eat out at a lot of restaurants, go to a lot of public events like concerts, etc.
So you might get somewhat better modeling for those folks than for most other people. And of course both lockdowns and just decreased interest in travel and concerts and such will have decreased all that.
@albatross11:
I think Kevin Bacon would tell you that fully random mixing isn’t necessary to get a high degree of connectivity. In a normal environment, at a population level, R0 basically smooths that over anyway.
Under lockdown, the people outside my house I know are the ones I’m actually least likely to come in contact with. Random person at store is far more likely.
Now, I mainly go to the same stores, if that’s what you mean, but that seems more like a local starting condition.
The question I have, is how do they arrive at estimates of R0 under various different policies?
There aren’t any body bags or mass graves where *I* live. In fact, there are unemployed nurses who are laid off or furloughed because their hospitals are empty. And I live in a place where all the “experts” are screaming that we implemented social distancing way too late, that the measures we implemented aren’t nearly severe enough, and that people aren’t obeying them with sufficient rigor.
I don’t deny that COVID can be very bad for certain people in certain places. The primary error seems to be “looking at the worst case environment and assuming that will happen everywhere.”
If this thing is as bad as they say, there should be millions dead already in places like India. Why aren’t there?
@Matt M:
Well, if you wait until there are trucks full of body bags and mass graves, you are doing it wrong. The whole idea is to look at what has happened elsewhere and avoid it, not replicate it.
I think people seem to have this unconscious idea that the spread started everywhere simultaneously, or everywhere outside of China, or something. Each locale starts at a different time. If anything, I think trying to model at a country level, while necessary, is too broad.
On this graph I see the progression of India’s confirmed Covid-19 deaths looking like a bunch of other countries, and the mass grave and body bag stage doesn’t start till after a locale is later in that curve.
They’ve also put in place aggressive lock down policies, earlier on the curve than the worst countries. Will they be as effective in India? One would tend to doubt it, but it’s not impossible.
I would also expect that India’s death toll is understated compared to other countries, just owing to starting resources per capita. They would seem likely to miss more deaths. But I don’t know enough about the public health service there to have a more informed opinion.
I agree.
But I also think that looking at all the places that don’t have mass graves and concluding “This must be because they implemented lockdowns more quickly, and even if they didn’t technically do that in terms of the calendar, they must have had their first cases later” is also wrong.
Lockdowns aren’t the only relevant variable. It’s clear there are more.
There is a lot of randomness on when a community gets its first few cases. The law of large numbers doesn’t take over until you have maybe 50-100 cases.
I would like to watch the Castle of Fu Manchu episode of MST3K on my tv. The episode is available for free on the web at shoutfactorytv.com. My tv is a fairly standard modern tv (a TCL with Roku). For example, it has built-in apps to watch YouTube, Amazon Prime, etc., but nothing to stream from just any old website. What’s the easiest way to do this? I also have a reasonably powerful laptop running Windows 10, a Samsung Galaxy Note8 phone, wifi that everything is connected to.
I assume you don’t have an HDMI cable lying around you can use to connect the laptop to the television? If not, you can try Windows’ built-in casting features. Never tried it myself.
There’s a ton of MST3K episodes up on YouTube anyway.
EDIT:
With a bit of screwing around you can trick the streaming platform in to letting you download the whole show, albeit as 15-second clips you have to splice together somehow. Just do “view source” and follow the chain of obfuscated URLs until you get to the video files.
I’ve heard it proposed that one way we could re-open the economy is by developing a test to determine whether someone has already had COVID or not, and allowing those who have already had it to return to work.
Even assuming that those who have had it gain immunity, and that such a test is successfully developed and deployed en masse, doesn’t this create a bizarre incentive situation wherein anybody who hasn’t already had COVID and wants to be employed and doesn’t have sufficient savings to live indefinitely without working will now actively seek to become infected with COVID intentionally?
If we divide society into two camps of “those who have had COVID” and “those who aren’t allowed to work” how in the hell are you going to stop everyone in the latter from rushing out to find an infected person to pay to cough on them or whatever?
It seems politically infeasible to make people choose between contracting a horrible disease or being indefinitely unemployed… and if we’re willing to go down that road eventually, why don’t we just go down that road right now and aim for herd immunity and re-openings?
What about those of us “allowed to work from home”, who are further divided into “prefers to go back to the office” and “prefers to keep working from home”?
I believe I would be perversely incentivised to NOT report that I had COVID and got over it, so I could keep avoiding my commute for as long as possible.
Easy – your employer says “Our new bona fide condition of employment is that you must be allowed by the government to come to the office, we’ll give everyone 30 days to ‘get tested’ before we start laying off everyone who isn’t compliant”
So people who get tested and haven’t had the virus all get fired? Or did you mean to phrase that differently?
If it is “you must be tested, and if you test as immune (already had it) you must report to work, otherwise keep working from home” I would maybe buy this but still think it would be highly unlikely.
Also, once they made it a condition of employment, the company would likely have to foot the bill.
In the US this runs afoul of the ADA, as not having immunity would be considered a disability that the company is required to make accommodations for.
Yeah, the weird thing about this situation is my standard of living has improved. I’m in no danger of losing my job, am still getting paid, and I haven’t put on pants in 2 weeks. “Oh no, puh-lease Br’er COVID-19, whutevah yew dew, don’t throw me in that…comfortable home office!”
You’re in more danger than you used to be. And every week of economic downturn your risk increases.
Nobody is immune to job losses in an environment where we’re seeing an across the board economic contraction.
Eh, I don’t want to say where I work for anti-doxxing purposes, but I’m at extremely, extremely low risk of losing my job. Yes, it’s possible a meteor could strike the earth, expunge all human life and I would lose my job. But it’s at almost no risk from coronavirus.
Forget coronavirus for a second. The question is whether it’s at risk for large-scale all-encompassing economic downturn in which practically every organization on Earth other than grocery stores are significantly poorer than they used to be.
No, I’m still fine.
+1
This has the potential to be a Great Depression sized economic downturn. Maybe it won’t, but I think that’s the scale we should be thinking of. In that context, few peoples’ jobs are truly secure long-term.
People working from home if they want to doesn’t seem like an important problem to me
One way you could do it is to only announce the policy after you’ve done the tests, and not extend it to future tests. Alternatively, you could make COVID-free unemployment more attractive by giving out a UBI for those who consistently test negative.
But I think this policy wouldn’t work regardless, because there is basically no way to enforce it. Would you be forced to have your Covid-haver certificate on you at all times? When you’re working, visiting your parents, sitting in a park? Would police walk through crowds forcefully distancing anyone who didn’t bring theirs?
This pandemic situation is extremely hard to resolve, because whatever you do, a lot of people will be materially hurt by it. I can’t predict what politicians will choose, and maybe the covid certificate route will be implemented somewhere. I guess the people eager to go back to work are mostly non-elderly and reasonably healthy, so they’re in the lower risk group for Covid regardless.
Giving someone a disease for money is probably already illegal, and finding a person with an active Covid case (typically lasts about a week before you’re either in the hospital or no longer infectious) might be harder than you think. And you could combine the policy with enforced quarantine and tracing for all confirmed cases, which will probably happen once we have testing even without the certificate policy. So getting infected on purpose might not be that easy.
I’ll take this time to point out that even the most pessimistic projections I’ve seen don’t expect 100% infection rate…so what about the people who never get it?
You wouldn’t have this policy forever, just until there’s a treatment, vaccine or herd immunity, and no more danger of overwhelming the medical system.
After that covid just becomes a notifiable disease like tuberculosis and the plague.
Well, early on it won’t be very useful because hardly anyone will be immune yet. By the time this allows enough people to go to work to be significant we’ll probably basically be at herd immunity levels anyway.
You have to have your driver’s license anytime you drive. It doesn’t seem too radical.
Yeah, just like they ticket people who drive without a license.
I’ve always assumed that the driver’s license model relies on the assumption that people without a driver’s license are also worse drivers, and thus easy to spot. Yet you still sometimes hear about someone driving for decades without a license.
If someone without a license drives in a way that is no different from a law abiding licensed driver, he doesn’t pose any extra danger and there is no harm if he’s never found out. If someone without a covid certificate behaves the same way as an immune person, that’s inherently dangerous and the policy relies on finding them. Keep in mind that the non immune will be a large majority of people for a while.
I guess you could have a central database of who can go out and who can’t, and put up cameras with face recognition, but that would be such an immense violation of our previous values that I can’t quite see it happening.
You could provide people who were immune with some sort of badge or baldric they were permitted to wear. If everyone you see working in a grocery store or restaurant is wearing it, that’s a pretty good reason to prefer going there to going somewhere else.
I don’t think compelling people to stay indoors is a very attractive option, but one can urge them to do it and prevent events that get large numbers of people together.
@DavidFriedman
In many contexts, assigning some wearable status badge to some portion of the population has such a bad history behind it that it’s not feasible. Even in the US I doubt people would accept it.
And from the enforcement perspective, you still have to go and check if the badge wearer is entitled to the badge. So they’d functionally have to be a conspicuous personalized certificate.
That said, you seem to assume that everyone is allowed to work, but businesses get the option to advertise themselves as certified covid free, which is different from what Matt M proposed and has different complications.
I believe everyone here suggesting it was being sarcastic.
(I know someone who drives without a license. He never ever gets pulled over because he is extremely conscious that he cannot afford to get pulled over.)
Only if he gets his car registered by someone else. To drive your own car you need a current license and registration, police will pull you over otherwise.
We can decide whether to care.
Police officers wear uniforms. So, in many contexts, do members of the military. Every year universities have commencements at which faculty members wear garb that signals their academic status. Boy scouts wear uniforms with badges showing their rank.
I think you are confusing a rule the compels the wearing of a token with one that permits it to those suitable qualified.
https://carm.org/what-is-the-mark-of-the-beast
Important blocks of both the left and the right would be against this.
Especially with a man as US president whose name literally means “Ruler of the World”. Even though right-leaning Millennial* Christians are disposed to see Trump in a favorable light, this may be too much of a coincidence for enough of them.
* – not the generation, the type of Christianity.
I plan on sewing a giant yellow star on all of my outer garmets that says “COVIDFREI”
People said social security numbers were the mark of the beast using the same reasoning. That didn’t go anywhere, why should this?
@Alexander Turok
Because one could purchase (and possibly sell) in public without an SSN. The original purpose of SSNs were for retirement income. The law also forbids requiring an SSN for most transactions and identification purposes (though people are encouraged to give it anyway to avoid the hassle).
This “mark” is meant specifically to regulate who can engage in parts of commerce. And it would be required.
It sounds unworkable to me. Just to start with there aren’t that many jobs where you can restart a business with just a random smattering of employees and no customers that aren’t currently open.
If you have reliable testing, there are then three categories of people, those who are currently infected, those not yet infected, and those who have recovered and are immune.
It would make sense to provide the third category with some simple way of demonstrating their status. It would then make sense for some employers, most obviously ones who are a serious potential source of contagion such as restaurants, to offer a salary bonus to those who are immune, ideally to try to be in a position to truthfully claim that all their employees are immune.
There is then an incentive for low risk people, the young and healthy, to get infected, quarantine for a couple of weeks, get tested, and then take such jobs. That seems to me to be a feature, not a bug.
Similarly employers who have many employees working at home and would prefer to have fewer could offer a salary bonus to immune employees willing to come in to work.
They’re low risk, not no risk. This sounds like “we’ll put the lives of some younger people at risk as long as it keeps the older generations safe” to me. If we’re going that route, I would rather just go ahead and tell everyone to do what they want, and at risk folks are responsible for quarantining themselves to stay safe.
They’re at low risk of dying, but not at low risk of crashing the medical system. This is why the UK stopped their “herd immunity” plans.
Very few young healthy people die of covid, but some need hospital treatment, and a hospital with any covid patients in it is a dangerous place.
The reason we want people to self isolate is not to protect that individual, but to protect society as a whole.
More precisely, we will allow some younger people to put their lives at risk for the combined benefit of being free to go out and making more money. We allow people to put their lives at risk all the time, for their own entertainment or, if they choose professions with hazard pay, for money.
No. Most everyone would prefer staying at home and collecting unemployment.
I reject all claims that ‘voluntary choice of A or B’ is worse than A being the only option.
Politically infeasible is different than morally wrong.
Copenhagen ethics are part of the way people judge things, if you bring bad news peple dislike you.
If you give two bad choices people may dislike you compared to not providing the second choice
‘Voluntary choice between A and B’ can run into situations where someone can make you choose option B by making option A unattractive enough (through economic incentives, peer pressure, actual coercion, etc). Taking option B off the table entirely prevents this from happening.
This. If it would be just one agent against nature, then more options couldn’t hurt. But with multiple agents, more options means other agents can change their strategies, with possible impact on me.
For example, there are people who are able to hurt me, but they generally don’t, because there is no profit in that for them. If you create an option that is “slightly better than death” for me, and “insanely profitable” for them, you just created an incentive for them to try to put me into situations where I have to choose between X and death.
Also, if more options would always be better, there would be no value in precommitments.
It’s not possible. We don’t have the police capacity for that.
In Spain, as soon as confinement got a bit relaxed in some towns where they applied some of the more extreme measures, people just started to go out.
The lockdown works while you manage to scare people with huge fines, and you only deal with a few people who have the legal permit and everybody else who is in the streets is guilty, and neigbours snitch on each other. But as soon as you’ve got a significant number of people who have a legitimate right to be outside, some people will just start to go out, and it will be much harder to detect who has the right to go outside.
Besides, this would mean that people who have a legal right to go outside (hate how that sounds) would face constant stops by the police. And people don’t like interacting with the police.
You don’t have to control individuals. Just control businesses and individuals looking to break the law won’t have anywhere to work/shop/play at.
Right. The cops in Kentucky successfully prevented church from occurring on Easter Sunday not by having one cop for every potential “easter worshipper”, but rather by sending a couple cops to each non-compliant church.
Maybe in countries with a less severe lockdown that works, but people in Spain are desperate to just go outside their house. Even if all shops, parks and theatres are closed, walking around a city block is still better than being stuck at home.
So that only works if you do it like in the UK, where people are allowed to go out for exercise.
1. People are scared of dying
2. We’re hoping for the time taken now to allow for medical developments – treatments, vaccines.
3. If that plan were to go through, could we at least do variolation/low dosing instead of herd immunity through reopening ?
Perfect “rationality” is isomorphic to stupidity.
Hey, I find that offensive – are you calling me rational???
If you’re living in a ghetto or maybe prison with severely limited freedom of movement, employment, and social interaction, and there’s a thing you can do to escape into the free world and stay there but it involves a ~0.1% probability of death, doing that thing seems to me very rational and not at all stupid. And that’s approximately the proposal being made.
Wouldn’t make more sense to pay unemployed folks 80% of their wages (and make these funds non-taxable) rather to mail out checks to people regardless of their employment situation?
Anyone want to steelman sending $1200 to a bunch of people like me (who didn’t lose our jobs) and my niece (who is working 50+ hour weeks for Target) or $2400 to my parents (who are retired)?
Since I don’t do Direct Deposit, I’m not expecting my check until August which will give me time to select a good charity to donate it to.
The check isn’t designed to help those in trouble, its designed to help the economy as a whole stay afloat as an injection of cash that will hopefully raise demand (I’m steelmanning, I have no opinions on whether that will actually work). It would be better to do that by concentrating the money with those who have been fired, but that would require creating means testing protocols and enforcement protocols, and those things would require much more time to set up and implement. And once you decide you will only pay the “deserving” it becomes much harder to pass the bill as politicians argue over the question of who exactly is “deserving” and who isn’t. So in order to provide some relief as quickly as possible the simplest solution was to pay everybody who made under a certain amount, since the government already had that info.
I think that individual payment is at least in large part intended to help people financially impacted. I don’t think the government needs to recompense people for every natural disaster, but when people are unemployed due to wide-scale closure of whole industries and basically confined to home, it does seem appropriate.
Agreed that simplicity is a virtue here.
I would also suggest that there’s a whole lot of people who aren’t in trouble yet, but will be soon.
Keep in mind the working plan, as far as I can tell, in most jurisdictions is still “lockdowns until vaccine.”
Unemployment is going to get a lot worse. Just because you think you’re safe and don’t need the money now doesn’t mean you won’t be needing it later…
The Fed is already going full out on stimulus. These checks are a personal bailout, not stimulus.
Monetary policy and fiscal policy are two different types of stimulus.
Stimulus is entirely besides the point until some method of controlling the epidemic is in place. You cant order people to stay at home and goose the economy into action at the same time, the checks are merely about letting people buy groceries and pay rent while they obey that “stay at home” order.
Steelman: there are a lot of people who are making much less money, but not in wages because they are sort-of self-employed–the $1200 gives them at least something. Examples: barbers, massage therapists, Uber/Lyft drivers, medical transport people, waiters and bartenders, small specialist retailers… It’s better to send everyone a check than try to identify all the people one at a time, because it means the money gets out where it can be used faster and people who are not good at paperwork get their share.
This. We can always means-test it later with a clawback on people’s 2020 taxes.
The $1200 is already means tested, dimishes with higher income, and AFAIK, taxable (not 100% sure about the taxable part).
I took us to be talking about the best way to get the aid out, not about the way they’re actually doing it.
It isn’t taxable.
If we are talking optimums, given that they’ll pretty much need to have the IRS run this, I don’t see a good argument for not means testing up front then.
By means tested it goes to 90% of the population.
The argument against means testing up front is that the IRS data is necessarily out of date. So they only have good information for what people’s situation was in 2018, as they’re not done processing 2019 taxes. And even if someone was employed at the beginning of 2020 there’s now a ~1 in 10 chance that they aren’t any longer.
@zzzort:
All you have to do is file your 2019 taxes and you get the money.
If you are going to means test at all, there good reasons to do it upfront rather than clawing back.
HBC, you’d still be in the position where someone who lost their job due to the coronavirus shutdown (in 2020) wouldn’t be eligible for the money. Unfortunately, that isn’t a small group.
The number obviously isn’t 0, and it doesn’t matter how small the number is to any of the people who were actually impacted, but what % of people who have lost their jobs to the coronavirus do you think make >$100k per year?
From a strictly lizard brain perspective, giving out money that you will then impose a special tax penalty for next year, in an equal amount, just pisses off the people it happens to. The sizable majority of the people you are going to claw back from are just going to park it in savings anyway, so you won’t even get the stimulative effect. To the extent that you do, you’ve just built in contraction next year. That’s not a great feature.
I’d frankly be fine with not means testing, but not at the expense of taking it away from other stimulative measures. If not means testing costs, say, $50 billion, and you can get the Congress to tack that on, then whatever. But more likely it comes at the cost of some other, more efficient, measure, which is less desirable.
The $1200 is a tax credit on 2020 taxes. Does that mean that it functions as an interest-free loan when given to people who aren’t paying any taxes, and is only a cash-transfer to the category of people (“the middle class”?) who pay real taxes but don’t make at least $90,000/year? Or am I misunderstanding that?
No one else seems to be talking like this is an interest-free loan, so I feel like I must be missing something, but I am not sure what.
@Joseph Greenwood
Usually loans have to be paid back…nobody has to pay this back. It is a cash-transfer for everyone. Whether you pay taxes or not doesn’t really matter, unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re asking.
A refundable tax credit is straight-up money; you get it even if you have no tax liability.
There are a lot of problems with the economic relief bill. There are things about it I really don’t like, even allowing for emergency situations where I am more tolerant of things.
But this is super hard. There isn’t a playbook for “how to hibernate the economy for N months.” Giving people $1200 each is a quick-and-dirty bandaid.
My family doesn’t need it, but we will use it to help local businesses. If the bill was somehow smart enough to figure out that my family doesn’t need it without impacting all the other people who do, that’d be fine and I wouldn’t whine one bit. But I suspect there isn’t time to figure out that I’m doing fine and my cousin with their local business isn’t.
I do direct deposit so my check is sitting in queue in the bank waiting to clear, I guess tomorrow or Wednesday. It’s not particularly helpful to me, but I’ll find a use for it, I suppose.
Isn’t this check just an advance on next year’s taxes, in that we’re going to owe it back next year?
Where did you hear that? You aren’t going to have to pay it back next year.
Bad journalism, I guess? I interpreted several news articles about the checks as indicating that, but it looks like I was wrong. Yay.
TBF, lowered withholding amounts continually get bandied about when stimulation packages are discussed. So it’s probable you could have read something about that and conflated it with this payment.
It’s very important to remember that the means tested $1200 is only one part of the package. More generous unemployment benefits, in terms of dollars and who qualifies, are already included, so the point raised is essentially moot.
In fact, the chief Republican complaint has been that these unemployment benefits are too generous.
The only Republican complaint about the UE benefits that I have seen was that it was badly written and actually gave some people more than 100% of their previous salary.
I’m not sure if you are intending to, but you seem to be in agreement with my statement. Lindsey Graham pitched a fit and said the bill would kill people because nurses would “go on unemployment” instead of working. It was a truly bizarre statement.
Yea you can’t just unilaterally decide to go on unemployment, your employer has to lay you off or cut your hours, neither of which is likely to happen for nurses. That was just FUD on Grahams part.
But I do know from a family member in the construction business that getting those employees back to work is going to be hard. Most of them are basically making the same if not more than what they would be working. The hell would they go back to work for before that money train ends? It’s a serious problem if the lockdown ends before the four months that the federal UE benefits last. They have projects/contracts that will need to be completed but most their workers will be strongly dis-incentivized from working. Paying them more would work if they could price it into their contracts, but no one’s going to want to renegotiate to a higher price. We’ll see.
In a normal environment you can’t just quit and go on UE, in this environment you could refuse to go to work due to fears of getting sick, get fired and likely receive UE.
this is not a complaint about them being ‘too generous’, that complaint is specifically about them being badly structured.
There are going to be a lot of situations like this. Who is going to drive for Uber with all those costs if you can not work? Who is going to head back into kitchens and wash dishes?
I think its more of a problem if (when) federal UE benefits get extended.
I feel like society has still not properly reckoned with the question of how the gig economy has fundamentally altered what it really means to be involuntarily unemployed.
From what I’ve heard, gig economy work is still in high demand in most markets. Doordash, instacart, etc. are hiring and offering bonuses. So… why aren’t the unemployed snapping all those jobs up? How can any physically able person with a car look an unemployment rep in the eye and say “I’ve been looking for work but I can’t find any” in an environment where you can download an app and get a paying gig in a matter of hours?
Because people like stability and the legal protections that the gig economy does not provide.
Yeah obviously. People “like” lots of things. There are lots of things to dislike about a standard job as a fry cook at McDonalds or a cashier at Wal-Mart, too.
But that doesn’t mean those aren’t real jobs that are real ways to earn money.
My only point here is that I don’t think society has fully reckoned with the fact that it seems like unemployment has gone from “this is a benefit for people who can’t find any work at all” to “this is a benefit for people who can’t find work that meets their exact preferences”
That doesn’t address the question since they don’t have access to those jobs right now, and taking gig work wouldn’t really preclude them landing a non gig job when they open back up.
But that is quite explicitly clear.
You get to reject sex-work related job offers and keep unemployment. So you don’t have to apply for jobs as a stripper or sex worker or porn actress.
We’ve just added gig work to that list.
EDIT: And an issue with Uber is that they require not just a working car, but a new one. I’ve got a car I am perfectly happy with, but I wouldn’t qualify as an Uber driver because my car is too small and old. While small cars may be less prevalent in America, do unemployed Americans have big cars that are <10 years old?
So what happens as unskilled labor in general increasingly becomes available only on gig-like terms?
@MattM
The current solution to this problem seems to be to force gig work platforms to become employers.
See lawsuits against Uber in the UK, against Deliveroo in Spain, etc.
So that won’t happen, because platforms will either have to reclassify gig workers as 0 hour contract employees or something like that.
I mean, in the past, unemployed people also had the option of becoming self-employed and start mowing lawns or cleaning other people’s homes, but it was (still is) possible to not become self-employed and keep getting unemployment benefits.
The best way to make sure that people really look for a job within the traditional or less conventional job markets is to keep unemployment benefit at less than that person can earn in the job market.
Gig work doesn’t fit into neat, rectangular grids. Marginalizing it and incentivizing people not to take it are features, at least until it can be banned outright.
I don’t think I’m explaining my point well here.
I don’t have any particular recommendation for how unemployment should treat gig work, or how the state should view gig work, or anything like that.
My point is more in terms of how the average person thinks about the necessity/validity of social safety net programs. And my read on society is that the average person supports unemployment insurance to the extent that they believe it pays out exclusively to people who are unable to find financially beneficial employment. Yes I know there are already established edge cases like being a stripper or whatever that don’t count.
But the gig economy is no longer a rare edge case. As I said, if you are an able-bodied person with a car, it’s now essentially impossible for you to be unable to find financially beneficial employment. And I don’t think the average person has fully grokked this just yet.
Nor has the libertarian right jumped on it and started shouting from the rooftops “it is no longer possible for able-bodied people with cars to be unemployed, as employment is traditionally understood, therefore we can roll back some of these programs.”
@MattM
I don’t see how gig work is substantially different from mowing your neighbours’ lawn. You just have a bigger platform that optimizes the process of finding work. And being willing to become self-employed was never considered essential to get UE.
As for the moral justification for UE. As you pointed out other times, you aren’t, forced to move to places with jobs, even though that’s what people who are really looking for a job do when there are no jobs in their area. “Unemployment is only for those seriously and honestly looking for a job”, was always more of a polite lie with many caveats.
Just add gig/casual work to the longer and longer list of exceptions we keep creating for people who aren’t that serious about finding a job.
But that makes a huge difference!
10 years ago, it just wasn’t possible for the average person without very good entrepreneurial skills to be able to go buy a lawnmower, and instantly have enough paying gigs to average an income that roughly approximates full-time minimum wage work.
Now, it’s trivially easy to do that, such that it’s done as a matter of course by fresh off the boat immigrants who barely comprehend English.
I think it is worse than that, if we are going to cover gigs with UE then there is a weird world where the incentive for a specific class of person is to work, get unemployed, work, get unemployed. This already existed for a segment of the economy (ski instructors), but the groundwork is being laid for job insecurity to be a major benefit.
1. It applies to edge cases. (Gig workers, contractors, self-employed)
2. It doesn’t disincentivize work.
#2 is most of it. this way it can be called stimulus and not unemployment.
Most of it is simply panicked government officials throwing whatever at the wall and hoping it sticks.
Steelman 2: who gets the money is mostly irrelevant–this is the “monetary stimulus” argument. The goal is to get more money in circulation–think of this as trading against interest rate cuts, not against unemployment compensation. I prefer this to interest rate cuts at current rates, especially given the lockdown–I think that interest cut benefits tend to go more heavily to finance, especially in the short-term, and the pain of the lockdown is widespread but mostly not hitting finance.
Arguments I’ve heard have all been about administrative capacity, and how quickly things can be done. There’s no program to subsidize wages directly, so we end up relying on bank shots where loans are made available to companies, but the portion used to pay wages is forgiven.
The other alternative to wage subsidies is increased unemployment benefits. The american equivalent of the 80% being done in the UK is macy’s furloughing workers, those workers getting UI, still being eligible for employer health plans, and ideally still attached to that job when the economy reopens.
As others have pointed out, these work arounds don’t cover everyone, so direct money is added on top.
So anyone read ‘Man after man’? Or another book of the trilogy? I wanted some biologists’ opinions on this, as some have claimed the science as terrible.
Oh man, that book was a trip.
Okay, so obviously much of it is scientifically bonkers. For instance, significant sections include post-men that have psychic powers, which obviously has no scientific backing. And a lot of it strains credulity, like the race of parasite men developing because some very small post-men decided to start sucking on larger post-men blood as a strategy. You can’t just decide you way into a brand new digestive system, for one thing. And how was a magnetic pole reversal supposed to wipe out the primitive men? I get it wiping out the last of the Hitek, but why the primitives who farmed? If I recall correctly he just hand-waved that the bees and birds wouldn’t be able to navigate anymore and yadda yadda….
But it’s a great book to read to make you think about new perspectives. I especially liked the twist in the final chapter: I didn’t see it coming but it made perfect sense and thematically tied the book together. And the illustrations are the real draw, I mean wow. Ugly but full of imagination. Overall I had a lot of fun reading it.
The twist? That seems odd for a work that’s not a novel.
Anyway, besides the hand-waving of how the ecology evolved, is the analysis of how things would play out with a given set of species interesting and reasonable?
Thanks for replying.
It may not qualify as a novel, but the format is mostly narrative (the other two books are written as textbooks, but this is more a collection of narrative micro-chapters). There is, well, an event occurring near the beginning that has a great impact much later.
In brief, I think the adaptations are generally plausible (barring the two magical ones, the psychic powers and the hereditary memory), but much too extreme for the given time frame (parasitism, eusociality…) — if they took >100 million years rather than 5, I could see them. (I’ll give a pass on the aquatic lineage, since it was created artificially.) Reasonable? Within limits. Interesting? Hell yes.
(I had a much longer comment, but it doesn’t show up — into moderation because of too many links? I could repost it with fewer links if necessary.)
Posts with too many links can be eaten by spam filters, there are also some banned words that sometimes appear in innocent posts.
Yeah, I’d be comfortable calling the book a novel. I mean it isn’t in the strictest sense but it’s certainly a work of narrative fiction. It just happens to be a story that takes the form of a textbook bestiary.
I thought it took it’s ideas very seriously (like any good work of sci-fi) and as a result much of it makes logical sense. For example, the transition from the carefree grazers to the hivelike mole people makes sense in context, as a significant ecological change resulting in a change of feeding habits would lead to different social adaptations. But the whole book can’t be one to one with ecological science because almost all the animals are intelligent to varying degrees and that means many of their adaptations won’t be biological but cultural. It’s as much a work of anthropology as biology in that way.
But personally I wouldn’t put much trust in the science. It’s obviously a work of fiction meant to make you think and to expand your imagination. Mostly in depressing and gross directions, but definitely expanded.
I was hoping there would be some anthropolgy in there. As you say, there must be. I’m guessing that’s as well justified as the biology, but just as interesting.
Thanks.
OK, I’ll retry it and hope it goes better this time.
That’s me! 😀
But yes, I have to agree with FLWAB. I found the book very enjoyable and interesting (especially in that unusual mini-narrative snippets format) — and the grotesque art actually somewhat fits the tone — but from the standpoint of scientific speculation, it’s solidly the least plausible of the trilogy. Besides the psychic powers that FLWAB mentioned (one species relies on them to the point of atrophying all its sense organs), there’s also reference to some kind of hereditary memory that causes a future human species to reinvent fire and metalworking out of sheer instinct.
The natural evolution of post-human species is kinda extreme (nest-building eusocial creatures, ectoparasites, ground sloth analogues…) but I could see them, or at least justify them for the sake of speculation, in a world where all other macrofauna is gone. If it took, say, 150 million years (about the time it took for the earliest mammals to become whales and bats). But the whole story takes place in 5 million years! That’s less than the time since our divergence with chimpanzees! Honestly the pace works much better if you add a “0” after each date.
Some of the decisions of the original Homo sapiens also make little sense. Why would you use barely-sentient modified humans to repopulate Earth’s ecosystems instead of any other animal species? (We know from the text that at least bats, rodents, and waterfowl are still around.) Why would you bother modifying humans into a space-dwelling bug-like creature that can’t survive in macrogravity or reproduce naturally instead of just making a space suit?
I mean, this remains one of my favorite SF books ever, and the basic concept of post-humans speciating by natural evolution is plausible, but the specifics are full of crazy details.
As for the other books? The New Dinosaurs, which deals with the evolution of Mesozoic animals to the present in a timeline in which the Cretaceous Extinction never happened, also contains plenty of interesting speculation, though some fit less than perfectly with known dinosaurs anatomy and phylogeny. See this review by the palaeontologist and palaeoartist Greg Paul for example. Though, funny enough, some of Dixon’s crazier ideas have been vindicated by later discoveries. Water-dwelling non-avian dinosaurs? Lurdusaurus might have been one. Tree-dwelling dinosaurs? Scansoriopterygidae. Theropods flying with skin membranes instead of feathers? Yi qi. Non-theropod dinosaurs with fur-like proto-feathers (like that delightful furry ceratopsian)? Tianyulong and the new Psittacosaurus. The specific implementation is still dubious (and TBH the illustrator does not seem a specialist of animal anatomy), but hey, sometimes crazy ideas work.
From the POV of scientific plausibility, After Man (Earth’s fauna 50 million years after the age of humans) is by far the best of the three, though I still recommend all of them, if you’re interested in the genre. The artwork also looks immensely better, with its vaguely 19th-century feel. The pack-hunting baboons and the elephant-pigs are some of the best. Even then, there’s some strange choice of ancestry — rats become the dominant predator clade, and rabbits take the niche of deer, even though there’s still carnivorans and ungulates around. Generic “rodents” are used often as an all-purpose ancestor for every adaptation. And while penguins evolving into whale analogues is a gorgeous idea, there’s the problem with egg-laying (past and living marine reptiles lay eggs on land or give birth to live young, but the penguin-whale is too big to reach land, and birds have never evolved vivipary). Still, these are not fatal flaws, and real evolution has done stranger things in the past.
(And then there’s this really obscure piece of Dixoniana, which… uh… is not the most inspired. (Every ecosystem in the world has been strip-mined but there’s still giant forests around? Super-advanced humans live on trees instead of building houses? All eye defects are removed by natural selection but the rest of the body atrophies completely? All mammals are gone but birds are not? Psychic powers again?) Cool fantasy setting, but he did a much better job in the books, even MaM.)
I wish I could comment on Dixon’s fourth book, one Greenworld, which deals with the human colonization of an alien planet, but Azathoth-knows-why it has been published only in Japan. (Dixon’s work is much more popular over there.) All I can say is that the organisms design looks excellent.
(If you’re interested in trippy deep-time SF featuring horrific crimes against nature and the human form, might I recommend you Nemo Ramjet’s All Tomorrows — published on the web by the author himself — as well as fragments of my own poor imitation of it?)
In summary: science good in After Man, so-so but strangely prescient in The New Dinosaurs, pretty bad in Man After Man, artwork good in After Man and not-so-good in the others, all three still really fun and fascinating. Recommended.
sees first two images
Forget Man After Man; there’s the guy who should have left Earth for no raisin!
Huh, Dixon doesn’t seem to play to any Japanese tropes. Is Japan just generically weird?
Perhaps? There is a Japanese TV adaptation of After Man made with stop-motion animation, starring the man himself. And The Future is Wild, a CGI mockumentary similar in concept to After Man to which Dixon also took part, was apparently adapted into a manga.
Right, I read the dinosaur article and a lot of the criticism refers to the physiology of dinosaurs. What their skin might have looked like, the positioning of bones and musculature etc. Those are fine details, but details can matter when looking at how a dynamical system might evolve, so fair enough.
But does that mean his analysis of birds and mammals evolving anyway are valid? Sure, the dinos as a whole didn’t evolve to meet those niches in hundreds of millions of years. But perhaps some species may have been forcing the whole group into an evolutionary trajectory. If enough of these were wiped out, perhaps species with more potential could have had their chance to diversify. And climate change might have been able to do that. Do you concur?
Do you feel that the other criticism, a lack of imagination, is valid? Because if he’s just picking ecological niches and forcing dinosaurs to evolve into something similair to their current inhabitants then that’s disappointing.
All Tommorows seems intersting, I’ll put it on my reading list. Your fragments look cool, but I’m not sure where to start. Is there a recommended order? If not, you should probably make one.
Well, it is true that mammals in general seem to be more flexible in their body structure than dinosaurs were (birds, on the other hand, do not — which makes sense, since they are after all a specialized subclade of dinosaurs). Contrary to the stereotype that all Mesozoic mammals were small burrowing insectivores, they seem to have been already very diversified midway through the Mesozoic, with large predators (Repenomamus, which actually hunted dinosaurs), specialized “anteaters” (Fruitafossor and Spinolestes), aquatic (Castorocauda and Ichthyoconodon) and even gliding forms (Volaticotherium). So Paul is probably correct that mammals and birds would have a much larger place even in an Earth with dinosaurs.
On the other hand, as I mentioned above, recent discoveries have shown that dinosaurs had exploited more niches than we thought. Paul says that no truly arboreal dinosaurs were known — well, now there are! (Scansoriopterygidae) Epidexipteryx even had an extra-long finger that it might have used either to dig for insects in the bark or to support a gliding membrane. It’s also worth noting that the fossil record is rich but selective. For example, we know basically nothing about Mesozoic mountain life. If I’m not mistaken, we have no records from Australia for the very end of the Cretaceous, and most of the Antarctic record is still inaccessible. Sometimes evolution makes exceptions — 48,000 species of spiders are known, and exactly one is herbivorous — and it would be easy for them to be lost. So Paul, while not without justification, might be a bit too conservative.
The Earth of the Cenozoic is very different from that of the Mesozoic, too — a longer separation of continents followed by fusions and interexchanges (India + Asia, Eurasia + Africa, North + South America), the global cooling and drying after the Oligocene, the replacement of forests by grasslands, the Ice Ages — which might plausibly give a shock to dinosaurian evolution. On the other hand…
… the specializations of dinosaurs would not appear identical to those of mammals and other animals. Little dromaeosaurs hunting sand-dwellers is plausible; shedding most of their limbs and becoming snake-like burrowers, not so much. Scansoriopterygids are not identical to woodpeckers. And it IS true that Dixon has a habit of making his convergent evolutions a bit too convergent. It’s not enough to make a giraffe out of a pterosaur, it also has to live in Africa and have the same color pattern; it’s not enough to make a kangaroo out of an iguanodon, it must be the only leaping dinosaur and live in Australia; and so on. To be fair to him, though, this is a common fault in speculative biology, even when it’s about ostensibly alien species. Evolution does not think like humans, humans think in discrete categories, and so when we try to come up with a new and surprising species we mix two, or put the accidents of one on the essence of another, so to speak.
The canonical order is simply chronological — all are set in the same universe, and sometimes (when there will be more of them) one may influence another — but each fragment is meant mostly as a standalone piece in a shared canon.
Thanks concavenator.
Asians of SSC – have you or your family/friends encountered issues with coronavirus-related racism? Widespread problem or moral panic?
(not really interested in hearing speculations from non-Asians, I can speculate as well as you can)
I’m in a big coastal liberal city, my parents flew in to live with me for the duration of the pandemic, they go out around once per week for groceries. We have not personally encountered any racism, but there is certainly some moral panic.
They like to browse Chinese forums (my impression of the forums is that they’re similar to BBS and are used by middle aged Chinese people who live in US or Chinese citizens who have kids studying in the US.) I don’t browse those forums myself, but my parents tell me they’re actively worried about racial targeting because of what they’re reading. I haven’t looked into it myself but I’m assuming they’re referencing the handful of reported cases mixed in with a lot of gossip and hearsay. I could ask them for more details if you’re interested.
Scott, you know how pedantic your readers can be. You should have specified East Asians.
Half-Asian. I haven’t been outside enough to encounter any kind of issues even if they were there, and I think the same goes for anyone else I know.
I did have rather nasty stuff randomly yelled at me and my family on the street a few months ago (e.g. “America, love it or leave it, you ****ing [racial slur]s”), and which was the first time in a *really* long time that anything like that had happened, I think the first time in my whole adult life. This was pre-COVID, but after various other pieces of inflammatory anti-China rhetoric. But of course it’s just N=1, and it’s far from the scariest/craziest thing that’s been shouted at me in NYC, so I wouldn’t draw any broad conclusions.
I’ve encountered no racism whatsoever. However, I’ve spent most of my time holed up recently, my neighborhood is mostly full of ethnic Chines, and I think that the area where I live is relatively wealthy and liberal (NC research triangle).
I’ve heard some concerns from my parents about a tweet that Trump made, although by now they’ve probably heard about actual incidents of racism. They didn’t seem particularly panicked to me at the time and I assume they haven’t encountered anything themselves.
That was supposed to say “ethnic Chinese”, sorry.
So the DSA has refused to endorse Joe Biden. I’m not clear if it’s on policy grounds or because of a specific scandal, but I assume it’s about policy mostly.
The DSA is a nominally pretty large organization (~50,000 people) with a decent amount of pull, including members in the House.
This seems like a risky play to me, although I’m not terribly in tune with the internal politics of the Democratic Party. It mirrors #NeverTrump in my mind.
There are essentially as I see it three outcomes.
The first is that Biden wins (either easily or narrowly), which shows that the DSA is essentially electorally irrelevant and degrades their ability to sway the party, which is what happened to #NeverTrump.
The second is that Biden loses very narrowly, so that the DSA might conceivably have swung the election. This proves their point but makes the larger moderate Dem base furious, which degrades their ability to swing the party.
The third is that Biden loses in a blowout, which means the DSA wasn’t responsible for spiking him but was right about how his electability was an illusion. This was what #NeverTrump was rooting for, so I have to assume it’s what the DSA is shooting for.
Anyone who is actually on that side of the aisle have anything they feel I completely missed and should reexamine?
1. Even assuming DSA members think they way you do, you have missed the fact that the DSA has principle-agent problems w/r/t/ its voting members. I don’t know the details of the process, but most endorsement votes by organizations I’m familiar with are discussed and then voted on openly, like a caucus, which means that people vote in ways that preserve their reputation and relationships, not in ways that serve the organization.
The DSA membership includes many who have staked themselves to the status of *caring* more than others, in a way that means being hardline about, e.g., a government that doesn’t let people die for lack of basic medicine, which stake they cannot preserve without voting against endorsing Biden.
2. DSA members do not all think the way you do. At least some fraction of the DSA membership will react to the above reasoning dismissively–maybe even aghast–the way a deontologist might be aghast to hear the reasoning of a utilitarian. At least some members of the DSA are subscribers to the kind of thinking that sees the CDC declining to recommend masks as what happens when we all know we all are trying to be utilitarians, and saying words based on whether they’ll ‘have the right outcome’ rather than because they are true… in that world, as their thinking goes, nobody trusts their doctors, or anyone else, and there is no state capacity to solve any problem except the problems the person with the biggest gun, and the biggest willingness to use force and threat of force, is willing to bully others into solving. Opposing the rot at the core of society–a willingness to use other people as means, not ends, including to lie–is the true aim of their theory of virtue. For this category of thinkers, if endorsing Biden feels like a lie, that is the end of the decision.
This is basically the right way to think about it. I would extend this to say that, in a closed ballot, there’s no such thing as “voting against your own interests”, “voting irrationally”, or “throwing away your vote”. Since your individual vote is irrelevant, the only rational way to vote is the way that makes you happy (ignoring, for a moment, any duties to God).
A lot of human beings have an attraction to the notion of standing on principle, damn the consequences. Voting in a way that ignores tactical and pragmatic considerations lets you play at standing on principle while conveniently escaping the consequences. Win-win. It shouldn’t be surprising that many people derive satisfaction from doing this, especially people who are more opinionated and farther out on the fringes.
Of course, if, as you say, this isn’t a closed ballot, then things are a bit different and you rightly point out there are social consequences. But in this instance the social effect you suggest may simply be magnifying these voters’ own inborn inclinations.
That (you think) voting the way that makes you happy is the only rational way to vote does not mean there is no such thing as voting irrationally. In fact, it strongly implies that there is (because it would be surprising if there were only one available behavior and it was the rational one).
Point taken. I suppose some people might vote in a way that makes them feel guilty or conflicted, wishing they had voted for someone else or not voted at all. If someone were to do so persistently, year after year, this is irrational voting.
Bold prediction:
Vast majority of Democrats have no idea who the DSA is. To put it into perspective, the AFT is 1.7 million members. So the DSA is a rounding error whose members mostly reside in reliably Democrat party strongholds. So they’re not important enough to blame.
If Sanders refused to endorse Biden then it would be news, a highly visible 1/3 of the primary electorate would be less likely to vote for Biden, and the Dems would place some well deserved blame on Sanders.
But he already strongly endorsed Biden.
I’m not an American, but I do follow American politics and my first thought was “wait, why would the Driving Standards Agency express an opinion on the US presidential election?”. So I tentatively second the point about them being fairly small and obscure, and hence while this may be significant as a weather vane it’s probably not significant as a causal factor.
Neither was #NeverTrump, to be clear. That’s why I’m comparing them. Doing organizational statements like this, as National Review did in the #NeverTrump era, tend to expose organizational weakness if you don’t affect the outcome.
“So they’re not important enough to blame.”
You may be right in real life, but Democrats will be looking for somebody to blame, the DSA has painted a giant target on themselves, and there’s no love lost between the two groups, so the centrists will definitely take up the offer. Putin dropping a few million dollars on Facebook ads might not have seemed “important enough to blame” to an outside observer, but here we are.
Fair point Scott.
Especially true if DSA ends up as a stand in for “young voters” or “the squad” or some other lightning rod of internal division.
Every time I hear this name I grow more and more convinced that they shouldn’t be allowed to use it unless they wear matching infantry uniforms.
Cheerleading uniforms would also satisfy precedent, but I hesitate to recommend it here.
I think this is something similar to what the Green Party over here did when they got the sniff of real power.
The Democratic Socialists of America are not the Democratic Party, even if it’s convenient to ally with them. I think there’s a combination there of hoping to grow their own brand, what with the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and have their own younger candidates who can then run under the aegis of the Democratic Party and win elections, and the True Believers demanding they prove that they’re a different thing. If they’re just going to rubber-stamp whatever Democrat the big party decides to run, and who has no ties to them or any kind of inclination to be aligned on policies with them, then what’s the point? At the best, they’re not distinct in the public mind and at worst they’re going to get subsumed into the major party.
To go back to what I said about the Greens over here, when in 2007 they were offered the chance to go into a coalition government as the junior party, they were racked by internal dissent; a vocal minority warned that they’d be decimated as a result, and the True Believers did not want to form any kind of alliance. This was pushed ahead, with the simultaneously rigorously honest yet seeming hypocritical casuistry solution of the newly-appointed Party leader resigning because before the election he had promised not to lead the party into coalition with Fianna Fáil and so he had to be replaced if they were to do this.
The ensuing government had its own share of complications and upheaval, but by the time of the next election in 2011 the warnings came true and the party was excoriated at the polls by the electorate, who blamed them for going back on everything they had promised. It took them up until the last election and a ton of hard work to win back the status they had achieved.
I can well understand the fears of the DSA that win, lose or draw, they won’t benefit but the Democrats will if they go along with them, and by the history of the Greens as a small outsider party, I can’t blame them. They may well feel that their best bet is to insist on a separate identity of their own to ensure the public don’t think of them as “Democrats Lite” – whether Biden wins, loses, or wins then has a disastrous presidency, better to keep distinct from the Democrats and so avoid being either scapegoats for the faults of the larger party or co-opted to go along with moderate/centrist views and lose any distinctiveness.
@deseich
You taught me the word casuistry. Thank you. What a great word.
Blame was cast at Jill Stein and the Green Party for Democrats losing in 2016 (they even investigated her for colluding with Russia), so I don’t see why the DSA would be any more exempt. It’s always important to root out heretics before infidels.
Well for one thing, the DSA isn’t on the ballot in tipping point states.
Yeah, I had no idea what it was yet I lean closer politically toward the socialists than any other group.
I don’t really think you can compare the two. Trump was an insurgent who won, and the Never Trumpers were parts of the old establishment. Sanders is an insurgent who lost. The DSA doesn’t have any say about internal Democratic party matters because they aren’t a part of the Democratic party. To be parallel, you’d need to have a situation where Sanders had won (or was winning) and Dem party insiders were openly declaring that they’d never vote for him, that he’d destroy the party, that sort of thing. Think James Carville just before Super Tuesday, except Sanders over-performed, rather than the actual outcome.
As it is, I think that the Sanders supporters’ disaffection will be a lot less bad this time. A lot of his supporters are pissed, but I haven’t seen nearly the amount of complaining that the DNC cheated him. It looks like, from where I’m sitting, that they generally accept that he lost fair and square this time, and that makes a big difference.
Several prominent DSA members are elected Democratic Representatives.
I didn’t realize that Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib were members of the DSA. It’ll be news if they fail to endorse Biden. If they fail to do so and it’s seen as hurting him, they could become persona-non-grata. Not sure if that blows back on the DSA or not. I’m barely aware that they exist and didn’t know about the link, and I think that’s probably common.
AOC has said, IIUC, that she plans to endorse Biden but wants the process to be “uncomfortable” which I assume means she’s going to try and get concessions. I give her a low probability of getting any concessions.
What sort of concessions do you think she would want?
Getting Biden to commit to pushing Medicare for All and/or a Green New Deal, I’d guess.
It looks like, from where I’m sitting, that they generally accept that he lost fair and square this time, and that makes a big difference.
So the three ring circus of all the candidates did work? If it had been a straight two-horse race between Biden and Sanders, it would have looked like cheating or chicanery by the DNC but because we had the Pick Your Minority selection, even though the foregone conclusion (it’s Biden because it was always going to be Biden) happened it looks (and well may be) fair and square?
To be clear, I’m not saying that the DNC did any trickery, whatever chance Sanders had in 2016 that momentum has long been lost by now and him running was just one last hurrah or a chance for the Socialist element to get a foot in the door. But the list of extra candidates never did seem convincing that no, this one is going to get the call instead of it being Good Old Joe.
Yeah…. while we can’t prove there was any sort of active coordination/collusion behind the whole “everybody but Biden drop out right…. now!” experience, it certainly looks like there probably was…
Well, people see faces in trees, but that doesn’t mean they are actually animated by spirits. You don’t have to go beyond the actual known facts to easily explain the behavior.
– Sanders is sui generis as a non-Democrat with a path to the nomination. He has professed actual enmity to the Democratic Party.
– Biden took a long time to declare and had relatively early campaign stumbles. That brought lots of standard Democrats into the race, and kept them in. But none of them could pull together enough supporters to make a good showing.
– But Sanders actually always looked weak, as he couldn’t muster anything like majority support even though basically everyone pulling numbers against him were established Dems.
– Bloomberg entered late precisely because the absence of consolidation of the mainstream seemed ripe to be picked up by a centrist candidate.
– After SC, Biden showed that he actually had support that could be consolidated. Bloomberg still had money and organization. Anyone else who wasn’t Sanders, Biden or Bloomberg had no viable path to consolidate the 70% who weren’t voting for Sanders, so they dropped out and didn’t play spoiler.
If Warren’s supporters had flocked to Sanders he would still be in the race. Heck if Yang’s 5% had flocked to Sanders when he dropped out Bernie might still be in it. It turned out there were Bernie voters and people who wouldn’t vote for Bernie, either he converted you or didn’t with hardly anyone with him 2nd best.
I mostly agree with you, HeelBearCub. There’s no need to suppose any kind of jiggery-pokery about candidates dropping out in a neat row beyond the usual kind of intra-party shenanigans all parties everywhere engage in. I don’t think there were any bribes or inducements, but if certain persons expect that service to the party should and will be rewarded at a later date… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My own view on it is:
(1) Biden was favoured because of the Good Vibes associated with being Obama’s VP and because he had a reliable appeal to the African-American vote (yes, even beyond that of Kamala and Corey who had their own problems).
(2) Sanders was running because (a) he’s ornery enough to not take 2016 lying down (I don’t object to a certain amount of orneriness in politicians so this is not a criticism) and (b) he was perceived to be pulling the youth vote along with him. Whether that was so in fact or not, I think it was a mistake to pin any great hopes on it; young voters notoriously do not show up to the ballot box in any way commensurate with their online activism or social media voiced support.
(3) Lizzie was running because, I don’t know, if Hillary had a shot at being First Female Ever then why not another white blonde old woman who could pick up all the Women Voters? And she might have thought she hit the sweet spot in between Joe and Bernie – not too radical, not too centrist. EDIT: While I’m being sarcastic about another country’s politicians, I think what sank her – apart from the Blonde Ambition – was the wild see-sawing in tone between the “Why, I’m Jest Ordin’ry Folks Drinkin’ My Own Beer In My Own Kitchen With My Own Dog And My Own Lawful Wedded Husband” videos and the “9 year old trans kids will pick my Cabinet” videos.
(4) The rest of ’em – a mix between vanity (Bloomberg’s notions of “I am big. It’s the
picturespolitics that got small” and it turns out that no, you can’t buy an election*), false belief that “demographics are destiny”, and strategic placing of themselves as “I realise I don’t have any real chance but this is just one more step on the cursus honorum to show the party what I can do and to be marked down for later advancement – did I mention I governed** a small mid-Western city, by the way?”. I have no idea why Julián Castro thought running was a good idea, but just because I don’t see his appeal is no reason somebody somewhere didn’t think it a good idea.(5) The even more obscure rest of ’em – same as No. 4 but going more for “big fish in a small pond” name recognition/advancement at local level. And of course, there’s always some measure of crazy out there.
*Unless you think that he was running as some kind of spoiler/wrecker Trojan Horse candidate to do down Whomever’s chances, but if we think that then we’re into “neatly folding our tinfoil hats to wear” territory 🙂
**Okay, smarty-pants, you pick a better verb. Yes, I know he was mayor not governor, but do you really expect me to say he “mayored” a city? And “ruled” sounds too autocratic.
IMO, Klobuchar did have a solid argument for running. She won her previous elections by huge margins in a purlish midwest state, which is pretty big for an election where everyone is focused on electability. And the moderate side was unrepresented when she jumped in (Biden didn’t run until much later).
Well, if a governor governs, then a mayor mays.
IMO, Klobuchar did have a solid argument for running.
I wasn’t thinking of Klobuchar as part of that group under No. 5, more like the ones in this grab-bag of “hey Imma put my name forward!” like Wayne Messam and Mike Gravel.
I’m wavering on where to put Marianne Williamson – for a brief shining moment there, she was the most level-headed of all the shouty debates, and she was certainly serious about running, but even though I am charmed by the whole Cosmic Unicorn Love Vibe, so long, Marianne 🙂
I personally think Beto was a joke candidate, but he (grudgingly on my part) makes it into No. 4 rather than No. 5.
Mayoralize.
Mayorinate?
Mayoror, pronounced “mar.”
I don’t think it was a foregone conclusion at all. Biden got pretty lucky with several things breaking his way at the right time. We could have easily ended up in a situation where it’s Buttigieg vs Bloomberg vs Biden vs Sanders after super tuesday and who knows how that would have turned out, other than that it’d have been a complete shitshow.
@Deiseach, there was a lot of complaining last time about the super-delegates endorsing Clinton early, and then the news covering her large delegate lead, as a way of suppressing the Bernie vote. And then Donna Brazile got caught passing Hilary a debate question early. I’m pretty sure there was other stuff, my biggest Berner friend will still bitch about Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (then head of the DNC) from time to time.
This time, the DNC is seen as having let the campaign happen. Even the also-rans dropping out doesn’t seem to be taken for unfair scheming. As I said, the take, on my feed, is angry, but this time it’s angry at us (the establishment democrat voters) for voting wrong, rather than at the party for rigging the vote.
As for Biden being the foregone conclusion, I’m really not buying it. It looked constantly like he was just a couple of bad days from being out of the race. I really don’t know why one of the other (IMO, better) moderates didn’t manage to consolidate that lane and send Joe into retirement, but it’s only a foregone conclusion with hindsight.
edit: typo
I think your assumption is incorrect and this is just the typical People’s Front of Judea splittist activist mentality at work. I’m not a leftist myself but my social circle consists mostly of leftists, and I don’t know any of them who would plausibly hope for Biden to lose big to discredit Democratic moderates in the way that the NeverTrumpers wanted Trump to lose big to discredit Trumpism.
A closer thought experiment, btw: imagine that the Republican party establishment had united early enough around Jeb! that he edged out the Trump insurgency. What would Trump’s hard-core primary base– or for that matter Trump himself– have done in that scenario and why?
I’m honestly not sure, but none of my guesses about the possibilities would have been motivated by a desire among his supporters to see Hillary win big in order to discredit the R establishment. Trump himself might have launched a third party candidacy, but my guess is it would have been a personal vanity/spite project rather than a calculated attempt to destroy Jeb! so he could win next time.
But maybe you think that’s how Trump’s core supporters would have acted– they actually would have deliberately tried to tank Jeb! in favor of Hillary– and if so, what I’d say is that this reflects an asymmetry between the parties. There’s just much less of the D primary voting base that hates their establishment as much as the Trumpists hate(d) the R establishment, and less still that is willing to try a “the worse the better” strategy where you deliberately give the country something you know is awful in order that you can increase your chance of winning down the line.
Eh, I’m the only Trumpist on this site and I would have held my nose and voted for Jeb because he’s less likely to take my guns (that were all lost in a tragic boating accident). Also judges.
I think he would have lost badly, though.
And that’s what I figured most Trumpists would most likely do, and why (mutatis mutandis) I think the vast majority of DSA members will hold their nose and vote for Biden, in order that RBG’s replacement will/would be a liberal African American woman and not Amy Coney Barrett.
I think he would have lost badly, though.
I was going to say “Do you really think people would have happily voted in a third Bush as President?” but that part I agree with. Political dynasties may get away with “unto the third and fourth generation” holding office or a seat in local politics, but a third member of the same family as Head of State smacks too much of hereditary monarchy.
I think the vast majority of DSA members will hold their nose and vote for Biden, in order that RBG’s replacement will/would be a liberal African American woman and not Amy Coney Barrett.
Perhaps, and perhaps not. (And I think even that putative liberal black woman is not going to be so hard jamming as to frighten the horses. I’m also amused by this suggestion that Coney Barrett is not acceptable, because during discussion of Kavanaugh there was some comment to the effect that Trump could have picked, and had selected with no hassle, Coney Barrett and avoided all the trouble that Kavanaugh’s pick created. Now you think Coney Barrett would also be an unpopular pick for the Dems? Well goodness gracious me!). I think the hard-core of the DSA feel that Biden, in being a centrist/moderate, is closer to the Republicans on a lot of matters.
If he’s Just Like Those Guys, and your whole point of being is No More Those Guys, why vote for him when if he’s in power he’s going to do 8 out of 10 things the same old way? Why hold out for an occasional bone (like a liberal African-American lady judge) when what you really want and need is for the entire Supreme Court to be extra-progressive? Or no Supreme Court, the People’s Commission on Truth and Reparations instead? Liberals are just as bad in the view of the kinds of left-wing party the DSA are, see quote below:
By voting for Biden, you’re just propping up the same old rotten system in this logic. Now, I don’t think the hard-core is very large, and a lot of the DSA supporters are more fringe types (college or recent grads who like to play at being vaguely lefty) who either won’t vote at all or will probably vote for Biden because no way they’re going to vote for a Republican, so the end result will be what you say, but for that hard-core it’s not “get a liberal to replace RBG”, it’s “pull down the entire system of privilege that the Supreme Court represents”.
So, first of all, I very much doubt that more than a small percentage of DSA folks think Biden is Just Like Trump or anything close to it. “Would not be in the same party as me in a >2 party system” and “is easily a far lesser evil than someone we believe to be the worst President ever and a mortal threat to American democracy and rule of law” are pretty logically compatible statements and I think >80% of DSA types believe both.
Second of all, and similarly, Amy Coney Barrett would in fact have sailed through even though Dems desperately want someone much more left wing, because the statements “I would accept this person if I had to accept that anyone nominated would be a hard-right conservative, because that’s who R Presidents nominate” and “I think one important reason to vote D for President is so that we don’t get any more hard-right conservatives on the court” are not in any logical tension with each other either, and again I think the vast majority of Democrats, and even a majority of leftists, believe both.
I think >80% of DSA types believe both.
I do agree with you on this, salvorhardin, because as I said, I doubt that the really hard-core are more than a minority of the party (and probably clustered around the officialdom because that’s who tend to be either the True Believers or the opportunists who see a path to power) while the vast majority are the ‘trendy lefty’ types who will accept a centrist candidate.
But by the same token, the hard-core probably really do believe the whole system is rotten, all the old stagers (and Biden is an old stager) are Tweedledum and Tweedledee when it comes to any real difference, and compromise is worse than death (the opposite of the “schism is worse than heresy” in theology and church governance types). They may not have much influence widely, but if it comes down to ‘become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party’ and ‘stick to our unique qualities’, why do you think they won’t fight for the latter?
On the second point, I do respectfully disagree. I think Coney Barrett’s nomination to the 7th Court, and the objections raised by Feinstein and Durbin, and the views of some that it was perfectly germane line of questioning, show that there is a tension between “the Republicans will only nominate hard-right conservatives, so I have to accept this particular one” and “I don’t want any more hard-right conservatives on the court”.
If her opinions have not considerably softened in the meantime, why would they accept her for a seat on the Supreme Court, the prize of prizes, if they can fight tooth and nail to force the other side to pick a less “hard-right conservative”, at least on certain topics? If I had a choice between “okay, every Democrat nominee is going to be rah-rah for abortion, but it’s a choice between the Katie Ragsdale cheerleader type or the bog-standard ‘safe, legal and rare, terrible tragic choice’ not particularly activist type”, you bet I’d go as hard as I could for candidate B.
Reading the tea leaves, I think the assumption is that politically, it will be necessary to replace RBG with another woman. There aren’t a lot of high-level right-leaning female judges to choose from, and ACB is one such possibility. Replacing Kennedy with a Kavanaugh may have shifted the court to the “right” a little bit. But replacing RBG with ACB would be a whipsaw. And hilarious.
The electoral position is somewhat similar to neverTrumpers now, but ideologically I think they have more in common with the tea party. So for both cases internal motivations could be a demand for more extreme stances, and an almost aesthetic preference for purity over compromise. Strategically, the goal is to push the democratic party to the left, even at the cost of some electoral success. I think there’s more sympathy for this position than their would be due to jealousy of the perceived leverage that groups like the freedom caucus gave to boehner/ryan; ryan could say with a straight face that he wanted to compromise, but the crazies in the freedom caucus wouldn’t let him, so better make the compromise more conservative or they’ll blow up the debt ceiling/shut down the government/what have you (whether this strategy actually achieved conservative goals other than making life difficult for democrats is another question). This strategy is based on independence from party leadership, so failing to endorse Biden, who was obviously the least palatable option, saves some of their credibility.
I’m on “that side of the isle”, so I’ll chip in my two cents:
(1.) One thing to keep in mind, is that centrist liberals and socialists are ideologically opposed to one another. As AOC once rightly pointed out, in a many political systems her and Biden wouldn’t even be in the same party. And ever since the left began rising on power beginning in 2015, there has been nothing but mutual hated and animosity between the two factions.
So it’s not really a question of the DSA’s endorsements making the centrist dems “furious”. Their very existence is a threat to the power of centrist liberals. There is no placation. No amount of groveling or apologetic submission would satisfy. Short of the DSA ceasing to advocate for socialism, they will never be “welcomed” by their ideological opponents.
Centrist liberals hate the DSA, because the DSA is fighting for things they are opposed to. It’s no different that if Biden said he hates, say, the NRA. It wouldn’t be because the NRA failed to endorse him.
(2.) Biden doesn’t actually want, or care, about the endorsement of the Sanders/DSA crowd. You can tell this is true, because he has made no meaningful attempt to court their votes or endorsements.
Normally if you are trying to win over a swing voter, you try to offer something in return, either policy-wise or in the form of cabinet positions. For instance, in 2008 Joe Biden ran against Barack Obama, Obama won the primary, and chose Biden as his running mate. This is normal, not unreasonable, behavior in a primary. The fact that essentially no one is even floating the idea of a Biden/Sanders ticket should tell you the relative importance of this for Biden.
So why all the fuss over the DSA and Bernie-or-busters? My take is that Team Biden is looking at some combination of 1. High-dollar internal polling 2. Serious mental decline in Biden 3. The general unenthusiastic of the Dem electorate, and they see the writing on the wall. So knowing that they are about to lose against Trump, in order for centrist liberals to maintain their positions of “electability”, they need some reason for why they lost, other than themselves. In 2016 it was Russia, Jill Stein, and Bernie. In 2020, we can see that the DSA is being added to their cast of scapegoats.
I don’t think it is unreasonable to think that high-ranking members of the Team Biden would rather lose to Trump than make meaningful concessions to the left. I recall, just a few months ago, some Bloomberg supporters on this website were open about their ranking of Centrist Liberal> Trump > Sanders.
(3.) It may be that the DSA is holding out an endorsement of Biden, because depending on how hard he pivots to the right for the general, he could end up being positioned as worse than Trump. It is not on-its-face given that, from the DSA’s perspective, a Democrat is necessarily superior to a Republican.
At least for my own perspective, this almost happened in 2016. After the primary was over, I began with a modest support of Clinton over Trump. But as the summer and fall dragged on, each debate showed an increasingly hawkish Clinton. Who, if her rhetoric was to be taken at face value, was essentially promising to initiate a shooting war with Russia upon taking office. By the time November rolled around, my support for her had dwindled into ambivalence, and I recall telling myself on election night “I no longer care who wins this thing”. Any endorsements I would have made that spring would have been premature.
One reason the Democrat might be worse is that he would have Democratic support in Congress.
Consider a centrist policy that the left would like to block. If the president is a Republican without a congressional majority, he can only get it passed with Democratic support and, given how partisan politics has become, he doesn’t get it. If the president is a Democrat, he might get most of the Democrats and some significant number of Republicans to vote for it. Obviously it depends on the details, but one can imagine such a situation.
That line of thinking was a big part of my logic, as a Republican-leaning libertarian, for opposing Trump in 2016: Congressional Republicans would be much more likely to show backbone and opposed bad policies from Clinton than from Trump. Moreover, I expected Trump to be bad for the Republican Party’s brand reputation, and I expected my chances of getting a President with policies reasonably close to my preferences in 2024 or 2028 to be much better with Clinton in office than Trump.
AOC as empirical evidence says you’re theory isn’t in alignment with reality. The place where you lose the left-center is farther along the horseshoe.
IDK, I find the whole theory confusing. AOC seems to just be a young democrat that hasn’t faced a tough race or a tough fundraising campaign yet. A lot of what she says sounds like kind of a reflection of idealistic young Republicans I’ve talked to, just from the left. She hasn’t been “broken” by the yoke of DC and fundraisers yet, I guess the new phrasing would be, “not yet swampy.”
But really she appears, to me, to be the natural progression along the line of ideas espoused by Obama, Pelosi, and other recent Democratic leaders, just not yet “mugged by reality” (or whatever facile thing people say).
She explicitly identifies as a Democratic Socialist, and her endorsement of Bernie after his heart attack was widely regarded as highly consequential.
But she is definitely not considered anathema by the overall Democratic party, whether leadership or membership. People may not agree with all of her stances, but she isn’t regarded as the enemy.
She could have set herself up that way, but she broadly chose to blend aggressive idealism with a sufficient amount of pragmatism. She does her homework. She policy wonks. She seems likely to eschew unicorn farts and rainbows.
Yea I agree with you.
Just noticed that Plato’s soul-as-city metaphor is also present in the Hebrew Bible (h/t Alastair Roberts), namely Proverbs 16:32 and 25:28. Any classicists here? How common was this metaphor?
I think it’s just a good metaphor. It reflects the fact that people generally feel more like a conglomeration of warring forces then a singular entity. We are a ball of conflicting desires, much like a city full of different class concerns and squabbling political factions.
I have found it somewhat helpful to model my own mental processes as being like the court of a king of a city state. The King is the Ego, the part of me that decides what to do, and the court is full of conflicting factions. The people of the city are the flesh (ie, the body, the monkey brain), represented in court by the City Burgher. He constantly petitions for more food, more sex, more comfort. He’s ever warning that the people may riot if their needs are not addressed, and he’s hungry to grab as much influence as he can. He’s a coward and will step into line when forced, but will never stay in line for long. Then there’s the aristocrats representing the emotions: powerful Duke Fear, and Countess Despair, and the bellicose Baron Fury, all doing their best to sway the King to favor them. They are loud and excellent at making speeches, and as nobility they will be heard even if they are not listened to. And of course the Captian of the Gaurd who represents discipline: he carries out the King’s orders, but he’s only as good as the weapons and training his men have been given. It’s no good for the King to declare a time of fasting (read: a diet) if the city guard can’t enforce the decree on the city as a whole, for example. The Captain of the Guard is loyal and true, but if the ranks of his guard are allowed to dwindle, if they do not train and drill, but rather sleep and wile away the days playing cards, if their weapons rust and dull, and their armor is rarely worn due to it’s weight; if any or all of those things come to pass then there is only so much the city guard can do against the rioting masses, or against foreign invasion.
You can systematize even further: here is Prince Reason, a wise adviser close to the King (when in favor) whose advice is essential to the proper running of the court. But beware: he can deliver to the King not only hard truths but, when prompted, manufacture soft sophistries to justify whatever decision the King prefers. There is also the Grand Vizier who is cunning and ruthless. He tells the King how to practically acquire whatever the King wishes, regardless of moral considerations, and is always pushing the King to acquire more security, more money, more prestige. The Spymaster is always wary of foreign threats to the throne: what do other people think of us? Are they enemies or friends? What are people saying behind our backs?
I could go on forever, inventing new counselors and advisers for the court (the Virtues, seven wise handmaidens, the High Priest, keeper of the great law book called Ethics, etc), but it all comes down to the same idea. If the King is wise and strong, and keeps his soldiers well armed and the walls well repaired, then he may have a prosperous city indeed. But if he neglects his duties and is lax on the throne then the city will be ruled by his advisers, constantly pulling him back and forth. In life you need to take control, or the alternative is to bounce from one fear or desire to another.
Very evocative. It would be interesting to take a simple plot, like “boy meets girl” and translate it entirely to this hypothetical arena.
That’s not a half bad idea. I can see it now: the Spymaster is on extra high alert, the Burgher advocating a strong push to reach second base on their next date, the Vizier is full of strategies to manipulate her and has gotten into a heated debate with the High Priest on what is or isn’t a morally acceptable courting strategy (with Prince Reason mediating), and Duke Fear hasn’t stopped ranting and raving for days now…
And every time he meets her the Iznogoud wants to be Caliph in the place of the Caliph.
How about a prequel to Inside Out set in the middle ages?
Appropos of nothing, and loathe as I am to give clicks to the NYT, I did quite enjoy this long-form profile of a cultural institution I assume most American readers are familiar with… Weird Al Yankovic.
The writer, Sam Anderson, writes really well, I’ve been following him for 4 or 5 years. I’ll recommend some of his other pieces i remember that you can find with a search engine:
Letter of Recommendation: Blind Contour Drawing
David’s Ankles
Impossible Owls (his book of essays)
Smoking is anti-correlated with bad coronavirus cases. https://twitter.com/KlausKblog/status/1249048902495592450
Can’t die of COVID-19 if you’ve already died of lung cancer?
Is anyone making chloroquine-laced cigarettes yet?
According to the CDC, 13.7% of U.S. adults currently smoke. Smokers are older and more at risk. This means they’re at least 10x less likely to get infected by covid?
People naturally social distance from smokers already?
But perhaps there are healthier ACE2 inhibitors than smoking?
Knock on effects of the quarantine, mortgage market edition.
JP Morgan has announced that it is tightening lending standards for the near term, a minimum 700 credit score and a 20% down payment with basically no access for other loans. The average previous down payment was ~10% for their loans, if this policy spreads and maintains for any length of time there are very significant implications for the price of housing. A highly simplified walk through of how a down payment shift can cause a cratering of demand.
I buy my first home for $100,000 with a 10% down payment. After 5 years of a 30 year loan I have around 8-9000 in principle paid off and ~ $18,000 in equity with my down payment and zero price change. If I could sell that home completely cost free and use my equity as a down payment on a more expensive house I can get a $180,000 house as far as my down payment is concerned. Another 5 years in a similar transaction would give me a down payment on a $324,000 house.
If you mandate a higher down payment then 5 years of payments plus your original 10% buys a lot less, and doubling it to 20% means that original example goes from being able to handle the down payment on $80,000 more in total price to being able to handle $10,000 less in total price. The original example assumed that you could sell your home for the same price that you bought it for, and regain your initial stake, but if the median borrower has lost a chunk of purchasing power then your home might not sell for what you need it to. Long story short a 1% decline in price of your home will mean a 5% decline in your next home’s maximum price.
This is not the only impact, to channel Arnold Kling it breaks a pattern of house buying that previously existed. If I saved $50,000 for a house at a 10% downpayment I could buy a $500,000 house. But I could also do something like buy a $200,000 house, and put $30,000 into renovations/improvements up front. Then after that round is completed I can get my house reassessed for say $225,000 and use an equity line to borrow $20,000 and put that into improvements, and repeat all the way down and end up living in a house valued at $250k+.
A down payment increase alone can plausibly lock up sections of the mortgage market very quickly.
You posted this twice, so I reported this comment to get rid of it.
Knock on effects of the quarantine, mortgage market edition.
JP Morgan has announced that it is tightening lending standards for the near term, a minimum 700 credit score and a 20% down payment with basically no access for other loans. The average previous down payment was ~10% for their loans, if this policy spreads and maintains for any length of time there are very significant implications for the price of housing. A highly simplified walk through of how a down payment shift can cause a cratering of demand.
I buy my first home for $100,000 with a 10% down payment. After 5 years of a 30 year loan I have around 8-9000 in principle paid off and ~ $18,000 in equity with my down payment and zero price change. If I could sell that home completely cost free and use my equity as a down payment on a more expensive house I can get a $180,000 house as far as my down payment is concerned. Another 5 years in a similar transaction would give me a down payment on a $324,000 house.
If you mandate a higher down payment then 5 years of payments plus your original 10% buys a lot less, and doubling it to 20% means that original example goes from being able to handle the down payment on $80,000 more in total price to being able to handle $10,000 less in total price. The original example assumed that you could sell your home for the same price that you bought it for, and regain your initial stake, but if the median borrower has lost a chunk of purchasing power then your home might not sell for what you need it to. Long story short a 1% decline in price of your home will mean a 5% decline in your next home’s maximum price.
This is not the only impact, to channel Arnold Kling it breaks a pattern of house buying that previously existed. If I saved $50,000 for a house at a 10% downpayment I could buy a $500,000 house. But I could also do something like buy a $200,000 house, and put $30,000 into renovations/improvements up front. Then after that round is completed I can get my house reassessed for say $225,000 and use an equity line to borrow $20,000 and put that into improvements, and repeat all the way down and end up living in a house valued at $250k+.
A down payment increase alone can plausibly lock up sections of the mortgage market very quickly.
So I wonder — if people bought with one of those very-low-down payment mortgages, where does that put them? Assuming they have job security right now, they now have a house that they otherwise would not have had, and it’s better to be in a house than an apartment right now; but a fall in demand means market values might collapse pretty badly, putting the relatively new homeowners in a bad way, in terms of home value?
I mean, they’d be “underwater” on their home for some time, sure.
But if they still have a job and aren’t moving anytime soon, that doesn’t really matter.
What people seem to have forgotten in all of this is that if you buy your house for the purpose of living in it, and you get a fixed-rate payment that you can afford to make indefinitely, interest rates and home values are basically irrelevant to your day do day life.
…until you need to sell your house to take another job or something, at which point they matter a whole lot….
That plus housing prices will affect wages. If housing prices fall enough to cause wage reductions, that fixed rate won’t matter much if you can’t afford it anymore.
What percentage of people do you suppose work jobs where mandatory relocation is likely?
I don’t think that’s the right question.
“What percentage of jobs filled involve location changes?” is a lot closer. That represents the potential net loss to the housing market if people can’t take jobs due to being underwater.
We also just went through this post-2008, so data should be available.
With 15% unemployment rates? Quite a few.
It matters a great deal, if you ‘own’ a house but aren’t building equity you are functionally paying much higher rent than walking away and renting.
But in this scenario you are still building equity. You just lost some value on your investment such that, temporarily, you have an unrealized loss.
But every month you pay, your “amount owed” goes down. After some time period X you’ll be back above water again, assuming the house is worth more than $0.
That isn’t always true–where I live, rents are 150%-200% of the price of mortgage payment + taxes + insurance.
In my opinion, a good measure for a healthy housign market is that rents are higher than mortgage payment + taxes + insurance – that means renting gives flexibility at a cost, rather than homeownership being a bet on rising housing prices.
Going from -10% equity to 0 is not the same as going from 0% to 10% at all.
This should be fairly rare, and only occur in specific times and places.
With interest rates this low, that is the scenario in most places that aren’t the biggest, most desirable cities (i.e., excluding NY, LA, and the Bay Area).
No, it isn’t.
It’s not -10% equity, though, as you know.
I don’t know what you mean by this.
The notion that improving your equity position from -10% to 0% is somehow trivial or not valuable is absurd.
No one said this, its an awful strawman.
It puts them in a place of uncertainty. If rents fall and housing prices fall and remain depressed then they are effectively paying higher rent for years before they get back to building equity.
Interesting, because with the freezes on rents, a lot of landlords aren’t getting their rents, which they need to pay *their* mortgages (because they couldn’t sell their houses, for example); so a collapse in housing prices and rental prices could be very bad across-the-board.
At the same time, how much are rents likely to fall in the saturated cities of the US and the world (the Londons and New Yorks)?
It depends on what you mean by ‘fall’. The average rent payed is likely to drop a lot, someone who doesn’t pay rent at all and is eventually evicted has a 100% reduction in rent for that time period, but that won’t show up in most of the average rent prices which are calculated off either advertised prices, the actual lease numbers or recently signed leases. In this way you can get a stable looking ‘average rent’ and a collapse in income. Say you own 10 properties and can handle a 10% decline in rent over a year and be above water, if 1 of your 10 tenants just stops paying rent you will not be offering rent reductions to the other 9, and if you are badly set up and 2 of them stop paying rent then raising rents on the other 8 if possible is your best case scenario*. OER and rent didn’t flatline until late into the recession and took only modest dips early during the recovery, despite delinquency rates rising very early on (prior to the recession delinquency rates were at a 15 year high). It isn’t until evictions happened and bankruptcies gave the properties new owners (at lower costs) that the increase in measured rent prices fall, despite it being clear that received rents had already fallen.
*There are some stories of landlords raising the rents of their tenants who have been late on their payments recently either as a tactic or desperation.
I wrote the above post to lead into this one:
There is an open question about how we get from the current situation to inflation, specifically as it is measured by CPI. It is difficult to see how a smoothly functioning market would lead to inflation in the near term with housing being the largest single component of CPI, with income down and missed payments likely already here early on there should be a static supply of housing with decreased (in dollar terms) demand.
The answer is that in a poorly functioning market you can get falling home prices and flat or rising rents*, how you ask? Well you get a downgraded market. Homeowners who end up in default are unlikely to be homeowners again any time soon, and renters who miss payments are also unlikely to become homeowners anytime soon. If you are assuming that those houses which are now vacant will be converted into rental properties, continuing to meet the new renting demand then you are mentally modeling a smoothly functioning market. The more likely outcome is series of frictions which prevent these things from happening. These frictions will include
1. Tightening lending standards. Banks will be shoring up balance sheets as best they can, and that typically includes more stringent standards. A reduced pool of buyers will cause units to sit on the market for a lot longer, effectively reducing the housing stock.
2. Lack of leveraged buyers. Like the example in the previous post there is a portion of the landlord community who use the same concept to perpetually leverage themselves into more properties. Buy one at 20% down, make payments and let housing prices appreciate. Borrow against equity, put 20% down on a new property, rinse and repeat. These landlords are both highly susceptible to a down turn and highly resistant to taking lower rents. With lower overall prices they cannot move their properties and cover the loans against them, and there is a minimum level of rental income that they need to meet their obligations. Anything notably less than that minimum will bankrupt them, as will a major repair, or the loss of income from a couple of units at the same time. At this point walking away and letting their lenders handle evictions starts to look more appealing than spending your limited resources filling the gap.
3. Similar to overstretched landlords, renters who are short of money have a strong incentive to simply stop paying rent and remain in place as long as they can. While their effective rent over that time period will be zero it will not contribute to the average rent falling. Eventually these tenants will be removed but that doesn’t mean their apartments will return to being supply in short order. Chunks of housing will become un-rentable without repairs, while liens etc contribute to the costs of taking over that property.
*the largest component of CPI is owner equivalent rent, or how much it would cost the owner of a house to rent it out, which is one reason why CPI didn’t swing up on track with home prices during the 2000s bubble.
**there is a large incentive for fraud here. Stop paying the banks what you owe but continue to collect as much rent as you can.
We just went through this, in spades, post 2008. If it didn’t spike inflation then, it’s not likely to now.
Owner equivalent rent continued to rise through the GFC until just before the end of the recession. Inflation didn’t rise because there was a broad decline in prices due to the contraction, and there wasn’t a supply shock potentially pushing up broader prices then.
Apologies in advance for this rant:
With the local schools all closed, the class instruction has all moved online. The schools have decided to use Classlink for this. Classlink has things so that when you go to their site, you automatically go to your student’s page. This works fine…unless you happen to have more than one child in school. When you log out so that you can log in to a different child’s account, you click on the login link…and instead of letting you enter login information, it automatically logs you in to the first child again. There is no way to change the account from one child to another. It’s not that I’m stupid and can’t find a way to do it. There is literally no way to do it. They actually have a FAQ about this. Their answer? For additional children, open the site in an incognito tab! What the actual fuck? I mean, they couldn’t actually expect that any family might have more than one school age child, could they?
Rant over.
Two not-perfect solutions:
1) Install Firefox for your second kid. It’s not that bad I promise
2) When you want to switch kids, delete local site storage for Classlink. That should make them forget you’ve logged in in the past. Instructions for Firefox. For Chrome go to chrome://settings/siteData and search for ClassLink.
Unfortunately, I have five school-aged kids I have to juggle. I already use Firefox. I’m using the suggested incognito tabs. It’s just stupid that they didn’t anticipate that someone might need to switch between kids.
I agree, that is really effing stupid. Major UX fail.
Firefox has a feature called “Profiles” https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles Chrome has a similar feature with the same name, but unfortunately it’s not so easily available on Chromebooks. You should be able to set up one profile per kid, and leave it logged in. It might be a bit of a memory hog to run all 5 at once, and you’ll loose the ability to trade tabs between windows that run different profiles, but this seems like the “least insane” thing that gets done what you want.
Haven’t used that particular programme but it’s like they say: pick any two of “fast, cheap, good”.
It’s amazing how software for government purposes that should recognise “hey, people have more than one kid/hey, people can have similar names/insert common-sense item here” does not. That’s what you get out of tendering process, unhappily too often: it’s cheap (but not really) and it’s all too often rigid and unable to be changed easily.
I have my suspicions that companies which apply for tender processes are like the PC shops around here: “Oh you need to buy a PC for your office? Here’s one!” and it’s a lemon they’ve had lying around and will fob off on you unless you know what you’re buying and watch them like a hawk. They have a kludged-together system that they want to get shot of fast, and here comes unsuspecting government department that they can unload it onto “sure, sure, it does all you want and it’s fast, cheap and good, sign the contract here, thanks (ha ha suckers!)”
That last may or may not be courtesy of at least two jobs where the boss went out and ordered office computers from Local PC Store – not even a chainstore, these were small businesses – and got landed with absolute bottom-of-the-barrel units that were bare minimum standards, no room to upgrade, and ex-demonstration stock that they plainly wanted to shift before they got new models in. All that the bosses looked at was the price tag and they trusted that the business would sell them something cheap but good because they have/had no idea what the specs should be beyond “Can it run Windows?”
GAH! And again I say “Gah!” because I’d have looked at minimum at “what’s the base model, what’s the memory, what do we need, what bloatware are they trying to fob off on us, is it compatible with what we’re already using/running and is the item fresh out of the box or ex-shop stock that’s been handled by everyone?” but it was all done without any input from end-users.
> hey, people can have similar names
Obviously, there’s a lot of bad software out there that doesn’t even try to deal with this, but from talking to someone who worked on this for police/prisons, this one can actually be hard to deal with in some contexts. Are “Bill Smith” and “William Smith” the same person? What about “William Richard Smith” and “Dick Smith”? How do you deal with typos? What about if two people have the same date of birth, address, and last name but different first names? Are they twins or is it a case of a nickname/typo? What if the first names are similar (however your program measures “similar”)?
Names are a hard problem.
I expected the xkcd about little Bobby Tables
Yup
I have to say I strongly dislike that post.
It is unsupported, uniformative, not actionable and not even particularly entertaining.
I posit that a more accurate title would be “Random yahoo on the internet has 40 FACTS about names that will BLOW YOUR MIND”.
Taking just the most obvious thing off the top:
I can certainly imagine a system that cannot cope with “Patrick McKenzie” (which, I presume, is one of the “acknowledged correct ‘full’ names” – and if not, he should state so outright), but I haven’t actually seen one in the wild, nor can envision one being made based on any culture I am familiar with. At the very least, I would expect an explanation why neither of those six are acceptable to those systems.
I haven’t actually seen one in the wild, nor can envision one being made based on any culture I am familiar with
I can vouch for a database system, centralised national record-keeping system brought in to deal with local authority social housing provision, that was unable to deal with names containing the character ‘.
As you can imagine, this led to some inconsistency in the spelling of names like O’Brien, O’Hara, O’Connell, O’Dwyer, O’Grady, etc. To get it to accept names, people would enter them as “OGrady, Ogrady, O Grady” and so forth.
And because the thing was also case-sensitive, if someone in the other office entered a new applicant as “John OGrady” and you searched for “John Ogrady”, well tough luck, we don’t recognise him as being on the system, so try the scattershot approach of all the variant spellings you can imagine and maybe you’ll get lucky!
The software management team (who were not the original developers, the system had been handed over a couple of times to different bodies to run) did eventually fix this, but it was tough.
And I think that before I entered into the lists and had to use it, it did struggle with and not accept names like “McKenzie” so they had to be “Mckenzie” or “MC Kenzie” or the like. So things do happen when you want “cheap and fast” and don’t quite know what exactly it is you want so you rely on the developers – who have no idea what your problems may be, and why should they? – to magically read your mind as to what you need.
@Deiseach:
Was it the backtick (`) or apostrophe (‘) character?
I’m guessing apostrophe, because that’s how you delimit strings in SQL and prepared statements are Deep Magic.
Still can’t see what’s wrong with McKenzie, other than someone insisting on adding autocorrect. I already said something elsewhere about feckless muppets, so I won’t repeat myself.
@Faza (TCM)
If I recall correctly, he lives in Japan and most older Japanese systems didn’t allow that many individual non-kanji characters.
@EchoChaos:
That would’ve been an excellent example to include in the post wouldn’t it?
My issue with the post isn’t that there aren’t bad systems out there (I’ve seen my fair share), but that the post doesn’t get anywhere near the issues that usually make them bad.
Wait! Scratch that! My biggest issue with the post is that it rattles off a bunch of shit, without going into any detail as to where, why and how it’s gonna bite you in the ass, and how you can avoid it.
“System doesn’t allow that many non-kanji characters” isn’t a “you made a bad assumption about people’s names” problem, it’s a “you haven’t accounted for internationalization” problem. Even then, it ain’t that big a problem if your writing system allows you to render foreign names with a passable degree of accuracy (and, having lived in the Middle East for a long time, my definition of “passable” is pretty elastic).
Honestly, though, it’s in the same class of problems as “10 characters should be long enough for anyone’s name, amirite?”
If the post were at least informative (“People in $CULTURE don’t use names, y’all!”) or entertaining, I’d have given it a pass, but it has no redeeming features whatsoever.
Apparently McKenzie’s issues stem largely from living in Japan. The BBC article linked by Noyann goes into it a bit.
I mean, sure, some more examples would have been nice, but I think you’re way overly hostile about the whole thing, Faza. He didn’t kick your dog (I don’t think).
It also endorses the proposal that whatever a person claims as their name is their name and that the rest of the world must accommodate them. Prince’s unspellable unpronounceable glyph, little Bobby Tables, the idea I just came up with that my name should be a shade of mauve but with the polarization vector included so it can’t even be expressed as an RGB value, whatever people come up with to deliberately break the system, the system has to accept and work with.
Yeah, screw it. The coders and computer scientists of the world are allowed to say “we have developed this wonderful new technology that will enrich the lives of everyone who uses it in ways too numerous to count. You don’t have to use it, you can keep living the way you always did, Amish are right over there, but if you want to join the fun we do require that, for this purpose, you chose a name from a vast and flexible but not infinite namespace. Or come up with something better yourself.”
Faza, it was the apostrophe (which I thought I had entered, but then WordPress made it come out like that).
As I said, forgetting or never taking into consideration that Irish surnames include ones with apostrophes in should have been a bit of a “whoops, how do we get around this one?” moment before they rolled it out for general use 🙂
@Conrad Honcho:
I wouldn’t have minded if I didn’t see it linked/reference every six months, to the minute, like it were the Lord’s own gospel, rather than a marginally useful listicle. First time, it was “meh”, second time it was “ugh”, third time it was “grrr”.
So now I do my “old man yells at cloud” routine in the hope people will stop, if it gets me to shut up.
The thing is, names are an easy problem that I can sum up in one sentence: “A name isn’t Personally Identifiable Information.”
(Epistemic status: conciliatory)
The article lists some neat things but is unhelpfully terse; I’m not as far down the Faza Annoyance Spectrum™, but I’m getting there. I certainly don’t see what the problem is with a system assuming one full name for its own purposes. I kind of wish the list were in descending order of importance, or qualified which items are sure to screw you and which only might under certain conditions. Of course, it’s not going to do that, because as Faza says, in the end it’s only a listicle.
Incidentally—one other way the name Patrick McKenzie can go wrong is case sensitivity. Like, some parts of your code might turn the name into “proper case” while others don’t. I’ve seen this in legacy code I work with at work, and it annoys the hell out of me.
Let this now be a Thing.
A introduction to this issue: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. It’s easily read by non-programmers as well.
This a good article that someone should have linked 47 minutes before you.
The piece is on names. Not transaction theory.
I appreciate the sentiment that we shouldn’t make unnecessary assumptions about names, but when designing a system you necessarily have to make trade offs between complexity and functionality and some of those assumptions really don’t seem worth the extra complexity:
6. Yes, I get that some cultures have very long names compared to the ones we are used to, but you have to set an upper limit somewhere or some asshat is going to dump gigabytes of data into the name field to break your database.
11. Unicode is fairly comprehensive. I’m not excluding the possibility that there are non-unicode names that aren’t deliberate examples of parents settling their kids with impossible names (though I’d like to see some examples), but given the complexity of supporting non-unicode characters I’d advise those people to just find a unicode representation of their name.
12. and 13. I’m assuming the joke here is that some names are case sensitive and others are not, but if you design a system you have to make a choice. Either you make all names case sensitive/insensitive or you have to figure out some system to detect whether a name is case insensitive (which then will inevitably break in some corner case situation anyway) , I think going with the former is a fine trade off here.
30. There are, in fact, an infinite number of such algorithms. Do I get an infinite number of gold stars now?
40. Disallowing the empty string as a name fixes way more problems than it causes. If you are a person that doesn’t have a name, just pick one (just pick NA or None or something like that if you are for some reason principally opposed to having a name).
What about if two people have the same date of birth, address, and last name but different first names?
Oh yeah, that’s a real problem. And I’ve worked with examples of Same First Name, Same Last Name, Same Date of Birth, Not Related Believe It Or Not, you can imagine how much the “one size fits all” software loved that. (In the case of an unusual surname, it was tough enough for the humans to believe “Wait, they’re not cousins or anything, really?” so the software could be excused there I suppose).
I know people like to imagine Big Government has a dystopian nightmare future in mind when it insists on using things like social security numbers as ID, but honestly? It’s the only way we can get our flippin’ databases to accept that George P. Montelimar in Newcastle and George P. Montelimar in Kill are not the same person and should get separate entries as records!
Or we could just use internal autonumbered id fields…
Actually, this is a design decision I had to wrestle with a bit a few years back: do we enforce uniqueness of “identifying” data or not?
It’s not like I didn’t have it easier than if I were doing it in (shudder) the UK: pretty much all businesses have a publicly known taxpayer ID, people have personal ID numbers. Still, the ultimate decision was to stick with internal id numbers and it has been shown to be the correct one. Integrating with external data will be problematic no matter what I do, because all computer systems (including mine) are being designed, developed and maintained by a bunch of feckless muppets, so I might as well just deal with the issues as they arise.
Or we could just use internal autonumbered id fields…
I don’t know why the system didn’t do that, it may have been too difficult (it was a national system so you had entries made all over). I think one for something like a company, even a large one, has less problems because sure you may have two Tom Browns, but if one is in Accounting and one in Marketing, you probably don’t have to deal with Accounts Tom and Marketing Tom swapping places or up and moving elsewhere and then moving back, and you do have a limited size of “these are all our employees, all 5,000 of them, and only five people have the job of entering their details on the system”.
My guess would be that nobody with the magic power of “sign the paperwork that makes the redesign budget available” saw a compelling business case for it (IOW they don’t feel the pain).
That doesn’t really solve the problem, it just moves it. You still have to figure out which “John Smith” you’re looking for at some point, the person using the software isn’t going to know the internal IDs, or whether the John Smith you’re entering in now is an update of the existing John Smith or a new John Smith.
@Noah’s post above (the parent comment to @Deiseach ‘s comment that we’re responding to) captured this pretty well I thought.
You are always going to have that problem and no amount of software is going to solve it for you.
Riddle me this: how did we know which John Smith we were talking about before computers?
In the Plain world (where duplicate names are very very common – I knew someone whose mother, sister, wife, and 3 sisters-in-law all had the same first and last name), the solution is to identify people by their male relative’s first names – Joe’s Sam, John’s Sam, Levi’s Sam, {father’s first name}’s Sam for men and unmarried women, Ben-Mary, Joe-Mary, Peter-Mary, {husbands first name} Mary for married women.
@Faza:
Both of these are true in the UK, at least for adult legal residents. Businesses have their VAT number, and individuals have their National Insurance number.
@AlphaGamma
My shivers are brought about by what I’ve seen of how man-on-the-street goes about identifying himself in day-to-day life when living in the UK. I am aware of VAT numbers (but what of businesses that are not VAT payers?), but I didn’t have a National Insurance number for the two years I was an adult legal resident, nor was it ever asked of me in all my dealings with local businesses and bureaucracy, so I’m not sure how useful it is in practice.
By way of comparison, in Poland all citizens (regardless of age) and a fair portion of resident aliens* have a PESEL (personal identification number) and it is a matter of record any time the identity of the person you’re dealing with matters (it is, in itself, sufficient to distinguish which particular John Smith we’re talking about).
* Resident aliens aren’t required to get one, but it is recommended and/or necessary for specific acts. “Resident” here means “staying in Poland for longer than 30 days”.
@Faza- ah right, I forgot that you only need an NI number if you’re working, claiming benefits, or taking out a British student loan. So there are plenty of adults who that doesn’t cover.
You get issued one automatically if you lived in the UK as a child and your parents applied for Child Benefit for you, or if you are an immigrant with the right sort of visa.
The logical consequence of all software and app development tasks being concentrated in the hands of Bay Area DINKs…
Founded in 1998. HQ in Clifton NJ.
Like EMR software sucking, I guess this likely has more to do with user base constraints (small budget and heterogeneity) which makes legacy code bases that have intrinsically less flexibility more viable.
I’d argue that it’s the principle-agent problem.
You aren’t the purchaser of the school software, so your interests only matter so much as you can make them heard by people who might care.
Same with EMRs: clinicians aren’t the purchasers, it’s (effectively) the billing department. So what the billing department cares about gets fixed and clinicians are just told to shut up and fill in the boxes.
My wife is in what was a local doctor’s practice , now part of a much larger org. The systems sucked out loud even when the 4 or 5 doctors were the ones picking them. It’s very hard to create software that works exactly in all the different ways 5 or 10 doctor practices each want their software to work. It’s probably impossible to make it work the way it should work, as the 55 year old doc is part of the problem.
My snarling take on it (and apologies in advance to all small business owners reading this) is that a large part of the problem is: Boss doesn’t know the nuts and bolts of what is needed, has vague idea “We need to be able to run Microsoft Office”, has vaguely heard “Windows 10” (or whatever OS at the time was the latest one), has vague idea that those two things are the same thing, and just assumes that the shop will give them the best version even though they’ve told the shop “Oh and we want your cheapest model, thanks!”
You can’t trust the shop to give you anything but crap in that situation unless you stand over them with a whip and chair like a liontamer.
Yes yes, they may swear that Windows 10 is included, it may even be included, but when it’s on a machine with the memory and processing speed of a sardine tin that’s been sitting out there as a demonstration model for the past three years pawed at by every bored passerby until you came along and they saw the chance to get shot of it – well. You see why I’m snarling.
(And then you get asked by the Boss “But why is this not running/running so slowly/crashes when I have sixty tabs open?”)
> You can’t trust the shop to give you anything but crap in that situation unless you stand over them with a whip and chair like a liontamer.
I’d put it differently:
You can’t expect to get anything you don’t ask for. And if the only non-explicit guidance your boss provides is “cheap”, they’re going to offer technically compliant and cheap. And because it’s the government, you know that they only care about the price.
If your boss had asked for “cost-effective computer projected to performantly run office and administration software for the next 3 years” he likely would have gotten something else.
You can’t expect to get anything you don’t ask for.
That is the more civilised version of it, yes 🙂
It’s not the shop’s business to hold your hand and wipe your nose for you, they’re in business to sell goods and services at the best price and highest profit margin they can get. That’s why I’m headbanging here about “but why… didn’t you work out… what you needed… before you went in?”
You can’t just assume that you will get Latest Bells And Whistles version A for Bargain Basement Price B, and it’s not the shop’s fault for that trade-off (though I still do think that, given all the business they got, they did rather take the opportunity to dump any lemons on us).
There must be some sort of extension that lets you switch between sets of cookies.
Searching found this (assuming you run chrome).
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-profile-switcher/dicajblfgcpecbkhkjaljphlmkhohelc?hl=en
Set up a profile for each kid.
If you’re using Chrome, Browser Profiles might be what you want. You should be able to set up a separate profile for each child, then log into Classlink as that respective child for each profile, and then you can switch profiles for each child to automatically log into Classlink as themselves.
Different user accounts on computer for different people would solve this, and it is a good idea anyway.
Or install Firefox, Chrome and Chrome reskins like Edge, Brave, Chromium…
Firefox with the “Multi-Account Containers” extension should solve your problem.
So what happens if you get your Betelgeuse in your Hastur? Nothing at all? Or is there some milquetoast calamity that comes about? And does the order matter? (Yes, I recognize that there is nothing in Lovecraft’s mythos about repeating thrice the name of H, but this is the rare case where I don’t care.)
Examples:
H, H, B: Hastur shows up but with a shrunken head and a funny voice.
B, B, H: Betelgeuse appears but has a thing for sheep.
H, B, H: H again but this time wants to devour Winona Ryder.
I’ve begun looking into potential risks to the power grid due to solar storms, and what I see is alarming. It seems likely that a storm on the order of the Carrington Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859) happens approximately every 150 years, and that such a storm would take large swaths of the US power grid offline for ~1-24 months. The most vulnerable areas are the coastal areas in the northeast, northwest, and around Michigan. The federal government’s current pandemic response leaves me with a lot of skepticism that we’d handle the aftermath competently. I’ve seen projected damages estimated at ~$1T. At first the projections seemed pessimistic to me – wouldn’t NYC just buy some transformers from, say, West Virginia, for $1B each? But I’m not sure whether that’s possible. If NYC (and 50-100 million other Americans) really are without power for months, $1T in damages seems implausibly optimistic to me in light of the current pandemic.
It seems that we could mitigate most of the expected damage for a modest 10-digit investment in ‘hardening’ the power grid, but we (the US) are not doing this. We could also pre-order replacements for critical transformers for well under $1B.
Does anyone with more expertise think my summary is inaccurate or out of date? Are other countries better prepared than the US in general or is this a global disaster waiting to happen? Should, e.g., the Gates Foundation be stepping up to fund this preparation if nobody else can get their shit together?
For a more detailed discussion, see https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13705-019-0199-y or https://www.lloyds.com/news-and-insight/risk-insight/library/natural-environment/solar-storm
Edit to add: also, the risk is concentrated in peaks of the sun’s 11ish-year cycles of activity, next one estimated around 2025. How well can we forecast the peak and how near to the peak would such a storm likely occur? Is our risk concentrated in, say, 1 specific year every 11?
I know some people who have this expertise, and now I’m curious too, so I’ll reach out and ask them.
Couldn’t you minimize the damage by just disconnecting all the sensitive equipment from the long power lines before the storm hits the Earth? It seems like there could be ~17 hours of warning (as a coronal mass ejection travels from the Sun to Earth), which sounds like enough time to shut down the power grid if you had a plan for that. I don’t know if we actually have the right kind of sensors in place to provide an accurate and timely warning.
Probably? I’m less confident that our government has the competence to execute that than I was 3 months ago.
I do think that it’s much more complicated than just unplugging things (e.g. power plants need a while to turn off, and running them without somewhere to put the electricity breaks things), and that if we only had 1 hour warning we might not accomplish much with that time.
Is it a government thing? Power companies deal with solar flares all the time, I guess when a bad one comes they’d just do what they usually do for a bad one.
On the other hand, it could be the estimates for damages already take this into account.
The problem is that there are regular super-sized flares. Bigger than any of “big ones” that you mention, bigger than any that impacted Earth since widespread use of electricity started.
Sun observing satellites detected some supermassive flares that missed Earth, so it is possible that one of next ones will hit us.
I would hope power companies (and their insurers) would get on this rather than the government, but most of them are probably hyper-regulated quasi-governmental zombies so maybe not.
It definitely would take some time to do an orderly shutdown of the power grid, even if you competently planned for it. But I am guessing there could be enough time, and that preparing to do this would be less costly than trying to make the power grid passively safe against huge currents from geomagnetic storms.
Also power plants with neither the ability to spin down quickly nor a last resort thermal or electrical load sound like a risk in and of themselves, since any unexpected local power grid outage will damage them!
Not sure if just shutting down is enough. I’m not an electrical engineer, but the way I understand the problem, just because a copper wire exists means it will be charged with a lot of current. Which could vary from “overload 1% of transformers” to a theoretical “all copper wires longer than 10 cm are melted”.
I thought the problem was induced line current too (like it is for nuclear EMPs), but apparently it’s actually ground current. The storms induce large DC ground currents (GIC, geomagnetically induced currents), which flow through the transformers, which aren’t meant to handle DC.
@The Nybbler
So… just having fuses on grounds would help a lot? True, not something you usually have, but sounds a lot more doable than shielding everything.
I don’t think fuses would help; the connections have to pass current normally, just not DC current. A fuse would leave you with the transformer floating, which would be dangerous in itself; they’re grounded for a reason. There are apparently some fancier neutral-blocking devices which can be used, but I’m no power systems engineer.
Are we capable of bootstrapping up a whole grid at once?
It takes an awful lot of power to bring a power station online.
I suppose it might be ok if you disconnect power stations but keep them running at a low level.
Not “at once”, but yes, if the whole power grid is down it can be restarted. The 1965 northeast blackout made the whole industry keenly aware of the need for “black start” capability.
That may take some time, but there are designated power stations capable of starting without outside input.
Prototypical example is hand cranked starter -> diesel engine -> opening gates of a hydro station.
But coordinating it on large scale, especially when combined with widespread communication issues may be tricky.
But major flare may cause permanent damage in some equipment, especially transformers (not sure about mechanism that is supposed to cause this).
It’s been years since I read it and a quick Google didn’t turn it up, but there was an assessment published by a federal agency (NOAA or NASA I think?) that basically found that if a solar storm happens, it would completely collapse society.
It would take much longer to recover enough to get the food trucks and oil tankers running, than it would take for the bulk of the population to starve to death (or turn into roving Mad Max gangs) due to lack of food.
The ultimate conclusion was that we would be reduced to pre-industrial agriculture for some number of years; if everyone in the world became a farmer immediately, that would produce enough for about 10% of the current living population.
And that’s the best case scenario, before you get to the problems of coordinating a complete return to pre-industrial agrarian society without any modern communication, and with billions of people realizing they are going to starve if they don’t eat their neighbors (and that their neighbors are in the same boat.)
Basically, you really want to hope there isn’t another Carrington Event.
It takes 10 farmers to produce enough food for one person? I can believe we would ultimately only be able to feed 10% of the population in the short term (because we’re not set up for everyone to be a farmer and it would take time for that to get up and running) but this framing seems weird.
Anyways, seems like this is a much bigger deal than AI x-risk, is anyone on top of this one?
It’s not that it takes 10 farmers to feed 1 person, it’s that if you farm every inch of arable land on the planet, with every single person trying their hardest to make it successful, but you have to use pre-industrial farming to do it, the maximum food produced won’t be enough to feed most of the living eight billion people.
Industrial farming – particularly mass-produced nitrogen-based fertilizers, but also basic stuff like gas-powered machinery – drastically increased the total human carrying capacity of the Earth. It’s why we didn’t get that overpopulation mass-starvation die off that people used to predict.
Turn off the power worldwide, for months, and the carrying capacity drops back to what it was before.
Probably even lower, because the total societal collapse caused by billions of starving people won’t be conducive to farming until after things have settled down and almost everyone is dead.
Edit – And where this stacks up as an X-Risk depends how frequently these things occur, I guess – the last one wasn’t that long ago, but I have no idea how far back the one before that was.
If they really do happen every 150 years or so, that’s basically the ballgame, so I hope that’s not accurate.
Edit 2 – Googling to find the report I mentioned above still failed, but did find some good news –
https://spacenews.com/house-panel-approves-space-weather-bill/
Bad news. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_2012
why it had 0 impact?
—
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm/
—-
What is even worse? It was detected by STEREO satellites, operating since 2006, with STEREO-B lost in 2014. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEREO
“Without the kind of coverage afforded by the STEREO mission, we as a society might have been blissfully ignorant of this remarkable solar storm,” notes Baker. “How many others of this scale have just happened to miss Earth and our space detection systems? This is a pressing question that needs answers.”
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm/
I think typical estimates for effects of another Carrington Event are only ~100M without power in the US (concentrated in coastal and northern regions). Sounds like the results you’re describing are for an even larger storm. That’ll definitely happen eventually, but I don’t know what the expected frequency is. Probably much more common than, say, extinction-level asteroid strikes.
How would a solar flare put fossil-fuel-powered trucks and tankers out of commission?
Gas stations use electricity. I’m pretty sure most or all petroleum infrastructure uses electricity.
Many gas stations (especially large ones which sell diesel) have generators; it’s unlikely the generators would be damaged by a flare. As long as you could keep diesel flowing, you should be able to keep your transportation infrastructure up. I don’t know how dependent refineries are on outside power; I’m fairly sure extraction is basically not.
From one of the articles linked elsewhere on this thread:
I think there was something in another article about a flare destroying computers that run oil pipelines, but I can’t find it.
Nice try Councillor de Fermat.
Anyway, yes, prolonged outage of the entire grid would collapse society. That’s not really the question. The question is whether some relatively short-term event would collapse the grid such that it could not be brought back on-line before society collapsed.
I would be incredibly surprised if any oil plants that rely on electricity for safe operation didn’t have emergency backup generators.
Previous SSC discussion on how bad a major solar flare would be. Unfortunately no great answers there either.
Thanks!
Also thanks from me!
NERC Standard TPL-007 requires electric utilities to study the effect of geomagnetic disturbance based on a benchmark event. I haven’t done much research on it myself and can’t speak to the scale of the NERC benchmark event vs the Carrington event, but at least here in the Pacific Northwest area, the studies suggested it wouldn’t be much of an issue. In my memory there were only a few transformers that showed high enough induced ground current to be an issue.
I have not vetted this, but according to this article https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13705-019-0199-y
“The [NERC] standards against [geomagnetic disturbance (GMD)] do not include Carrington storm class levels. The NERC standards were arrived at studying only the storms of the immediate prior 30 years, the largest of which was the Quebec storm. The GMD “benchmark event”, i.e., the strongest storm which the system is expected to withstand, is set by NERC as 8 V/km [26]. NERC asserts this figure defines the upper limit intensity of a 1 in 100-year storm [26]. The Los Alamos National Laboratory, however, puts the intensity of a Carrington-type event at a median of 13.6 V/km, ranging up to 16.6 V/km [27]. Another analysis finds the intensity of a 100-year storm could be higher than 21 V/km [28].”
This article also suggests (but again, I have not vetted) that NERC is captured by utility companies and takes positions at odds with independent researchers.
I know a 12V/km “supplemental event” has been added to the standard and I don’t think it changed much in the results, but I’m less sure of that. And if the Givewell blog post linked below is accurate, I think the likeliness of those extreme intensity numbers is really low, and even if they exist they are likely more localized.
Calling NERC “utility captured” is I think a strong exaggeration given the level of industry enmity for NERC Standards, but it is certainly closely connected to the industry and does (from my perspective) a decent job of listening to industry feedback, which I think is mostly a good thing.
Givewell wrote a series of blog posts and a paper on geomagnetic storms in 2015. I haven’t had time to read it (I will later, but wanted to make sure OP saw this post) but skipping to the conclusion it is that “Theory and field tests reassure. Statistical correlations and evidence from specific cases such as in South Africa suggest that not all is well,” and of course that more research is needed.
Thanks for the link, I’d hoped this was on GiveWell’s radar and I’m glad to see thoughts from one of their contributors.
Elsewhere I’ve seen reviews of historical aurora sightings that suggest significantly higher incidences of Carrington-level storms than the Givewell author’s statistical model. Lloyd’s for example estimates 5 occurrences from 817AD to 1517AD. I do think though that storm intensity has several dimensions, and that auroral latitude does not strictly map 1:1 with the dimensions we care about.
The Givewell author’s 95% confidence interval and the Llloyd’s “reasonable range” of estimates just barely overlap, both consistent with a frequency of once per 250 years.
https://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging-risk-reports/solar-storm-risk-to-the-north-american-electric-grid.pdf
From what I’ve read, everyone is in the same boat with regards to their grid. The difference is how technologically dependent your food chain is. I’ve seen estimates that the increased urbanization of the US population combined with a carrinngton level event could result in the death of almost 80% of the population in 2 months due to failure of the food distribution system.
ecosophia.net:
Putting the problems of seeing regularity in(to) history aside, I can’t think of more than one who the elite classes couldn’t stand and who was elected to the presidency. How “common” is that phenomenon, who else before the current president would qualify? Or on governor level?
Andrew Jackson was Trump before Trump was Trump. A jumped up member of a class despised by all right-thinking people who had made himself personally wealthy and then took over politics with populist appeal.
I struggle to think of what Jackson and trump have in common under any but the most facile reading of Jacksonian history.
EDIT: Although it’s worth mentioning that Trump himself wants to think of himself as another Andrew Jackson, the comparison doesn’t come off well for Trump.
Worth remembering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_inauguration_of_Andrew_Jackson#Inauguration
Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon.
Thanks! (also @EchoChaos)
Was LBJ kind of one of these too? (I know very little about him except the lore around that photo of him with the basset hounds.)
No, LBJ was the insider’s insider. He was the Senate Majority Leader before he was Vice President.
Oh, OK. Nevermind then.
I mean, he was, but he was also a crass, boorish texan who never felt like he belonged and was definitely loathed by a lot of the establishment.
Not sure I agree with Nixon, who was an insider and major power player for decades before he was elected President.
Lincoln definitely qualifies, because a lot of the power in pre-Civil War politics was in the South and they really didn’t like his populist anti-slavery stance.
I’d say that Polk was also somewhat in this mold, and Grover Cleveland was in his run for both Governor of New York and President as a populist anti-corruption crusader.
Nixon is admittedly only partly qualified — he was a major power player, but he hated what we’d now call the Cathedral, and they hated him back–that was one of his defining characteristics.
Fair. Somewhat like Ted Cruz, which is what your description reminds me of.
Similar to Cleveland, then, who was of course a mayor and Governor before he was President but was on the outs with every major power player, including directly fighting Tammany Hall.
If you give me Cleveland, I’ll relent and say Nixon counts.
In some ways, Nixon to me seems the best example of someone in opposition to elites of this kind (those who feel entitled to run the government). They were existentially threats to each other. It’s hard to make good comparisons before the current culture war style of politics, and before a centralized bureaucracy really took shape. The dynamics were just too different.
Jackson and Lincoln had the common man thing going and got a lot of criticism from elites, but definitely Lincoln and I think to some extent Jackson also received respect from many elites. Also, who counted as elite was different per-twentieth century.
Despite the Adams-Jackson dichotomy, Massachusetts/abolitionist papers during the Civil War lamented not having someone with Jackson’s courage/firmness, even though he was thought violent and unsophisticated. This seems to have been a common sentiment among people who hated Jacksonian politics. Anti-Trump elites don’t appreciate any quality in Trump, usually, but I’ve been struck by how back then, it was normal to acknowledge good and bad points even in enemies. The criticism could be absolutely vicious, beyond what we would say now, but people rarely dared to pretend that someone who had become that successful had no appeal, talent, or persistence.
Lincoln had tons of elite support, or at least support among the educated. Not among southern-leaning Washington elites, but it would have been the same with a more established, educated person with similar political beliefs. Some were concerned that he lacked education and sophistication, but I would not call what went on there a populist or anti-elite rebellion. He faced some elite opposition, but it is definitely not true that “all right-minded people” were opposed to him. It was a time where a lot of people started out at the bottom and became respected leaders, with no formal education. The Democrats were still associated with the “rabble” in the Jacksonian sense, and the Republicans quickly became associated with finance and big business/war profiteering. Among cultural elites, Charles Sumner and Ralph Waldo Emerson were more than willing to give Lincoln a chance, even if they grated at little things he did that seemed undignified. Their reaction to Andrew Johnson was far more comparable to how modern elites react to Trump.
Society was too different to draw direct parallels to the particular Trump phenomenon until quite recently, I think–the world Nixon inhabited was much closer to ours, so I think it’s the best fit. But certainly people do shake things up periodically when they’re unhappy with the consensus at the top.
Lincoln is pretty questionable- he famously got the Republican nomination because although he was the favorite of no one in the party leadership, who they did favor was quite bitterly divided between several other candidates, but everyone in the leadership could live with Lincoln.
He did come from an extremely humble background – probably the poorest person to ever become President – but by the time he got elected he had made a fairly standard political career.
Yeah. One of the key reasons it is hard to have early parallels to Trump is because national elite consensus is mostly a recent development. Party leadership was more state-based and and there were competing factions with more than superficial differences. I know it isn’t completely homogeneous now, but it is just a totally different scene.
Also, up until the 1970s, party nominees were decided by party insiders rather than election anyway.
I remember reading that Grover Cleaveland spent the four years following his (first) defeat basically just fishing at a cabin in the woods, but published a political essay shortly before the next election which caused him to become popular among the party elites again so they asked him to be their nominee.
Anything that depicts “the people” or “the elite classes” as functioning as singular coherent entities, rather than as collections of lots of individuals, many of whom are strongly opposed to one another, is nonsense.
Every president, without exception, has had some support and some opposition both from “elite” (whichever of the possible meanings of that you’re using) and “non-elite” Americans.
That’s just more fancy Elite thinking. We all know you just make up these “mistakes” you call us out for. It’s just a power play in the conflict between you and us.
Regarding comparative advantage:
I am skeptical it works* in cases of non-agricultural sector production or when you scale from individual production.
So, the examples I see for comparative advantage are something like: you can produce 10,000$ worth of grapes per hectare or 7000$ worth of apples per hectare in country A. In country B, you can produce 2000$ worth of grapes/ha and 5000$ of apples/hectare. Country A will be better off using its lands to produce grapes and exchange it for the apples in country B, since that increases the total number of apples and grapes.
Or, in the cases of an individual, you are better off learning a skill you are good in which you are better at than most people, and can command the highest wage, rather than the skill you are best at. So, study math if you are good at it, even if you’re a really good painter, because your comparative advantage is in math.
But the thing is, this works when you have a limited resource (land, human capital), and I am skeptical it works that much when it comes to the US/China and other trade relationships.
The US has a lot of spare capacity. During this period of low unemployment preceding the coronavirus, labor may have been a limitation, but it won’t be anymore. The US can produce both the corn in Iowa and the cars in Detroit, without having to sacrifice the production of any of those goods. Whereas a field can only produce either grapes or apples, and there is a high cost in starting to produce it, the same as an individual has to specialize in something, a country doesn’t have to.
*Meaning trading with countries for things they’ve got a comparative advantage at is the best strategy for a country.
I’m not sure I understand your line of reasoning here. To clarify, you’re saying opportunity costs are nonexistent in the US whenever unemployment is > X?
If you’re trying to analyze comparative advantage, it’s all about opportunity costs
Edits below for clarification:
The classic Ricardian version is static. A temporary rise in unemployment does not truly change the underlying opportunity costs for comparative advantage to hold. Sure, you might have 8% unemployment for a year instead of 4-5% unemployment at the ‘natural rate’ but that’s not going to change the 3 year average opportunity cost of building a car in the US.
There are simplifications built in (immediate cost-free transitions from one industry to another of labor and capital) which make it easier to model, but that doesn’t really affect the outcome from a longer run perspective
Good point, I agree.
This is what I call the homogeneous labor pool fallacy. If labor was homogenous, interchangable, you could build a new business entirely from the ranks of the unemployed. It’s not and you can’t.
@John Shilling
Shouldn’t Variolization be treated as an independent variable in any vaccine experiment under your standards? I’ve seen you say many times that it is just vaccination, but dumber. But how do we know? What if in Jan 2021 the best vaccine still is not great. It kills old people and doesn’t provide immunity to the young? This is a future that is highly probable, probably over 50%. Vaccines also have their own side effects. What % of those are lower than the .0001% that covid does to 18-40 year olds?
I’m actually not in favor of the idea, but I find the “wait for vaccine” people to beyond insane. What is the other path?
There’s also the other solution people dismissed as being the same as variolation (which I disagree): look for natural mutations with much less severe symptoms, select those that can’t go back to being bad (not just a gene flip) and promote them over the strain we have now. Basically natural virus evolution, but sped up with artificial selection.
The big downside would be all the conspiracy theories: “They’re infecting us on purpose!!!”. The upsides are many, but most of them can be classified as “covering our bases”. What if we can’t find a good vaccine? What if immunity from both the virus and the vaccine lasts 6 months to a year? What if we find the virus in 2 months, and it takes 2 years for the vaccine?
Plus if you find it in the wild, it’s pretty much pre-tested.
Well done, you’ve invented live vaccines.
That’s how BCG and certain polio vaccines work.
Not me. Interesting.
I found the article interesting, too
Weirdly, I think the way a lot of attenuated virus strains were created is by passaging them through animal hosts–the virus evolves to be better at reproducing in mice or ferrets or whatever, and that makes it unable to be very effective at making humans sick.
Also, there are cases where the attenuated virus reverts to a dangerous wild-type. This happens occasionally with the live-virus polio vaccine, and is one thing that makes eradicating polio much harder.
It’s @John Schilling, but I’m sure he’ll see this by scrolling regardless
Correct on both counts. And variolation isn’t really a separate dimension; it’s on the same axis as attenuated-virus and inactivated-whole-virus vaccines, just closer to the origin. The origin, of course, being the place we are trying to get away from.
If the attenuated- and inactivated-virus candidates all fail, it is extremely unlikely that variolation would have worked either. If the attenuated- and inactivated-virus candidates all fail by being too dangerous, then variolation certainly wouldn’t have worked and would have killed more people in the attempt. And the biggest failure mode for those vaccines is that they turn out to be too dangerous because some full-potency virii slip through during mass production.
Everyone has been discussing most of these issues as if the U.S. were the only place for developing a vaccine. Consider some much poorer country with lower standards of safety and much less ability to do sophisticated things with viruses. Might variolation make sense for them?
I think even the poorest countries could now manage an inactivated-virus vaccine at this point. But I suspect there’s a lot of learned helplesness among poor countries to the effect that they believe things like pharmaceutical research and development must be done by more advanced nations.
It would probably be more effective to try and sell them on an inactive-virus vaccine with accelerated challenge testing, if they were up for the risks associated with that. But I suppose there might be marginal cases where they believe that even that would be too hard for them but that this “variolation” thing would be within their reach.
Immune enhancd infections…
Conspiracy theory prompt:
What are they doing while we’re all stuck indoors?
Seizing the means of production.
Sunning themselves on rocks, eating flies etc.
It’s not like lizards have ACE2 receptors.
No need to be paranoid, many things are actually happening. The good part is that by being an external event, it has the potential to shape up a lot of existing systems (cultural, institutional, political, social) in ways that would be absolutely impossible otherwise. See how Environmentalism is suddenly an obvious luxury, while local pollution is much more visible by its absence. If you tried to put this in the public discourse 6 months ago you’d be either ignored or skinned alive. But that’s just one example.
The bad part – the VERY bad part in my opinion, is that it leads to accumulation of power, especially economical, and the criteria aren’t even meritocratic. An example I’m familiar with: you’d think courier companies are doing great, right? Wrong. Most of my clients are doing just a little bit worse than they should (as business), and while I don’t have inside information, I’d guess they’ll start suffering soon from cash flow issues as well. You absolutely need to pay fuel and paychecks, but if their clients are doing badly they’ll be later and later with payments. So who is doing well? A small number of companies that work with the big online retailers. And even so, many online retailers may just buy a couple of courier companies and do everything in house – why not?
Another example that irks me to no end: Boeing will be saved by this. Trump made sure to call them by name as a “great company” when he announced support for the private sector. Money received won’t be proportional to merits, but with either accounting proficiency or plain lobbying.
What do you mean by this:
Do you mean… no one thinks we can afford environmentalism anymore, or now that people have seen a lack of pollution we realize how much better things are?
Both. Environmentalism has a very powerful altruistic quality – it’s not something you do to help yourself, it’s something you do for the planet, or for the future, or for the whales, or because it’s the right thing to do. It’s definitely not something you do because you want clean air on your commute. Trying to suggest we should care a bit more about the now and the us and less about global warming would get you (metaphorically) shouted out of the room. I suspect we’ll see just a bit less of that in the future.
Many of things enforced now by governments to fight this pandemic are actually key elements of green parties platforms for usual times. No flights or much less of them, localization of production, and so on. I think some people will realize, after seeing what it looks like in practice, that they actually don’t believe that (but on the other hand it will still remain good signaling tool).
There are a bunch of liberal wishlist and conservative wishlist items that are very likely to get enforced soon, because they plausibly line up with pandemic mitigation. This is regardless of their wisdom in normal times.
This will also be a good test for all the “overpopulation is very bad” people out there.
If overpopulation is so bad, why are we so dramatically reshaping society to avoid a virus which, worst case scenario, would seemingly kill less than 1% of the overall population?
@Matt M
“death of 0.1% of currently living people is very bad” does not mean that reduction in births is also bad.
Not sure why this would be relevant at all.
One reason for opposing over population is that it makes the populations susceptible to plague or other miseries. You don’t want to reduce the population by plague to keep it safe from plague.
Of course, if someone opposes overpopulation because they want more green spaces or whatever, they may, if also sociopathic, welcome a plague as a way of getting there.
If higher populations mean worse plagues then you might trade a plague and lower population that kills 5 million than one in 10 years that kills 50 million.
@Randy M
But it’s not true. Epidemic risk is risen by overcrowding, not population growth in general.
Fair enough, but population is one variable in population density.
If you are extremely confident of your models, maybe.
Gee, I don’t know, because us “overpopulation is very bad” people are not in fact evil misanthropes who want fewer people solely because we hate people and want them all to die? Because the fact that we don’t want people to breed like freaking bunnies does not mean that we are inhuman monsters with no regard for human life? Because we are not whatever strawmen you have created in your head?
Or because killing off what you quite correctly note is a tiny percentage of the current population won’t do actually anything whatsoever to combat overpopulation, especially since the people who die will mostly be old people who have already bred. At least try that one on for size, if you really can’t wrap your head around the idea that we’re not cartoon supervillains out to exterminate the human race to make room for more dandelions.
More like weak men than straw men, people like that do exist
@Baeraad
Please try to tone down a bit. I don’t agree with Matt M’s point either, but I see no attempt in your comment to be charitable, or to be honest, even civil. Also there were many other responses to it, so I have to wonder if another extra angry one adds anything useful.
And even so, many online retailers may just buy a couple of courier companies and do everything in house – why not?
Interesting reversal of the trend to outsource every last thing in the name of cost-cutting and efficiency, but yeah, I could see some Really Big organisations deciding that it’s worth more to have the certainty of “when we need to transport something/have our offices cleaned from top to bottom/etc.” than the cost-cutting of “hire an outside firm to do that on the cheap for us”.
Though they’ll probably try to eat their cake and have it by making those employees of the taken-over couriers or whatever “independent contractors” so they don’t have to give them the same benefits and rights as full-time employees but can rely on them being available 24/7 for them.
Normally you’d go with outsourcing being the right decision – each company should focus on its own core competency. But in this particular situation, Amazon’s core competency is getting products from suppliers to consumers. It’s a more or less natural extension to also cover last mile, if they get to the point where economies of scale make it a good idea. Which just might happen now.
Plus it’s a strategic asset – you don’t want courier service providers renegotiate with you in a crisis. Best if you have some reserve in your own back yard. Cheaper as well.
Fishing on SSC to see if anyone’s actually smart enough to know/guess what they are doing, then sending squads of black-clad enforcers to disappear these people.
Which is why all the answers will be silly, not actual guesses. That would put us at risk
But who you mean exactly? Freemasons? Illuminati? Vatican? Jews? Patriarchy™? Fat Rich Guys in top hats and monocles? Maybe Reptilians, Aliens, NWO or Opus Dei? Because an answer depends on that.
Personally, as a member of freemasonry-adjacent organisation: we’re just doing our usual stuff, but our meetings in funny attire had to go online. Oh, and some of us freak out, because local minister of health is one of us and if he screws up, the public might notice. Altough he is doing quite well, for now.
We know what the Vatican is doing, given that this is the Paschal Season.
Silly Deiseach, that’s just the pope. We’re talking about the real power brokers, who are probably in concrete bunkers waiting out the pandemic, together with their stash of Nazi gold and occult gospels. 🙂
So you’re saying the pope is just a modernist lefty face for the real Church elites who wield old-fashioned supernatural power?
Like how the Anglican Communion has the Episcopalians but also the people who’ve bound Dracula to kill vampires for Christ?
Like how the Anglican Communion has the Episcopalians but also the people who’ve bound Dracula to kill vampires for Christ?
Dang it, I was going to pooh-pooh that but thinking about it (1) this is probably a pop culture reference to a TV show/anime series/game that is going over my head because I don’t know it and (2) given the attempted rapprochement at the time Henry VIII was declaring himself Head of the National Church because he totally was an Emperor too in his own right given that King Arthur had conquered European territories and so was not merely a king but an Emperor, this is a possibility that I am grudgingly forced to admit could be feasible over my initial objections as to why an Orthodox Christian* would throw in with any variety of the Latins.
*Citation needed because the very tangled and complicated political situation from his father’s time to his involved a lot of promising fealty and swearing oaths to/with everyone from Catholics to the Sultan, often simultaneously, despite whatever original denomination they may have belonged to.
@Deiseach
It’s a reference to the manga and anime Hellsing. Or more famously, Hellsing Ultimate. Or still more famously, Hellsing Ultimate Abridged.
Ok, could be the wine, but I’m watching Alucard Ultimate Abridged and laughing my ass off. Thank you!
According to my Weekly Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy Listserv Bulletin (WWJCLB), I’m supposed to stay inside, let the virus run its course, and then harvest the bodies of dead Christian bankers to dispose of in alignment with a still-being-worked-on Excel spreadsheet.
> still-being-worked-on Excel spreadsheet
That’s both the most horrifying and realistic part.
Pandemic really caught everyone unprepared I guess.
Protocols of the Actually Derpy Elders of Zions?
Rules change … caught up in committee.
Commas are important people!
Soylent Green is punctuation!
what.
Is anyone familiar with the differences between Bisquick Original mix and Bisquick “Heart Smart” mix? Normally, I use the former, but I got the later on a previous trip to the store since it was all they had in stock. I tried making pancakes with it today (using the same recipe I use with normal mix), but I think they tasted different. (I won’t say what the difference was in order to avoid biasing responses). Of course, it’s also hard to tell whether it was due to the mix or due to my imagination or a consequence of random variation – I never make pancakes exactly the same due to differences in quantities of ingredients, oil, size, cooking time, etc. since I am not a machine.
As far as I can tell from researching it online, the only difference is that Heart Smart mix is made with canola oil and thus has less transfat. But I’m surprised that would lead to noticeable differences. Even the texture of the mix in the box is noticeably different.
Hydrogenated oils have a very different texture than canola oil; that’s kind of the point. Alas, the FDA has banned hydrogenated oils and the last grandfathered uses end on January 1, 2021, sacrificing yet another source of happiness in the quest for safety.
Wait, does that mean they’ll literally stop selling original mix in the near future?
(My assumption is they’ll find some reformulation to put in the yellow boxes that isn’t the same as before)
Edit: After looking this up, it sounds like the deadline was actually June 2018. How are the yellow boxes even still appearing on shelves if they stopped manufacture almost two years ago? Something doesn’t add up about this.
There was an extension of the 2018 deadline.
It turns out that the original mix no longer contains hydrogenated oils anyway. The information online is out of date. Based on the ingredient lists, the presence of corn starch in the original mix seems to be the biggest difference. I wish it was possible to find actual information about how the mixes differed and the implications for cooking though.
Question: is there anything hydrogenated oils are better for than butter (excluding cost and vegan concerns)?
I hate margarine and have never purchased it in my life, but wonder if it has some cooking advantages I’m not aware of.
Not only vegan, but any other reason for avoiding dairy–vegan, kosher, dairy-intolerant. The texture is also somewhat different – cookies often use a mixture of butter and Crisco to make the texture right.
Another good substitute for some people is lard–but that’s obviously neither vegan nor kosher.
Expense is the obvious one, but also a box mix made with butter would go rancid without refrigeration quite quickly. Clarifying the butter or using something like refined coconut oil or palm kernel oil is more shelf-stable while also having the properties of being more saturated and solid-ish at room temperature. (Bisquick coats the flour particles in fat in order to ease mixing, prevent gluten development, and add richness).
For a home cook, unless you’re making your own mix for later use, shelf-stable flour-coating isn’t a huge priority.
The texture is quite different, and dairy is a thing some people avoid for a host of reasons (religious, health, etc).
Also I have family recipes developed with margarine or shortening that fail when my family switched to butter, because butter contains milk solids and water in a quite specific suspension while shortening doesn’t and margarine is… complicated. (The recipes which overtly called for Imperial margarine actually worked well with butter, but it’s also not margarine but a “spread”)
And of course, Margarine causes Divorce in Maine.
Update:
I checked the ingredients list of my Original and Heart Smart boxes, and contrary to the information I found online, the Original mix no longer contains the trans-fat laden partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Instead, it contains palm oil and canola oil. I guess that’s how they continue to be sold after the June 2018 ban on partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. That still makes me wonder what the actual difference between the two is.
Looking at them side by side, the only difference in the ingredient lists is that Original mix contains palm oil, corn starch, and distilled monoglycerides, while the Heart Smart mix contains tricalcium phosphate. The ingredients are in different orders in the list as well though.
Palm oil is a saturated fat, evolved to be solid, or nearly so, at tropical temperatures. In this respect it is similar to hydrogenated vegetable oil, or butter, or lard. If the Heart Smart mix does not contain any saturated fats that might well explain a difference in texture and toothsomeness.
Slight tangent, but Trader Joe’s pancake mix is the only one I can stand any more. Most of the other ones just taste off– definitely anything I can get at Safeway does.
Why bother with a mix?
because pancakes are a marginal food that aren’t worth the effort if you don’t have a mix. Also all online recipes I have found are worse tasting than a mix.
Your question is like asking, “why buy vodka from the supermarket?”
I don’t think it’s like asking ‘Why buy vodka from the supermarket?’ It is in fact very unlike that question – making vodka at home would cost a large amount of money, would take months, would be illegal and you would very likely produce something undrinkable.
Making a pancake mix is just about the simplest thing you can do in the kitchen, requires only three ingredients, takes seconds and (for most people) will produce something greatly preferable to a bought mix.
My youngest, who is ten, has been making pancakes for about half her life and in fact making a pancake mix was the first thing she ever learnt to do in the kitchen.
Everyone in my extended family makes pancakes that are slightly different which hints at one of the joys of making things at home – you can make them exactly to your own preferences.
@zqed
Fair points, duly noted
Unless mold gets in.
We fermented and distilled ethanol as a chemistry practical once and everyone’s flasks went moldy and was the worst thing I’ve ever smelled in a lab.
Like I said anteros. All internet recipes I have tried are inferior to pancake mixes by a lot. Indeed I find box pancakes better than restaurants most of the time. And you can doctor them up easily. My common hack is extra vanilla.
Anteros, it really boils down to “what did our mothers make when we were kids and we grew up eating as This Is How It’s Done”? When you’ve been raised on “This product should taste a certain way” because that’s what you’re used to, then a different mix will make your tastebuds go “No! This is wrong!” even if the second recipe is objectively better.
This is particularly so with comfort foods and what we ate as childhood meals. If Mammy made it out of a box or a tin, then that’s what we expect this to taste/feel/look like (be that rice pudding, baked beans, or pancakes) and you can only retrain such instincts with great difficulty. Recipes or foods we only encountered as adults/when cooking for ourselves are a whole other thing and not nearly so entrenched.
@ Deiseach
Yes, you’re right of course.
I still make a trip back to England twice a year. It’s ostensibly to catch up with friends and family, but if truth be told it’s because I need to stock up on Hellman’s, Heinz baked beans, English bacon and extra mature cheddar. Nothing France has to offer is an acceptable substitute for any of these things despite the glories of French cuisine 😀
Yeah, I couldn’t find Bisquick mix at the store–which I use exclusively for pancakes–and apparently you can do something really close with 1 cup of flour, 1½ tsp of baking powder, ¼ tsp salt, and 1 Tbsp butter. Then you mix with the 1/2c of milk and 1 egg (I live alone, so I cut the recipe in half) just like you would with Bisquick. It’s really not that much longer than using the mix, since most of the effort is in portioning out the 1c of mix, which takes about the same time as the 1c of flour. The other minor stuff using teaspoons only takes a minute or two more.
That’s odd, since I’ve seen plenty of bisquick mix in the stores, but flour is nowhere to be seen.
Anteros > I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Heinz baked beans in the foreign food section at supermarkets in France. Can’t speak for the other stuff though.
Have heard of the product, never used it since not American. Looking at the two products, the differences seem to be in the ingredients:
Original Pancake & Baking Mix: Enriched Flour Bleached (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and/or Cottonseed Oil, Leavening (baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate), Dextrose, Salt.
Heart Smart Pancake & Baking Mix:Enriched Flour Bleached (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), Canola Oil, Leavening (baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate), Dextrose, Sugar, Tricalcium Phosphate, Salt, DATEM, Corn Starch.
Corn starch is going to make a difference to texture (compare corn flour to ordinary flour in feel/texture and how you use them in cooking and it really is noticeable if you try substituting corn flour for ordinary flour). I had to look up what DATEM was and basically it’s a flour improver; again, that’s going to make a difference. Rapeseed oil (as we call it over here) does have a different taste as well which you will notice if you use more than a splash of it. The Heart Smart mix has additional sugar in it which is going to affect taste, and the tricalcium phosphate is an anti-caking agent (again, because of the corn starch).
So there are definitely additional ingredients which are going to affect taste, texture and how it behaves when used in cooking. You may not think you’d notice the difference, but if you’ve been accustomed to soyabean oil in the mixture, you will notice if it’s been replaced by rapeseed oil.
Honestly, I think you’d do better to just use plain flour, baking powder, milk or water and eggs for your pancake batter, but it’s up to you! I know American-style pancakes are different to the Shrove Tuesday pancakes we have over here, but this BBC recipe doesn’t seem that difficult if you want to switch to “less slaked lime by-products in my meals”.
EDIT: Okay, having read the other comments about the reformulated recipe, here hot off Amazon are what is supposed to be in the Original Mix:
ENRICHED FLOUR BLEACHED (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, IRON, THIAMIN MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), CORN STARCH, DEXTROSE, PALM OIL, LEAVENING (BAKING SODA, SODIUM ALUMINUM PHOSPHATE, MONOCALCIUM PHOSPHATE), CANOLA OIL, SALT, SUGAR, DATEM, DISTILLED MONOGLYCERIDES.
Heart Smart (“a great source of calcium” oh yeah I bet, what with the tricalcium phosphate produced by “treating hydroxyapatite with phosphoric acid and slaked lime”):
Enriched Flour Bleached (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Canola Oil, Leavening (Baking Soda, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Monocalcium Phosphate), Dextrose, Sugar, Tricalcium Phosphate, Salt, Datem, Corn Starch.
So we’ve got two ingredients in the original mix that are not in the Heart Smart mix: palm oil and distilled monoglycerides (“In bakery products, monoglycerides are useful in improving loaf volume and texture, and as antistaling agents”) and in the Heart Smart mix we’ve got an ingredient not in the original mix: tricalcium phosphate.
As mentioned, there will be a difference in taste due to the presence of the palm oil (now both of them have the rapeseed oil). But another crucial difference is the proportion of ingredients: generally, ingredient lists on commerical products is in order of “greatest to least” so, for instance, the fact that flour is the first ingredient on the list means that most of this product contains flour, and so on down.
The order of both mixes is different:
Original mix:
1. Enriched flour bleached (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid)
2. Corn starch
3. Dextrose
4. Palm oil
5. Leavening (baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate)
6. Canola oil
7. Salt
8. Sugar
9. Datem
10. Distilled monoglycerides
Heart Smart mix:
1. Enriched Flour Bleached (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid
2. Canola Oil
3. Leavening (Baking Soda, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Monocalcium Phosphate)
4. Dextrose
5. Sugar
6. Tricalcium Phosphate
7. Salt
8. Datem
9. Corn Starch
Heart Smart has more sugar and less salt, original has more corn starch. Same with proportions of the rest of the ingredient list.
This will make a difference to taste, texture and how it behaves when cooking, which I think is what you are noticing.
Kinda surprised that more people aren’t discussing the most likely outcome of American hyperpartisanship- not a ‘civil war’, but just vastly increased federalism. (I’m assuming I don’t have to explain the red/blue divide in the US, and of course it will get worse over the next 7 months). I am pretty skeptical that the mostly indolent, complacent US population could really engage in any type of sustained warfare or mass violence. (Also, countries that have breakaway regions usually have a clearly defined geographic area they’re splitting off, whereas red and blue America are pretty intertwined). More likely, red & blue states will simply and increasingly go their own way on a variety of issues now considered under the federal remit, and I could see some conservative Supreme Court decisions bolstering that. Also, arguments about federalism go back to literally day one of America (before, really), so it’s an idea with a ton of historical, legal and cultural precedent.
What would that look like? First off, letting states set their own policies could actually be the one thing liberals and conservatives agree on- it’s a red talking point now, but I could see rising disgust and fear of conflict leading California/New York/Massachusetts to just say ‘you know what, they can do whatever they want in Alabama or Wyoming, so long as they don’t infringe on us’. (I’m fascinated that I don’t see more complaining among blue states about how much tax revenue they send to red ones now. I mean, consider how weird much of the American left’s platform is- ‘we want to help the poor residents of red states, even though they hate us and don’t want our help’). Federalism could be a conflict release mechanism, especially if blue is somewhat afraid of red’s dominance of the military & law enforcement functions. Maybe a few 5-4 Supreme Court decisions could return say pollution, commerce, gun and discrimination issues out of federal control. (For example, I’m personally pro-choice, but I think my side is a bit too worked up about Roe v. Wade. Repealing it would, again, just return abortion decisions to the states, and abortion is effectively illegal in most Republican states now. There would be no huge change). I’d imagine red states would implement their full package of voter suppression without federal limits, so they’d probably transform into Hungary or Russia. I’m guessing individual states would have their own militias.
A more federalized US would be weaker on the world stage and probably step back from being a superpower. (Would that impel the EU to take the opposite course, especially if Russia takes over a couple of Baltic countries? Interesting thought experiment). But every power that’s taken away from federal control is one less thing for red & blue states to fight over. (Are there other countries in the modern era that are made up of strong regions and a weak central government? I.e. not like pre-20th century).
I don’t think this would be a particularly good state of affairs, just a very likely one. Issues include: red states other than Texas are usually pretty economically weak, and live off transfer payments from California/New York/Massachusetts/Maryland etc. (Say goodbye to your ‘farm aid’!) It would be a tough situation for rural counties in blue states. Blue states would probably still form compacts together (we’re all joining the Paris Climate Accords together, we’re all joining a free trade deal with the EU together, etc.) The decline of America as a superpower would hit the national security hawks hard. Lack of federal regulation, especially antitrust, would clear the way for huge megacorporations with unchecked power- so probably a transition to the dystopian cyberpunk future we’ve been waiting for. (Facebook buys every tech company under the sun and dominates all aspects of technology as Zuckerberg & Thiel are transformed into immortal AI. Boeing, Exxon, Monsanto and Koch Industries merge and also establish a private army. Etc.)
Anyways, I wouldn’t personally want this state of affairs, but I think it’s kind of likely! Should be considered more
I don’t see how this is likely at all. Whichever party is in power at the federal level will always want to use that control to enact their preferred policies in opposing states and vice versa. Also, there’s a lot of stuff that can only reasonably be done at the federal level to begin with. We can’t go back to 1900 even if people wanted to.
Also, “blue states” and “red states” don’t describe their populations all that well to begin with. Democrats and Republicans are not neatly divided along state lines.
I guess I don’t really agree with that. I think there are some people on the right who have a good-faith belief in federalism and state power. Also, the power to make some of this stuff happens mostly lies with the judiciary, where more principled and less openly partisan John Roberts-types can devolve power back to the states, one 5-4 decision at a time.
I’m personally pro-a strong federal government, but countries can always break apart, become dysfunctional, have civil wars, etc. If there’s increasing political violence, especially around elections which are disputed, total dysfunction in Congress where the two parties hate each other so much they can’t pass a budget or raise the debt ceiling, etc. I can see ‘screw it, let’s live and let live in our individual states’ as seeming reasonable. That plus a few pro-federalism SC decisions and we’re on our way there.
I agree there are rural parts of blue states and urban parts of red states. Kind of like how there were Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in Indian pre-Partition. Some people will move, some people will stay and have unhappy lives. By definition there are more urban than rural people in blue states and vice versa- otherwise it wouldn’t be a blue or red state….
I just can’t understand what part of the last 20 years makes you think any of your predictions are remotely likely.
It’s also unclear to me why you think the Supreme Court will become less partisan when it is already highly partisan and you predict that partisanship will only continue to increase.
Theoretically purple states like Virginia would be fun. Could we get it to split into a “North Virginia” encompassing the suburbs? My personal North/South dividing line is set at Charlottesville, VA.
Do we really need a third Virginia?
For symmetry there should be four.
Isn’t there something in the Koran about us getting 72 Virginias?
Would be interesting to see what happens to US corporate dominance, aside from the dystopian megacorporation stuff listed above. I’d tend to think it’s bad for finance/Wall Street because that industry needs a little more certainty, and I’d imagine the UK/EU/Hong Kong/Beijing would want to step in as the next financial center? But on the other hand, more companies might voluntarily move to the US for the relaxed regulations, which I’m sure every libertarian is Very Excited about. For example the EU is quite gung-ho about antitrust, but there’s no reason you can’t simply switch your corporate headquarters to California or Texas.
I’d imagine we’d keep the dollar as the national currency- too many advantages for everyone, and a currency issued by Alabama, Montana or Vermont would have little value, they’d be open to speculative attacks in the markets etc.
I would like to see more federalism, but consider some of your outcomes unlikely:
red states other than Texas are usually pretty economically weak, and live off transfer payments from California/New York/Massachusetts/Maryland
I think most of that is the accounting for retirement benefits, which I would not expect to change. If a New York retiree moves to Florida, it looks like “taxes paid in NY going to Florida”–but it’s the same person. I think “New York retirees can’t get Social Security benefits if they move to Florida” to be very unpopular in New York.
Blue states would probably still form compacts together
That’s strictly illegal per the Constitution (not just modern interpretations) if it involves treaties with foreign nations–I’d expect that limit to stick.
Lack of federal regulation, especially antitrust, would clear the way for huge megacorporations with unchecked power
Historically, it’s been the opposite – federal regulation is super-valuable to multi-state corporations, and local regulation is something that makes things more difficult for them.
I’ve heard another large part of the “transfer payments” are military spending around bases that’re disproportionately in Red states. Though, I’ve never looked up actual numbers.
Also, it’s totally Constitutional for states to form compacts with each other as long as Congress approves – though, as you mention, they can’t involve foreign countries.
I dug a little into those graphs that purport to show that red states are scarfing up disproportionate amounts of federal government benefits.
To make them work out, you have to include things like the salaries of federal employees. Military bases, like you said, but also national park employees.
Also federal prisons. Both the costs of paying the prison guards, but also the other costs, like feeding the prisoners and keeping up the facilities.
And a lot of that stuff isn’t transferrable. Like, the federal government own major fractions of the land in many states. The majority in some. Any money spent managing those holdings shows up as “transfers to red states”, but so long as you own 80% of Nevada, you’re going to have to spend some federal money there, even if it’s just to pay people to post “No Trespassing” signs. And you can’t relocate that spending to New Jersey usefully.
It’s one of those things where it gets simplified down far past the point of usefulness to be a twitter talking point.
They could forcibly seize 80% of the land in New Jersey, fence it in, and do nothing with it.
Then New Jersey would be getting those same ever-so-desirable “handouts” they are so envious of today!
*forcibly seize 80% of the land in New Jersey, fence it in, and nuke it a thousand times.
The issue with this take is that the states themselves are fairly split, with urban areas and less urban areas tending to be in opposite corners (although that’s a ragged division line). Less urban Californians won’t be comfortable with a “more federalist” take , nor will more urban Georgians or Texans.
Plus, at the end of the day, the need for federally coordinated policy in many circumstances is brought into crystal clear relief by this crisis. It’s odd that you think that people who already saw this need are going to be convinced by a pandemic that they were in error. That way lies the dissolution of the Republic.
The Left’s platform is saying that, not actually doing it.
Why would they be afraid of something that doesn’t exist?
LOL. The EU is only about free trade within the EU.
It’s not like tech companies are subject to antitrust law today.
The problem with your vision is that it’s predicated on the assumption that the Red state leadership will actually fight for their claimed “values.” I haven’t seen any evidence of this happening now, why would it start happening in the near future?
Are there any concrete, falsifiable predictions that can be constructed from this scenario?
Nope, it’s just a guy who’s been trapped in his apartment for a month having fun on the Internet. 🙂 I am pretty sure that the EU just inked the world’s largest free trade deal with Japan recently though. And I am quite sure that the rank-and-file of police & enlisted military men are right-leaning, sometimes very much so
The fact that the right has become convinced that the FBI is against them is one of the greatest ironies of the last four years.
Back in 2016, we were seeing articles like “The FBI is Trumpland”.
Easy resolution: those articles were not correct, and where not being written by the Right, so if you’re implying a “contradiction,” there is none.
Indeed, “The FBI is Trumpland” appears to come from The Guardian, which is emphatically not on the right. I don’t know about the right as a whole, but I’m fairly sure the “Second Amendment people” knew better.
I’m pretty sure it’s not a “free trade agreement,” just a “trade agreement.” If the EU wanted “free trade,” can you explain why it refuses to simply negotiate a free trade agreement with Britain? Why it demands Britain pay a bunch of money for access to the market? Free trade is not difficult to do. Mostly it consists of not doing things. The statement that “abortion is effectively illegal in most Republican states now,” indicates you may be speaking in terms of symbolic politics, I’m not.
My impression is that both Republicans and Democrats see setting policy on a local or state level as a kind of temporary step prior to setting it on the federal level. This is basically what happened with gay marriage, for example. It’s also the game plan for advocates of legalizing marijuana as well, although that one doesn’t seem to be going as well. I think the parties will continue to fight over federal policy since it’s the big prize.
I don’t see the connection here, at least not directly. For example, Texas and California could have different policies about abortion and not affect our status as a superpower. I mean, they already kind of do (I’m sure someone could comment about the relevant laws).
The problem with this theory is that at least one (maybe both I’d have to think) of the major parties in the US proposes policies that would obviously fail under federalism + free movement. Imagine medicare for all implemented on a state by state basis. Disaster. Sick people moving to state XX just because they have cancer.
To me, this demonstrates the weakness of medicare for all as a system, to others it shows why federalism is bad.
My understanding is the long-run trend in most federal entities is increasing centralization of power. Are there any examples that show a peaceful / non-catastrophic reversal of that trend?
Are you looking for cases of a transition from a unified country into a federation?
There are multiple cases of autonomous regions, that would at least sometimes sort of fit.
Are you interested in recentish history or also older one?
United Kingdom, Spain.
The USSR slowly decentralized over time from its peak in the 30s and 40s, eventually peacefully dissolving into several different countries.
Though for Russia it fails “non-catastrophic” part (but it was very successful for nearly all occupied countries).
Does it? Russia isn’t doing great, but it’s doing better than it was at the end of the Soviet period and I don’t know that there was any specific “catastrophe” other than perhaps the failed Communist coup in 1991.
Situation is heavily confused by fact that Soviet Union ended because it failed. Pierestroika was attempt to stop hiding various issues and fix them, it turned out that it was too late to fix collapsing empire.
It is very hard to say exactly what was revealed and just no longer hidden, what was a new problem and what was caused by fact that Russia was no longer able to steal resources from its colonies. But in Russia situation clearly went from bad to fatally bad.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia#Post-Soviet_Russia_(1991%E2%80%93present)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union#Dissolution
Define “catastrophic”. The economy tanked pretty hard and the early 1990’s were rather miserable.
I’d say the Baltics pretty clearly benefited.
e.g. Turkmenistan is probably worse off today than it was in the post-Stalin USSR. Does this count as “catastrophic”?
Off the top of my head, Belgium and Switzerland.
> you know what, they can do whatever they want in Alabama or Wyoming, so long as they don’t infringe on us
That won’t happen. It would require accepting a reversal of Roe v. Wade (yes, yes, Casey is controlling) and certainly the logic or reasoning behind Obergefell, though the outcome might be supported on other grounds. It would also require a federal repeal of the GCA and NFA.
I think it’s likely that major states- Texas, New York, etc.- will get more ability to do what they want, whether the feds like it or not. I don’t think this is likely to translate into similar benefits for Rhode Island and South Dakota. This is because it’s the project of both major parties to punish the opposite tribe for voting against them, with their actual policy goals, and helping their own voters, being strictly secondary. Gun control is a pretty good example from a reddish perspective- most gun control proposals are aimed at semiautomatic rifles, which are rarely used in crimes, and not handguns, which are used in more murders than every other gun crime combined- and the parties don’t want to give that up. On the other hand, state governments are going to grow in power, but only major states are going to be able to make it work for them.
I could see rising disgust and fear of conflict leading California/New York/Massachusetts to just say ‘you know what, they can do whatever they want in Alabama or Wyoming, so long as they don’t infringe on us’.
I strongly doubt that, given the whole “we will not pay for state employees or people employed by organisations or entities that get money from the state to attend conferences in states that are homophobic” bill signed by the California governor in 2016, which said entities then found ways around because such a law was dumb virtue-signalling.
The extremely extreme progressive element will always consider other places to be infringing on them just by existing in a different way:
Maybe the current situation is going to make a big difference, but I am more inclined to see it pushing “we have to make sure those barbarians do the right thing or else, because it does impinge on us!” instead.
And yes, I can equally see a move from the conservative side likewise, I’m not picking on progressives just because (using them as examples mainly because they make the more visible kind of signalling about stuff like this: even states rolling back “reproductive justice rights” didn’t, so far as I am aware, pass laws about “we will not let public money be used to travel to states that permit abortion”).
Nope, they just pass bans on giving aid to charities that mention contraception.
To be fair, I am not aware of any “right-wing” conference bans, so that bit of stupidity is one sided.
A more plausible equivalent would be over gun rights. The justification for the conference bans is that we wouldn’t want to force LGBT employees so go somewhere they would feel uncomfortable/persecuted, so the right wing equivalent would be “we wouldn’t want employees to be forced to go somewhere where they would feel unsafe due to not being able to bring their guns”, but as far as I know, noone’s tried to pull that yet.
Didn’t people get fired from minimum wage jobs at Subway for participating in the Charlottesville protest?
I don’t think most corporations have an explicit policy that says “If you do right wing political stuff we will fire you.” Rather, they have an implicit policy that says “You must uphold the company values of tolerance, diversity, and respect” and if someone sufficiently whines to them that they’re employing someone who is right-wing enough, they get fired for that.
I can never remember if you guys are claiming the Nazis as persecuted for being right wing or claiming that it’s vile slander to include them as right wing.
Other way around. Claiming that right wingers are persecuted for supposedly being Nazi sympathetic.
Anyone photographed at the protests was assumed to be a literal Nazi, despite the fact that many attendees were not literal Nazis.
That’s why I said “conference ban”, as in an official policy against attending conferences in certain locations. Individual workers get fired for looking bad on social media or the like all the time.
The justification for the conference bans is that we wouldn’t want to force LGBT employees so go somewhere they would feel uncomfortable/persecuted
Except the people travelling on state/work-related business to such conferences were not all/solely LGBT persons, so that was particularly silly.
I can see “We don’t want to let Sharona-formerly-Stan be forced to go to the conference held in the Walter Q. Bigot TERF Foundation Conference Centre” as a rationale, but when it came down to “there’s the big national This Type of State Official shindig/university faculty conference being held in that backwards hell-hole where they don’t even legalised gay marriage yet, we are not letting our guys travel to this necessary work-related event on the state dime until those knuckle-draggers get as advanced and loving and tolerant as what us are”, then it was purely about making a big noise about how virtuous they were, and since people needed/wanted to travel to those places they came up with excuses as to why it was okay for them to do it (if they weren’t using state money) or why that didn’t count (if they were):
Imagine the traffic the other way: “There is some value in having state lawmakers from Red Tribe states talk to counterparts in boycotted states to educate them about Texas and Tennessee’s ideas on issues including gun ownership rights and how best to answer an altar call”.
I was explaining the rationale behind them, not defending them. I don’t have a strong personal opinion on the matter.
Incidentally, your first objection is easily answered in that it would be unfair if certain employees weren’t allowed to attend conferences, as that would disadvantage them within the organization, and thus it’s better to implement a policy that prevents the issue head on.
it would be unfair if certain employees weren’t allowed to attend conferences, as that would disadvantage them within the organization, and thus it’s better to implement a policy that prevents the issue head on.
Loriot, unless the legislators and governor of California at the time thought (and God knows, maybe they did) that any misfortunate visitors from the shining beacon of all that is good, right and true known as the State of California would be hauled off upon setting foot on the soil of such backwards states, interrogated as to whether they themselves were LGBT and if so, thrown into durance vile where they were forced to listen to 24/7 Joel Osteen sermons, then this policy did not help make all employees equal.
Gay black geologists could go to conferences held in Texas without the proviso “if you’uns send your gay black geologists, we’uns are gonna treat ’em bad” being attached to the invitation, so a policy of “no employees at all who get or use or are paid or pay for their plane ticket and conference fee by state money can do so if they’re going to backwards places which need to be educated on LGBT rights” doesn’t protect, help or do anything for anyone except loud clown-car honking of “perceive our superior virtue! cower as you lose out on our largesse by not having our university faculty and civil servants attend events in your stinking wasteland!”
And as the linked article points out, people who need or want to go to events in such hellholes manage to find some way to do it while salving their consciences that they are ‘enlightening the backwards natives’ or putting up some fig-leaf of “we raised private sponsorship”. So the stated policy didn’t even do what it set out to do, which was an economic boycott of places considered not to exhibit right-thinking.
I’ve considered this issue for years as I live in the NE but all my roots/relatives are in the SE and have lived in the NW and midwest for years at a time. The differences in both culture and understanding of the role of government is growing and widening by region (with acknowledgement of the differences in beliefs between those in urban areas vs the rural counties). Where I live now in the NE has many counties in which Trump dominated though there was no chance of the state swinging red and the answer I get from some of those (n=<10) is "well, I'll just move to where I'm more likely to feel at home" when I ask if the policies don't change to conform to their understanding of the role of government or as a reaction to the changes in society. If this were to happen on any large scale, I can definitely see a move towards loosening the federal role in state activities. Look at the non-implementation of the reconstruction constitutional amendments to this day and you get the idea that not everyone buys into 'what the feds say, goes' logic. We need to look much farther out – probably more than 50 years to see big changes to the fabric of the country. Once one piece starts to unravel, it's not hard to imagine regions on the coasts seeing how they could 'get a better deal' regionally or by making alliances outside the current U.S. The receding dominant role (if it continues) of the US in world affairs could conceivably be the basis to say "why not?" What could change this course: an existential threat is an obvious one and hard to think of any others. I'm not saying this happily and I'll be long dead but hard to see us celebrating 2076 in the same way as we did in 1976 if trends continue.
I have a theory about why people get worked up about what counts as a sandwich, not to mention the more important question of what science fiction is.
It starts with prototype theory– the idea that people don’t structure their ideas about what things are around definitions (boundaries). Instead, they have best examples and things which more or less resemble best examples.
That’s standard stuff, but the part I haven’t seen discussed is that the reason people get emotional about these questions is that there’s an emotionally important moment of imprinting when a person connects a prototype to a word.
I wonder if that goes along with why “orange” went from the name of a fruit to a basic color term: an orange fruit, being a bright orange sphere, is such a good prototype for the color orange that it just stuck in the mind.
But the pink (the flower) is such an unimpressive prototype for the colour, that many people do not know there is a flower with that name, and many who do know, think the flower is named for the colour, and not vice versa.
I think colour names start as simile, then the simile drops away like a booster rocket. Pink and orange entered English in the Restoration when new bright fashions made it necessary to stop just calling everything red, or groping for mixtures like “yellowy red” or “pale red”.
What’s next? I’d like to see chartreuse, or a better word than chartreuse, replace groping for “yellowy green”, or “greeny yellow”. The new word needs to not have yellow or green in it, and stop using those adjacent colours as crutches, and should eventually eclipse its exemplar.
Is chartreuse meaningfully different than avocado? I think more people have seen guacamole than have imbibed chartreuse, so that might be the better word for it.
Way brighter, avocado is dark. The hue for which I require a name in question is fully saturated, the mid point between bright chrome yellow and that intense green that is the G in RGB monitors. Paler tints, darker shades, and the less saturated tones can take care of themselves: there’s too many of them to worry about.
If you think chartreuse isn’t rich enough to take its place among fire engine red, chrome yellow, cyan, and royal indigo, why then as I said, maybe we need a different word for the tertiary hue between primary green and secondary yellow.
Would “emerald” do? I think it is used to describe a color.
From childhood, “emerald” was the epitome of green to me, because I had a set of reading books about three pirates, one who was all about red things like ruby treasure, one who wore blue, had a blue ship, and a chest full of sapphires, and you can guess the green pirate.
I think when we call Ireland “the Emerald Isle” we don’t mean to call it yellow-green.
The Irish for “pink” is bándearg, which literally means “white red”, and as you point out it’s not like pink things did not exist that could have been used to name the colour (e.g. apple blossom is pink, for one).
So I suppose if you have any example of something, like the orange fruit, which very strongly shows “ah, this is that colour!” then it makes it easy to use that “name of fruit -> name of colour”. But colour names, as we’ve discussed on here before, are odd in how they come to be.
Nice. I would have to see what the Tudors thought that looked like. I can inspect the real thing all too easily when next it’s daylight, as the Canada- and various other geese leave it on the Thames riverside path a few yards from my door.
Other colours on that 1522 page include pink and orange, making a liar of me.
Also: puke. hmmm…
Sure enough, there it is:
Is it possible that’s a spelling shift for “puce”, which currently “brownish dark-red or rich purple-gray”?
I know “puke” meaning “upchuck” goes back at least to Shakespeare, but in my experience (yes, I’m going there) I wouldn’t call it “dirty brown”, more of a yellowy tan. Or should I see a doctor?
APE’S LAUGH will never catch on.
My theory of sci fi is that there has to be a mystery. Either a megacorp conspiracy, or a false history of some lost colony world, a first contact, or exploring new worlds.
Stories without this (no, Vader being Luke’s father doesn’t count—it’s a twist, not a resolution to a mystery) are not sci fi.
I call it “The Terrible Secret of Space.”
Wow, there’s a call back.
Do you have stairs in your house?
What the coal-powered Jesus did I just see?
I think the resolution of the mystery is as important as its existence. Mystery with no satisfying explanation is horror or fantasy.
For example, I recently watched Radius, a movie about a man who killed everyone he came near, unless he was with one particular woman. No real explanation was ultimately offered, they mumbled something about synapses and flashed back to a lightning strike.
I recall reading some essay about how modern sensibilities have shifted, such that the public is no longer tolerant of stories wherein weird/paranormal/mysterious stuff “just happens” without a proper explanation.
It cited both “Big” and “Groundhog Day” as films that wouldn’t work with a modern audience. The modern reboot of Groundhog Day would require some scene where an alien spaceship orbits the Earth and talks about how they have time control technology and deliberately targets Bill Murray’s character to teach him a lesson or something. Because the modern audience would no longer accept “This is just a weird thing that randomly happens to him so he can learn his lesson.”
I disagree, I think they work just fine… as comedies. Perhaps as somewhat abstract explorations of human psychology. They don’t work as explorations of setting, or concept, and theme is iffy as well, because in these cases the details matter.
And sci-fi without a competent exploration of setting, concept, or theme, well, isn’t. Which is fine, fantasy or horror or “literary” or comedy are fine genres. But Sci-fi is for something more, or at least something else.
I saw “The Fare” the other day. (When my wife is out, I put on weird movies to have something to listen to). It’s a Groundhog Day like premise, but in this case an explanation is offered, though it isn’t scientific, it still works very well, and everything fits together. The explanation is what elevates a strange movie from passable to really good.
This claims seems to be weird. In many recent wildly profitable movies thing happen with no reason, explanation or even thinly veiled reason.
For example Star Wars.
I find the claim facially implausible as well. I can believe that some essay writer has that opinion, but providing evidence for that is a lot harder.
It doesn’t make sense to cite “Big” for that. The stuff in “Big” happened because the Zoltar machine actually worked. How is having hidden aliens lurking in the background any different from that?
The essay writer suggested that a modern audience would demand backstory for the working Zoltar machine. I’m not sure I agree with that one as much, but I do agree that Groundhog Day happening “just because” would get a lot of grief today…
“Someone wakes up to amazing, unexplained transformation” is a staple genre. We not long ago got “What Men Want” as a sequel, of sorts, to “What Women Want”.
I’m not buying this theory.
It occurred to me that Russian Doll is the perfect counterexample. The protagonist ends up in a Groundhog Day situation which happens just because and is never given even a handwave, and it got rave reviews.
Can’t one just assume that Someone thought he was overdue for a lesson? I mean, even if you don’t know the details of why it happened, if you feel there must have been a Reason you can guess at the outline.
Might it be better to say that to be a Sci-fi story rather than a fantasy what is needed is an explanation?
My imprint for SciFi demands that there is some science or humanities or technological fact that is altered or extrapolated. The story then explores the resulting world.
Examples that I enjoyed include social dynamics (Doctorow, Walkaway), a new take on the great filter (Brin, Existence), a semi-sapience (‘thalience’) in all environmental things (Schroeder, Ventus), intelligence without consciousness (Watts, Firefall series), space races that educate pre-sentient newcomers (Brin, Uplift series), or simply steampunk action in a world with an athmosphere but no gravity (Schroeder, Virga series).
Good examples. I admire Watts, but he gives me the shivers, so I’ll have to be in a better place before I go back to him. I should read more Schroeder.
Ditto about Watts. His biologism is horrifying, but feels — once you got over the sleep disturbances 🙂 — like having had a good reading.
Schroeder: definitely do! Esp. if you haven’t read Lady of Mazes yet (and its reversal of technology making culture possible, in the book’s world it’s the opposite). LoM and Ventus were ‘speculative realism’ and ‘object-oriented ontology’ (ooohhh, these words <swoons>) avant la lettre. (related, related)
You won’t miss much if you skip the pieces coming from consulting for the Canadian army (“Crisis in…“)
Apropos of nothing:
Could it be that the real rationale behind male circumcision is that it increases the chance that sexual intercourse will result in conception? I’ve never heard this argument made before, but thinking through the mechanics of it it seems plausible.
1. Does circumcision increase the chance that sexual intercourse will result in conception? That’s a huge [citation needed] flag.
2. Granting that this is true, is there any plausible way the pre-modern societies that practiced circumcision would have known it? The kind of statistics that would let you see an effect like this is a modern invention, isn’t it?
They don’t need to know it for it to become a tradition. See The Secret of Our Success.
I would rephrase it as “Is it plausible that in pre-modern societies circumcision increases conception likelihood in ways that are both relevant and a net positive?”. If circumcision increases conception in one-off encounters, but not a more stable sexual relationship, then it fails the test because societies want a high marital childbearing rate and a low out of wedlock birth rate. If circumcision decreases conception, however, it might actually pass that test, because the effect could be negligible in the context of marriage, concubinage, etc, but make a difference in the out of wedlock birth rate.
In any case, I think there’s pretty good evidence that circumcision is a group identity thing that got tied up in cultural evolution by the route of “do what we’ve always done and don’t question it too much”.
Firstly, I don’t see how circumcision would increase the chances of conception. The foreskin does not cover the head when the penis is erect.
Secondly, I don’t think increasing the odds of a single encounter causing conception would increase childbirth within a married couple. If it doesn’t work the first time, or the sixth, you just do it some more. Sex is quick and easy compared to everything else you have to do to produce children.
This is an interesting comment. 🙂 Could you explain more what else you need to do?
Childbirth, plus the cost and effort of raising them. We’re not fish.
Would there be Western civilization without an emergence of Islam?
My read of the historical evidence is that without Arab invasion in 7th century, Roman Empire would likely regained political and cultural dominance over the Mediterranean.
And without an emergence of Medieval Western civilization, there is no reason to suppose that Roman civilization would do whatever caused a switch to Modernity in a real history.
But wasn’t Western Rome already firmly squashed by various barbarian invasions and boxed in by other empires like Eastern Rome (which did dominate a huge part of the Mediterranean) and the rising kingdom of the Franks? And you could also easily argue that parts of Roman culture survived through the Catholic church and through former barbarian tribes adopting some Roman traditions.
So I must say, I find your read of historical evidence (that you don’t specifiy) kinda weak.
By Roman Empire I mean an Empire centered around Constantinople. Only, in this scenario it would stop being “Eastern”. We know that in 5th century, Justinian reconquered Roman Africa (modern Tunisia) and parts of Italy and Spain. Without Arabs, who would prevent Romans from dominating Western Mediterranean? Obviously Franks are a main plausible candidate, but given political instability and poverty of their realm compared to (Eastern) Roman Empire, I doubt that they would be successful.
In Justinian’s case, I believe it was the Sassanid Persians. Actually a large invasion of Persians, attacking specifically because the Byzantines were overextended in Europe.
As for other parties preventing Byzantine dominance of Europe, there were smaller empires that beat up on the Byzantines pretty regularly in the West: the Avars, the proto-Bulgarians, various Slav tribes.
If the Byzantines had sole control over the Middle East, then yes, they could have reconquered the West but even the Roman Empire at it’s height never controlled all of the Middle East and as long as there was someone else in the Middle East, be it Persian, Muslim, or someone else, the Byzantines would never be able to commit the majority of their resources to Western conquest.
Islam was so successful at first because it came rushing into a substantial power vacuum. By the seventh century Byzantium wasn’t looking so hot. Justinian’s plague had greatly reduced the population, provinces away from the Greek/Anatolian core were religiously/culturally/politically alienated, and they’d undergone a nasty crisis with Phokas. The Sassanians had nearly finished them off a few years before Yarmuk.
Suspect that, if Islam had not appeared, Byzantium would have recovered somewhat of its strength but still lost most of the East to a resurgent “Persia” run mostly by convert Turks. The Turks appeared on the scene around that time, and in the absence of Islam they might have simply become nominal Zoroastrians and treated the Shahanshah much the same way they treated the Caliph.
Turks became significant factor only centuries later.
I don’t think this is accurate. Don’t forget that the power vacuum that the Muslim Arabs expanded into was more than just a weakened Rome. Persia had been hit just as hard, if not harder. Both empires had just gone through 26 years of brutal war, and then the Persians killed their King and had another 5 years of civil war before the Arabs came for them. Don’t forget that the Romans ultimately survived the Arab invasions (albeit weakened), the Persian Empire didn’t.
Remove the Arabs from the equation and Rome probably comes out ahead, as Heraclius is able to consolidate and recover after the Sassanid War whereas the Persians get further weakened by their civil war. In that situation you’re probably looking at either modest Roman gains exploiting the destruction of the Persian civil war, or at least a generation of quiet borders as both sides recover, then back to the status quo of jockeying for position and occasional wars.
After that it all gets a bit too ‘chaos theory’ for reliably predictions. But Persia never managed to take and hold the Roman territory the Arabs did. So any future ‘Empire endangering threat’ would most likely be dealing with an Eastern Rome retaining Egypt, the Levant, Syria and Anatolia, which is a far different power dynamic than the one the Turks got involved with irl.
I believe northwestern, non-Mediterranean Europe would continue to develop, as it and every other region of the Eurasian supercontinent had slowly been developing during and even before a dominant empire sewed up the Mediterranean, whether that dominator was Greece, Carthage or Rome.
The more developed the Mediterranean dominator became, the more opportunities the land far from and north of the Mediterranean had to level up, by trade and imitation. I would say the disruption of the Mediterranean hurt the northwest more than it helped, but it was able to survive the loss of a developed neighbour and develop itself.
I think Venice helped, and whether you call Venice the centre from which all subsequent northwestern development spread after the Dark Ages, or the furthest southeastern outpost of the northwest in contact with the Mediterranean, is a question.
(I’m a little surprised the Greeks in BC times didn’t take an interest in the Po plain, when they were colonizing Grecia Magna to the south. Presumably the Gauls and Veneti were too hot to handle?)
Without cutting Europe off from North Africa, you’ll always have a race-less identity as Christendom even if an East-West Schism still happens. And without a hostile civilization controlling the trade routes to India, there’s no Columbian discovery of the Americas. Any sense of “Westerness” would be very different indeed.
Sea travel is faster and cheaper than land travel, even without hostile control of the land.
Also it’s my understanding that the Muslims were very much in favor of trade passing through their land, because they profited from it, regardless of their feelings toward the people on the end of the trade route.
They were in favor of trade, but after the Ottomans took Constantinople and the rest of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 they pretty much had a monopoly over the land trade, and as a result charged exorbitant taxes on goods that were bound for the West. This was a primary motivator for finding a long and expensive alternative route to India. So really the question is “Without Islam, do you get a huge, powerful, and stable non-western power that controls the entire middle east?”
The “hostile civilisation” thing is nonsense, in my considered historical opinion. Cutting out the middleman would still be profitable, regardless of whether said middleman was the same religion as you or not. It’s worth pointing out that, when the Portuguese managed to find a route round Africa, the King of Portugal crowed about getting one over *Venice*, not the Ottomans.
And the Portuguese were pragmatically experimenting with how to sail around Africa without dying for generations before Columbus, to cut out middlemen. Columbus went from court to court with a zany scheme that even the crusader queen Isabella rejected the first time. Then in 1492 her and her consort’s armies kicked the Muslims out of Grenada and she changed her mind: God was sending her signs that she was chosen to defeat Islam, so sure, try sailing west to China to outflank them diplomatically and economically.
If it wasn’t for the Arabs, it would have been someone else, which we know because that’s what happened. The Arabs declined in the 9th and 10th century and the Romans took advantage of it. But it didn’t save them from the Turkic invasion.
I am not suggesting that Empire would have lasted indefinitely. Rather I am suggesting that if it would lost Middle East in, say, 10th century instead of 7th, western Mediterranean would be very different place.
Sure it would be different. But the idea of western civilization surely would survive regardless. The Byzantines lost almost all of Europe before the Arabs, which means that those European countries would continue a similar development. Maybe they could retake parts of Europe but I doubt it. Look at how precarious their hold on Italy was.
If I understand correctly your theory is that the Eastern Roman Empire would have extended its rule over Western Europe so that western civilization would be centered around the east? And the Muslim invasions prevented this by destroying the Byzantine Empire.
There are two issues with this theory: Firstly, it presumes without much reason the Bulgarians or Persians wouldn’t have remained a threat in the absence of Islam. Secondly, it ignores the pressure on the west and how unsuccessful reconquest was. The Eastern conquests drove out some tribes from some areas but powerful and hostile tribes remained and pressed back.
Their gains began to shrink immediately because resources were stretched thin and because the locals were of dubious loyalty. The Byzantines also had to rely on an increasingly distant and indirect administration. The one place they made a lasting change was in Africa, where they allied with local Berbers to defeat Germanic Vandals. This meant the Berber administration was friendly and resisted leaving the Empire. Elsewhere, like Spain or Italy, they failed to actually expel the barbarian tribes and they began to retake territory or reassert independence almost immediately. Before the emregence of Islam (or the Byzantine reaction to it) they’d already lost significant ground everywhere except Africa. They often had no effective control in the countryside to begin with.
I think this is the correct answer. From 400-1400 or so, every time a group of horse people got sufficiently organized they could stomp on the settled people near them. The arab/islamic explosions were a particular series of horse people getting organized events, but they weren’t the only ones, and it seems likely that you’d get a similar number regardless of islam.
If by “horse people” you mean steppe nomads, then that’s not a very good description of the 7th-century Arabs. Plus, it’s not really true that even well-organised nomads could reliably “stomp on the settled people near them”. We remember groups like the Mongols or Huns because their successes were so spectacular, but they were very much the exception rather than the norm. There were multiple centuries-long periods in Europe, China and the Middle East in which sedentary peoples managed to at least hold their own against the nomads.
It wasn’t a given that barbarians would beat civilizations but it happened enough that calling them the exceptions is just wrong.
When have non-state people won in the long term, except for horse nomads?
Rome was overrun by sedentary, proto-state peoples.
Plough farming is just a better way to feed an army.
“Except for horse nomads” is a pretty big qualifier considering that most of the non state barbarians relied on horses, especially across the vast Eurasian Steppe.
The barbarians usually lose; you just hardly ever hear about the ones who lose.
Bret Devereaux has a series of blog posts about what he calls the “Fremen Mirage”, some of which are relevant to this discussion.
Part I explains his premise, and then talks about pre-state farmers vs. non-farmers (farmers almost always win) and early states versus pre-state farmers (states almost always win). States get all the land that’s good for farming and non-farmers are stuck with whatever’s left.
Part II Romans vs. barbarians. Rome lasted an awfully long time because they mostly won.
Part IIIa Greeks and Romans claimed that the barbarians were tougher than they actually were.
Part IIIb Modern descendents of European barbarians claimed that their ancestors were tougher than they actually were.
Interlude about how the actual Fremen from Dune fit Devereaux’s idea of “Fremen”.
Part IV The big exception, the Mongols. And to some extent steppe nomads in general, but mostly the Mongols, because they had much better organization than other steppe nomads.
Barbarians only have to be lucky once. Civilization has to be lucky always.
While I agree with these essays as a corrective, it does miss two major details. Firstly, civilization is not often a narrative device which doesn’t necessarily correlate to anything “real”. Caesar considered Gauls and Germans to be equally barbarians despite admitting the Gauls were much more advanced, wealthier, socially complex, densely populated, and better at raising large organized armies. The Chinese were calling Victorian Britain barbarians in the 19th century and from their perspective they really were.
Secondly, it misses that pastoralism can be a superior way of life to being sedentary if it is a choice. The scraggly mountain farmers living on the margins of Italian society in Roman times were nothing like the Turks, Mongols, Berbers, or Bantu. They were all societies that drove out others and were not driven out themselves. They took and cultivated good agricultural land. But they preferred to focus on acquiring and maintaining good pasturage so they could sustain gigantic herds. Basically they optimized for husbandry over field agriculture. And as a result, they created complex and stratified societies with a great deal of specialized production. Complete with states, taxation, etc.
But this circles back into barbarian-as-rhetoric. These societies were very different from sedentary societies and they generally left fewer records. So they were called barbarians. And it can be appealing to play into the barbarian role for propaganda reasons, so the few times we hear from them they generally don’t disagree too strongly.
These were mostly the people that thundered down from the steppes. They were the ones who had kings to organize them, warrior aristocracies to fight for them, and states that could organize a society’s resources for war. For example, we have this image of the Turks invading the west as bloodthirsty barbarians. If you actually read the sources, the Greeks (of all people) call them overly legalistic and contract focused, especially around land use and divisions between pasturage and tilled fields. This implies a much more legalistic people than we imagine.
I’ve read those blog posts. He gets to his conclusion by heavily relying on the Romans(who were in many ways unique) and downplaying the exceptions to his thesis, which are many. He didn’t even mention the Turkic people by name. It’s ridiculous.
Basically this. Just taking Europe as an example (because that’s the area I’m guessing people here are most familiar with), how many examples are there of steppe nomads beating sedentary civilisations? There’s the Hunnic conquest of the Hungarian Plain, although note that by the time of their big wars against Rome their armies mostly consisted of (sedentary) Germanic auxiliaries rather than Mongol-horde-style horsemen. There’s the Mongols themselves, at least in the first wave of conquest (subsequent generations of Mongols had a much more mixed record fighting against their settled neighbours, although pop history tends to forget this). Who else? You could make a case for the Avar and Magyar migrations into the Pannonian Basin, although I think that Mediterranean writers would have considered the Slavic tribes the conquered to be just as “barbaric” as the Avars and Magyars themselves.
Western Europe was fairly well protected from horse nomads, probably for geographic reasons. It’s a completely different story in the rest of Eurasia.
But somewhat vulnerable to boat nomads.
Yeah, that would be my theory. I am not saying that you are wrong and I am right of course, but counterpoint would be that in real history, Byzantines/Romans were formidable power in Italy until 8th century, although they had to contend with the Lombards, and retained Sicily and some coastal areas long after that.
if Romans would have retained their control of eastern Mediterranean for longer, resources they could draw on there might change the balance of power in western Mediterranean significantly, so perhaps Italy would be “reromanized” instead of “deromanized” like it happened in real history. And with that, emergence of medieval Western civilization as we know it seems doubtful.
Deromanization was actually a result of the Byzantine Invasion wiping out Italian elites (they were the ones who did the most to end the Roman Senate, for example) and assimilation with barbarians. Indeed, the barbarians tended to have a higher regard for Italian nobles because they used relations to them as a status symbol. Meanwhile, the Byzantines just saw them as competitors for legitimacy. You find repeated references in the sources to how Rome wasn’t really Roman anymore as a Byzantine narrative that the Italians and the Germans are resisting because it disadvantages both of them.
Also, ‘formidable power’ is not what I’d call an empire whose territory was constantly shrinking and who constantly abandoned its allies in the region to focus elsewhere long before the Muslims showed up. I take your point that if the Byzantine had less pressure in the north and east it could have focused more on the west. I’m just saying the absence of Islam would have simply meant different people (the Persians, other barbarians) pressuring them.
So, in my mental model of history, Islam greatly increased overall strength of pressures from the east that Byzantines faced. I think that, like Christianity, it is very effective at unifying large polities and mobilizing them for an external expansion.
I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. In particular, while it created a new and massive pressure from Arabia it also removed basically all pressure from Persia. And the Persians weren’t weak: they’d almost completely defeated the empire a couple of times. Including in the 7th century when Khosrau II managed to capture almost the entire Roman Levant at one point. This was just before Muslims burst onto the scene. In fact, according to Islamic tradition Khosrau and Mohammed exchanged letters and Khosrau tried to have Mohammed killed.
Khosrau’s siege of Byzantium was actually more dangerous than the later Arabian ones because the Iranians were better siege engineers and had better diplomatic contacts among barbarian tribes.
Indeed, from the point of view of a purely Greek-Balkan-Turkish-Caucasian empire (geographically, I mean) the Arabs were significantly less of a threat. They tended to prefer fighting in environments like their homeland and never got really good at naval or mountain warfare. They levied two unsuccessful sieges. It would be nearly a thousand years later under the Ottomans, who have no ethnic ties to Arabs whatsoever and had an entirely different style of warfare and governance, that serious inroads would be made against the Byzantine heartland. And even that only after centuries of unrest and damage.
Note the parallel that a Muslim army conquered Sindh in India around 710 AD, as well as the civilization’s northwest frontier in what’s now Afghanistan, and then completely and utterly stalled until a Turk named Mahmud of Ghazni took up jihad.
It’s those steppes.
Even with your qualifier, I would still disagree. The Arabs had a zeal that the Persians lacked. Sure, they were a threat, but they had their own problems and were willing to give back territory for a favorable deal. But the Arabs were relentless. Those kind of expansion societies are always the most existentially threatening.
The concept of the Muslims that other empires could not legitimately exist was predated by the Roman concept of imperium sine fine or the Persian concept of Xsaythiya Xsaythiyanam, which similarly implied that no ruler was legitimate without the acknowledgment of the Persian King. Both concepts implied that no leader was legitimate outside of their authority or acceptance. Indeed, the Persians continued posturing this way into the medieval era until an Ottoman ruler forced them to renounce it as a way to humiliate them.
In fact, a lot of 6th century diplomacy was around finding ways to fit these two imperial systems together in a way that didn’t inevitably lead to conflict. Which never actually worked. They didn’t call the big treaty between the two empires “perpetual peace” because they were idiot idealists but because it laid out a way that the two systems didn’t inevitably lead to conflict. Now, you’re correct that the Arabs and Byzantines never got to this point. But it took centuries to get to that point with the Persians too, even imperfectly. And the Byzantines would make actual formal peaces with later Muslim rulers.
Likewise, the Persians proved capable of occupations of Egypt, the Levant, the Balkans, the Caucuses, Turkey, and rendering long and serious sieges of Constantinople itself. The Arabs never did similarly. Indeed, not only were they beaten back from the Caucuses by the powerful and organized Byzantines but by scattered and disorganized tribes that had previously been kept underfoot by the Persians.
And all on its own the Byzantine Empire managed the remarkable feat of rolling back organized and hostile enemies on three borders simultaneously from the 9th-11th century. This included the Arabs and it was only interrupted by the steppe peoples thundering down. But the Arabs got the worst of that.
The way I’ve come to understand history is that there might not have been Western civilization without a certain butterfly flapping its wings at a certain moment. But there also might have. So to answer the question, sure, maybe.
I think the biggest difference would have been cultural: namely that Egypt and the rest of North Africa would have remained Christian, and that Christianity may have spread south to Mali and Ghana in much the same way that Islam did. It is even possible that Christianity would have out-competed Zoroastrianism and become the primary religion of Persia, and who knows where it would have spread from there? Christianity is a very energetic and proselytizing creed, and without a similarly vital and proselytizing creed to check it the sky is the limit on how far it would have spread in the East.
That would definitely have influenced culture and values in the East and changed them in some way. How much of a change and how significant depends on how you look at Christianity historically. Some have argued that the reason the Islamic Golden Age ended was because of the end result of Islamic theological debates during that time period, results that led to a stagnation in scientific discovery (not to mention the later banning of the printing press, which couldn’t have helped). If the Middle East was Christian instead, would the Golden Age have continued until lit developed into the modern scientific method? Would there have been any Golden Age at all in the Middle East without Islam in the first place? When the Mongols came and conquered, many of them became Muslims. If they had become Christians instead, would that have changed how they carried out the business of state? Would the East have been more peaceful, or less, or the same? Would the Coptic church have become as large and successful as the Catholic and Orthodox churches? Would Christians today make up 54% of the worlds population instead of 31%? Or, without a powerful competitor, would the world be 70 or 80% Christian? Without Islam there would probably be no Crusades (unless it’s a crusade against Zoroastrians): how would that have changed the history of the Catholic Church? No Spanish Inquisition either, no reconquestia. What would that change? Who knows!
This might be diving off topic but I do always wonder how fragile this switch is. There’s some broad speculation that the moment things began to change towards modernity was the Black Death, but presumably changing history drastically affects how the response to the plague goes. Does Europe without a unified peer (or even superior) competitor to the South collapse in the same way that allows the plague to be so effective? Or does being the big dog in the region allow for the government to respond better and prevent the plague being as catastrophic, and so forestalling the social changes that made the world look modern?
It’s a fascinating question that we can only speculate on because there was only a single modernizing event in human history. Even farming happened multiple times allows us to compare and contrast but modernity happened just once and spread, rather than occurring several times and mingling.
I think that speculation about Black Death as a jumping point of Modernity is indeed very speculative, which I mean as a polite euphemism for baseless. There were tons of disastrous plagues in premodern times that did not lead to a modern civilization.
But modernity revolutionised the world in a few centuries. There was time for farming to be invented in many places, thousands of years apart. Modernity was the Singularity, expanding at light speed.
The Black Death caused the Renaissance, but the Renaissance was a regression, slowing the path to modernity. The big revival of antiquity was the Renaissance of the 12th century. Aquinas commissioned the translation of Archimedes, which inspired Roger Bacon and medieval science. How many scientists can you name between the Black Death and Francis Bacon?
Our friends the aliens are offering to take the Hubble space telescope on a whirlwind tour of 10 star systems over a single year, with a two-week stop in each. They’ll then bring it back, including whatever it recorded. The star systems must be within 1000 ly of Earth. What star systems should the Hubble visit?
Some spoil-sports might complain that the stated trip could violate general relativity. I asked the aliens about this, and they said (and I quote), “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.”
Are they specifying the “single year” will be Earth time? And that they won’t modify Earth time, say by putting us inside a gravity well?
Also, they must have interesting standards for prettiness.
The inhabited ones
And if that is going to pass, then modify Hubble software to (if possible) record more close-range transmissions.
Remember to point the Hubble _towards_ the planet too.
> Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.
No. I propose we set up a transmitter in some kind of appropriate reference frame that lets us set up a closed timelike curve and use that to effficiently solve stuff in PSPACE.
Probably the ones with cool exoplanets. Maybe Betelgeuse to check it’s not blown up yet.
I want a closeup of what’s *really* going on in Eta Carinae.
Sturgeon-Clarke’s Law: 90% of everything is indistinguishable from magic.
Thoreau’s Razor: Do not multiply necessities beyond necessity.
Betteridge’s 34th Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘porn’.
The Yudkowsky-Occam Razor: Shut up and do not multiply entities beyond necessity.
Hanlon-Clarke’s Razor: Never attribute to sufficiently advanced technology that which is adequately explained by magic.
Clarke’s 34th Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from porn.
Godwin’s First Razor: Never attribute to Nazis that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Godwin’s Second Razor: Never attribute to Nazis that which is adequately explained by Hitler.
Godwin’s Third Razor: Do not multiply Hitler beyond necessity.
Sturgeon-Clarke’s 34th Law: Any sufficiently advanced pornography is indistinguishable from crud.
Acton’s Razor: Never attribute to power tending to corrupt that which is adequately explained by absolute power corrupting absolutely.
Acton-Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology corrupts absolutely.
Betteridge’s Razor: Do not multiply question marks beyond necessity.
Acton-Clarke-Occam-Betteridge-Yudkowsky-Thoreau-Sturgeon-Godwin-Hanlon’s 34th Razor-Law: Shut up and never attribute to headlines that end in question marks being multiplied beyond simplicity that which is adequately explained by the words “Any sufficiently advanced Hitler corrupts absolutely, and absolute Hitler is 90% porn”.
(I will now comply with Yudkowsky’s Demi-Law, which states: SHUT UP.)
Brilliant.
Stigler-Godwin-Warhol’s Law: In the future, everything will be mistakenly named after Hitler for 15 minutes.
“In the future, everyone will be called a Nazi for 15 minutes” is quite plausible.
I actually laughed out loud.
Niven-Godwin’s first law: Never throw shit at armed Nazis
Niven-Godwin’s second law: Never stand next to people throwing shit at armed Nazis
Niven-Godwin’s thirty-fourth law: It’s much safer to throw fetish porn at armed Nazis
Niven-Godwin-Sturgeon’s thirty-fourth law: Even if it’s really crappy fetish porn.
Clearly I’m not a leftist, but this strange peaceful resolution sounds better than punching.
We should amend the rule to “safer and more effective”, yes. And include Sturgeon, because we don’t want to waste our good porn on Nazis.
Churchill’s Rule 34: porn-porn is better than war-war
Churchill-Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of what Americans do is wrong: but 90% of everything is wrong, and you can count on 10% of what Americans do to be the right thing.
Churchill-Hanlon’s Razor: Do not attribute to Democracy that which can be adequately explained by all the other systems of government.
Hilarious,
Kestrellius.
I’m giving you–
for serious–
Your prize, hard-won:
A Stallion
Of Gratitude
For silly fun.
This is high praise from a plant of your talents! Much appreciated.
@Canyon Fern
Why not a Stalin of Gratitude?
You don’t want to come to any attention of powerful people?
If it’s going to be Stalins of Gratitude, I think any self-respecting recipient ought to demand fifty of them.
I found this humorous.
Sturgeon General’s Warning: 90% of everything causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and may complicate pregnancy.
I might have to use this one…
Hofstader’s 34th Law: There is always more porn of it than you expect, even when you account for Hofstader’s 34th law.
Hofstader-Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap, even after you exclude what Hofstader-Sturgeon’s Law would cause you to believe is likely crap.
If you have some young children who are bored, why not have them learn about military vehicles using rhymed couplets with Bob the Train?
Hot take: “Liberals are exagerating how bad Trump is by several orders of magnitude” and “anyone who presents Trump’s track record as anything other than a net negative is suffering from metaphorical brain damage” can both be true at the same time.
“Several orders of magnitude”?
I have seen people (otherwise descriibable as liberals) claiming Trump is plotting or initiating genocide or that his policies are leading to genocide, so “several orders of magnitude” is actually accurate.
But I’m not sure why anyone listens to liberals about Republican presidents, since they’ve claimed every single Republican nominee is a Nazi, back to at least Wendell Willkie.
I don’t hang out much with Republicans, but I’ve still managed to hear Obama called everything from a nazi to the literal Antichrist.
But hey, the Democrats at least have diversity going for them. I don’t think there’s ever been a Muslim Antichrist Republican president.
Seriously, this whole argument is silly and I don’t know what you’re hoping to accomplish here.
Recommendation: When there are people saying obviously dumb things, on your side or on some other side. that’s useful information that listening to them is a waste of time. I mean, it’s obvious that neither Trump nor Obama is some kind of Hitler-scale villain, so probably it’s best to just kind-of tune out the people making such unhinged claims unless they can provide some kind of evidence.
Then, you can look around for people who actually seem to talk sense, from whatever side. This won’t give you the joy of seeing your prejudices about the other side confirmed as some obvious nutcase continues to hold forth on his particular brand of nutjobbery, but it will help you learn more about the world.
Yes.
Tally me up as brain damaged. I wish he were more effective, but he’s literally the only president in my adult lifetime whose agenda has been “things that aren’t against Conrad’s interests” instead of “things that hurt Conrad and Conrad better like it or else we’ll call him evil.”
If you think I’m exaggerating, please tell me, which of Hillary Clinton’s or Joe Biden’s policies would make the life of Conrad Honcho, standard middle class white guy’s, life better?
That’s agenda. How about track record. Trump has systematically reinvigorated his enemies, radicalized the moderates against him, alienated his allies, and weakened his own power base and institutions, both domestically and internationally.
Do you feel safer now with Iran definitely getting nukes, Russia getting a blank check in the Middle East, the Talibans about to take over Afghanistan again? Do you feel economically empowered when your tax money is spent on pointless trade wars with no conrete gain at the end?
Frankly at this point you might as well declare the oval office sede vacante, because an empty desk chair spinned randomly to make decisions couldn’t possibly endanger you this much.
None of these things endanger me. It’s stuff like this that make me glad we have Trump. Anyone else would see these as problems for the US to solve, when they are not. We are not the world’s police. If anything I would like us to do even less with regards to Iran. Sanctions just hurt the poor, not the government. And most importantly, what Iran does is not my problem and not something the US government exists to solve.
Yes, we should definitely be punishing China for their trade practices, and what I would really like would be protective tariffs against pretty much everyone, not just China.
We have very different values. Things that I don’t think are my problem, like what goes on in Iran, the Middle East and Afghanistan you think should be my problem, but things I think are problems, like foreign trade, you think should not be. Trump is the only major party politician who’s run for President in my lifetime that agrees with me.
It’s ironic that Trump tore up the peace deal and ramped up sanctions then.
Yes, that’s what I was saying, I would prefer we both rip up the deal and end the sanctions. I do not care if Iran gets nuclear weapons.
If you’re going to end the sanctions, what’s the point of ripping up the deal? The deal basically says “no sanctions unless the US says that Iran is too blatant about its pursuit of nuclear weapons”; we always have (well, had) the option of always certifying Iran as being compliant so long as they don’t do e.g. atmospheric testing. And really, we can turn a blind eye to atmospheric testing if we want to.
If you’re pissed that Obama sent a planeload of cash to Iran once upon a time, too late. Trump inherited a situation where we had the ability to reimpose global sanctions with minimal debate if thing went too sour for us to tolerate, and the ability to preserve our reputation as a nation that at least mostly honors its deals, both at close to zero ongoing cost. What was gained by throwing that away?
Is it the policy of Trump or the Trump White House “we don’t care very much if Iran gets nuclear weapons”?
@John Schilling
I don’t have much of a horse in this race either way, but I have to correct this. We did not have a deal with Iran. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was never ratified by Congress as required by the Constitution. It was a non-binding political commitment that the State Department explicitly said was neither an executive agreement or a treaty. If Obama had wanted to make an actual deal that the US would have been required to honor he needed to get it ratified and he failed to do so. The US never made a deal with Iran, Obama did, and everyone involved knew that.
All of which has nothing to do with whether other nations will perceive the United States as being a nation that abides by its deals. You might as well sign a contract with your left hand and say “Hey, you should have noticed that I signed that contract left-handed and therefore only my right brain consented; my left brain cannot be bound by this deal!”
And you can argue that US Presidents shouldn’t make deals like this, but that also is too late. Trump inherited a situation in which he could do a thing that would help preserve America’s reputation as an honest nation, or a thing that would diminish it, and he chose the latter. For no apparent gain, so why?
@John Schilling
One could as easily argue that Trump had a moral duty to violate the agreement to remind all nations of the world that American treaties only matter when ratified by Congress so that Presidents don’t gain the de facto power to make irrevocable treaties by fiat.
Other nations should understand just fine; there’s procedures for creating international agreements in most countries. Iran itself should understand just fine; the US is the Great Satan, so it should be no surprise if a deal with us is no good unless signed in blood by 2/3rds of the Senate.
Iran doesn’t want nukes right now, Russia doesn’t have a blank check and already won in Syria and their position was better than ours, the Taliban cannot be defeated and we have been trying for 20 years, and I’m not sure how anyone comes out of this crisis thinking that our China sourcing decisions is anything other than a massive strategic weakness.
You are correct that both of those can be true at the same time, but I’d quibble with both.
1) On a bell curve of opinion, you are going to get some outliers, but I think mainstream liberal opinion is probably only exaggerating Trump’s badness by one order of magnitude or less. 🙂
2) I’m not sure Trump is a net negative when compared to the alternative, which I guess is Hillary. He might be, but it’s tough to evaluate counterfactuals. I would definitely 100% prefer Mitt Romney or Ted Cruz at this point.
J Mann:
Yeah, that’s approximately my take, too. I think Trump’s skepticism w.r.t. dumbass foreign wars and interventions has been a net positive, though I wish he were more focused on actually getting US troops out of hostile foreign places[1]. Otherwise, though, I’d much prefer a Romney, Cruz, Jeb Bush, or third term of Obama if that had been possible.
I think Hillary would have made a pretty bad president, but probably not actually worse than Trump except on foreign policy, where she seemed to be on board with every dumbass foreign intervention anyone proposed for us.
I’ve been deeply unimpressed with Trump during the COVID-19 crisis, but we seem to be about middle-of-the-pack for Western countries responding to this stuff, so maybe I’m just responding to his (to my mind) incredibly grating and unpleasant manner of acting in public rather than substantive differences. Is there a strong reason to think Hillary would have, say, leaned hard on the FDA to get testing out faster even if they had to accept something Not Invented Here, or would have better funded pandemic preparedness?
[1] But I think pulling out of the Iran deal was an own-goal, the way we handled things with the Kurds in Syria seemed pretty lousy, and it doesn’t look like our dicking around with North Korea actually accomplished anything, so I’m not *impressed* with his foreign policy so much as glad he at least seems to have less enthusiasm than the median politician for blowing up faceless people in the third world for murky purposes.
Trump certainly doesn’t seem to be helping much on Covid.
1) The US system is designed to centralize tests through the CDC. That system failed disastrously this time, and I think we should deregulate so we’re closer to the South Korean model. I’m also in favor of having the lesser medical privacy regime of the South Asian states in place for a pandemic.
Better decisions by the presidency might have caught this a week or two sooner, although I doubt Hillary would have shouted down her experts either.
Frustratingly, I keep seeing people post that the only difference between SK and the US is Trump, which is dangerous – if we think their pandemic system is better, we should keep an eye on the differences so we can improve our own at the systemic level.
2) Trump’s use of the bully pulpit seems at best useless to me, and at worst slightly harmful. If he had been yelling at DeBlasio to close a week earlier, he’d at least have the satisfaction of being right, and DeBlasio and others would have closed earlier.
I think all of the following are true
1) The CDC failed epically for reasons that would have been only marginally less likely under a non-Trump presidency
2) If we had handled things properly, we would have still had it at least as bad as say, Germany.
3) Trump bungled the response almost as badly as possible (the best you can say is that he isn’t Bolsanaro)
4) Trump left the government woefully unprepared in the first place due to his favoring of personal loyalty over competence, hostility to and/or neglect of government agencies, and getting all his intelligence briefings from Fox News.
Happy Easter: He is risen!
Are you making your own bread in quarantine?
I’m stuck with the bread of affliction until Thursday, alas.
Is this some rye humor I’m not getting?
I’m afraid my joke fell a bit flat.
It’s not you, sorry; it went right over my head.
I’m as confused as you are. Are we still doing puns?
Yes, but our bread flour supply is running low, and very few places seem to have any in stock.
If you have a friend in the business, ask them to check Restaurant Depot. (You need a food-service business license to shop there, but since restaurants are hurting now they are very well stocked on some items.)
Around here, CostCo has flour at least 75% of the time.
At least in NJ, Restaurant Depot is currently open to the public. However, you’re still dealing with food-service sizes.
our bread flour supply is running low
By any chance would you be a poor widow with an only son? Then if you happen to find a stray prophet in need of board and lodging, you’re set! 🙂
There’s still plenty on Amazon if you’re willing to buy restaurant-supply sizes.
Also consider spending some time reporting the 1 star reviews for “price gouging” because they don’t understand that it’s a 100-lb sack of flour.
Hallelujah He is risen!
We made hoska
I have just made buns for my son to have my sous vide BBQ pork (made weeks ago) on.
He claims they are not squishy enough. Everyone else seems to like them. It would serve him right if the rest of us ate them up before he got to them.
They were made with all whole wheat flour, something I hadn’t tried before, but came out just fine. A good thing, since my daughter’s preparations for self-quarantine included a twenty pound bag of whole wheat flour.
My wife made hot cross buns a day or two ago.
He don’t want none if it ain’t got buns.
Words of wisdom.
Making cinnamon rolls for Easter is basically a religious rite in my family, passed on from my mother, so I did that. Flour has been uncertain at the stores lately so I’ve been cautious about making break in case we want to make other things (like my birthday cake a little while back, or cookies after an especially long day.)
We haven’t been able to get yeast or self-rising flour. My kids made lemon cake and 5 dozen cookies this weekend, mostly for something to do.
I just went to the store, and there was no flour at all. It’s weird because they had tons of sugar, baking powder, brown sugar, baking mixes, etc.
I guess I won’t be doing any baking any time soon unless it involves Bisquick Mix. It’s a bit ironic since my mom keeps getting on my case about bisquick mix being unhealthy and offering me a recipe for making pancake mix from scratch, but it turns out I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to.
Update – found self-rising flour today, will try to make Megan McArdle’s refrigerator rolls with daughters.
I think making yeast rolls with self-rising flour is likely to come out quite strange.
Whoops. Baking is not for amateurs, it seems. Off to google what I can make with self-rising flour.
(ETA: Biscuits, apparently)
Biscuits. Quick breads–including any muffin batter. (You can always make what my family calls “puffin” if you are lazy like me–muffin batter baked in a cake pan.) Pancakes. Waffles. Basically, anything you put baking powder in.
It sounds from this as though most people here are still shopping. We (actually my wife and daughter, mostly my daughter) did our last shopping two weeks ago, plan no more for at least another two weeks, although my daughter is talking about buying some plants at the local nursery where you can apparently do it as curbside pickup.
Is it just that most people don’t have refrigerator/freezer/storage space for what we are doing? Are less paranoid about infection risks (I’m also leaving cardboard packages sitting on the porch for a day, all other packages for three days, before touching them)? Are less prepared to start with storables such as dried beans and flour and end with meals they like eating?
For me, it’s a mixture of less concerned about infection risks and less prepared to start with storables only and have meals the family enjoys.
Less concerned about infection risks: I’m under 50, and we have no one elderly or immuno-compromised to whom we would be likely to spread the virus. Also, we are in an area with relatively few cases.
Milk doesn’t keep well, and we use about 3 gallons a week. Eggs generally have purchase limits. And we have meat in the freezer, but little chicken–and would prefer not to eat up all the more special meats.
I’m 60 but have no health problems. I don’t go to the supermarket for recreation, but I’m fine with visiting there once a week.
I need fresh milk for my daughter every week and it’s hard to store long term. The evaporated milk has been sold out for weeks.
Fresh milk is the limit for us to normal eating without shopping — we got two gallons two weeks ago and are now out, having used it sparingly.
Europeans have milk that doesn’t need refrigeration until you open it. Such milk is legal in the U.S. but rare. I managed to order two gallons of it for delivery some time back, and it’s been sitting unopened until today. This morning I transferred it from the giant plastic bag it came into two gallon milk jugs, our refrigerated milk having run out yesterday, and put them in the refrigerator, which finally had room. I tasted it, and it seemed fine — not identical to what we usually drink, but not bad. It’s 2% and we use skim, which appears to make a large difference for other members of the family, so they may or may not use it, but isn’t an issue for me.
I would also be willing to use milk from powdered milk, which is what we did in the summer when I was growing up, but we didn’t manage to stock up on that and I’m not sure the rest of the family would be willing.
It also helps that we have, by local standards, a large yard — the lot is about 1/3rd of an acre — on which I have been planting fruit trees for the past twenty+ years. The early peach should come ripe in a couple of weeks, my daughter’s tomato plants a bit after that, along with the figs and apricots, assuming the squirrels don’t get them all. And it turns out we have three or four varieties of wild greens growing in the yard, some of which we have been eating.
But even without all that, I think we could self-quarantine tolerably just relying on powdered milk, dried beans, oil, and other things that don’t require refrigeration. Add in a freezer and refrigerator and, even without our yard, it would be only a little worse than normal.
To be fair, that opinion may be biased by the fact that I am less selective in what I am happy to eat than other members of my family.
My wife informs me that we started with four gallons of milk, not two — two one gallon jugs and four half gallons. My error.
We have a healthy stock of food (2-3 months worth in my estimation) and I am going shopping once a week for basically 3 reasons.
1. Fresh fruit and vegetables. Still another ~8 weeks away from being mostly self sufficient for the summer on this front.
2. Maintain our 2-3 months of food. More concerned with social unrest and supply chain disruptions than contracting Corona given our risk factors. I definitely don’t want to eat half of what we have and then discover that I can’t replenish.
3. Keeping an eye on local conditions. Just knowing that our store has been out of flour and paper products regularly for almost 4 weeks now is useful, also good to note if the trend is towards healthier stocks or more shortages and also keeping an eye on how people are behaving.
I don’t have a car, so it’s hard to get large loads of groceries. I avoided going to the grocery store for a month starting around March 12, but that was only possible because I spent weeks stocking up bit by bit.
I could probably survive for the next year without leaving the house so long as the gas, water, and electricity stayed on. Two months if those go (fortunately, one of the water district’s wells abuts my back yard). But,
A: I judge the risk of death or disability due to occasional properly-managed excursions to be small compared to the risk of death or disability due to complications of cabin fever. And from my reading on the subject, maintaining a “normal” diet is a major factor in that. This means things that don’t keep for more than a week or so, like milk and eggs. Also things that the local stores only have in stock for a few random hours out of every week.
B: I’m a quarter of a century younger than you, and not sharing a household with anyone particularly vulnerable (or anyone at all unless you count cats).
C: If this is going to last eighteen months, which nobody in authority seems to have a decent plan to avert, a year’s supply of stored food isn’t enough. I want to avoid dipping into that reserve as long as possible
D: It’s one of the few allowable excuses to go out and see how the rest of the community is doing, even talk briefly with people who may be having experiences different from my own.
“things that don’t keep for more than a week or so, like milk and eggs.”
I’ll grant you milk, but eggs last for months!
Still shopping. my wife and I have 3 teenagers (well, the oldest is 20) in the house and we’re also cooking/delivering food on the regular to her mother, who lives alone and really can’t handle the majority of her own cooking. Certainly we don’t want her out shopping right now. We just moved her from her home to a senior living apartment (which, in my opinion, is still too much for her) and that process requires a lot of trips to various stores.
We were definitely less prepared (for some reason my wife likes to live on the ragged edge of running out of everything and refuses to stock up on non-perishables). We did stop eating out about approximately the first week of March so we’ve been eating all home-cooked meals and baking a lot. Honestly, my wife and middle daughter bake a lot of desserts, anyway, but I’m the person who makes the homemade bread, pizza dough, bierox, (not a sandwich, by the way) cinnamon rolls, anything with yeast and we have to go to the grocery store about weekly. Even with 2 fridges, we don’t have freezer space to feed all of us, though.
Alabama has not been hard-hit, yet, though, so I am probably less paranoid about infection risk than you.
I compulsively buy anything non-perishable or freezable that’s on clearance, and until now never really ate any of it. If I was willing to go without fresh vegetables I could hunker down for about a year and a half between dented cans and frozen about-to-expire meat.
People are spending $200 on MRE kits while I dab on them with my 5 5-lb tubes of ground beef I picked up for $25 in late 2019.
Same here, I probably have 2 months of food in my rather small freezer, but I’ve been doing shopping once every 2 weeks because I snack way too much for my own good (with a strong novelty preference, so I don’t buy snacks in bulk), and for milk.
Don’t have a car, so loads are limited to what we can carry (been meaning to get a little rolling cart for ages, never got around to it). At this point southern california seems close to peaking, so making two trips once every four weeks or one trip once every two weeks doesn’t seem to matter that much.
I’ve been trying to shop less often, but I’ve ended up going around once a week on average, the same as before. Mainly because I have very little fridge space, and I also don’t have a car so I have to carry everything home by hand. Also, I judge the risk of infection when grocery shopping to be minimal.
We’re still able to get grocery pickup in our area; it’s zero human contact (pay in advance, attendant loads the car trunk) and so not very risky. We are pretty careful about how we handle the groceries when we get them home. Some things get rinsed in bleach water and others sit around in the basement for a few days before we use them. This is likely excessive but it makes me feel better.
We stocked up some earlier, we could get by for a few months, but we might as well make the most of shopping while we can. (It’s getting harder to get a pickup slot, and pickup may eventually become impractical, though the stores are trying to expand capability also.) A lot of uncertainty in the next few months.
To be painfully honest, when all this started going down I was afraid of looking like a panicked prepper, or a hoarder. I am a little of both: some years ago I laid in a bunch of freeze-dried food, and I maintain six months worth of toilet paper; still, when the opportunity to load up arose I got some cans of stew (which we still have not opened) but mostly we just used up the fresh stuff that we had. When that was gone, Instacart picked up the slack. We are both pretty high-risk for various reasons, so we haven’t actually been to the store since the fifth of March.
If things really go south, I’ll start making meals from the freeze-dried stash, but as John says I don’t want to do that until I have to.
The deliveries we have gotten get dropped at the door. I let the dry goods age for a few days in the mail-queue room, and I wash all the fresh stuff in the sink and dry it before I put it in the fridge. I throw out all the bags and other paraphernalia.
We don’t have a lot of freezer space, but I could have stocked up a bit more than I did — I froze a bunch of bacon but that’s about all. I tried to get a pork butt to make pulled pork, but that turned out to be hard to specify in Instacart’s interface, and I just ended up with a pound and a quarter of boneless pork, so I made posole.
I go shopping because 1) delivery is unreliable and I want to leave it for people who need it desperately 2) if I don’t keep us supplied with decent food, other people in my household will go shopping over my dead body. And I’m the one you want doing the shopping, since I wash before getting out of the car, again inside the grocery store, and sanitize my hands before transferring groceries to the conveyor belt.
I’m aiming for every 8 days. I may have to cut it back to 7.
Isn’t self-rising flour basically just flour plus baking powder?
You are correct, and I have a lot of self-rising flour that it seems I don’t knead as much as I thought I did.
I just got the free trial of CuriosityStream. Does anyone else here use it? If so, any recommendations?
I got it with Nebula included, so any recommendations for Nebula?
So, you think you know what a sandwich is? Well, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong.
I’m neutral good, which is obviously the only correct view on sandwiches.
As am I.
Me too.
Yup. C’mon, it’s obvious.
OK, I’m lawful good. What did I do differently?
To my eye, only the first picture, the one of a sandwich, was a sandwich.
ETA: Well, further down I see that you can be lawful good by denying that anything is a sandwich, so I’m inclined to think the whole pointless exercise is in fact pointless.
You don’t deserve to get an icecream sandwich.
This is the most mean-spirited thing ever posted on SSC. Love you,
David, but everyone deserves to get an ice cream sandwich.
I’m lawful good, you disgusting heretic.
And if I answer every question wrong, I’m chaotic evil, so that checks out.
Does that mean that you denied the sandwichness of an icecream sandwich?
I did the second time.
I said the ice cream sandwich was a sandwich and I also got Lawful Good. I mean, it’s right in the name!
I said yes for anything that was ingredients between two clearly separated slices of bread or bread like substance (the cheese and crackers counted as a sandwich).
I got lawful good despite answering that question as “yes, that is a sandwich”
So maybe I was neutral because I didn’t think crackers and cheese were a sandwich.
I’m chaotic evil, getting three wrong (two of which I dispute, so I’m going home and I’m taking the football with me)
What am I missing about the fondue? I checked with my French wife and she said “Of course zis ees une fondue..”
What do you think you’re missing? It isn’t a sandwich, if that’s what you’re asking.
Further experimentation: declaring everything a sandwich is chaotic evil, and declaring nothing a sandwich is a lawful good.
I see my presumptions were too literal..
However there are more questions than would uniquely determine only nine results. If you answer everything ‘not a sandwich’, but mark the burger, the two-slices-of-bread-with-normal-sandwich-fillings, and the ice cream sandwich as sandwiches, and everything else not, that’s still lawful good.
I got lawful good with even more sandwiches than that; I included the cheese crackers and the stuff-still-in-jars-between-bread.
True neutral, the most boring of sandwich alignments. Sigh.
(I had to think a good minute about the sushi burrito one though.)
I am also True Neutral, and considered the sushiburrito very hard… But how did you answer? I said yes, it is a sandwich.
After long consideration I also said yes. That said I re-did the test and turns out that changing that answer did not change my alignment.
True Neutral as well. I answered everything from the 100%-non-disprovable standpoint that all foods are one of: soup, ravioli, sandwich, salad, or casserole (except foods that are mostly just an *ingredient*, like steak or a piece of fruit).
Where do rice and beans fit?
I know what a sandwich is. What surprises me is how many people don’t, apparently.
Lawful good, ofc.
Just like with everything else, Lawful Good.
I’m Superman to you people.
Rest of the world: Idle discussion about wheter a sub is a sandwich
The UK: VAT tribunal about whether the temperature of a Subway sub is an essential or accidental property.
Hot takeaway food is taxable but cold takeaway food is exempt.
But a bread roll that’s just come out of the oven is still meant to be eaten cold, unlike e.g. a chinese takeaway and is thus exempt. Sub One Ltd. tried unsucessfully to argue that a sub was ‘a toasted product rather than a hot product.’
Of course the famous landmark case is United Biscuits (UK) Ltd v HMRC (VATD 6344), where it was ruled that the line between a biscuit and a cake is that a stale cake goes dry while an old biscuit goes soggy.
Edit: Why is everyone so hungry today?
Thomist influence in the law? Sounds politically suspect!
[Integralism intensifies]
Dear God in Heaven. This, in the birthplace of liberty.
Who calls the UK the birthplace of liberty, and why would they do that?
Magna Carta? 1689 Bill of Rights?
Whoever wrote British history must have loved dramatic irony, to make it an Orwellian police state after all that. 😛
I’m not sure I would. But I might call it a recent host or breeding ground of liberty. John Locke and John Stuart Mill were both from there, as well as having had a major influence on Voltaire.
I do. Didn’t I say that?
Read Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.
The rule here is that prepared food is taxed, while most groceries are tax-exempt. This means that if you buy a bagel and ask them to slice it and put cream cheese on it, it’s “prepared” and thus taxable, while if you buy the bagel and cream cheese separately and slice it yourself, it’s tax-free. Unless you just buy the bagel and eat it at the bagel shop, then it’s taxed as a restaurant meal. I think. Uh, not tax advice.
Anyway, a bagel with cream cheese may technically qualify as a sandwich, but I never think of it as such.
That seems like a more defensible distinction.
Especially in a world where sushi and salad exist.
Lawful good, of course, but I think two meanings are actually defensible:
1. The strict meaning, encompassing regular sandwiches, burgers, subs, etc.
2. The metaphorical meaning, encompassing the above, but also ice cream sandwiches or cheese and crackers. It’s very important, though, that the middle ingredients be surrounded with two distinct things, be they slices of bread or crackers or leaves of lettuce.
Heresy: leaves of lettuce don’t count. The identical outer layers you touch to eat it must be constituted from flour.
Crackers are flat wheat (or whatever) so they count. You could make a hamburger with two cookies instead of a bun and still not be a heretic: just a clogged-artery monster.
Correct. A sandwich must necessarily be something between something else, but it doesn’t follow that anything sandwiched between anything else is a sandwich. There are additional criteria for both the outer layer as well as the contents (I’m looking at you, hot dogs).
You could make a hamburger with two cookies instead of a bun
I dispute that! The items need to be all savoury or all sweet (hence an ice-cream sandwich can be a sandwich because the layers and filling are all sweet) but cookies being a sweet biscuit, and hamburger a savoury meat, cannot go together as a sandwich.
Two cookies and a fake meat (like a ‘burger’ that is really made of chocolate) yes, but two cookies and meat? Do you have no tastebuds, or were they seared away with your conscience?
A bad sandwich is still a sandwich.
Not all bad things are heresy, Deiseach.
That is it, I am throwing down the gauntlet and challenging you two to put your money where your mouths are.
So “You could make a hamburger with two cookies instead of a bun”, huh? And this counts as a sandwich? Well, go ahead, I dare you: get your two chocolate chip cookies or whatever flavour you like, fry your beef patty, and make a sandwich out of it (with accompaniments or without as you like).
Then eat it.
Then come back here (if you survive the gastric adventure) and tell me that’s a sandwich! 😀
Do you think no one would eat such a thing? I remind you that America exists.
Wikipedia refers to the Luther burger as a sandwich.
Wikipedia also lists the double down as a sandwich.
Fair point. But still, Deiseach is injecting her opinion on what makes a good sandwich into the definition of sandwich.
Oh I was agreeing with you.
How about a twinkie wiener sandwich? (From the criminally underrated UHF.)
I’m more of a bundle theorist. Bread on the outside makes something more sanwichy. Clear division between the two or more pieces of the outside layer material make something more sandwichy. Sliced bread is more sandwichy than a roll. Probably various other factors I’m not thinking of. And at the margins, there are grey areas. Is a hot dog a sandwich? Kinda.
Not being a bundle theorist myself, I think once you allow that a hot dog is a sandwich, then by analogy with other folded flour products, you have to allow folded pizza, too. Or certain kind of dumpling like pierogi. That’s too far for me. Likewise, if you allow folded bread, you’re not far from allowing wraps.
But a hot dog bun is emphatically not folded, it is sliced (just as a sub roll might be). And if you look at how a hot dog bun is baked, it’s clear that the “sides” of the hot dog actually consist of the top and bottom of the bun! So to rubberduck’s point, by rotating a hot dog 90 degrees you are simply returning the bread to its natural orientation!
I don’t think things where the “bread” is cooked in the process of cooking the filling, such as a filled dumpling, or barmakiya, or a Cornish pasty, count as sandwiches.
Where the hot dog gets me is that if you rotate it 90 degrees around the sausages longest dimension, so that you are holding it with half the bun on top and half on the bottom, it goes from “maybe a sandwich” to “absolutely a sandwich”. It is absurd to suggest that sandwich-ness is anisotropic so therefore a hot dog is a sandwich.
But the bun is just one piece of bread.
@bullseye By that logic subway subs are not sandwiches unless the bread has been sliced all the way through, which it never is.
Subway subs are barely even food.
Of course! Americans don’t have proper sausages so they cut hot dog rolls in a way which is both less sandwich-like and flatly demented. How could I have overlooked this?
@rubberduck
That doesn’t make it a sandwich, that just makes you a person who eats (non-sandwich) hot dogs weird.
Now, if you cut the hot dogs in half lengthways and lie them flat between pieces of bread, you have a (hot dog) sandwich.
> if you rotate it 90 degrees around the sausages longest dimension
Maybe. Except that’s almost never done. Because the structure would result of all of the condiments falling all over. That makes it a critical distinction. You might be able to make an argument that it qualifies as an open-face sandwich. But note the extra qualifier of open-face and not just “sandwich”.
Topology matters, but it isn’t the only thing that matters in-practice. Topologically, humans may be a torus, but I not seen a movement to allow same-topology marriage. Yet.
But by that logic, a sausage roll is a sandwich, and it is not. As David Friedman so rightly says, a Cornish pasty is not a sandwich, and a sausage roll is within the same clade as a Cornish pasty.
A hot dog is not a sandwich qua sandwich regardless of the orientation of the bun around the sausage (or the sausage within the bun), unless if you slice the bun through so that it is in two parts, and even then the “bun-ness” of the bun militates against it (put it in a bread roll and I’ll give ground on “maybe a sandwich”).
So it is also to do with the nature of the bread used, and a bread roll is more like sliced bread than a hot dog bun is like sliced bread. A sausage bap or blaa is not the same thing as a sandwich, though it is on a spectrum approaching more nearly to a sandwich than something like folded pizza or other examples.
You should formalize it in fuzzy logic.
Is a hot dog a sandwich? Kinda.
Yes, I agree that this is a grey area. When answering that part, I said it was not a sandwich(despite the rolls being bread-type). Yet there is such a thing as a sausage sandwich which I do hold is a sandwich.
In trying to descry what makes me think of this distinction, is it because the sausage sandwich is not a unitary item like a hot dog (when one thinks of a hot dog, both sausage and bun are indispensable parts, one cannot have one without the other) while the sausage sandwich is assembled from separate items which can be eaten separately and do not have the same linkage (yes one can put sausages in a sandwich, but one can put other items – egg sandwich, salad sandwich, crisp sandwich – into a sandwich, the sausage and bread slices are not indissolubly linked into one category the same as a hot dog)? Is it because the hot dog bun is a single item sliced in two, whereas in the sandwich the two bread slices are individual and separate items? Is it that the hot dog presupposes the additions of condiments and accompaniments whereas the sausage sandwich does not (the sausage sandwich does not have onions, raw or cooked; one can garnish it with mustard, ketchup or brown sauce but none of these are vital – although that is a debatable question – whereas a hot dog requires that relish be added)? Where lies the distinction?
Maybe you can’t.
I agree that one can disassemble a hot dog into its constituent parts, but I maintain that if you are eating the sausage and the bread separately, you cannot then call what you are doing “eating a hot dog” as that activity does depend on consuming the entire assembled entity that is “the hot dog“, any more than you could eat the raw dough of a cake and the filling separately, and then say you were “eating a slice of cake”.
Regard these two pictures: exhibit A and exhibit B. Which one is “a hot dog”? I think you will have to agree it is the second one; the first may be the discrete basic elements of the hot dog (sausage and bread, though even there I will enter the distinguo about sliced bread versus hot dog bun) but it is not a hot dog by any definition.
The bun is not part of the hot dog. You can eat hot dogs with no buns in sight, as for example in this eating contest.
That’s not a hotdog, that’s a Brühwurst (Parboiled sausage).
@Bullseye:
My point precisely. You can eat a hot dog sliced up in a bowl of baked beans, for example. Or all by itself without a bun.
That’s eating hotdog, but it’s not eating a hotdog.
Same difference as hamburger and a hamburger.
“Eating hamburger” would be chowing down on ground beef; once it’s a patty, it’s a “a hamburger”. And certainly “a hot dog” refers to the sausage itself; using the same term to refer to a sandwich consisting of a hot dog roll and a hot dog (“a hot dog onna bun”) is metonymy.
“Eating hot dog” has no meaning on the PG-13 side of the Internet. A hot dog can be divided into hot dog pieces, but there’s no mass noun phrase “hot dog”.
Subway subs typically don’t fit this definition.
I’m neutral good.
What about a noncompact space containing exactly one slice of bread and one slice of meat where it ‘wraps around’ such that the one piece of bread is on both sides of the meat?
Depends on what you mean by “both sides”.
I require an opening. This is why the folded over pizza slice counted as a sandwich while the fried dumpling-like edibles did not.
The one slice of bread has a crust around the outside.
Diagram, please? I don’t really know what a “noncompact space” is.
I mean like Pac-Man, where you can go off the left hand side of the screen and appear on the right.
The space of Pac-Man is compact. For spaces which can be considered as a subset of a Euclidean space of some dimension, compact is equivalent to closed and bounded. It’s closed because any point Pac-Man can get arbitrarily close to, he can get to; and it’s bounded by inspection (it has a finite length of paths that Pac-Man can travel to).
Yeah. I was getting confused between a compact space and a contractible one.
I believe you’ve invented the “Lambert”. Congratulations on a new food type. 🙂
If open bread is a sandwich, why all this talk of folding pizzas anyway? Isn’t a pizza a sandwich already?
(I say no, because open breads, unfolded pizzas, and folded pizzas are none of them sandwiches, so I have no issues with the folding, it makes no difference to me)
I think a distinction could be made between “folding” and “slicing”.
An open-faced sandwich is obviously still a sandwich, so only one slice is necessary.
(I think the open-faced sandwich is actually a more central example than one with two slices, but I’m not sure if others agree.)
Hard disagree. an open-faced sandwich contains a fundamental internal contradiction, like silent music (yes, I know 4:33 exists). In fact, I had never heard this term before.
In german, it’s called a “belegtes Brötchen”. It’s hard to translate literally, but it would be laid-on, filled (in the sense you fill a seat, not a suitcase) or perhaps loaded bread. Also, Brötchen is diminutive, and thus usually signifies a roll, as opposed to a slice of a larger bread.
Seconded. “Open faced sandwich” is a misnomer, they are not sandwiches.
How someone like you achieved the honorable high ranking of Lawful Good I’ll never understand. Heresy of the highest order, this sandwich hierarchy is a sham!
The true sandwich believers who reject the burger will have to form a splinter sect.
You have never heard of an open sandwich?
I guess that’s a sandwich where lots of people contribute, you don’t have to pay for it, but the support is lousy if you have any problems?
Each slice agrees they can see other slices. In some other sandwiches, the slices agree to stay together for the sake of the fillings.
What makes a good sandwich lover turn neutral? Lust for strawberry filling? Tomato sauce? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?
Lawful good or there’s no point.
Wait, sorry. Do you mean to imply that a jam sandwich is not a sandwich?
I’m guessing it is more directed at layered cakes or filled donuts/pastries. Two pieces of bread with jam between them would, indeed, be a sandwich.
One of the original reasons to have sandwiches (possibly apocryphal) was to allow the eating of food without getting one’s hands dirty. So a jam sandwich might be fine because the outer bread isn’t presumed to get one’s hands dirty. But a jam-filled cake isn’t because a cake or similar doesn’t have bread-like material which is designed to be able to be eaten with hands without getting them dirty. Indeed, I think “usually eaten with hands” is a good filter.
John wins.
A sandwich is a condiment trapped between two pieces of dough (or a folded piece of dough), such that the assembly can be held in hands without significant dirtying of said hands. This excludes dumplings (too greasy/humid/hot to be held), lasagna (too creamy and would fall appart) or any manner of toast (only one piece of dough, non-folded). Neutral.
Food between two separate pieces of toast is a sandwich.
I agree, but I think Machine Interface meant to exclude toast with just butter or jam on top.
Where do open-face sandwiches fit in all this?
@Nancy Lebovitz
A bread-based trencher is an edible plate. The Earl of Sandwich innovated by turning an extra trencher upside down and placing it on top of another food-topped trencher, thus inventing the sandwich.
My feeling is that an open-faced sandwich with just one thing on it isn’t really a sandwich– let’s say bread with a layer of pate. However, if it has pate and lettuce, or even pate with thin slices of onion, it’s a true open-faced sandwich rather than just a thing someone slopped together.
I suspect there’s no way to defend these distinctions.
@Nancy Lebovitz
I dunno, it seems odd to me to say that a peanut butter ‘sandwich’ isn’t a true sandwich, but a peanut butter and jelly one is.
If the peanut butter is between two pieces of bread, it’s a sandwich.
An open faced sandwich is an open faced sandwich, however it is a bit of a misnomer, as it is not actually a subgroup of sandwiches but an entirely separate class.
I hate when terminology does that. If “minor planets” are not actually a subset of “planets”, then don’t pick a label for them that has the word “planet” in it!
Making “open-faced” an alienans adjective is linguistically fine (compare “decoy” or “counterfeit” or a hundred other examples), I just find it hard to swallow.
@Nick,
Thank you for teaching me the word “alienans.”
Disagree, open-face sandwiches are perfectly valid and demanding only closed-face sandwiches is very America-centric, ignoring the popularity that open-face sandwiches enjoy in much of Europe.
However, I would add that to be a sandwich, the dish must be eaten with the hands, without the aid of forks and knives. Therefore toast with jam is a sandwich but French toast with maple syrup is not.
I’m actually writing from a French perspective, where a “sandwich” has to be closed-face. Open-face preparations are “tartines”, “canapés” or “toasts”.
I was gonna say, canapés and bruschetta are clearly not sandwiches, they even have special words for them. You might even have canapés and cucumber sandwiches at the same tea, and would not confuse the two.
Nice attempt to wrap yourself in the flag of internationalism against America-centrism, but “open-faced sandwich” cannot enjoy popularity in places that don’t speak English, unless their name for them is unusually English-influenced. I say that it is “open-faced sandwich” that is an America-only phrase.
I know of no open-faced sandwich in Europe, and that includes the English-speaking parts. Americans are at liberty to point at bread and butter, beans on toast, cheese on toast, or Welsh rarebit, and declare it an “open-faced” sandwich, but that don’t make it so. The fact that we do not call any of these things sandwiches, in the land where the sandwich was invented, should be a clue.
Structural purist, lawful good. A hot dog is a sandwich. It is very nearly the ur-sandwich of cured meat and bread at the Earl’s card table. Like a covenant of blood, the bread is pierced and sliced, and though the surgery is not complete it is final.
No. Language is usage. If there’s a hot dog on a table and you ask someone to “hand me that sandwich on the table,” 100% of people will respond “what sandwich?” Therefore, a hotdog is not a sandwich.
I suspect this isn’t actually true. I’d be interested to see someone run that experiment.
But even if true, wouldn’t it prove too much? You’d also get a confused response if you said “Hand me that computer” when there was only a smartphone, but I can’t imagine anyone arguing that a smartphone is not a computer.
I had funny discussion with younger family embers some time ago at a family gathering.
They
1) were unable to recognize desktop PC, laptops and smartphones as fundamentally the same type of device
2) categorically refused to accept smartphone is a computer
3) many of them never used PC tower, only laptops. Though they had no trouble to consider them as the same type of device
My working theory is that they considered touch vs keyboard & mouse as a very important part.
Isn’t the parsimonious explanation that a smartphone is a phone that can also do a bunch of computer-like things, but a computer is a device for doing computer-like things.
One of the reasons I don’t have a smartphone is that I consider it an inferior device wrt to the “smart” things (I use proper computers for that) and it seems to me that it isn’t necessarily superior (if not actually inferior) as a POMT (plain old mobile telephone).
Desktop/workstation PCs and laptops do the same things, so they fall in the same class of thing. Phones have a different set of use cases and are therefore considered something different.
What a smartphone actually is these days is the “universal pocket gadget”.
You dont need a camera, flashlight, dictation recorder, music player, step counter, gps map device, video camera, mobile game system, mobile phone ect, ect, because the smartphone does all of those things, and it does some of them just flat out better than the dedicated gadget it replaces – you have to spend very unreasonable amounts of money to get a video camera which is up to the standards of a decent smart phone, for example.
About the only reason it has not eaten the laptop at this point is the lack of sufficiently good input and display technology, typing on a phone is painful.
Not only that, but what dedicated video camera (you can afford) is going to give you an always-on internet connection so you can instantly post your video clip on social media?
Gary Gulman: “To me, the phone is this seldom-used app on my phone”.
Lawful good. While some of those items are in a debatable zone, some are plainly and clearly not sandwiches (and I’d maintain fairy bread is not even food).
Trying to decipher the algorithm, it looks like pure sandwiches include some combination of “sandwich”, “empanada”, “burger”, “chicken & waffles”, “crackers & cheese”, “twitter photo”, “Swedish cake”, and “hot dog”, but not all of them at once. Can’t narrow it down any further than that without tedious experimentation, and yes, it empirically will let you exclude the “sandwich” and still be a Lawful Good sandwich purist. Which clearly indicates that the algorithm is defective.
By my thinking, an absolutely pure sandwich must have two separate bread-items on the outside, most any non-bread edibles in the middle, and be meant for holding in one’s hand while eating. The first allowable deviation, possibly still qualifying as “lawful good” in a 3×3 matrix, is to allow variant bread-like exteriors such as pitas or partially-sliced rolls so long as the result is still clearly hand-edible.
“Hand-edible” is an interesting criterion. Is a BLT the size of a Buick a sandwich?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeoWsSFqeEI&t=46s
Hand-edibility is the original purpose and whole point of the sandwich. If, by virtue of size or sloppiness, you need to put it on a dinner plate and use a knife and fork, then it’s not a sandwich.
I know a deli which sells huge double decker sandwiches. I have to take them apart, in effect making them into two conventional sandwiches and two open faced sandwiches. I would find it hard to say they aren’t sandwiches, though.
It counts if Dagwood Bumstead can eat it with two hands and open mouth, even if you can’t. True purists would insist on John Montagu as the benchmark, except that nobody measured his jaw size while he was alive and exhumation would spoil one’s appetite.
There is an extant Earl of Sandwich, also named John Montagu.
Yes, but only because it’s clearly a derivative of a sandwich that is hand-edible, blown up to giant size, presumably to get into the record books. If for some reason that was the normal way the dish was prepared, then no, it would not be.
I’m neutral good, and said five of the items are sandwiches: the sandwich, the burger, crackers and cheese, the ice cream sandwich, and the hot dog. I’d be interested to hear from some of the really strict lawful good folks how few items they accepted. Anyone not accept the burger as a sandwich?
Or going the other way, what’s the largest number of items anyone accepted as sandwiches?
Lawfull good here.
Can answer not the largest number, but the largest that I accept.
I accepted all those except the hot dog, and got lawful good.
Same.
the sandwich, the burger, crackers and cheese, the ice cream sandwich, and the hot dog
Lawful Good here and out of that shortlist –
Accept as sandwiches: the sandwich, crackers and cheese, the ice cream sandwich
Do not accept as sandwiches: the burger, the hot dog
This is where I landed, although I had to ponder the crackers and cheese for a minute.
Is a hot link sandwich a sandwich? What about a meatball sub?
Lawful good. Obvious sandwich and burger only. I almost said yes to the crackers and cheese and the ice cream sandwich, but decided against them because I’m particular.
I almost said no to the burger, too.
A real sandwich has a top and a bottom layer of material that is not transferring to someone holding it, in order to not smudge the cards .
Everything that gets the cards dirty is out, without further debate. ETA: Because it does not deserve the name of Sandwich.
My brother, I’ve found you at last.
Maybe we should push for Sandwich fundamentalism, demanding that the true sandwich never has any sauce, mustard, or marmalade oozing out its sides, and never sinks to besmirching the cards of the holy game in that sneaky way of the condemned.
(…But, I don’t even play cards –?? Fundamentalism has a strange attractiveness.)
Lawful good. Only two items from the quiz were sandwiches, namely the sandwich and the ice cream sandwich. All wider claims reek of descriptivist heresy.
You reject the burger purely because people don’t usually call it a sandwich?
It seems so obviously sandwichy to me: meat and condiments between two pieces of bread.
Maybe the criterion is sliced bread.
Burger bread IS sliced. You don’t mash it between two rolls, you slice one.
If “crust on the top or bottom” is a distinction, then a sandwich made on Wonderbread using the heel of the loaf is not a sandwich. But that makes no sense.
If “sliced bread” matters because you get more then two slices from a loaf, then a Big Mac is a sandwich but a double cheeseburger is not. Which also makes no sense.
You’re right.
It can be salvaged with a definition: “a slice that is cut from a loaf that (usually) is large enough to make >1 sandwich”. But then the definition wars begin…
Maybe the criterion is sliced bread.
Yes, that makes sense.
You can eat the slices of bread on their own as bread without needing to make a sandwich, but I don’t think anyone eats burger buns on their own for any kind of meal. Maybe if you had no other bread in the house, but it’s not the same as “tea and slices of bread and butter”. Burger buns are part of the entire entity of “a burger” and on their own they are not useful (unless in desperation you use them in lieu of proper bread rolls if you have none, but a bread roll is not the same thing as a sandwich).
Exact same answers as me.
It’s pretty obvious that if it isn’t called a sandwich that’s because it’s not a sandwich.
It seems very weird to me that you can make a sandwich not a sandwich by changing nothing except running the primary filling through a meat grinder. (that is, if no one debates that a steak sandwich on a sliced roll is a sandwich, how can a hamburger not be a sandwich?)
The Aussies do a weird thing where basically anything on a bun is a “burger”. They don’t have Chick-fil-A, but if they did, they would serve “chicken burgers”. Would you say that Chick-fil-A’s “original chicken sandwich” is not, in fact, a sandwich?
Yes, the Aussies are right on this one. Chik-Fil-A is the one that is heretical here.
I see things in a bun as not a sandwich because they’re in a bun, not between slices of bread. Emphasis on “bread” and “slice”.
The slicing is what puts your fingers and thumb in contact with the spongy flesh of the bread, and not crust. If the bread is a whole roll, bap, batch, cob, or barm [*], sliced in half, it’s a “cheese roll (or etc.)” or “ham roll” and so on. These are not sandwiches, which is why we don’t call them sandwiches.
That feeling you get when you think Australians are weird for calling everything a burger is how I feel about Americans calling everything a sandwich.
[*] this is an example of regional variety in England, analogous to the pop/soda regionalism in America
If you want a sandwich and all you have left are the crusts of the sliced bread, would you call that a burger?
“Burger” is a diminutive of “hamburger” which itself a shortened version of “hamburger steak”, which is always a dish consisting of a ground beef patty.
Using “burger” to refer to anything that does not contain a ground meat patty is the thing that is heretical.
And, given the etymology, it is clear that a “burger” is a “hamburger steak SANDWICH”.
Not all sandwiches are burgers, but all burgers are sandwiches.
If I can, I actually do attempt to flense off the offending crust and make better slices. But I’m not someone who’s bothered by fuzzy edge cases, so if I can’t, I just call it an inferior sandwich and be sad I had only the butts left to make one with.
I might call it a butty, because it’s made with the butts; however, see above where I lose interest in investigating boundaries if the boundaries aren’t stark enough to warrant such fine distinctions. I tend to call a chip butty a chip butty even if it’s made with regular slices.
Sandwich-making people, either considerate hosts or shopkeepers, don’t make sandwiches out of the loaf ends; their instincts are good.
Agreed. And it is reasonable to suggest that “burger” has outgrown etymology and can be applied to things other than ground beef patties, but it’s still a (now large) subset of sandwich-space.
Defining features of the burger being the dedicated burger roll rather than a loaf of bread which is sliced to form the exterior, and a filling dominated by one or two separately-cooked slabs of some homogenous meat-like thing plus minor condiments.
Have to agree with the Australians, over here a chicken burger on burger buns with the usual fillings (lettuce, mayo) is a chicken burger not a chicken sandwich. Even if McDonalds call it a “McChicken Sandwich”, everyone in practice calls it a chicken burger.
Sliced cooked whole chicken with lettuce etc. between two slices of buttered bread, on the other hand, is a chicken salad sandwich (slices of cooked chicken on their own or with condiments is a chicken sandwich).
If it’s chicken, it’s a chicken sandwich.
If it’s turkey, it’s a turkey burger.
I have no idea how/why, but this is the arrangement America has settled upon, which means it is the correct arrangement 🙂
I’m going to disagree. A turkey burger and a turkey sandwich imply two very different things. Only one of them is a sandwich (the other is a turkey burger).
Edit: Ninja’d by Matt M. I’ll point out the reason that a chicken sandwich is a chicken sandwich is that it is (supposedly) a solid piece of chicken meat. Where hamburger or turkey burger is ground meat packed together. This does create a gray area for processed stuff at places like McDonalds (Chick-fil-a does use whole chicken breasts, so they’re in the clear to call it a sandwich).
Burgers are ground meat, fried up and served hot. No one calls sliced turkey on bread a “turkey burger.”
Ninja’d by an edit. :/
That’s because in chicken sandwiches the chicken is a whole piece of meat, like a fried fillet, while in a turkey burger the meat is ground and formed into a patty. A hamburger is a burger because the main ingredient is a “hamburger steak” ie ground beef that has been cooked. Thus the turkey burger is a burger because the turkey has been prepared in the style of a hamburger steak, while the chicken is a sandwich because it hasn’t been.
Edit: a whole clan of ninjas have strong opinions about burgers and sandwiches today.
A burger is a sandwich because when I go to Wendy’s if I say I want a #1 they ask if I want the combo meal or “just the sandwich.”
I have seen lots of points arguing that a burger is distinguishable from other sandwiches. I have yet to see a compelling argument for why a burger is not a subclasses of sandwich.
The fact that you have a more specific name for a certain kind of sandwich doesn’t make it not a sandwich, any more than the name “horse” makes a horse not a mammal.
If you want to say a burger (or a “ham roll”) is NOT a sandwich, you must explain why sandwiches must be made with bread sliced from a loaf, rather than bread cooked as a single serving loaf (which is all a bun or roll really is)
Oh I agree, a burger is definitely a subclass of sandwich.
Chicken Sandwich Species: Sandwich Multiplicitus Savourious Poulty Gallus
Turkey Burger Species: Sandwich Multiplicitus Savourious Hamburger Gallapavo
burger:sandwich::horse:mammal is a false analogy, since there exist things which are sandwiches. Just that, sandwiches. It would be like calling tigers, tigers, then insisting horses are another kind of tiger in the broader class of tiger, the kind that’s not… tigers. Because horses have four legs too.
Or, it would be like having a broad class of mammal, including horses and other different mammals, and then these things here, what do you call them?
-We call them mammals.
Yes, but what kind of mammal?
-Just, mammal.
I thought mammal was supposed to be this diverse umbrella term?
-Yes, and this mammal is also a mammal, and we will call it… “mammal”.
Are you Wash from Firefly?
@Del Cotter
I mean, we do have species like the Red Footed Booby who are technically Aves Suliformes Sulidae Sula Sula. Or Gorilla Gorilla. So perhaps Sandwich is a family and somewhere out there is the wild Sandwichae Sandwich Sandwich
Fine, use the analogy horse:Clydesdale or computer:laptop or car:sedan (sorry, “saloon”) if those better float your boat:canoe. The point is that one is clearly a subclass of the other.
The hardline language distinction between “burger” and “sandwich” simply does not exist in American English. We’ve covered Chick-fil-A, but really any deli in America is likely to offer a choice of breads, including sliced rolls, and call the result a sandwich. Plus sub shops (no one will give you too much side eye if you call a hoagie, a grinder, or a cheesesteak a “sandwich”) despite their product also coming from a sliced roll rather than slices from a large loaf.
So to make it language independent, it makes sense to examine the nature of the thing. And really, a hamburger is a sandwich in the purest form: meat between two pieces of bread. That those pieces of bread are obtained by slicing a roll/bun rather than slices from the center of a loaf seems the most trivial distinction, certainly not impacting the esssential sandwichness of the dish.
“Sandwich” is of course a verb as well as a food, and I rethink serves as a discriminator: any food that is called a sandwich must be “sandwiched” between at least two layers of something else.
Essential characteristics of a sandwich:
1) consists of fillings between two or more layers of something else. These “outer layers” should consist of the same material
2) is “open” (the fillings are accessible) on all sides. At most one “edge” may consist of the outer layer material (this last bit is debatable)
3) is assembled from prepared ingredients that could be eaten separately, not raw materials that remain uncooked until post assembly (you can heat a sandwich after assembly… a panini is a sandwich, but it was not “raw” when it went on the press)
4) is designed to be held by the outer layers and eaten with the hands
Defensible (but possibly too strict) requirements:
5) the layers of a sandwich must be assembled vertically such that the outer layer material forms the top and bottom of the sandwich (excludes tacos and hot dogs)
6) the outer layers of the sandwich must consist of two instances of the same thing, or a single thing sliced. The layers of a sandwich cannot be formed by folding (excludes tacos, folded quesadillas, and any “wraps” not caught by 2)
7) like 6 but “two instances of the same thing” are excluded. Eliminates cracker sandwiches and most ice cream sandwiches.
8) the outer layers must be cooked carb based products (eliminates the KFC Double Down)
9) May only work in English: if the primary filling is most often described as “on” the outer layer, it is a sandwich. If it is most often described as “in” the outer layer, it is not a sandwich. E.g. “hamburger on a bun”, “pastrami on rye” vs. “hot dog in a bun”, “carne asada in a taco”. What’s interesting about this one is that the things we usually say “on” for sound really weird if you switch to “in”, but the “ins” are not quite as awkward if you flip to “out”. “Pastrami in rye” sounds really weird. “Hot dog on a bun” is not too bad.
9) may only work in American English
Related: On burritos vs sandwiches, including commentary from Antonin Scalia and Richard Posner on the lawsuit White City v PR Restaurants, in which a judge in Massachusetts ruled that a burrito was not a sandwich.
I think that ruling was absolutely correct, for the purposes of the case in question. Panera believed that a mall was in violation of its agreement to not lease space to another “sandwich shop” by allowing a Qdoba to open. These two products are definitely not equivalent substitutes for each other.
As evidence that hamburgers are indeed sandwiches, here’s MST3K. If Crow and Tom Servo call it a hamburger sandwich, that’s good enough for me.
I love the out of nowhere Patton reference at the end.
Holy Canoli, SSC is starved for entertainment.
Don’t you start bringing desserts into this, the ice cream sandwich was bad enough.
It’s only just.
But can I call it peace?
Let’s not bring cakes and pies in. That will just lead to circular arguments.
You win; all I have left is [something about squaring the circle].
I prefer ice cream sandwiches to canoli, which I always seem to find gritty.
Is that the ricotta?
Gritty almost assuredly is the sugar being incompletely blended with the ricotta.
Also, for the people that don’t think a hamburger is a sandwich, what are your thoughts on a Philly cheesesteak? If a Philly is a sandwich and a burger is not, why not? What’s the difference?
ETA: Damnit, now I really want a cheesesteak…
Or for that matter what is the smear of sadness that is New York’s “Chopped Cheese”?
I just had a Philly cheesesteak calzone for lunch.
Cheesesteak is a sandwich. I’m not sure why you would think these things are similar enough that they should be categorized the same…totally different contents, bread, and presentation.
The answer lies within the question…because a burger is a burger.
And now so do I.
Be warned. But you probably already are.
If you order Philly cheesesteak far from Philadelphia, the odds are substantial that it was made by someone who never had a Philly cheesesteak, doesn’t know what one is, and is deducing what it is from the name.
I think I’ve had one cheesesteak outside of Philadelphia that was comparable (still not as good) to an actual Philly Cheesesteak (can’t remember where, though). Still, even the terrible knockoffs that you described that seemingly every pub/sports bar offers are pretty tasty.
The biggest problem (other than wrong ingredients/toppings/type of cheese) in most places is the steak is too thick and usually too dry (not greasy enough).
Jersey Mike’s has a passable cheesesteak, or at least some of their New Jersey locations do. It’s certainly not on an Amoroso roll but it’s definitely a cheesesteak (Roxborough style, which is the best anyway).
There’s a few places in South Florida that have decent cheesesteaks, probably run by people from the area.
Well that’s my point, what’s the difference between a cheesesteak and a sub? It’s cooked beef and cheese with some vegetables in a roll.
Cheeesteaks and subs are both sandwiches and the two are very similar (maybe the same). You weren’t comparing it to a sub, you were comparing it to a burger, which is totally different and not a sandwich 🙂
Why isn’t a burger a sandwich?
A burger is a sandwich in the same way that a human is an animal. They are such important groups on their own that the broader category can be assumed in most contexts to exclude the more specific version.
@Jaskologist probably gave a better answer. My answer would have been “because a burger is a burger.”
If I shout at you from the kitchen and say “I’m making myself a sandwich, want one?” do you expect the result to be two bacon cheeseburgers, or just some turkey and lettuce on bread or whatever you normally eat on a sandwich?
I agree that language is usage, but people do use “sandwich” when referring to burgers. If there’s a hotdog and a hamburger on the table and someone says “hand me the sandwich,” which do you give him?
From context, I expect it to be some member of the subset of sandwiches that can be made in maybe a minute or two without cooking. It does not follow that no sandwich can be cooked.
A confused look.
Question for the people who do not consider a hotdog a sandwich. Is it the shape of the bun that stops you from considering it a sandwich?
A hotdog is traditionally made by slicing a bun partway through, and stuffing a sausage into the slit. But sometimes the slit is very deep, so what you have is two halves of a bun held together by a thin hinge of bread, and that hinge sometimes breaks completely. If the shape of the bread is essential to the determination, does the not-a-sandwich hotdog become a sandwich if the bun separates into two pieces accidentally or if the bun is deliberately cut into two separate halves when the food is prepared?
If there’s a hotdog and a hamburger on the table and someone says “hand me the sandwich,” which do you give him?
Neither, because if he wants a sandwich instead of what is on the table, he can go into the kitchen and make one himself.
Go a step further, and cut it or have it break all the way in half. The hotdog now fails in its culinary endeavor. Hotdogs, owing to cylindrality, are a strictly vertical construction. If you claim to make a “hotdog sandwich”, most will assume you are slicing the hotdog to allow for horizontal construction.
But, hotdogs are basically sui generis in American cuisine. Imagine ladling chili and liquid cheese on top of anything else that’s plausibly a sandwich.
Sloppy Joes?
That’s a good way to eat a burger. Well, minus the liquid cheese. Fool me once, queso….
A hot dog is usually served with condiments that would not be adequately confined by a long skinny cylinder and two long skinny bun-halves, leaking out to smear the cards and the table and invalidating the hand-edibility that is the purpose and part of the core essence of the sandwich. To make a hot dog hand-edible, the contents must be largely enclosed by bread, not merely sandwiched between two pieces of bread.
I consider hot dogs on the fuzzy border of sandwich space (see also pitas), but I get the people who would exclude them altogether.
Sloppy Joe’s would have that on top of the slop, not on the upper side of the top bun. You can put all manner of things inside a sandwich.
Like anything else, the definition of sandwich is contextual. You could point at “Italian Sausage Sandwiches” and ask “Why is that a sandwich?” Well, maybe it isn’t, or maybe it’s because it’s not a hot dog or a braut, that’s why. The cylinder not really in bun niche is entirely filled in America by hot dogs, except in the places that have the decent sense to sell brauts as well. But a braut ain’t a hot dog, and a hot dog ain’t a braut.
It’s akin to asking if the sky is actually blue, or just appears to be blue. Who knows? Enjoy the sunshine while you can.
Said the Buddha to the hot dog vendor “Make me one with everything”
Said the hot dog vendor to the Buddha “Do you mean a sandwich?”
Said the Buddha to the hot dog vendor “Unask the question”
This is so close to being metrical. Was that intentional?
How about,
Said the Buddha to the vendor “Make me one with ev’rything”
Said the vendor to the Buddha “Do you mean a sandwich?”
Said the Buddha to the vendor “Best unask the question”
Fits the tune of Tempus Adest Floridum, but it needs a last line.
Nobody yet has discussed rolled sandwiches, which long predate the Earl of Sandwich.
I commented a while back that it would be nice if something like a meetup or a science fiction con could be done online in a way that duplicated the casual socializing element of such a thing. Someone mentioned Mozilla Hubs as a way of doing so, but I have not yet actually seen it being done — perhaps someone here can organize (or has organized?) such a thing.
Ideally everyone would have VR headsets, making it a very close substitute for the real thing, but the social element could be provided at a much less sophisticated level. I’m imagining a two dimensional world, representing a building with one level and rooms of varying sizes. Top down view. Each person is a circle, showing his location. You can move your location around. Clicking on a circle gives you the name or pseudonym, possibly a picture. People can speak or type, and what they say or write will be heard or seen by anyone within a short distance — long enough so a cluster can have a conversation, short enough to permit lots of separate conversations by different pairs or clusters. Anyone can wander within range of a conversation to see if it sounds interesting, join it or move on.
Does something like that exist? Has anyone tried it? Anyone want to create it?
Hmm. That sounds rather like most multi-user “dungeon” games, including the primarily social MUSH variant. These were text-based, but had similar “who you could talk to” options. Many commercial MMORPs look very much like MUDs with video on top. I’d expect those engines to be adapatable – but of course they are private property etc etc. The old MUSH engines have much better licensing terms. But no audio communication even in the modern game engines, AFAIK. And adding audio (or video) is a different skill set from creating a basic engine. (Not one I have, even if I weren’t still workign full time.)
My first thought on reading this was ‘ Marauders map!’
I’m looking for something very similar for a virtual Diplomacy game. We need the ability to break into small-group private voice chats, but also observe who is talking to whom, and some opportunity for casual interaction when you walk by someone. Scaling should be much easier though since the max number of players is 7.
With the right software setup this could work even better than real-world Diplomacy since it’s hard to find a venue with enough separate areas to enable many simultaneous private conversations.
Yeah, VR Chat. AFAIK public servers are populated mostly by adolescent males whose avatars are lewd anime girls or penises, or who travel in troll-swarms. But I’m sure you could set up a private server for a sort of conference.
https://www.vrchat.com/guides
edit:
but honestly, a discord server probably is 90% as good and much, much more practical in terms of setup and adoption.
Well, just this weekend we are holding Revision (a demoparty) online. Normally, it takes place in germany, and people travel to it from all around europe and the world.
So, to lighten the mood, some people slapped together a game where you can walk around a faithfully reproduced model of the actual partyplace where the event would be usually held. You can chat with others, have your avatar dance, etc. The twitch stream of the online event is projected on the big screen in the virtual party hall.
It was kind of silly, but it really got me feeling like I was there. This partyplace is a very iconically clunky and ugly factory hall type of building. The event has been held there every year for the last decade. I’ve got a bunch of memories of the place, having been there 4 times or so.
Didn’t really duplicate the socializing aspect, though. That was done in discord and twitch chat.
You can look at and vote for the Wikipedia best images of the year. Lots of pretty pictures.
Very nice, thank you!
Why is this nebula called Elephant Trunk? I see a woman from behind, a bit like Magritte’s “La robe du soir“.
I guess that they see an eye in the top part and a trunk to the left. However, if an actual elephant looked like that, I’d suspect poachers.
I’ll keep going with these Dutch fixed expressions until someone stops me, mwhuhaha
‘Alle gekheid op een stokje’ = All craziness on a stick
Let’s get serious. This originated as the chastisement of a jester, who typically would carry a marotte, which is a stick with a likeness of his own head on top of it. The jester would use this in his act, for example to talk to/with. Imagine ventriloquism, but without the illusion. However, we also have evidence that it was used for fart jokes.
A marotte is still used in faithful reproductions of Verdi’s opera, Rigoletto.
‘Alle hout is geen timmerhout’ = Not all wood is lumber (or more literally: hammerwood)
This person lacks the talent to do that.
‘Alle zeilen bijzetten’ = Adding all sail
Giving 100%.
‘Als de dood zijn voor …’ = Being like the death for …
Being very scared of …
‘De een zijn dood is de ander zijn brood’ = One person’s death is the other’s bread
I/he profits from the misfortune of others. Can be used for face mask factory owners, right now.
‘Als de kippen erbij zijn’ = Being there like the chickens
Showing up to profit from a situation very quickly.
‘Als de nood op het hoogst is, is de redding nabij’ = When the distress is greatest, rescue is at hand
Don’t give up.
‘Als één schaap over de dam is(, volgen er meer)’ = When one sheep crosses the dam (more will follow)
Alludes to the human tendency to let others take risks first and only take advantage when something is proven safe/profitable/etc. This saying alludes to the high value of luring that first person.
‘Als het kalf verdronken is, dempt men de put’ = When the calf has drowned, the well is filled up
People often wait for an obviously dangerous situation to end in tragedy, before fixing it.
‘Als twee honden vechten om een been, gaat er de derde ermee heen’ = When two dogs fight over a bone, the third will run off with it
People can get so focused on the fight itself, that they forget about the thing the fight started over, allowing a third party to profit.
‘De appel valt niet ver van de boom/stam’ = The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree/trunk
She is like her parents.
I think you should keep going until you’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel and your well has run dry.
That would be beating a dead horse. On the other hand it would be a shame to spoil the ship for a ha’penny worth of tar, so you’re twixt the devil and the deep blue sea.
(“On the other hand” is a stealthy one, when I wrote that I nearly didn’t spot that it was a fixed expression)
Have you already done, “Iemand ben af de trap gevallen.”?
People used to say that to me when I got my haircut, when I was over there (Mormon missionary).
Yep, I did that joke on April 1st.
Your version is grammatically incorrect, though.
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” is also an English expression, with the same meaning.
Indeed, of course.
Spoiler: Aapje isn’t actually Dutch and is just making all of these up.
It’s obvious that he isn’t really named Aapje. He just chose that name to be first in all alphabetical orderings.
I should start posting as Aaapje.
That’s an old aardvark trick.
AA rated by the Better Aardvark Bureau.
AAA Plumbing
From back when ‘looking up a business in the Yellow Pages’ was a thing.
“Thank for making 4A’s Painting your Foray for Painting.”
“Wenn die Not am höchsten, ist die Rettung am nächsten.”
Mack the Knife in the finale of the Three Penny Opera (about to be hanged, but pardoned by the king’s riding messenger).
Repeating my question about online virtual meetups, which presumably are replacing many in-person ones for a while. This creates an opportunity for people all over the place to go to meetups they’d ordinarily not be able to attend. If you are an organizer and are open to this, will you share whatever info is needed so that interested outsiders can be vetted and then attend?
Since my previous two requests of this type got zero responses: I’m also curious, if you’re an organizer and are reading this and having misgivings, what is your reasoning and what would it take to settle your doubts?
In another comment, I described the software I would like to have to do it with. I ought to investigate Mozilla Hubs but so far haven’t.
My advantage for realspace hosting is a fairly large house in an area, the South Bay, with lots of SSC people in it, plus a family three members of which enjoy cooking. I have no experience organizing VR events, so probably someone else could do it better. I have spent time recently in several Zoom events, and they did not provide much of the effect of, at least, our meetups, which don’t have any central theme, speaker, or the like, just lots of socializing in small groups. Giving a talk online is easy, and I’ve done it multiple times, but that’s a one to many interaction, which isn’t what I want a meetup to be.
I remember that comment. I hope you can find a tool that provides the experience you’re talking about. My OP was more aimed at organizers who already have settled on a tool and have made plans to conduct their meetups virtually, or have already conducted them virtually and will be doing it again.
It looks as though Mozilla Hubs may do it.
In that case, I hope you’ll consider opening up invites to outsiders.
I plan to create a suitable space, then invite a few people to join me there so we can experiment with how it works, then announce a meetup with everyone invited.
But I would be happy to have someone else do it first.
It’s kind of interesting… I attended a virtual poker game last night with a bunch of my old high school friends. We hadn’t really attempted to get together like that in probably at least five years. Many of us hadn’t communicated with many of the others at all.
And of course, nothing was stopping us from having done this sooner. It just seems like COVID has suddenly normalized “virtual hangouts” in a way that they weren’t before… and also eliminated their in-person competition.
I think the biggest difficulty is that in any sufficiently large group (like, more than 5?) it can become difficult to figure out whose “turn” it is to speak, as such. I think we’ve underestimated how much of how a conversation flows is non-verbal and can be disrupted severely by lacking the in-person intuition. Even with webcams it doesn’t quite work, particularly when there are even small audio delays.
Indeed. My drinking buddies and I usually do a big trip once a year, and a casual meet-up every few months. Since this thing we’ve been doing a Google Hangouts virtual meeting every Saturday night. It will hopefully wind up a tradition. And one of them said they figured out a way we can all play Cards Against Humanity online while we’re at it, so I think we’re going to try that next week. I think it’s just a matter of everyone having access to a computer at the same time because some people were using their tablets or phones.
It’s not the exact same as Cards Against Humanity, but Quiplash is pretty close, and so long as one person buys it on Steam, it’s pretty easy to set up a screen share and everyone else can log in and play on their phone.
The other big issue I’ve found with large virtual hangouts is that there’s no good way to break into smaller groups for a chat. My church group has been meeting online for a couple of weeks, and while it’s better than doing nothing, there’s not really any way to split up and have four different sub-conversations depending on who is sitting next to each other like we can in person.
That’s my problem with Zoom for hangouts. I think Mozilla Hubs may solve that problem.
It’s not just a problem for social hangouts; this is a big difficulty for work teleconferences as well. And for things like running space flight operations from multiple geographically-dispersed sites.
Extra bonus points for anyone who comes up with a solution that works in a classified environment.
STU-IIIs and Cones of Silence for everyone.
Seriously, IIRC even way back there was secure video conferencing (between secure locations), and secure audio conferencing before that. The problem isn’t the conferencing, it’s that almost nobody has a SCIF in their house.
Even in the secure facilities we are using, there aren’t nearly enough secure phones to go around because they weren’t set up for this use case. And no way to share a screen of telemetry data over a STU-III.
Sure, if you’re interested in attending a Sacramento meetup, send an email to stoodfarback@gmail.com. We generally have weekly or biweekly meetups for 3-4 hours.
Can’t give insight into why other people haven’t responded; I just didn’t see your previous posts.
On a note, we might start doing regular online meetups once Covid is passed. We had one guy move to Thailand and another to the Dakotas who are able to attend again because we’ve gone online and that’s been really cool.
Do you mind letting us know what day of the week and times of day are typical? Also, what sorts of things a visitor should expect in terms of discussion topics, dynamic, etc.?
Are there any good resources for learning the theory behind cooking, e.g. what things go together and why things are prepared the way they are? Wikipedia has some of that, but it’s really hard to search for, because trying to use Google on anything cooking related just gives you pages and pages of recipe sites.
As an example, what would happen if you tried to cook potatoes like french toast (e.g. dip them in egg mixture and fry them)? My guess is it wouldn’t turn out well because the potatoes can’t soak up the eggs like bread can, but I have no idea.
As another example, why do cookies require half white sugar and half brown sugar? My mom told me she once tried to make cookies using only white sugar and they turned out terribly.
Another question: Is it possible to cook carrots with white sugar instead of brown sugar and/or honey?
Echoing that I’d be very interested in something like this. A writer for The Atlantic recommends the book “Salt, Fat, Acid” as a decent starting place, though I haven’t read it: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/the-why-of-cooking-samin-nosrat/523923/
You cook carrots with brown sugar?
I can see why you ask your original question!
The Flavour Thesaurus is a good reference for flavour pairings.
You probably could cook carrots that way, but the molasses in the brown sugar adds flavour. I’m guessing the thing with the cookies might have something to do with moisture levels. The molasses also makes brown sugar much more hygroscopic than white.
I learned how the usual types of ingredients behave and interact by watching my parents cook and by occasionally being forced to help do the cooking. I don’t think there is any “theory of cooking” fine grained enough to tell you that French Toast Potato Slices would probably not work. But experience making French toast as well as cooking potatoes makes it easy to predict. Not as a theorem of the Axioms of Cooking, but just from experiential knowledge.
Even if you found the Axioms of Cooking, they would be of no use to you without practical skill in cooking. So if you want to learn to cook, I guarantee you you’ll be better of just actually cooking, rather than theorizing.
Do they?? Never heard that in my life, and I’ve baked for years. There’s also thousands of different types of cookies of different sorts, so I don’t even see how such a weird generalization could be true.
Wait a minute, why are you speaking as if cooking carrots with sugar is some kind of default method? Maybe you don’t mean it that way, I do know that this is one method. I do suspect other sugar sources would be ok.
Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen is a fantastic resource for this sort of thing.
You can certainly make cookies with just white sugar, but you’d need to adjust some other things as well, as white sugar is less moist than brown sugar.
The show Good Eats and the website Serious Eats’s “Food Lab” go into detail on the scientific aspect of cooking (it’s all just chemistry), as well as the history of dishes which is another aspect of understanding how recipes came to be.
For instance the answers to all of your questions are I think covered at some point between them. Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking is the ne plus ultra of food science. It’s not necessarily light reading but it is an unshakeable foundation for anyone. I also love the Flavor Thesaurus for a treatise on how flavors combine qualitatively.
On French toast potatoes.
The point of eggs in French toast is both to rehydrate staled bread and to create a custard. Potato doesn’t have an open protein structure which stales in that way. The historical evolution also wouldn’t trend that way, as leftover potatoes can be made into bread or doughnuts. Stale bread, however, demands resuccitation. Adding egg to cooked potatoes could make a very serviceable potato pancake, however, and indeed is a recipe I’ve seen.
“Leftover starch” recipes are a whole genre. French toast, Fried rice, Migas, pancotto, fitfit, gazpacho, the list goes on.
Brown Sugar has a host of properties different from white sugar, and Kenji at the food lab has done the tedious work or comparing all-white-sugar to all-brown-sugar cookies and the intervening combinations. The difference is apparent.
My guess is that eggs and potatoes are a classic combination. I’d say very thin slices of potato and use butter.
You’d get browned eggy potato, and it would be pretty nice. Probably not highly compatible with maple syrup.
I’m restricting carbs, so I’m not doing the experiment, but if anyone else tries it, please post.
If you started with raw potato and cut it as thick as a slice of bread, I don’t think the middle of the slice would get cooked, and it wouldn’t be a french toast effect because potatoes, especially raw potatoes, are not porous the way bread is. To get potatoes to the condition where things can soak into them — I have recently been using sweet potatoes as a rice substitute — you have to cook them and mash them.
Done with thin slices of potatoes it would be a perfectly legitimate dish, a scrambled egg variant rather than a french toast derivative.
And done with cubes of potato cooked until brown before adding eggs, and not stirred after, you’d have a classic spanish omelet (frittata).
My favorite book in for this is Cooking for Geeks. Online there’s J. Kenji López-Alt’s Food Lab blog (which I believe is also a book).
+1 (for both. i frequently search for a specific recipe or dish with “kenji” included in search terms, because he doesn’t just want to give me instructions, he wants me to understand.
Another potato and egg recipe: spanish tortilla. Note that flipping can be a bit tricky, but you could avoid that by finishing the cooking in a preheated oven (a fritata technique).
Cook’s Illustrated is another way to learn cooking theory as you work through recipes. They test variations and explain at least some of their thinking (why they considered an option, why they think the ultimate recipe works).
The Modernist Cuisine books are also very good, but super expensive.
In addition to the shows, Alton Brown/Good Eats has two good books:
I’m Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking
I’m Just Here for More FOod: Food+Mixing+Heat=Baking
I still love McGee’s On Food and Cooking, but I recall seeing that some of his ideas had been discredited (maybe related to Maillard browning?)
Yes, Spanish tortilla is amazing. I would recommend against putting it in the oven, though. In my experience, the key to a proper and safe tortilla flip is to use the right tools: just make sure the plate is larger than the frying pan or, even better, invest 10 euro in one of these: https://www.amazon.es/tapas-tortilla-patatas/s?k=tapas+para+tortilla+de+patatas
By the way, the recipe you link includes onion, which, although very popular, is not a hard requirement. Just eggs, potatoes and oil will work, in a pinch.
what would happen if you tried to cook potatoes like french toast (e.g. dip them in egg mixture and fry them)?
Raw potatoes? My instinct is that it would be a horrible mess. Cooked potato that you mash up and form into something like croquettes? Could work, though I think you’d need something extra like breadcrumbs after the dip into egg mixture to work best, or a batter.
You can make potato bread/farls, though that doesn’t involve dipping into egg and then frying. Though there is this recipe for sweet potato dipped in egg, and if it works for sweet potato it should work as well for ordinary potatoes.
Another question: Is it possible to cook carrots with white sugar instead of brown sugar and/or honey?
Okay, I’ve never done glazed carrots, but the idea of cooking with brown instead of white sugar for some recipes is that brown sugar is less refined and has some proportion of the original molasses left in (that’s more Demerara or Moscovado sugars, as apparently commerical brown sugar is simply refined white sugar with molasses added back in after refining).
As to why you use it instead of white sugar? Caramelisation: “Brown sugar caramelizes much more readily than refined sugar, and this effect can be used to make glazes and gravies brown while cooking.” Carrots with white sugar would certainly be sweet, but you wouldn’t have the molasses flavour or the brown sticky caramelised glaze.
Real question: Who thinks cooked carrots aren’t sweet enough already? Frankly I find them overly sweet on their own. Nothing ruins a good chicken soup more than biting into a grossly sweet carrot.
In chicken soup? Ew, no. But as a standalone side dish, glazed carrots are fine.
> Who thinks cooked carrots aren’t sweet enough already?
Me. I mean – I can eat them plain. Much like I can eat lettuce plain. But the reason things like salt and butter or whatever is added to carrots is because they aren’t great-tasting on their own. “Hint of sweetness”, perhaps. “Sweeter than a turnip”, sure. But not something I would inherently call sweet on their own.
I think it could work if you grate the potato. But that’s a latke.
As an example, what would happen if you tried to cook potatoes like french toast (e.g. dip them in egg mixture and fry them)? My guess is it wouldn’t turn out well because the potatoes can’t soak up the eggs like bread can, but I have no idea.
I think you’d just get battered french fries, which are definitely a thing. The batter doesn’t get absorbed into the potatoes, like with french toast, so it’s different, though.
“Cooking for Geeks” is a pretty good intro, and as @Beans says, experience is a really good teacher. Once you’ve seen, smelled, and tasted an ingredient in action, you can probably make a decent guess at what it will do in other contexts, or what will happen if it’s missing.
I’m pretty sure this is exactly correct. Potatoes and eggs would make a nice frittata or omelet, though. (Which indicates another way to answer questions like this – look for other dishes where those ingredients are used together and see how they work.)
One important feature of brown sugar is that it is slightly acidic. Some bread recipes (the type I call “Mennonite white bread”) exploit this–using brown sugar to sweeten bread means a single fast rise will give you well-conditioned dough.
Professional chef of 12 years Paul Karyakos recommends the books Culinary Artistry and The Flavor Bible.
I’m thirding Harold Mcgee’s On Food and Cooking, I’ve worked with some very experienced food scientists and they always recommend it as the go to reference for laypeople. Great book.
PSA: there is currently a livestream concert on YouTube of Andrea Bocelli performing in Milan’s empty Duomo Cathedral.
Happy Easter!
I saw a bunch of people on Twitter replying to a guy who thought people were pretentious because the number one food ordered on on Uber Eats was tikka masala.
And it got me thinking, was there ever a time when eating Chinese food, or Italian food, or Mexican food, was seen as pretentious in the US? Does foreign food (or at least food seen as foreign) always seem pretentious at first and then become more normal?
Unless you’re live-blogging getting your delivery and Instagramming your meal, how could it possibly be pretentious? Who (other than your delivery driver) is going to know whether you got Tikka Masala or Five Guys Burgers and Fries? And if you are putting your delivery food on social media, pretty sure that’s pretentious regardless of the ethnicity of the cuisine…
I don’t know what exactly was said on Twitter but the guy sounds like a crank.
Yeah, it was along the lines of, “I’ve never heard of this food, so it’s not possible that people enjoy it, they must just order it to show they love foreign cultures.”
The best part is he’s spent time in India (apparently rubbing elbows with their chief justice), so it isn’t even true, it’s some weird show he feels compelled to put on.
(ignoring the possibility that he’s actually two steps ahead of us and is criticizing chicken tikka masala specifically for not actually being Indian, but that somehow feels unlikely)
I just remembered the line in Yankee Doodle, “stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni”. Macaroni was another name for dandy, of an annoying sort, and came from the fact that people coming back from the Grand Tour would not shut up about the macaroni they had when they were in Italy (the implication is that they were “mentioning” the pasta to shoehorn into the conversation the fact that they had been on the tour)
So yes, mac and cheese was once considered pretentious.
My understanding of that line is a little different. “Macaroni” at the time was a term for “stylish” essentially. The point was that Yankees (Americans) were so stupid and lacked class such that they thought putting a feather in their hats made them macaroni (stylish).
My point is that macaroni is stylish (good) or “stylish” (bad), and it comes from the Italian pasta, so macaroni pasta was once seen as stylish. Whether you then go on to admire the stylish thing or decry it is another matter.
Slight correction: he was visiting Palau, a tiny island republic in the Pacific east of the Philippines, which has a population of ~10,000 …and an Indian restaurant(!) This is like some punchline to a joke about Indian restaurants being everywhere.
(I read an article once about how Thailand actually has officially sponsored the planting of Thai restaurants all over the world, as an exercise of cultural soft power)
I think we’ve had this argument here before. I argued that in a lot of blue-collar and/or red-tribe situations, eating foreign food is low-status, but in a lot of white-collar and/or blue-tribe situations, avoiding foreign food is low status.
Showing up at the construction site with a lunch pail filled with Tikka Masala would definitely make you seem weird. Similarly, objecting to a work team dinner at an Indian restaurant with your fellow consultants and investment bankers would also make you seem weird.
Ultimately, it comes down to whether your local ingroup values diversity over tradition, IMO.
Chicken tikka masala is pub food here in the UK – indeed, I think it was invented here.
Traditions change very fast. And I think sushi in San Fransisco is totally the tradition now.
Yeah, in San Francisco. But if you live someplace where most people pride themselves on being very different than the sort of people who live in San Francisco, the reaction will be very different…
Apparently its origin is unsettled – everyone agrees that it was invented some time in the 60s or early 70s, but claims have been made for a (known) Pakistani chef in Glasgow, an unknown Bangladeshi chef somewhere else in Britain and an unknown Punjabi chef in India.
It’s also been called England’s favorite food. Which feels like an insult to fish and chips to me.
Indian Food : the UK :: Mexican Food : the US?
That sounds about right.
Earlier:
Indian Food : the UK :: Chinese Food : the US?
That is, very available, cheap, not necessarily especially good.
In the US, Indian food tends to be less common, more expensive, and maybe not the best thing ever, but definitely better.
Comes with being an ex-empire, I guess. Japanese curry is also very british – and basically potato stew with extra spices.
I first encountered curry in Japan.
Huh. Shaking my memories a bit made me realize I’m (partly) wrong. It’s seen as British by the Japanese, because they’re the ones that brought it from India to Japan. But (and I’m speculating here) it’s even now a more british/european version of curry because it got filtered by them first. I cooked a lot of if, and while delicious and very flavored it’s not really very Indian.
… and now I’m in a huge mood for curry. Guess that’s what I’m cooking tomorrow.
From what I’ve heard, Japanese curry is actually based on the curry served in the Royal Navy in the 19th century, rather than on any Indian recipe. It was adopted by the IJN, partly to prevent beriberi which was a problem for sailors who ate only white rice, then spread from there to civilians in Japan.
Potatoes may be a Japanese addition to this recipe.
…except that the context of the discussion in this case involves getting food delivered by Uber Eats. It’s like saying you’re kosher and sneaking some pork vs. eating pocket bacon in a Synagogue.
The status argument doesn’t seem to apply to private actions, unless I’m missing something. Sane people actually give a shit what other people order on Uber Eats?
The dude who sparked the controversy is your standard out of touch liberal professor, so it doesn’t apply in this situation, if your formulation is even a little true.
But eating lunch at a Mexican restaurant or a Chinese buffet would be perfectly normal for a construction crew (I can’t imagine it’s less common now than 20 years ago when I was working construction, and it was common then.)
+1
I agree, with the small caveat of what you mean by “Mexican restaurant”.
If you mean a place where the average check is $10 and the menu consists almost entirely of tacos, burritos, and enchiladas, and everything comes with refried beans and spanish rice, then sure. That’s blue-collar friendly.
If you mean a place with “authentic” dishes where the average check is $20+ and the dishes are more exotic and sides are variable and such, then that’s white-collar friendly.
Yes, I was definitely thinking of the first. Don’t forget the fajitas, and the dollar frozen margaritas (cheap tequila and sour mix) at happy hour.
You are forgetting the most likely possibility, that these construction workers are getting their lunch from a taco truck, and probably don’t look like you imagine they do.
Ah, that’s where the middle ground still exists! The location that is cheap and authentic (which is typically a food truck, but not always) is the one place left where the upper and lower classes can mingle unironically!
Although in that case, it’s usually lower-class minorities seeking the familiar (and affordable) along with upper-class whites seeking the authentic (and you know it’s authentic because poor Mexicans are actually eating there!)
You can also see this without the racial element at hipster-esque dives. The sort of place where Guy Fieri might spotlight is deliberately courting the sort of middle ground feel where both rich and poor feel comfortable going, and bringing their friends!
What Matt M said. In at least some black families I know, members who eat foreign food — heck, not just foreign food, but anything with fresh vegetables or whole grains in it — are sometimes ridiculed.
That’s interesting. I have a hard time even imagining what exact form that ridicule would take. “Nice carrots Bill, you little fairy, can’t handle doughnuts like a real man!?”
not USA, completely different context but I have heard “vegetables are food eaten by a real food”.
(said by someone who was quite fat, though still capable of moving under his own power)
Yeah, US sitcoms like Married with Children and Parks and Recreation often used jokes centered around “real men eat meat, not vegetables”. When Ron Swanson on Parks and Rec was served a salad, he said, “There’s a mistake. You served me the food my food eats.”
In this case it was a subtle but still clear form of “You’re not acting black enough” or “You’re acting too white”.
Is this one of those things that’s actually a class issue but Americans don’t know how to talk about that so they sublimate it onto race?
Maybe? In my experience it can authentically be both.
As a Brit, it’s particularly funny to me because chicken tikka masala not only may well have been invented in Britain but has been probably the most popular takeaway dish of any cuisine, fish and chips included, for decades, and it’s hard to think of anything much more bland and mainstream. You’d struggle to find someone who hadn’t at least tried it, and looking down on it would code as snobbish, not parochial. It would be like calling pepperoni pizza pretentious.
I have an in-law who dislikes most foreign (non-American) food because so much of it amounts to “saucy chunks of stuff served over rice” which she doesn’t like or finds boring or something. I personally love saucy chunks over rice, but her objection to it was insightful: before that I never noticed how many cuisines rely on variations on this formula.
On the other hand, a substantial amount of traditional American food is “saucy chunks with potatoes,” so it seems like me that’s just which starch the culture finds appealing.
I don’t think that’s right. Pizza, burgers, french fries, tacos/burritos, sandwiches, hot dogs, fried chicken…even casseroles are kind of a fundamentally different format from tikka masala. Mashed potatoes here are often served with gravy on them, but the gravy doesn’t usually have chunks of stuff in it, and it’s a side course anyway.
The closest analogue might be American “spaghetti” (which in other countries approximates something like spaghetti bolognese).
I was thinking of all the variants of pot roast or chicken in gravy, as well as (like you say) casseroles.
The second-closest analogue is Cincinnati-style chili. But not a lot of people eat that, thankfully.
Most casseroles I’m thinking of are, I suppose, saucy-chunks-on-starch, but they’re mixed together before serving, and usually baked to produce a crust, which arguably of transforms them into a different type of format.
Pot roasts/chicken-in-gravy aren’t necessarily served over a starch, and I’d say are frequently served by themselves in a bowl. There might be a starch in them, but that’s different than the saucy-chunks-over-rice format.
Saucy chunks of stuff served over $STAPLE is like half of all food.
Since it was invented by the Jomon people of prehistoric Japan, soups and stews have been the backbone of mankind. It’s much more foolproof than competing technologies like roasting and it allows you to get nutrients from lower-quality sources (e.g. making stock from bones)
Is this a joke?
It’s an exaggeration, I suppose. The main alternative is roasting, where you have to worry much more about cooking the food through without burning the outside too much. The polynesians, having given up on pottery for some reason, did develop hangi steaming, but it’s an awful lot of faff.
Boiling a stew is a simple way to cook food over long periods of time. You can run it as a continuous process, where it’s simmering all the time and you add uncooked meat/veg and ladle out stew as required.
Note that pottery is one of those things that was probably invented independantly in multiple places.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/tKmMd2a9SBuOeTay4eiStQ
No, some foreign food (I’m thinking in particular Mexican here) starts out as low-class food that only immigrants eat, and then becomes more normal. Italian probably also did this in the United States, outcompeting French food that started pretentious and was never fully normalized – I’m told Prohibition may have had something to do with that.
Regardless of how it happened, chicken tikka masala has become so completely normalized in the UK that I can’t imagine it still falls into the snobby category in the United States. And I’m wondering whether that “most popular on Uber Eats” statistic includes the UK.
FWIW, chicken tikka masala still sounds exotic to me, though I wouldn’t call it “pretentious” either. But I can certainly imagine the blue collar (white) workers that Matt mentioned finding it pretentious. Still, the idea that it has become every-day takeout food in the UK is very surprising to me. I don’t think you can find it outside of dedicated Indian restaurants in the US.
To me, “pretentious” would be ordering wine and roast duck or something like that.
There’s about 10,000 Indian takeaways in the UK – about 7 times as many as there are MacDonalds.
And with chicken tikka masala specifically, you wouldn’t even have to go to an Indian – you could also order it at most chain pubs, or buy a premixed jar of masala sauce from most corner shops, never mind supermarkets.
You think they’re going to be taking out English food? The whole reason they went out and conquered a globe-spanning Empire was to find some decent food; no cuisine native to Great Britain bears eating if you have any choice. Fish and chips is as close as it gets, and even for that they had to go offshore.
As I put it long ago, there’s lots of good food in England. Good Indian food, good Italian food, good middle-eastern food, good Chinese food, …
A very long time ago, my wife and I and my son, then about twelve, were in York. My son wanted to try Yorkshire pudding. We found a restaurant that specialized in historical English food — not as early as our interests, more 18th or 19th century — and had Yorkshire pudding.
When I got back to London I mentioned to an acquaintance that we had been in York and found a restaurant that had good English food.
He named it.
I had Yorkshire pudding in York a few years ago. I hope that it is isn’t supposed to be like that.
It probably was.
Back when I was scouting London for the first time, I learned the Courtfield Pub just opposite Earl’s Court Station serves a rather fine English breakfast (but that was ten years ago, so no warranty offered). Also, the Ship in Borough High St. has burgers that go down a treat with a London Pride or two.
> no cuisine native to Great Britain bears eating if you have any choice
Those are the words of a man who has never ate a good steak and ale pie.
Things have improved a lot over the last decade, first in the London and Manchester hipster belts, but increasingly elsewhere too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVcey0Ng-w
Brown bread, beer, peas cooked with stock and herbs, and salmon with a sorrel sauce.
Narrator at ~6:30: “You could serve this up in a really expensive restaurant in London.”
Not bad for a medieval English peasant. I’d enjoy it if I wasn’t vegetarian.
I’ve been hearing the phrase “English food is bad” from Americans since forever, and from some Americans, “but it’s improved a lot over the last decade” for several decades.
I’m side-eyeing that Americans think having a range of cuisines is something to boast about when they do it, but something to be ashamed of when anyone else does it.
David, if I visited New York and wanted to try a Reuben sandwich while there, I’d find the best place to have one. It would not be at all strange for someone else who had visited New York to name it. It would not logically follow that the Reuben sandwich is bad food or that New York is thus proved to be a place of bad food.
Actually, you will have a hard time going to “the best” place for a Reuben in NYC, because, like most places in the US with a popular local cuisine, there are many places that make an excellent version, each of which has an army of partisans arguing that their preferred shop is the one true whatever and the rest are overrated trash (NY delis, Texas BBQ, Chicago pizza, Detroit coneys, etc).
I think David is saying the same is not true for traditional English food even in its nominal home.
EDIT: and compare to Paris, where there is a very good restaurant on nearly every corner… as long as you want French food.
It’s not clear to me that David’s colleague was English, let alone from York. The tip-off to what happened here is the reference to “historical 18th century English food”.
He went to a place that’s catering to a clientele that is predominantly non-local, and likely more well to do. Not all that surprising that his academic colleague named that place.
Acquaintance. Probably not a colleague, but it was too long ago for me to remember details. But definitely English. And the conversation was in London, so I doubt he was from York.
I didn’t specify historical food, just good English food. So the implication was that restaurants that could be described as serving good English food were very rare.
Used to work right down the street from the Ship, good pub (though the glad and the libertine both have tastier food, imho). Now I miss London and going out.
It’s likely far less surprising if you simply compare it to “Kung Pao Chicken” or “Pizza”, two “ethnic” cuisines that are highly modulated for local consumption. It’s just that you are highly familiar with that particular culture.
Yeah, nobody in the US would think that ordering pizza or tacos was pretentious.
The other comparable dish in the UK is spaghetti Bolognese. The stuff that goes by that name in most UK homes, schools and pubs would no doubt horrify an Italian chef (or indeed an Italian housewife) but it is truly ubiquitous.
@Tarpitz:
If you really want to horrify and Italian, show them Chef Boyardee.
@Tarpitz,
Yeah, I make spaghetti Bolognese a lot, but it’s to Italian food what tikka massala is to Indian food.
Totally pretentious. I mean, inauthentic. I’d always heard it was invented in the US, but no one’s sure.Now I’m wondering what the French-cuisine Americanized equivalent of, I don’t know, the Olive Garden menu would have been.
I’m thinking some kind of deep fried crepe’.
And brie in a spray can.
IHOP?
As usual, IHOP is at the revolutionary forefront of the Americanization of cuisine. In their Patriot Labs they are constantly devising ways to make even American food more American.
I must live in a different universe from all of you because I’ve never even heard of tikka masala. Maybe it’s different in the UK and some major US cities but it’s not something eaten in Middle America.
My college served it at lunch sometimes. It’s a UK thing, I think.
I’m American, but not Middle American. I’ve heard of tikka masala, but I don’t know what it is.
It’s much more common for British and Irish people to know the language of Indian restaurants, so the meanings of the words come through, instead of just being an arbitrary label. They know paneer is cheese, saag is spinach or other greens, aloo is potato, tikka is marinaded cuts of meat, and so on. When you know what the words mean, it’s all a lot less of a mystery, a bit like the famously-pretentious habit of naming French cuisine using French terminology.
I’m torn between finding chicken tikka masala a comforting, sticks-to-your-ribs sort of food, and considering pouring masala sauce over it to be a pity to do to a good tikka, if it is good.
A thing I’ve found out since moving to the Netherlands is that here (for very understandable historical reasons) people tend to know the language of Indonesian restaurants. Saté fills the role of chicken tikka masala in the UK (many restaurants that otherwise serve no Indonesian food will serve it, and the pre-made sauce to make it at home sold in most supermarkets). Similarly, Indonesian terms will often appear on Dutch menus with no translation- people seem to be expected to know that ajam is chicken, babi is pork, and so on…
After the Indonesian independence, a lot of Indonesian people who had worked with (or fought for) the Dutch moved to The Netherlands. This included Indonesians with a (mixed or pure) Chinese heritage.
The result was that existing and new Chinese restaurants migrated to a mixed cuisine: Chinese-Indo. This turned out to be the magic formula to attract native Dutch people too, for their first foreign restaurant experience.
Note that the Indo part refers to Eurasians, so this was already a mixed cuisine, with Indonesian cuisine being adapted to Dutch tastes. For example, the ‘rice table‘ or ‘rijsttafel’ is a Eurasian invention. Native Indonesians didn’t serve food like that, but white colonists and mixed Eurasians did.
In The Netherlands, both the Chinese and Indo meals were further adapted in taste and ‘cheapened’ (bigger portions, cheaper ingredients) to the delight of cost-conscious Dutch people.
These restaurants seem to be on their way out, BTW, with newer generations of Chinese and Indonesian people preferring more upscale or ‘bigger’ formulas; or not wanting to go into the restaurant business at all.
You can get it in Peoria now. Literally.
Chicken tikka masala is to Indian food what sweet & sour chicken balls are to Chinese food. Definite hints of the original culture, but so modified that people from where the food is based on probably wouldn’t recognize it as a domestic dish.
It’s also a great introductory dish for Americans with no experience with the cuisine. The ingredients are either recognizable on their own (standard chunks/cuts of chicken) or are spices – the most “disgusting” ingredient is yogurt. It has a bit of spice, but is very mild overall. It’s also fairly rich so it doesn’t feel like you’re getting just some over-spiced broth or something.
It’s also not very exotic in terms of ingredient sourcing. The only spice I see listed that I don’t recognize from my Minnesotan mother’s spice rack from 30 years ago is garam masala.
Garam masala isn’t a spice, it’s a spice mixture.
Your mother’s spice rack might have had fennel, black pepper, cloves, cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, cardamom, cumin and coriander. That’s garam masala, which just means “warming” (garam) “spice mix” (masala) . It’s older than “chicken tikka masala” and, like so much cuisine from Greece in the west to India in the east, comes from or was inspired by Persia.
Yup, she did (maybe except for cardamom, I’ll have to check).
Thanks for the info.
It could be Persian in origin, but how do we know? There was stuff moving the other direction — consider the Tutinama or the Kalila wa Dimna.
I defer to you on Persian and Arabic cooking.
Garrett, note that with so many degrees of freedom in the ingredients, you can bet your life everybody’s got their own preferred combination, before you even get into preparation and storage.
I wonder if it’s the “UberEats” rather than the tikka masala that comes across as pretentious (what, you’re too good to go down yourself to your local takeaway/have the delivery driver from there bring it to you?), because tikka masala is not fine dining, given that it was a British variation on a curry recipe and is not Authentic Native Cuisine 🙂
It still gets served at Indian restaurants here in Seattle, though.
I really think it’s just that “Indian” food serves the same role in UK cuisine that “Chinese” food does in US cuisine, but a lot of Americans are unaware of this. And no one in the US thinks Chinese takeout is pretentious. Chinese takeout boxes strewn across a table loaded with paperwork is TV shorthand for “these guys just pulled (or are in the process of pulling) an all nighter”
Time to reference the classic “Going For An English” sketch from the late 90s BBC comedy show, Goodness Gracious Me 🙂
This reminds me of a sketch that I can’t find anymore of African academics going on an educational safari somewhere in Europe with native European guides.
The tweet for those interested.
The other food he calls out is crab rangoon, which is almost certainly invented in the US and is mainly comprised of deep fried cream cheese. Truly some of the weirdest edge-lording I’ve seen.
Having read that tweet I am embarrassed for the gentleman (if you don’t know what chicken tikka masala is, Google is your friend).
Honestly, it mostly sounds like “What are all these exotic sounding dishes – you mean they are popular with the masses takeaway foods? I don’t recognise any of them, because I eat proper food cooked at home by my lady wife, as God and Nature intended!”
What he needs, now, is a good spice bag. Mmmmm – delicious! 😉
I think you’ve got it right that it’s some sort of weird edge-lording.
American Chinese Cuisine has been popular for what? At least 30-40 years in most of the United States, longer in certain regional cuisines.
Spicy tuna roll being widespread is a bit newer, but clearly follows the same pattern, and you can often get it deep fried too!
I’m interested to see if any American-Ethiopian dish breaks out. I haven’t seen any battered and deep fried Ethiopian food yet, but I assume it’s only a matter of time if someone hasn’t already.
I hate Twitter.
My first reaction on reading the comments: Yeah, it was a stupid post, but the comments are a toxic cesspool.
Second reaction: Oh, the first f- you comment is from Popehat, who now thinks it’s a great idea to spend his free time swearing at randos on the internet.
If there’s anything I hate Twitter for more than anything else, it’s what it did to Popehat. He started neglecting his blog for his Twitter feed, which meant a real decline in the quality of his writing. He’s still got some great stuff on Twitter, and his threads telling stories are worth reading, if you can find a way to get them on their own. The other 80% of his feed is snippy garbage, and I’m finding it a lot harder to wade through to find the good stuff.
Not to say that he’s less skilled at writing: I’ll still drop everything to read a long-form piece by him, same as I will for Scott Alexander. When he has to tell a long story, even if he wants to throw in a snide comment here and there, it’s not the majority of the content. There’s something about the 280 character limit that makes him favor snide comments, though.
Popehat doesn’t like Turley because of Turley’s work during the impeachment hearings. Not an explanation, but Turley isn’t a “rando” either to the people who pay attention to politics or to Ken.
I mostly cosign CatCube’s comment. The neglect to the Popehat blog is sad (but I don’t think it’s entirely on Twitter; the experience with Clark made them all put it into a state of malign neglect, rather than engage and fix it). But I’m glad it gave Ken a chance to move onto bigger platforms like Reason and NPR.
Popehat has faced a decline in quality over the years. Its just a consequence of a person only having a small amount of interesting ideas.
Fair point. “Swearing at people he doesn’t like” would be more accurate.
The Discord link seems to have expired