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Assume the lockdown continues nigh-indefinitely, i.e. until everyone is vaccinated and the FDA takes its usual sweet time and then some before approving a vaccine (whose rollout is then delayed by production difficulties at the one facility granted a monopoly on production).
At what point to we see a recurrence of speakeasies?
Already?
Hell, I know someone who worked as a bartender and they absolutely kept their place open informally for “regulars only” until the state liquor commission literally raided them and shut them down with the threat of “we’re going to keep coming back and if we see people here again you’re losing your license permanently”
What is the advantage of a speakeasy over hanging out generally when liquor is available in grocery stores? I suppose people drink at bars to avoid their partner.
Hanging out, in my understanding, is spending time with friends – which presumes the existence of some place you can do so.
The whole point of social distancing as a policy is to eliminate “normal” ways for people to spend time together, which leaves going underground as perhaps the only option. Can having friends over at home (assuming no internal impediments) get you in legal trouble if one of your neighbours calls the police on you? In Poland, yes, it could land you in hot water. How about where you live?
What was ever the advantage of bars when you could buy liquor and drink at home. What, in particular, was the advantage of illicit bars during Prohibition when drinking at home would greatly reduce your risk exposure?
Drinking and socializing are two great tastes that taste great together, and lots of people don’t even think drinking is all that great if you have to do it alone. Socializing, lots of people don’t want to do that just with the people they know well enough to invite into their home, and lots of homes aren’t really set up for serious socializing – for reasons including but not limited to the presence of the spouse you already spend half your day with. Bars, pubs, inns, etc, exist for good reason and fill a very broad human desire.
If you make it illegal to get together with a bunch of other people to drink and socialize, they’ll find a way and a place to do it anyway.
During Prohibition I assume the main advantage of illicit bars was they had relationships with the brewers/distillers and their
supply chainsrunners, whereas the average Joe did not have those connections. (I don’t think it was legal to purchase alcohol during Prohibition unless you used it in industry or for a religious ceremony.) That advantage is gone in 2020 where buying alcohol at the store remains totally legal.Socializing was probably a large but secondary advantage for speakeasies, and it is partially made up for in 2020 by virtual socializing. Yes, holding your drink up to the webcam while your buddy on the other end does the same (or to just get your buzz on while you post comments on SSC) is clearly an inferior alternative to drinking together in person, but it beats the 1920 alternative which was to not drink at all.
The 1920s alternative was to buy a jug of moonshine or bootleg liquor which, yes, people could do. It didn’t require extraordinary ties to the criminal underworld; it’s not like Al Capone wasn’t going to do the outreach to serve the drink-at-home market.
ETA: Any speakeasy customer can just ask the bartender for a bottle of whisky or whatever, pay $$$, and leave – this greatly reduces his exposure to police raids. Any “speakeasy” that focuses on such customers, can reduce its own footprint and exposure. Sitting on a barstool and hanging out with a bunch of other drinkers isn’t a thing anyone had to do to get a drink, and it isn’t anything a speakeasy had to cater to except that that’s what their customers specifically wanted.
That makes sense. Come to think of it, speakeasies are a lot sexier to historians so probably their popularity relative to people who just showed up to buy a bottle to take home might be inflated.
FWIW, my teetotaler grandmother unselfconsciously told stories about experiences in speakeasies. She was pretty clearly present entirely for social reasons.
Looking at what G.K. Chesterton said about Prohibition from his first visit to America, and comparing it with the Wikipedia article, there’s remarkable agreement between them: Prohibition, whatever its ideological basis, was mainly against the poor. Rich people could and did continue to drink freely and openly, and the dodges were threadbare and transparent: you could ‘use up’ old stocks of alcohol and not be breaking the law once it went into effect – but who is more likely to have a filled winecellar, a rich or a poor man?
In response, the middle- and working-classes went for trips to Canada (if they could afford it) to drink legally there, homebrewing, ‘medicinal’ wines dispensed by chemists (pharmacists) and bootleg liquor.
Wikipedia:
Chesterton:
Crime and Prohibition – from Wikipedia:
Chesterton:
Drug prohibition is likewise to this day a thing that only truly affects the poor. It is the lower classes who are sent to prison for having drugs, the middle classes generally get sent to rehab, and the upper classes hardly ever get caught to begin with. Hell the rich not only can have as many drugs as they wish, but they can go up on national television and admit to prodigious and profligate drug use with little consequence.
A middle class person with a drug conviction quickly sinks to the lower class.
I guess drug prohibition has that going for it, it improves middle class social mobility!
I don’t know if we’ll see speakeasies — as in, illegal bars — but I could imagine illegal versions of things for which there is no obvious replacement, such as barber shops. Unless I want to look like a convict I can’t really cut my own hair.
I’m just picturing the articles about people getting together to do dirty dangerous things like playing bridge. Don’t they know that spreads disease? The scoundrels!
Ya got trouble, my friend
Right here in River City
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI_Oe-jtgdI
This reminds me of a Jewish joke. In a certain city all forms of gambling had been banned, you know, to protect the public’s moral fibre. One evening the police get a call from a concerned neighbour reporting three men playing poker. When they arrive they are astonished to discover the men in question are a Catholic priest, a Protestant pastor, and a Jewish rabbi.
The police sergeant is troubled by this, they can’t have it get out that three holy men were gambling! It would undermine both religious authority and the anti-gambling ordnance. After a moment’s thought he comes up with a solution and tells the three men, “If you would swear to me before God in front of these officers that you were not playing poker, I will let this go.”
The Catholic priest immediately agrees and so swears, thinking that it is after all a minor sin that he can later wash with confession later, and far less disruptive to the integrity of the church. The Protestant pastor, moved by similar considerations, does the same. The Rabbi however, flatly refuses.
“I will not swear,” the Rabbi says, insistent, and continues to do so even as the Sergeant pleads with him. Eventually the man grows tired of arguing with the Rabbi, and exasperated asks him, “Do you admit then, that you were playing poker?”
The Rabbi is surprised, “Me? How do you figure I was playing poker? All by myself?”
About two weeks ago.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-52136758
Thats not the most hilarious possibility. The fda may take its sweet time, but if so – that is, if a vaccine exists, but red tape is tying up the us, some other country with a reliable medical manufacturing base is going to get this done much faster. Cue: smuggling!… Hell, cue State Sponsored Smuggling.
How many doses of vaccine do you think one could fit into the detachable external pod of the SSN Suffren?
I know of two just in my small suburb of my smallish city. If the total count isn’t already in the thousands in the UK alone, I would be pretty surprised.
I’ll guess that by Memorial Day, “rent parties/house parties” will be more popular than ever before.
Never mind speakeasies — When do we see an underground Chuckee Cheese?
After the Wisconsin results, and all of the recent polling, I am convinced the media narrative after the 2020 election will be something like “How did we miss all the signs this was going to be an easy win for Biden?”
My confidence here is pretty high; I’ll self ban from commenting on SSC for a year if wrong. Anyone want the other side of this bet?
Define “easy win”. 3 points? 5? 7? Or is it by Electoral Votes?
In the RCP average of polls, Biden is up by 5 points nationwide. John McCain lost to Obama by 7, and while most predicted it, I don’t remember the narrative that it was “easy” ever existing. Mitt Romney lost by 4 points and that was definitely portrayed as a very close election.
Given that the current Electoral Vote landscape favors Republicans, a 5 point Biden win will give him the Presidency, but won’t give him an “easy” path there.
Instead of defining easy, lets just do odds then. You tell me the odds, and I’ll put up my year to your N months, where N is whatever amount matches the odds.
No, I’m not interested in the bet, just curious what you meant by your statement.
Given that the narrative “easy win” hasn’t existed since 1996, I am skeptical that it returns for 2020 unless we have a Clinton-Dole landslide, which most current polls are not predicting.
The evidence was not in favour of an easy win for Biden until all the other moderates dropped out and endorsed him, which was kind of surprising when it happened so I don’t blame people for not predicting it.
There was a point when 538 had forecast Sanders to win every single state.
If the media retroactively declares it obvious, they’ll be making a mistake. The primary was genuinely uncertain for a long time.
I hate how the media, politicians, and individuals always need to tell themselves a story of certainty. As per the most recent SSC post, I really wish people could learn to acknowledge and work withe uncertainty better.
It’s not obviously a win for Biden at this point, though things lean that way.
If it does become an easy obvious win by election day (say Biden up by 10+ points in national polls and with significant leads in states worth 370+ electoral votes) then I think the media will still be reluctant to portray it as such, partly as an overcorrection to the general media overconfidence in 2016, and partly because close elections are more interesting and dramatic and get more clicks.
The bet isn’t well defined, but I think we’re headed towards either another narrow-but-decisive Trump win or a shitshow that’ll make 2000 look like a walk in the park.
EDIT: oh, did you mean the primary? That’s just another big argument against letting tiny, unrepresentative Iowa and New Hampshire go first and distort the narrative.
To clarify, I am talking about Biden winning the 2020 presidential. The media narrative will be the win was obvious in retrospect, and Trump was weaker than thought.
Media narrative is hard to quantify, so lets just say my bet is if Biden doesn’t win I won’t comment for a year.
I think it’s odd to talk about that happening now, when during the time that they haven’t been talking about an obvious Biden victory, 1) Biden was running consistently in 3rd-5th place in the primary for 7 or 8 months and 2) there wasn’t a pandemic that’s shut down half the country putting 17 million people out of work.
So I think we’ll need to see how they’re talking about Biden’s chances for the next seven months.
Or is that what you’re predicting, that they’re going to spend the next seven months downplaying Biden’s chances, then be “surprised” on election day?
No. We are all diminished by you exiling yourself from SSC. Both sides of that bet are losers.
How do you know both sides are losers? Maybe he is looking at it as win-win. There are people have purposely asked to be banned, for time use purposes.
like if your favorite bar suddenly became too crowded
what is your proposal?
Hi, I think the invite link for the SSC Discord server is expired.
Would anyone be interested in regular discussions on historical analysis?
I have a number of topics I would like to explore, for example,
– Why was Japan successful in its XIXth century modernization efforts while other Asian nations were not?
– Why did British industry fall behind Germany’s?
– What caused the decline of Sparta?
– What made European civilization different from others?
If enough people here have interest in these or similar topics, I can set up a platform for monthly or semimonthly discussions.
Are you new here?
Yeah, it seems like we have a platform for those discussions. It’s SSC. I think I’ve seen all of them here.
I don’t think the comment section is a convenient format for in-depth discussions. Isn’t that why there are two redddit offshoots of SSC?
You think reddit is a good platform for in-depth discussion?
Mea culpa. I created a different account to keep my comment history anonymous.
Hello Deiseach!
Anteros, you little devil! 😀
No, this isn’t one of mine, and you’ve now badly confused this poor new friend!
Welcome, and don’t mind us, we’re usually half-ways civilised!
Because it was nationalized?
Didn’t the nationalization happen about half a century later?
I thought you were referring to the post-1945 period, although the period after ~1890 could also apply.
IIRC British GDP per capita was keeping pace with the US GDP per capita up into WW2, but its overall level of production didn’t because its population growth failed to keep up from the 1890-1930 period. I think this is roughly the case with GB vs Germany as well with the caveat that Germany had a very different post WW1 outcome.
Baconbits has it right. Britain was far richer per capita than germany through ww2, as it had been for centuries. This was reversed by the late 60s. British post-war economic policy was terrible.
Didn’t Germany after unification have a much, much larger population than Britain? Given two equally modernized nations, shouldn’t the nation with more people be more productive on gross?
According to this paper, German productivity caught up somewhere in the pre-WWI period, and was probably ahead the UK in certain areas of advanced manufacturing. Famously, on the eve of WWI, the British government found out that all of the UK’s magnets and all of the khaki dye for their uniforms came from Germany.
Yes. There have been such discussions in the past, with significant success.
I’d argue that they didn’t quite end up where they wanted to be, and the result was extremely ugly.
How does one even start to crack that question? Can we please get a definition on “European civilization” and a definition on “different”? Can we also clarify who the “others” are? Even with clear boundaries on all of these, I think it’s truly impossible to nail down any one thing as the reason why.
It will be easier to have this discussion if you can first define “European”.
Bonus points if you have some idea why cartographers drew a line on their maps, labelling one side “Europe” and the other side “Asia”. There may have been a good reason at the time, but the usefulness of that line has decreased greatly since then.
There were (and are) cultural/political differences between those two regions that likely pre-date the creation of the cartographic distinction “Europe/Asia”, but there are also cultural/political differences between various parts of “Europe”…and those differences play into the history, also.
Herodotus complained about this.
“I cannot conceive why three names [Asia, Europe and Libya], and women’s names especially, should ever have been given to a tract which is in reality one, nor why the Egyptian Nile and the Colchian Phasis should have been fixed upon for the boundary lines…”
The original referent of Asia was Assuwa, perhaps not even a land but a political confederacy west of the Hittites in Anatolia. Europe gets her name from the myth of Europa (Herodotus complains that she only set foot on an island, not the mainland), and Africa was originally the fertile coastal area where Carthage’s local food supply grew (Tunisia) while the whole continent’s name was Libya.
It wasn’t. They just had the more recent timing, but their reign is a drop in the bucket for number of years.
British industry had a gigantic first-mover advantage, and also didn’t have large chunks of its material and social precursors burned down during the Napoleonic Wars like continental Europe. They were never going to be competitive with larger, more centralized nations with greater population and available resources without doing a much better job of leveraging the Empire long-term – they didn’t, and so didn’t.
I’d be interested!
Does anyone else on SSC have depersonalization? I mean not in a sense of transient everyday thing, but in a sense of real, persistent condition. Share your experiences.
Yes, though I think mine is closer to derealization. Wikipedia says, “Depersonalization can consist of a detachment within the self, regarding one’s mind or body, or being a detached observer of oneself. Subjects feel they have changed and that the world has become vague, dreamlike, less real, lacking in significance or being outside reality while looking in.”
I have all of that except for the “being a detached observer” if that means like floating above yourself–it’s not a feeling that I’m out of my body, but rather that I’m kind of stuck in it and it’s not responding right. I have much more of what is described in the second sentence, but I think some people refer to that as derealization instead of depersonalization. The main feeling is that I don’t seem connected to the outside world—that I can sort of see it but not feel it. Because of this, my actions don’t feel like they occur—the best metaphor I can think of is if you went to write on a piece of paper but there was no resistance from the paper, like you were writing on air. It is disorienting and disrupts feedback mechanisms, so nothing is rewarding and experiences aren’t really integrated into memory. When I do something, my brain doesn’t get any satisfaction–there’s no sense of the act being completed.
This drives the internal detachment, because my thoughts also aren’t really experienced other than in a totally intellectual way in which nothing stands out as a preference. It is a very odd thing to explain, and was not something I’d ever really experienced transiently. I was always somewhat anxious, but nothing major. And whatever triggered it was not a big, traumatic event. Instead, after a long period of chronic stress from several fairly mild but seemingly unresolvable basic conflicts in my life, something snapped. Apparently this is common, with something like a combination of academic or professional overexertion with a relatively routine personal matter like a breakup or parents getting divorced, and moving to a new place, that scrambles all your mental landmarks at once, begins to feel existential, and overloads your mental coping ability. It feels like too many changes happened at once, I couldn’t orient myself or stay on top of any of them but couldn’t see a way out, so I just mentally surrendered and disconnected. There are all these little symptoms that are hard to explain but are a result of the disorientation, and unlike anything I’ve ever felt, and impair functioning much worse than anything because there is little let up. I just feel incredibly “off” all the time, in ways I can’t articulate, and that makes it hard to really focus on anything. Everyone tries to help by focusing on what I “want,” but the problem is that I don’t have “wants” anymore. That’s what the condition does.
It’s been a few years now and it has gotten steadily worse. It bothers me because the condition comes up so little—everyone is trying to recommend things for anxiety or depression, but disassociation is very different from either of those, in my experience, though it leads to both. I think it needs very different treatment, and there’s little guidance, even though it seems common. It’s hard to ask for help or explain myself to those around me. I was scheduled to try a new therapy but the pandemic messed that up indefinitely. I think I really need a more structured environment, since collapse of structure undermining a sense of security seems to to drive it. But there aren’t many of those, and they’re expensive and aimed at other conditions. And life in general has less structure than it did, or feels that way.
I recently watched the film “The Death of Stalin” and found it to be pretty entertaining.
My question for the better informed – about how historically accurate is it? I mean I’m sure it’s very highly exaggerated, but I’m also sure the general theme of “everybody was scheming to place themselves in the best possible position” was also generally right.
Are there any good suggested reading materials for what really happened in that precise timeframe? It does seem quite fascinating to me…
I don’t know about books, but for a quick overview of the events of that day and the players involved I recommend the podcast “The Cold War: What We Saw” Episode 5, Death in the Kremlin. There’s a lot of moving pieces involved, but I think that the episode made it clearer what was going on and who was doing it, though not in meticulous detail.
(A warning though, it takes the host a bit to actually get to Stalin, as the episode is just one part of a longer series.)
The biggest inaccuracy was the very, very compressed timeframe, which changed the players quite a bit. For example, Beria wasn’t arrested until months after Stalin’s death. While his arrest was effected by by Zhukov, Zhukov had been in the wilderness at the time of Stalin’s demise, and was in a relatively minor post not commander of the Red Army, so he was nowhere near as important in the immediate days after Stalin died as the movie made him look.
The movie was great, and I’d recommend it to everybody, but it’s definitely been Hollywoodized for entertainment. It also made me interested in the immediate moves to consolidate power after Stalin died, so I’d also like to second Matt’s question for good books on that.
More-or-less accurate, given that it’s a comedy. Steve Buscemi as Krushchev was an inspired bit of casting. The only actor who didn’t seem quite right for the part was the one who played Stalin.
Khrushchev: The Man and his Era by William Taubman is a good source for the events immediately following Stalin’s death.
I thought it was a bit odd that it was clearly a British film casted with primarily British actors, except for the lead, who was an American that didn’t even bother to fake a British accent…
the lead, who was an American that didn’t even bother to fake a British accent
Haven’t seen the film, but that makes me wonder if it’s an in-joke there – during the 60s/70s when British commerical television producers were making shows, often they would cast a token American because “if you want to sell this to the US market, they won’t watch it unless it’s got an American in it”.
Heck, they did this up to the 80s even, see Dempsey and Makepeace (and if any of the Americans here have seen this, I will be very surprised!)
Mostly it was not wanting to do the lame thing where everyone speaks English with a mock-Russian accent all the time, which is only ever justified as a way to signal “these particular guys are Russians” in a movie where most of the characters are Anglospherians speaking English but you think subtitles will scare away the audience. If everybody is speaking the same language and you’re not doing subtitles, that language magically becomes standard-ish English (or whatever).
On top of that, the filmmakers had the notion that different regional or class origins within the Soviet Union should map to different accents or dialects of English, which is kind of clever but I’m not sure how much effort they really put into it. For most of them that defaulted to the actors saying “can I just use my own accent?” and the director saying “Sure, your character has a different background from the rest and your natural accent is different from the rest of the cast, so easy enough”. But e.g. Jason Isaacs explicitly chose Yorkshire for Zhukov, because he thought it fit the peasant origins and not-fucking-around bluntness of the character. As noted elsewhere, it was glorious.
And there were at least two American actors who went with their natural speaking voices. Steve Buscemi’s Brooklyn accent for Nikita Krushchev’s Ukrainian(ish) factory worker who made it big, and Geoffry Tambor’s California American for Malenkov’s rural but educated Russian.
That’s not the worst casting decision they could’ve made, though. Stalin was all the way from Georgia, and Russian was never his first language. He never quite shook the accent, either, so I can see why you’d want to reflect that in an English language reprisal somehow.
Don’t let the title fool you, the lead in this film is not Stalin, but rather Khruschev, played by American Steve Buscemi.
Ah, well. I guess that’s suddenly much less clever then.
Rus bigotry against Caucasians is common, so Georgian characters should be depicted in English with a low-status regional accent: Southern American!
Perhaps more seriously, urban ethnic Russian should map to British Received Pronunciation, Ukrainian to middle-class south of England, Cossack to cowpoke… perhaps ethnic Russians from non-Cossack rural backgrounds like Zhukov and Molotov should be Scottish.
Trotsky could talk like he just arrived from a production of Fiddler on the Roof, of course.
Sounds like we need more stalins. 50, perhaps?
The film compresses into a few days, events that historically took place over a much longer period, but gets the essence of those events about right. A necessary dramatic simplification.
It also compresses characters for about the same reason. Probably the biggest change in that regard is that Zhukov was no longer the commander of the Soviet Army in 1953; the Army’s role in the succession was played by a clique of officers with Zhukov a fairly minor player I believe. But I’ll forgive a great deal of historical inaccuracy for the sake of Jason Isaacs’ portrayal of Zhukov. Glorious.
Him coming onto the scene was definitely my “Oh shit – here we go!” moment of the film.
Right. What’s a war hero got to do to get some lubrication around here?
Jason Isaacs is this movie’s turbo boost button, packaged with three hundred pounds of grade-A ham.
Yeah. I’m not expert in Russian history, but it seems the liberties they take are mostly unimportant and simplify the storytelling, which was lovely. Jason Isaacs is the man.
That said, the movie doesn’t hold a candle to In The Loop–funnier and more trenchant.
The accents weren’t quite true to life.
I read somewhere that they intentionally kept the actors normal accents so they wouldn’t sound silly, but someone commented that technically all the Soviet players involved grew up in wildly different regions so the variety of accents actually makes sense.
I read that they kept the Georgian characters as having Northern English accents, so a British audience would understand that these weren’t characters born into the political establishment.
Some may be interested in an earlier thread where we discussed “The Death of Stalin”.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/open-thread-139/#comment-811632
More “Death of Stalin” fun. The original movie poster was, appropriately, styled like a Stalin-era propaganda poster, with the larger-than-life Heroes of the Soviet Union lined up in quarter profile staring intently at the glorious future against a Soviet-flag backdrop. Well, OK, Buscemi’s Kruschev is suspiciously eyeing his competition.
Shortly after the movie was made, Jeffrey “Malenkov” Tambor was cancelled for offenses against #MeToo. Enter the new movie poster, with Malenkov airbrushed (OK, photoshopped) out and replaced by a less significant female character. To this day, I don’t know whether that was deliberate irony or Hollywood cluelesness.
That is definitely brilliant.
Yeah, I lean towards the guys who actually made the new poster being clever and ironic, and the Hollywood suits being to clueless to realize what was being done with their “Cancel Tambor” directive.
Here is a what is true/false in the movie
https://slate.com/culture/2018/03/whats-fact-and-whats-fiction-in-the-death-of-stalin.html
I recently remember seeing a Russian-made film about life during Stalin’s reign. It’s called “Burnt by the Sun.” It left a real impression on me. So if you are looking for something else (tangentially) related, it seemed to be rent-able on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Burnt-Sun-Andre-Oumansky/dp/B0050QRWT6
So, who’s coming out ahead in Shutdown City? It must be a very good time to be making medical protective equipment, particularly domestically. Who else is living the good life right now?
Richest man in the world made a few extra dollars this week
I was standing in line to get into the auction warehouse a couple weekends ago and I had a brief conversation with the guy in front of me (20 feet between us, we were both masked). He owns a cleaning business. I said “It must be a good time to own a cleaning business.” He said “I’m not hurting for work!”
I don’t know if I’d call being a delivery driver “the good life” but they’re not hurting for work either.
Anecdotally, large hospitals might win out.
Medical providers have been hurting: in a lot of states non-essential medical procedures have been temporarily banned, and even when the procedure itself isn’t on the banned list people are avoiding hospitals and doctor offices until this blows over. I took my daughter to get a needed shot and her pediatrician’s office was a ghost town. We were the only clients there, and the nurse that helped us told me she was the only nurse working that day (usually they have three or four running around). When our doctor made some chit chat the topic kept turning to the economic impact of the lockdown. He said that they only had cash reserves to make it another month or so.
So why would hospitals be winners? Well, like many providers our pediatrician owns his own practice which just happens to be located in a hospital. The hospital is part of a large regional non-profit chain of hospitals. He said that if things didn’t improve in a few months he was probably going to have to sell the practice to the hospital. The way he said it implied that the hospital had been wanting to buy his practice for some time. So it seems plausible to me that large hospital groups or chains have the opportunity to buy up a lot of private practices cheaply: radiologists, pediatricians, GPs, lots of independent providers are suffering right now.
I would expand that generally to say that any large organization that has the cash reserves or lines of credit on hand to weather this storm may find that they can buy up their smaller competitors cheaply if things continue this way.
Can’t doctors and nurses get work dealing with this huge influx of COVID-19 patients? I mean, it’s not their usual work, but it’s work.
The huge influx hasn’t been quite so huge as was originally expected (or indeed, even close, if you were following the IHME model), and it’s only in a few areas of the country.
What Nybbler said, but also its not that simple. I’m not saying the big losers are nurses and doctors, but specifically small private practices.
Put yourself in my pediatrician’s shoes. He’s a pediatrician, he started a private practice, gained some pediatrician partners, and has built it up from a single office to three. Your whole business model is based on treating children. Suddenly COVID-19 pops up and everybody is keeping their kids at home unless they’ve broken an arm or swallowed a detergent pod, and even then they’re taking them to the ER, not to you. You’ve got two months worth of cash to stay afloat, but that’s it. How are you going to pivot your entire business to treating COVID? You might personally be able to get hired somewhere that is treating COVID, but your business is out of luck either way.
It’s even worse if you’re a radiologist or an OBGYN. How are you going to pivot your previously lucrative small business towards COVID? You have payments to make on your highly expensive scanning or ultrasound equipment, and they’re no good for treating COVID. Etc, etc.
Your examples sound good, though I’d reckon that OBGYN practice should have a portion of their clients still seeking appointments to talk to the doctor.
Even if half of that business is consult-by-phone.
My source on this: my wife and I recently had a child. Every time we sat in the waiting room at the OBGYN office, something like half the women in the waiting room were visibly expecting a child.
It’s kind of hard for an expecting mother to delay appointments…though it should be easy for those who don’t need blood-work (or any other test requiring physical presence of doctor/nurse) to talk to the doctor over the phone.
@FLWAB
There is a joke going around the internet these days:
“I had my first telepractice OBGYN visit, which officially makes me a camgirl”.
I think it only counts if someone tips you five cents for doing it.
In addition to what Nybbler said, that may hold true for nurses, but I doubt it for doctors, or at any rate, if you are subbing in Emergency nursing care instead of, say, optometry, dentistry, or reconstructive surgery because demand for you specialty has dropped, you probably aren’t making what you expect to be and thus your practice is in danger long term.
I wonder just how qualified a doctor is to act outside their specialty. Probably a bit more than a layman, and they’re on the staff already, but I don’t know how much of their expertise really transfers.
> but I don’t know how much of their expertise really transfers
Not nearly as much as you might think. There are a number of good reports of the 9/11 attacks and specifically what happened at New York Downtown Hospital which was 4 blocks from the twin towers and a comparatively small hospital. This isn’t the
article I’m looking for, but it provides some context. IIRC, some of the physicians who showed up were put to work cleaning floors (a real need with all the debris and dust coating everything). Others were assigned to perform the few critical procedures which could be performed within their specialty or training.
In-general, any doctor is trained to perform basic physical exams, treatment and some basic procedures. (I’m glossing over 4 years of medical school plus undergrad). A look at what appears to be a higher-end med-school procedures curiculum shows a list of what might be considered expected for a random doctor to be able to do.
But those which seem to be most relevant to Covid-19 management, like arterial cannulation and Swan-Ganz catheter use, don’t get a lot of training.
In an emergency like 9/11 a bunch of the needed procedures can be handed off from ED physicians to other specialties to free up the ED physicians to work on the cases which need their expertise the most. But I have a hard time seeing a hospital being willing to pay non-specialists on an ongoing basis to come in and staff the ED when patient volume is down.
Even the military struggles with this. A lot of reservists I knew who had some pretty decent skills/expertise (medical, IT, etc.) were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan to be gate guards, or to fold laundry in the barracks, etc.
Not just competitors: Berkshire Hathaway famously held $128 billion in cash and equivalents when the bull market ended (collective tut-tutting over not investing that much was depressing share prices). That’s enough to devour any number of NYSE-traded corporations that become undervalued enough.
A commune near my home community runs an heirloom seed business and they’re shattering their sales records right now.
How are is the entertainment industry doing? With all these people cooped up at home, I would expect them to be watching a lot of TV, reading a lot of books, and playing a lot of video games.
Yeah, Netflix stock has been soaring. Video game sellers have been offering pandemic deals to people, “stay home and play!” I don’t know how well they’re doing in general, but they certainly worked on me as I’ve piled several more games on top of my backlog.
Aside: which to play first, Sekiro or Disco Elysium?
I would go with Disco. you might be tempted to play another game while playing Sekiro, and Disco is a terrible choice for that. Clear Disco first, then when your choice is Sekiro or a game that you will play oin small discontinued session, play Sekiro and that game.
I made the mistake of playing MGS : Revengeance and start playing 3 houses to erase my frustation. I finished 2 playthrough of 3 houses, and didn’t touch Revengeance despite being at the first “exam” boss.
I haven’t played Disco but Sekiro is very good. I would recommend finding a spoiler free beginner’s guide on youtube before you play. The game’s core mechanics are extremely well done and very fun, but the in-game tutorials don’t do a great job of explaining how they work.
Home birth midwives for sure. Mine says her business has more than quadrupled, and would grow more than that if she hadn’t already reached her maximum number of clients. I’m due this Sunday and recently met via Zoom two backup midwives who will cover for her if she’s attending another birth when I go into labor. This possibility was included in the contract I signed with her back in December, but it was deemed extremely unlikely at the time and was unprecedented in her practice. I can’t say I’d be happy to have someone I didn’t know well, but it’s still preferable to going to the hospital for me.
Pets are coming out way ahead. They love having their humans with them all day every day.
My dog is not going to know what to do when I go back to the office.
I miss having a dog right now.
Duh, he’s going to go back to playing poker with all the other dogs. You have no idea how pissed he is that he’s had to cancel his weekly poker game over this nonsense virus that doesn’t even affect dogs. Sure, humans are convenient with their ability to operate the can opener and whatnot, but humans 24/7 is just too much.
Most overrated movies of all time! Fight with me!
1. Apocalypse Now
2. The Usual Suspects
3. The Godfather, Part II
4. Reservoir Dogs
5. Inception
Why do you think Apocalypse Now is overrated?
All through the movie, Martin Sheen’s character relentlessly voice-overs what a charismatic figure Kurtz is, and then we finally meet Kurtz in overweight elliptical inward-looking Marlon Brando mode. I think it’s the most egregious anticlimax in cinematic history.
We finally meet Kurtz when he is at the end of his game, resigned to have his “command terminated with extreme prejudice”. Willard, fueled by being back in the jungle, puts in all this work to survive and find his nemesis while Kurtz readied himself to die. Apocalypse Now is a story of contrasts and opposites, yins and yangs — i.e. the dark and light sides of human nature — so it’s only fitting that the final brooding reality of Kurtz is so different from the voracious renegade in the dossier.
Besides, if Kurtz was some kind of Schwarzenegger end-of-level boss and Willard’s journey ended with a big fight against him and all his cronies, with a bunch of explosions and a hot chick he gets to carry home, think about what kind of dumb movie that would have been.
I suppose any movie that’s so widely lauded as Apocalypse Now runs the risk of being considered overrated, but in this case I think the acclaim is warranted.
Maybe so, but it’s on record that Francis Ford Coppola was so upset by Marlon Brando’s weight that he shot all his scenes in half-darkness and had to significantly alter the end of the movie. I would really like to see that documentary about Apocalypse Now, maybe it’s streaming somewhere.
“Hearts of Darkness” – I believe it is streaming somewhere. There’s a guy on Youtube who’s also made his own multiple-part documentary about it, and it’s pretty good. I can’t remember what it’s called though. Anyway, there’s more to that Brando-Coppola dynamic than you describe.
To be fair to Bobobob, Brando’s character comes off better when held to brief screen time and dim lighting. He’s diminished when you see him walking around and talking like a human in the light of day. That’s one of several reasons I prefer the theatrical cut to the longer director’s cut.
Not watched AN but have read Heart of Darkness and that’s kind of the point.
It’s an inherently anticlimactic book.
The Usual Suspects has one of the most jaw-dropping twists in all of cinema, and Kevin Spacey at the top of his game. You’re out of your mind.
I would count it as the least-overrated movie on Bobobob’s list. But it’s a very good movie that gets a very, very, very great deal of hype in some circles.
The movie never added up to a logical whole for me, and I never bought the twist at the end. If you want Kevin Spacey at the top of his game, try Swimming with Sharks.
I think the most memorable part of The Usual Suspects was Pete Postlethwaite’s weird pseudo-Japanese lawyer, whose origins (if I recall correctly) are never explained.
The fact that the lawyer’s Japanese name doesn’t sit right with you is foreshadowing of the final twist.
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What are the other most jaw-dropping twists in all of cinema?
I somehow haven’t seen the movie myself, but The Sixth Sense had the most unexpected (and lucrative) twist ending in the history of forever, apparently enough to fund the next 20 years of M. Night Shyamalan’s career.
That and Fight Club are what came to mind for me, but I have a poor knowledge of older cinema. Or, really, recent cinema. Basically if it didn’t come out when I was in college.
@Randy M
At my office, you would be forgiven for thinking the only thing people ever see are 90s and early 2000s comedies.
Someone told me the ending to the Sixth Sense before I saw it, and I thought it was clever. But I’d already seen The Others, so it didn’t blow my mind.
I correctly guessed the twist to The Village about 15 minutes in though.
6th sense blew me away, but I guessed the ‘twist’ to The Village before the movie came out.
Is there anyone who did not guess the twist to Shutter Island within the first five minutes?
I possibly have the twist to Shutter Island but have never seen it, precisely because I believe I already know the twist.
Even more off-thread, I have read exactly two books in my life whose plot twists made me jump out of my seat:
1) The reappearance of Magwitch in Great Expectations
2) The revelation of the Mule’s identity in Foundation
Yeah it’s not worth watching if you already know the twist. I watched wondering if the twist they telegraphed was so obvious that of course the real twist is that the obvious twist is not the twist! It’s a double twist!* But no, it was the totally obvious thing.
* I would have called it a twistception but I obviously can’t since I saw Shutter Island years before Inception came out.
Oh, but yeah, Sixth Sense totally got me. That was amazing.
Also, people forget that when The Matrix came out, no one knew what the Matrix was. The trailer just showed people doing crazy bullet-dodging stunts and asked “what is the Matrix?” So you didn’t know if they were aliens, or robots, or superheroes, or what. Even though the “twist” is revealed 35 minutes into the movie, yeah, I was shocked. I did not see that coming.
I don’t remember this being so fascinating, can you refresh my memory?
I happen to be rereading one of the Assimov Robot novels right now, Robots of Dawn. His writing is much drier and sparser than I remembered from reading it in High School. I think I may have picked up a bit of his style.
@Randy M
I recently reread the Foundation books so I have it fresh in my memory. Asimov spends a lot of time building up the mystery of who the Mule is, and the character who is eventually revealed to be the mule is so pathetic, so ridiculous, and so superfluous that when you know the twist in advance it almost seems like overkill. But I do remember being genuinely surprised the first time I read it, and it all does make sense when you look back at the events of the book. But honestly, it was a bit like if Jar Jar Binks turned out to secretly be the genius Sith Lord mastermind at the end.
And yeah, he is dry as Death Valley. I love his works, but his prose is so far from purple that its infrared.
Shutter Island’s twist is really dumb.
The problem with talking about the “biggest twist” is that you’re talking about two different things.
The Usual Suspects, Fight Club, and the 6th Sense have what I guess you’d call “stealth twists”, by that I mean that even saying “oh there’s a great twist to this” will spoil the movie, cuz you don’t even realize you’re watching “that kind of movie”. Into this category I’d also throw, for example, REALLY unexpected plot developments in non-mindscrewy movies, for example, [Spoiler] Ziggy shooting Double-G in the Wire, or The ending of the Sopranos, both of which come out of NOWHERE and make you really think about fate and chance and all that.
Then there’s like, Knives Out, where you KNOW there’s a twist and the question is what, and guessing’s part of the fun.
@FLWAB
That’s not far from how I remember it. Maybe the effect for me was spoiled by the paperback cover; it showed the Mule as a scrawny man dressed as a jester.
They came out in the same year (2010).
Oh. In that case I take it back, I was expecting a total twistception!
Confused by this statement.
I can’t think of an ending more in keeping, more expected, than what happened in the Sopranos. Nearly every episode of the Sopranos had a similar tone, and I always thought you practically could end it at any episode.
I think people were expecting it to be satisfying, because of conventional expectations based on other series. But darkness, ambiguity, uncertainty and dissatisfaction were that series stock in trade.
Also, I don’t know if the last scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris counts as a true twist ending, but it’s extremely effective.
“No. I am your father.”
Jaw-dropping to Luke. The fan base had already guessed.
Not those of us who were under 10!
@The Nybbler
The fans already guessed that Vader was Luke’s father before Empire Strikes Back came out? How? What were the clues?
I’d have to ask my dad, HE was sure of it. Probably some genre savviness on his part. A mysterious figure in black, and an unknown father, both with Jedi training. Obi Wan never mentions Luke’s father during his last fight with Vader. The name “Vader”.
Gone Girl has a big twist in the middle. It was clear we had an unreliable narrator, but I wasn’t expecting it to play out quite like that.
Going back a ways, we all know the story now, but the shower scene in Psycho was a big shocker at the time. The main character just died and there’s more than half a movie left, now what?
There’s also a twist at the end of To Live and Die in L.A., when the hero detective suddenly and unexpectedly gets his head blown off. (BTW, I think To Live and Die in L.A. is one of the top five *underrated* movies of all time.)
The twist in “Parasite” genuinely caught me by surprise, though I rarely watch movies so maybe other people found it predictable.
There was a twist?
It was more like a surprise than a twist. I guess the “twist” is that you thought the movie was about one particular thing but then it turned into something else halfway through. I dunno if that’s really a twist though. If, for instance, the rich couple were actually scam artists who were pretending to be the rich couple but weren’t, that would be a twist. (Note for those who haven’t seen it: that isn’t what happens.)
Did anybody watch Citizen Kane without knowing what Rosebud means? I’m guessing not, but if so, did you find the ending a big surprise? A let-down?
I like the movie a lot, though I haven’t seen it in a while. But if I had seen it in the theater when it came out, I can’t imagine that I’d have thought much of the surprise, and I definitely wouldn’t have thought people would remember that bit of the movie decades later.
Pre-WWW, we didn’t have TVTropes and you weren’t likely to come across of random mentions of what Rosebud was. So yeah, I watched it without knowing about Rosebud. And it was a let-down, though not that much of one because at least the movie was over.
I watched in college, as part of a course on the study of motion pictures. I didn’t know what Rosebud was, AFAICR, but Rosebud is something of a McGuffin, so it doesn’t really matter.
Kane is a movie built to be deconstructed. It’s an austere look at the hell Kane builds around himself, and every shot is carefully crafted. It’s not necessarily an enjoyable film, but being given a guided tour of it was fascinating.
I’ve heard Psycho.
It certainly made an impression on me as a youth, once I realized what had happened. Maybe it’s not really a “twist” in the tradition sense…maybe almost more like a “jump scare”…I did NOT see it coming and maybe an hour later I put it together and was like “Holy crap, that must be exactly what it’s like”
Fitting that you all seem to have forgotten Memento.
I think I have a note on me somewhere about that.
Oh, I loved Memento, good call.
I’m going to put it on now, in fact.
Would The Handmaiden count?
T2 was overrated before, during, and after it hit theaters, but T1 remains one of the best sci-fi thrillers ever made.
T2 had really good special effects for its time. It doesn’t look nearly as special now as it did then, because FX technique has advanced.
T1 looks kind of old-fashioned now, but the sense of menace in it, and the tension in the action scenes still works just fine.
If you could make T1 but with T2 level special effects it would be an all time great movie.
It’s funny because a couple years ago, I watched the Terminator movies (both of them) for the first time. I found the CGI effects in T2 to be cinge-inducingly bad, but the traditional effects were amazing. Which is a bit ironic, since it’s the opposite of the reaction of the time.
I think it’s sort of like the 2d vs 3d videogame effect. At the time, 3d videogames were mind blowing, because it had never been done, but nowadays, early 3d games look like crap while 2d games from the same era still hold up well.
P.S. I was also stunned by how *young* Arnold looked in the first movie.
What’s wrong with The Godfather Part II? It’s certainly better than the first one.
GP2 is dour, humorless, and overlong. It has never had even remotely the same magical effect on me as the first Godfather, which is one of the best movies ever made.
On a side tangent, part of what made Godfather 3 such an atrocity was that there is NO WAY the Michael Corleone of the second movie grows up into the Michael Corleone of the third movie.
The Usual Suspects gets 89% on Rotten Tomatoes, 8.5/10 on IMDB, 77 on Metacritic. This seems reasonable. It’s a great movie that suffers mostly because it doesn’t bear re-watching.
Anyway, #1 has to be Citizen Kane. 100 Metacritic, 100 Rotten Tomatoes, though only 8.3/10 on IMDB. It’s an overly-long, rather slow paced slog through the life of a man who isn’t really all that interesting. Like The Usual Suspects, it relies on a mystery, but one whose revelation is anticlimax. It’s a shaggy dog story in cinema.
My memory of Citizen Kane is that the main character was just obnoxious enough not to feel sorry for–most if not all of his problems were his own doing–but not really hateful enough to root against, either. Basically, this guy kept shooting himself in the foot and he didn’t learn or change, so bleh. But I haven’t seen it in almost twenty years.
I think any Christopher Nolan Batman movie is way overrated. Fight me on that!
Well, the third was simply garbage, but I thought everyone agreed on that. The second had Heath Ledger’s Joker who absolutely was great. As for the rest, it was overlong and tried to cram in too much. The first was competent enough and benefited greatly by coming after Batman and Robin.
Tim Burton’s Batman movies were the only good ones. (I like Schumacher’s “Batman Forever” but I’m willing to write that off as my own sentimentality.
Even Heath Ledger couldn’t make Dark Knight good, and his enthralling performance actually made the movie worse. My reasoning is that any movie about a man in a cape who goes around beating up bad guys should look cartoonish. When it tries to take itself seriously, as Nolan’s movies do, it just becomes self-parody.
I’m on a weird island where I thought Batman Begins was excellent, one of my favorite movies (not top 5 or anything, but definitely at the “will watch many times” level). I thought Dark Knight was just ok, with a few pretty good parts. Dark Knight Rises was terrible.
DKR had Anne Hathaway in the catwoman suit, which alleviates the terrible to some degree, but I’m with you on the relative rankings.
The two Tim Burton Batmans, and Nolan’s first, are the only ones that bear a full rewatch IMO. All three treat Batman just seriously enough to make for a credible story, while acknowledging that there’s something off about the concept of one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world spending his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands for fun.
“Dark Night” takes both Batman and the Joker too seriously, and the Joker in particular should never have let Nolan get away with that.
Hot take:
While Ledger was obviously a great actor, he was one of the worst Jokers, saved from being the absolute worst only by the truly cataclysmic Jared Leto character (mostly not Leto’s fault). The Joker as a character must critically be inherently absurd, which Ledger could never muster.
There is only one greatest Joker and that is Mark Hamill.
Agreed, but don’t let Jack Nicholson’s Joker hear the bit about Mark Hamill.
My other problem with Ledger’s version, and again no fault on the fine actor, is that the story demands not only that we take him seriously, but that the other characters take him seriously at a time when he hasn’t yet established himself as a mythically unstoppable supervillain and they should be reacting to him as a marginally dangerous nutcase.
@John Schilling
Nicholson was absolutely the greatest live action Joker, although Phoenix did a fine job on the most recent Joker film.
The other problem is the cops letting him do things that under no circumstances would anyone do with either a mythically unstoppable supervillain OR a marginally dangerous nutcase.
I don’t think they took him seriously. In the first robbery scene, weren’t they talking about some “weird guy who wears clown makeup,” then the mobsters treated him dismissively, only dissuaded from killing him by the grenade he was carrying, and then they put out a hit on him. Only after he killed their leadership did they start taking him seriously.
The cops would never have known Heath Ledger’s Joker even existed; the mob would have left him bleeding out on the floor thirty seconds after his character was introduced. If not earlier. That’s the point where Nolan lost me, and all I could notice is (as you say) all the places where everyone else was letting him get away with crap that should have gotten him shot.
Once was a time where I would’ve laughed in Jack Nicholson, but then I played Arkham Asylum and… yeah.
@John Schilling
Yeah, exactly. I wasn’t disagreeing with you, just adding on.
At thirty seconds he’s just gratuitously killed a mob henchman, his hands are empty, and nobody has seen the grenade in his pocket. And he’s a dangerous nutcase who hasn’t even claimed to be able to do anything useful for them, never mind establishing any credibility behind that claim. Anyone who doesn’t shoot him down on the spot, doesn’t get to be a mob boss or a mob boss’s bodyguard in the first place – dangerous nutcases who want to kill mob bosses are orders of magnitude more common than dangerous hypercompetent nut cases who want to help them.
But he’s played by Heath Ledger cackling ominously, so everybody is frightened and/or respectful because, hmm, I guess they heard all the internet buzz about how awesome a Joker Heath Ledger was going to be?
As evidence for Hamill’s Joker being the best, I present this scene from Batman: The Animated Series, where organized crime has stolen an atomic bomb and is auctioning it off:
Now, this scene has exactly the same problems as noted with Ledger’s Joker accosting gangsters–he even does the same thing with a bomb, and isn’t shot before he exposes it to view–but not taking itself so seriously makes it easier to go down, as well as the Joker being a well-established supervillain at this point.
But the biggest difference with Hamill’s Joker: he’s a clown who’s also a supervillian. He’s having fun with this. Compare this to Ledger’s Joker, who is a supervillain who only dresses like a clown. So Hamill’s Joker is more fun to watch even in an equivalent scene.
Anybody know a place that streams Batman: The Animated Series? I was able to find some movies and such on…I think Hulu or Amazon, and my kids loved it, but I can’t find the series streaming without buying it.
I admired Ledger’s performance. Nicholson was fun, but he was always too silly, never actually disturbing or frightening. Haven’t seen the other versions, though I like Mark Hamill in general.
I don’t worry too much about plausible reactions to threats or provocations because http://wondermark.com/939/
@Conrad Honcho:
The first two seasons of Batman: The Animated Series are available at dcuniverse.com.
Thank you, that might be worth a subscription. I wish they had one of those things where you can watch free with ads or pay to skip them like crunchyroll, though.
Before I fight… how do you feel about MCU?
What is MCU?
Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Well there’s your answer.
(What I wanted to say is “Sorry, I’m not a dork who lives in his mom’s basement reading comic books so I don’t really give a crap about any cinematic universe” but I know over the internet the humor in that response could get lost on people.)
no no. the humor of someone posting this on a hidden internet discussion of movies would not have been lost.
anyway, i would not fight you on it in this case. if you though MCU was gold, but hated Batman Begins, then i would have thrown down
Quasi-film snobs (film quasi-snobs? quasi film-snobs?) with addictive personalities (like me) and dorks who are very concerned about comic book movie universes might both be found on hidden internet discussions about movies. Just sayin’.
I’ve got very bad news for you, film-snobs (even quasi ones) are dorks.
Totally different species of dork though.
I’m going to borrow your thread to recommend a movie that’s underrated, at least imo.
I rewatched “The History of Time Travel” the other day, it’s a crack-up. In faux-documentary style, they related the story of the invention of time travel. The US government run Indiana Project attempts to develop time travel during WW2, but never succeeds. The lead researcher’s wife later dies of Polio, and some time after that (in the ’80’s), his only son finds his notes and completes the research, culminating in a device he uses to vaccinate his mother as an infant. This is told interview style, with various experts giving their view of how it happened and so forth.
Anyway, sometime later she dies giving birth to her second son and, years later, her children invent time travel after finding their father’s notes, and create a device they use to save their mother’s life, the younger son delivering himself. She raises the two boys, but is troubled by images of strangers appearing, nightmares of being stabbed by needles, and takes her life.
The memory haunts her sons, and, years later, they invent time travel for the first time and use it to help their father get a jump start on his research decades prior, reasoning he would have been able to help his wife if he weren’t so wrapped up in his research. Unfortunately, Soviet spies steal the technology, and have been beating the US to every invention since.
You get the picture. It’s not exactly subtle in how history is being rewritten before your eyes–culminating in the title of the program changing to “The Science Fiction of Time Travel” by the end–but they never explicitly call attention to it.
Seconded. A very nice job. If you just skimmed Randy’s message, don’t read it more carefully (sorry Randy), just watch the movie.
I notice that nobody has argued about Reservoir Dogs and Inception, which leads me to believe these movies really *are* overrated.
I think Inception is just “rated.” Inception is not overrated, not because it’s an amazing movie, but because I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone sell it like it is.
Funny, I feel the same way about Reservoir Dogs!
This seems exactly backwards to me. How overrated something is a function of two things:
(1) How highly people rate it.
(2) How good it is.
But surely no one coming out to defend those films is stronger evidence that (1) is lower than you think than it is that (2) is even lower.
I think Reservoir Dogs should get an automatic boost because it’s only a bit over 90 minutes. You can watch it real quick in the morning before school or work or you have to check into prison for the weekend.
all 5 slots on that list should be 2001: A space odyssey
My favorite movie of all time (thus establishing my priors).
you’re not the only one i know who says that, I just don’t get it. The HAL stuff is fun, but the rest of the movie is just so up it’s own butt…
It’s in my top 2 or 3, but I have no idea how I’d defend it. I guess one thing it has pretty clearly going for it is the cinematic accomplishment: that they were able to create those kinds of images in 1968. I also really admire that it’s widely agreed to be one of the best movies of all time despite having no character development, no real plot, and only like 11 minutes of dialogue across its ~3 hour runtime.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is in my top five worst movies I’ve ever seen. There’s no story, the characters are loathsome, there’s no deeper meaning and it’s not even funny. It’s just pathetic.
I remember thinking it was funny, but then I was a teenager. Still smile a bit at “It was a fucking reptile zoo! And someone was giving BOOZE to the damn things!” I didn’t get the point, was told it’s that baby-boomer idealism wound up dissipating into a sordid mess of substance abuse and hedonism.
That point is made explicitly in the movie.
The greatest critic of my lifetime agrees on one of them
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-usual-suspects-1995
There’s no such thing as an overrated movie. Any creation has the potential to please an amount of people equal to X. It will generally end up pleasing a number lower than X, and thus be underrated. But it cannot being liked by a number greater than X, which would amount to being liked by people who cannot like it.
I think being “overrated” is a more qualitative idea: that people commonly attribute, either through ignorance or groupthink or whatever else, a fineness of quality to a movie that it does not deserve. Obviously you can object that quality is subjective, and in a fundamental sense that’s true, but I think there are some ways to objectively analyze movies using heuristics most people can agree on (believability of acting and special effects, predictability/cliche-/trite-ness of writing, articulation of art direction and wardrobe, grandeur of cinematic accomplishment*, etc.).
*E.g. it’s much more impressive to pull off a movie like “The Ten Commandments” than an art movie shot in a black box theatre with a small cast, multiple cameras etc.
Quality in art is tautological, because all supposedly objective criteria for what makes art good always end up being a reflexion of what the person establishing the criteria personally prefers.
Some people don’t care about “good acting”. How can you demonstrate that they are “wrong”. Why is “good acting” a necessary qualitative element of a movie? How can it claimed to be when so many people enjoy movies with bad acting, and when so many film experts utterly disagree on what “good acting” even is?
At best, you can judge a movie against its intent. If a director intented to make a fast-paced, breathtaking action-thriller film, but the audience for action-thriller films finds it a snooze-fest, it’s a faillure, but it’s ultimately a faillure of the director, who didn’t acquire/deploy the skills needed to make the movie he wanted. But the movie he did make will still have an audience, even if it’s an audience of three people who watch it ironically — they’ll be saying it’s “so bad it’s good”, but whatever the reason, they’re enjoying it, so to them the movie is entertaining, in spite of being “bad”, and there’s not really any rational ground on which you could argue that they are “wrong” for enjoying it (and that even if they were enjoying unironically).
That’s why I said “heuristics most people can agree on”.
It’s kinda funny: you can trust the yardsticks most people agree on using to be reliable yardsticks, but you can’t necessarily trust people to use those yardsticks in a reliable way.
The Shawshank redemption. Not a bad flick, but top of the IMDB? No way.
The Shawshank Redemption isn’t at the top of my list or the top of anyone I know’s list, but of my close group of film buff friends (maybe 20 in number) it’s one of the few films we can all agree is unqualified “good”…that counts for something I think.
Yeah, it’s surprising how few films exist that literally nobody dislikes… and Shawshank definitely seems to be one of them.
Babe. Anyone here dislike Babe? I have yet to meet anyone who dislikes Babe. (IMO, Babe should have been Best Picture the year Braveheart won.)
@Bobobob
Great choice.
Another that everyone I know likes is The Sandlot.
I don’t care for The Sandlot, and haven’t since I was a kid. It’s okay and I can watch it but it always left me a little uneasy.
I think I finally realized why, and it’s that it’s not a movie about being a kid, it’s a movie about the transition period out of childhood. And the ways it marks that transition period most often are via transgression. Kissing the lifeguard, trying tobacco, etc. And these transgressions are viewed rosily and nostalgically by the adult viewpoint of the film. As a kid it made me uncomfortable to see kids do bad stuff, and as an adult I don’t identify with nostalgia for the transgressive teen years. The transgressive stuff I did as a teen made that period miserable for me until I actually grew up and stopped it.
So, like, there are parts of the movie that are pleasant and quotable, but I can never love it.
ETA: To me it feels like watching a move about The Fall of Adam and Eve that simply ends with them cast out of paradise with no resolution besides “Sigh, wasn’t that sure a great time when we got case out of paradise into a world of death and sin?” Even if you made it funny and quotable it would still feel weird.
Well, Twelve Angry Men should obviously be at the top, but Shawshank Redemption is a very good movie nonetheless.
I was thinking about it this morning, and #2 on my list of Best Movies of All Time (after 2001: A Space Odyssey) would have to be Goodfellas. Which may be as different in tone, structure, pacing, and just about everything as two Best Movies can possibly be.
Honestly, I’d probably throw out Goodfellas as one of my most overrated. IMO there are many more entertaining mob movies…
It’s funny how a discussion of movies points to deeper issues about qualia. I like the taste of coconut, and I can’t imagine being a person who hates the taste of coconut. I can’t imagine people disliking 2001 and Goodfellas, but they feel exactly the same way about my (to them) bizarre preferences. Life is indeed a rich tapestry.
I actually really like Inception. Also I don’t think its rated too highly. So I’ll fight you there.
Also I think of your list as flawed, generally, because it contains a bunch of films that are rated very highly, but also in my opinion are at least good. None of those is a horrible movie.
There does, however, exist a caste of movies that are highly rated, and are awful, making the discrepancy much greater. For instance, there is Dances with Wolves. A trash movie that won an oscar. To be more overrated than Dances with Wolves you have to create a movie people rate as a 100 that is only a 50. Brokeback Mountain is another I’d place in this category along with Birdman and Shape of Water.
I think it’s more subtle than that. There are movies that (intelligent) people rate badly, but do well with the general public–remember when Crash won Best Picture? (I agree with you about Dances with Wolves, and I would also add Braveheart, which was enjoyable but not even close to being a great movie.) But there are also movies that (mostly intelligent) people rate well, but aren’t nearly as good as they think, hence the ones on my list. Why these movies punch so far above their critical weight is the mystery I am trying to explore.
Ahh, well I’ll summarize some:
1. Apocalypse Now
No idea, never seen it.
2. The Usual Suspects
It has an ending that can be talked about a lot and analogized to al ot.
3. The Godfather, Part II
People love gangster movies, they all punch above their weight. This is simply the best gangster movie.
4. Reservoir Dogs
Tarantino lovers
5. Inception
Crazy cinematography and an incredible original concept at a time where most blockbusters are derivative works.
I also really liked it. It also seems hard to call a movie “overrated” if it is never really talked about anymore. There was a lot of hype about it when it came out and for a year or two after, but I think people have mostly moved on (although it has sort of entered language as a verb i.e. “I Incepted you into doing that”).
Whose language has it entered? I’ve never heard this expression.
I’ve never heard that either, but Inception definitely entered the lexicon with the -ception suffix, meaning “thing within a thing.”
Example, elsewhere in this thread I described a “twist within a twist” as a “twistception.”
“A tunnel through a tunnel” or “a wheel within a wheel” — would that be tunnelception and wheelception?
@Nick
I did a terrible job saying what I was trying to say and used a terrible made up example. I was trying to say what @Conrad Honcho said.
Ah, thanks. That I have definitely heard, though not in a while.
“A tunnel through a tunnel” or “a wheel within a wheel” — would that be tunnelception and wheelception?
That would be the windmills of your mind 🙂
🙂 I wondered if someone would catch it and bother to reply.
ETA: I quoted it wrong. Should have been “Like a tunnel you can follow | To a tunnel of its own…”
It seems the windmills in my mind are quixotic in nature.
Chariots of Fire — and now, more running in slow motion.
Not a movie, but “Game of Thrones” is one of the most overrated, if not the most overrated, “motion picture” of any kind.
Seconded.
Probably underrated as a softcore porn flick though!
I’ve only seen The Usual Suspects and Inception, and I thought they were both pretty good but not anywhere near “favourite” territory so I won’t fight you on those.
For me it’s Forrest Gump. I like Tom Hanks, but I found that film incredibly dull and annoying. 8.8 on IMDb!!
And now for something completely different: Singing in the Rain.
Mind you, I personally adore Singing in the Rain. But it is not the greatest film musical of all time. All of its good points aren’t innovations, and while it’s A+ on execution, is executing on complete fluff. There are other film musicals that execute just as well, but with a tint more meat on the bone.
Are there? I thought pretty much all musicals (as distinct from opera) were >95% fluff, and that that was basically the point.
That, or Genesis chapters 37-46
Sure, the plots may be as simple as a love story (take Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, or Gigi, both of which were Best Picture Oscar nominees, and the latter won), but you have meaningful character arcs and relationships.
SitR is absolute fluff because it doesn’t have that. There is more meaningful conflict in the Broadway Ballet (the main character in that is abandoned by their love interest for money) than there is in the actual film’s plot.
Take The Bandwagon, a film produced around the same time as SitR, and much the same style. I consider it to have a tint more meat on the bone because the main plot is also relevant to the central romance (all of the characters and most of the relationships are about how they let subjective genre boundaries limit them), even if from a distance, it’s simply a “let’s put on a show!” story.
Agreed. Several years ago I rewatched Singing in the Rain for the first time in a while and then soon thereafter watched White Christmas for the first time. Singing in the Rain was disappointing relative to my memories and White Christmas exceeded my expectations for musicals from that era.
The big difference I think is that Singing in the Rain has great numbers but no solid emotional core. Yeah there’s a love story (right? I’m not even sure now that I think about it) but it just kind of happens. White Christmas does a better job building and then developing upon solid core of compelling character relationships while also having great numbers.
Heh, I’m of the opposite opinion, the Bing musicals tend to leave me more cold because the love stories are insufferable and the pacing of the humor is off.
Agreed. It’s good but not that good. But then what is the greatest film musical?
Oliver!
Winners of the Best Picture Oscar include Gigi, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Oliver!, and Chicago. Of those, I think that West Side Story and Chicago are the best contenders. But Beauty and the Beast can’t be ignored, either.
As per above, I do still adore Singing in the Rain. Of the films of its kind (pure fluff with hella good execution on that fluff), I think that The Bandwagon is probably the best.
Of course, I have yet to see Zombie Apocalypse Christmas Musical film Anna and the Apocalypse, so.
Is there a single, non-judgemental, non-offensive word or phrase that would cover the demographics characterized by:
– distrust of science
– distrust of authorities
– proneness to conspiracy theories
– reliance on folk remedies and word of mouth
In my limited experience, these traits correlate with each other. Is there science confirming this? If they do correlate, is there an accepted way to refer to the combined trait?
Any non-judgemental, non-offensive word used in this context would quickly become offensive.
See how non-offensive words for people with intellect-related disabilities become insults.
Skeptic or contrarian might plausibly fit your first three items, but not necessarily the fourth as much.
Also ‘skeptic’ is already taken and means the opposite: people skeptical of folky knowledge because it is not supported by science.
In the modern west, science and “folky knowledge” are essentially the same.
“Folk skeptic” would state the case pretty well. A touch pejorative, but I agree with matkoniecz that trying to avoid that is ultimately futile.
Also worth noting is that you are going to get a different word depending on whether you mean the motte: “science” or the bailey: “Science !”
Though the word “fundamentalist” comes to mind, and while it doesn’t inherently come with negative connotation, it is of course a slur at this point.
Fundamentalists have a creed and they stick to it: that’s the whole point. Fundamentalism first arose around the turn of the century due to the Modernism/Fundamentalism controversy wherein a lot of people split off from modernizing mainline protestant churches into churches that held to the “fundamentals” of the faith without compromising. And while Fundamentalism has become a slur in the hundred years since, it still refers to people who stick to a creed without compromise.
The people kai.teorn are describing do not have a creed and are suspicious of creeds. They are trying to find the hidden truth that nobody else has (conspiracy theories, quack medical remedies, etc). That’s not something Fundamentalists do: they yell at people to “keep in line”, not “wake up sheeple!”
With that in mind it might be better to call them Secular Gnostics. They have the hidden truth, and the rest of the world is deceived.
Hippie goes a bit beyond this, but they do fit that cluster. I’m not sure if that is considered perjorative or not. My impression is that Hippies are generally seen as admirable but naive.
I haven’t really seen that term used outside of referring to the countercultural movement of the late 1960s. Are there people who refer to themselves as hippies in the 21st century that aren’t doing it to be retro?
I mean, probably about as many as refer to themselves as “fundamentalist” or “folklorist” or what have you.
It’s a shame “folklorist” is taken, because it would fit really well: someone who holds to the lore of the common folk.
“Epistemic reactionary” would describe it literally, but the noun there has negative connotations: very few people describe themselves as reactionaries.
“Epistemic populist” maybe? “Populist” is a charged word but it’s embraced by many of those described by it, and it conveys the same sort of disdain for established authorities and elites.
Populist seems like it should be included in the answer, certainly. Maybe “cultural populist” or “populist tribe”?
This seems like the wrong context for “populist tribe,” and maybe it’s just me but “cultural populist” sounds like a position in the culture war, not the reality war.
“Epistemic populist,” for all its high-falutin-ness, strikes me as immediately suggesting someone who thinks the beliefs of common people are more trustworthy than the beliefs of intellectuals.
Epistemic folklorist?
I don’t know a word as you describe, unless it’s “peasant” or “traditional customs”, but the late Michael Hartnett wrote a poem about such people (inspired by the death of his grandmother in 1965):
DEATH OF AN IRISHWOMAN
Ignorant, in the sense
she ate monotonous food
and thought the world was flat,
and pagan, in the sense
she knew the things that moved
at night were neither dogs nor cats
but púcas and darkfaced men,
she nevertheless had fierce pride.
But sentenced in the end
to eat thin diminishing porridge
in a stone-cold kitchen
she clenched her brittle hands
around a world
she could not understand.
I loved her from the day she died.
She was a summer dance at the crossroads.
She was a card game where a nose was broken.
She was a song that nobody sings.
She was a house ransacked by soldiers.
She was a language seldom spoken.
She was a child’s purse, full of useless things.
Alternative thinker?
I don’t know if a completely non-offensive term is possible, because the ability to apprehend this as a cluster sort of implies seeing it as naive. Like, I would assume a crystal-healing naturopath doesn’t feel much kinship with a tin-foil hat wearing UFO conspiracy theorist, even though the rest of us might see it that way.
It depends on whether the crystal-healing naturopath is also a tin-foil hat wearing UFO conspiracy theorist, of course.
Actually, in my experience, while each one may look at the other as “the ones who make the rest of us look nuts,” and might resent being lumped together for dismissal by skeptics, they’d actually feel a kind of kinship in being dismissed and scorned by the mainstream.
Uncontacted people.
That word is “elderly”.
How about “rhetoricians?” These are defined by a worldview that the arguments which are true are those which sound to his ears to be the most rhetorically convincing. This distinguishes them from people who base their beliefs on evidence or experiment (or believe they do this) and also from the masses who just trust whatever their authorities tell them. The rhetorician is inspired by generic stories and doesn’t seek out more than one or two data points that fit with them, certainly, he doesn’t look for data points that don’t fit the story. The rhetorician isn’t entirely closed to abandoning his story for another, more convincing story, but there must be another story. He will never abandon his story for “nobody knows.”
It reminds me of my reaction to Idiocracy: that it wasn’t pessimistic enough. In a realistic world, they’d never appoint the smartest man alive to a government position thinking he will fix their problems, after all, we don’t. They’d just keep laughing at him.
Camacho appointed Not Sure to be the fall guy and to take the blame for the existing state of affairs. It was a smart gambit!
I’m curious whether any delivery services are using UV to decontaminate packages and groceries.
It seems like an obvious and important thing. https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/nc-woman-gets-covid-19-despite-staying-home-for-three-weeks/
I’ve got a few UV lamps ordered on eBay. UV light is apparently unusually effective against coronaviruses of all kinds, due to their large, complicated, and fragile genomes, and I plan on making a sanitizing box out of one of them and a plastic tub that I will use to sterilize all incoming groceries and packages if this continues.
It does seem obvious, and important, but per Scott’s last article, I think we’re realizing more and more that the experts aren’t.
There is extremely limited evidence of surface transmission. Using UV to decontaminate packages is unlikely to hurt anything (unless it causes your groceries to spoil because you leave them out…), but I believe there is not evidence that it would pass a cost-benefit analysis except perhaps for someone at unusually high risk.
There is also the nearly-mathematical fact that the virus could either spread more easily than we think or be more deadly than we think, but it cannot be both at the same time given the evidence we have. If it spreads easily (e.g. by casual person-to-person contact, or by surface transmission), its prevalence is almost certainly much higher than reported and its death rate correspondingly lower. If the death rate is much higher than we think (e.g. because deaths are being missed), then it must not spread as easily as we have estimated, or there would be too many deaths to miss. In other words, errors at this stage will tend to cancel out or produce a net decrease in “dangerousness” of the virus.
One of the things I’ve been pondering is why, given what seems a lengthy period of infectiousness, R0 is so low.
I wonder if all the routes of infection are relatively rare. Haven’t really subjected that to much scrutiny, but it might explain why strict social distancing is more effective than was first predicted.
What makes you believe strict social distancing is more effective than predicted? Not a leading or rhetorical question — honestly curious.
Deaths have been significantly lower than most models predicted (right?), but that could equally be because the models were too pessimistic. For whatever it’s worth, Tyler Cowen has started to suggest explanations in that category.
Because the recent revisions downward in models are, I believe primarily, but at least partially, dependent on new data from Italy and Spain about how effective social distancing is.
My first hypothesis is that it is very good at spreading in some superspreader environments, but it loses its superpowers in normal environments, and even moreso when moderate measures are taken.
My evidence is: 1) High measured infection rate of athletes, celebrities, and politicians. These people fly a lot. Planes are known for getting you sick, its a trope for a reason. 2) Some small sample size studies showing humidifiers lower transmission by a lot. 3) Rural and suburban non-gatherers (mostly non churchgoers) being largely unaffected.
This all indicates that C19 is very environmentally dependent. You probably could get 90% of shelter in place’s value by shutting down mass transit and mass gatherings of something like 50+. This would burden some workplaces, like a work-center I used to work at, but that could be fixed by staggered work hours or staggered teleworking. Installing humidifiers all over the place probably even lets you open restaurants, but they probably have to reduce capacity (to a more comfortable seating arrangement I’d argue for most of them).
Of course, this is my own musings that update as data comes in. This is simply the best model I have now. I don’t think models that say, “we could have flied commercial flights and packed subways and had the same outcome” are credible. The data seems to indicate to me that there is a middle path.
On celebrities, I think you are likely at least partially succumbing to availability bias there. Do you have anything like a study that says they have high infection rates relative to the public?
On humidity, sure, maybe. But we still don’t have a good explanation for flu seasonality, despite guesses about humidity and mucus membranes.
Obviously large gatherings and mass transit are likely vectors, but I don’t think the data at all supports a 90% reduction in disease via those two restrictions alone. Like, even remotely. The clustering would be very apparent, in all the many places without mass transit, I would think. You can say that spread has been slower in rural and suburban areas, but I don’t think you can say they have been unaffected.
I assume we could get most of the current benefit by only doing some of the things we are doing now. Most things work like that.
But we don’t know which things.
We get none of the current benefit beyond postponing the inevitable, unless we continue doing the things we are doing until we can implement Plan B. And Plan B seems to be the vaccine that’s a year or so in the future, because I don’t see anyone e.g. hiring and training more public health workers to do contact tracing. So we should be doing the subset of things that we are doing now, that we reasonably expect that we can keep doing for another year. If that’s not enough, then we always were screwed.
@John Schilling
It’s an explicit part of Switzerland’s strategy to take up contact tracing again (now that the number of cases has dropped substantially). Businesses will start to re-open on April 27th.
That will be useful data, but I don’t think any of us here are Swiss so not directly helpful. What’s the over/under on anyone in the US or even EU effectively incorporating Swiss experience in their field operations in any time less than a year?
I remain skeptical of contact tracing.
@Clutzy:
In general? Or just for Covid-19?
For Covid. Particularly when dealing with the herding cats problem that Americans comprise. We just did a huge Costco run (still no TP there despite other stores having some) and there were fat old guys without masks who walked up behind me real close to look at some cheese. Incubation is too long, we still don’t have a handle on how it actually spreads, etc.
If we integrate (1/distance)*time, for all your human contact, what fraction of it is taken by two-fat-geezers-at-Costco and the like? Remember, we’re talking about a disease where, in a normal pre-lockdown social environment, the total of (1/d)*t for an average person over a ~10-day period is enough for 2-3 instances of actual disease transmission; someone who is only in your face for a few seconds is a tiny fraction of that.
It’s probabilistic; one of those fat geezers might infect you while leaving their officemate spared. But for contract tracing to be effective in general, it only has to catch most transmission, and not an overwhelming “most” at that. It can ignore the supermarket geezers and just trace the officemates and other coworkers, friends and family, and the like, maybe down to the level of the waitress who served you at a restaurant and the diners in the next booth. The rule my company is using is six feet / ten minutes. Also, I’m not sure why the age or obesity of the people in the supermarket aisle is an issue.
Public transportation is the biggest sticking point I see for contact tracing, and maybe things like movie theaters and sporting events.
If I came down with COVID, I’d tell whoever is doing the tracing the times I was at the grocery store, and they’d work with the grocery store to figure out how to track down the people there.
Generally, all the things that John said. See the end for one niggle.
What none of that really addresses is whether contact tracing is an effective way to keep Covid-19 under control in a “normal” environment. I think that’s a valid question. What will we need to do once we have infections under control in order to keep them under control? I don’t have a good guess at the answer. But maybe it will be enough to reduce our exposure in a variety of ways, like most people wearing masks, orders for distancing in many cases, etc.
Now for the niggle:
The question becomes whether the elderly and infirm are more at risk to contract the disease. If so, it’s possible the overall health status is relevant to their relative risk vs. the “average” community member. But, I don’t think that’s really likely to matter. You basically need to treat everyone as a risk, except for people you know have it, or have been exposed to it, and those you have to treat as high risk.
I can’t see contact tracing working with this disease, particularly with mass transit. Suppose I show up at the ER with shortness of breath and test positive for COVID. I’ve quite likely been contagious for several days. So where was I for those several days? Well, I was at home, and at work. And I took NJ Transit to work each day. And I took some subways. There’s no records on who was on those subway cars. Nor on the trains. And certainly not the stations, which includes Penn Station
Worse, suppose I go through the entire course of the illness asymptomatic? Asymptomatic transmission is going to break contact tracing.
I wondered how South Korea dealt with contact tracing with public transport, and it looks like they just shut public transport down to stop the virus?
https://time.com/5804899/u-s-coronavirus-needs-follow-s-korea/
Its an issue because an old fat guy not doing any of the social distancing and PPEing at all is indicative of the high levels of noncompliance I’ve seen. An old fat guy should be pretty freaking afraid of the virus.
I understand the sentiment that contact tracing doesn’t need to be perfect, but something needs to be done correctly if we return to semi-normalcy people need to be doing personal sanitation at extremely high levels.
My impression is that the U.S. makes much more use of automobiles and much less of public transit than most other countries. Is that resulting in a slower spread of the disease?
Isn’t that why they’re planning to use cellphone data? You won’t need to remember who was standing close to you on the subway; they’ll just check the phone logs.
And if you don’t carry a cell phone, well, that’s a clear sign of tradecraft. What are you, a terrorist?
Cell phones work notoriously poorly underground.
@The Nybbler
There is an approach that uses Bluetooth to measure proximity and duration, stores anonymous identifiers in the smartphone, and in case of later symptoms/positive tests the earlier contacts will be alerted and proactively quarantined. No continuity of cell login necessary.
From what I can see in my acquaintance, where two families have had it, transmission within a household is virtually guaranteed.
Definitely not true. Plenty of examples either way.
What’s the evidence on how much exposure to how intense uv it takes?
We have two uv sources, one a flourescent which is used on Halloween when my daughter sits on her balcony over the front porch playing mournful music on her harp dressed in white with the uv shining on her. The other is a flashlight sized unit intended to spot cat urine stains. My guess is that neither would do the job short of hours of exposure, but I could easily be wrong.
I saw a study a few weeks ago apparently showing that a few hours of direct sunlight would do the trick. I’ll see if I can dig it up again.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2656420/
??? It seems likely your blacklights are longer wavelength UVA sources. Perhaps they would help? But maybe only with other cellular components not present in the viral capsid?
Direct sunlight (as mentioned by The Pachyderminator) also contains UVB.
My employer has hired an outside contractor to come in and sterilize high traffic areas with some sort of UV setup. I haven’t seen them at it yet but my understanding is they set up some kind of tripod thing in the center of a room and it blasts everything. Not sure how effective it is vs how much of it is for show, but I doubt it’s cheap.
Security theater for the coronavirus?
“Never fear, valued employees! Your work-space has been purified through the use of scientific Vita-Rays! Begone Coronavirus, by the power of Science!”
Effectiveness of UV-C on coronavirus (not your typical UV lamp, but quite possibly what the contractor uses): https://www.mrsa-uv.com/cronavirus-cov.html
It’s likely ineffective only in shadows, unless it functions at a low enough wavelength to produce ozone.
Important note: There are different sorts of UV.
The sort that kills viruses effectively is ionising radiation and will give you sunburn and possibly skin cancer. Keep your exposure to it to an absolute minimum. Make sure no humans or pets will get into a room where it’s being used.
Normal blacklights don’t have enough energy to destroy the viruses.
Or maybe do a bunch of welding next to your groceries. Shame I don’t have access to my MIG welder right now.
These videos go into more detail.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=big+clive+UV
@David Friedman:
^
John is an employee of your favorite burger restaurant. He has just prepared a burger and fries while respecting all ordinary (but not extraordinary) precautions expected of burger chefs. That burger will arrive at your door.
This morning, John tested positive for Coronavirus, but is exhibiting no symptoms. How much money would it take to get you to eat the burger?
Probably around low six figures. This seems like it could lead to me losing my job and ending up with significant medical bills, although probably not almost certainly I would survive if I did catch it.
I am not trying to fight the hypothetical by nuking the heck out of it first, but if that was an option, I would certainly try.
I mean, given that there are zero reported cases of food-born transmission, however much I could swindle out of someone willing to pay me to eat a burger.
it’s a low-end estimate so I’m assuming this means you’d happily just eat the burger on arrival?
Well, no, because you’ve already stipulated there’s someone willing to pay me to eat it. How much do I think I can swindle out of this person?
Also, was I already hungry for a burger? If not, then whatever you’d need to pay me to get me to eat something I didn’t already feel like eating, plus whatever I can swindle.
I’d ask for 1K, even though I think the risk is much lower, because that’s the point at which it’s worth the hassle of engaging someone in the hypothetical.
I think I’d ask for higher and if they negotiated I’d go lower. A person daring me to this task would obviously think its something scary. My level of caring isn’t relevant, it is the proposer’s mindset that matters.
I know the details are fuzzy, but isn’t there a good chance that the original transmission was caused by someone eating bat meat in China?
It said the burger was made by the COVID-19 positive worker, not out of him.
Yeah…if he’s the ingredient it’s gonna change my answer. Still makes for an interesting hypo though.
My guess would be that someone caught it from a live or freshly killed animal, not from cooked meat. I believe the standard guess for how AIDS passed from monkeys to people was through a butcher.
If the burger is fuzzy, you’re probably getting sick from something else entirely.
No, the thought is that it was caught from a bat, or some other animal infected with a bat virus, that was sold on the Wuhan wet market. Whether the first human patient ate that animal, or sold it, or cleaned its cage, or interacted with it in some other way, is not known.
Given what we know about how the virus spreads, I’d imagine someone caught it from the live animal. But even if he ate it, eating an infected animal is not the same as eating something prepared by an infected person.
From what I understand you can get it from touching a contaminated surface and then touching your mouth. Surely touching the contaminated surface *with* your mouth would count?
No reported cases of food-borne transmission, but how many patients actually know how they caught it?
Nations are still doing contact tracing. You’d think if food-born transmission were possible we’d have seen something.
Okay, these are the Food Safety Authority of Ireland recommendations.
Recommended scenario – John should not be working in the burger restaurant if he knows he has the virus.
Otherwise – so long as John practices good hygiene and doesn’t sneeze or spit directly onto the cooked burger and fries or the containers they’re put into, then it’s fairly okay to chance it.
Now if John is regularly spitting into the burger boxes, even if he hasn’t got the virus, then no way I’m eating their dodgy burgers for any money. But if he’s careful and doesn’t sneeze onto the food, ah sure go on!
Given there’s a decent chance that our future scenario is something like “eventually, COVID is going to have to pass through the entire population,” then, if you live in an area where medical capacity is currently holding up fine, getting COVID right now might not be the worst thing…
I was actually considering the cost/benefit analysis of deliberately exposing oneself in like, early March, before the system got overwhelmed.
One thing that might matter for that calculation is that if you’re one of the unlucky people who get super sick with COVID-19, it’s usually quite awhile until you hit your crisis point. A few days after exposure until you get your first symptoms, a week or so with very bad flu like symptoms, then increasing breathing difficulties for the next few days until you end up in the ICU trying to get enough oxygen into your lungs to survive. I think it might be like 20 days. So intentionally exposing yourself now means making a pretty big bet on whether there will be a big wave hitting in 20 days where you live….
albatross,
Sure – but given that some states are starting to talk about re-opening, right now (i.e. near the end of the window when basically everyone has been locked down for nearly a month) would still seem to be the best time.
You’re forecasting what will be hitting in 20 days based on everyone else’s behavior right now. Sometime in the next couple weeks, we aren’t going to be in “everyone is locked down nationwide” mode anymore, and forecasting will get much harder…
I guess slightly more seriously, I would still want to get paid for this one, even if I were hungry for a burger.
I’m sure there’s a name for the psychological phenomenon, and I’m sure somebody here will know what it is, but it’s like “irrational disgust.” Like drinking from a never-before-used, sterilized bedpan. Yes, yes, intellectually I know it’s perfectly safe and probably cleaner than a regular cup that came out of my dishwasher, but it triggers my lizardbrain disgust sensation that’s supposed to keep me from drinking out of bedpans that might have contaminants. So, whatever that’s worth. Maybe $100 to make it worth my time to participate in a stunt like this. Unless of course I thought I could swindle the guy out of way more by pretending to be more grossed out than I am.
It’s one of those human disgust/dignity situations where it’s hard to separate the two. For example, if some djinn or whatever could assure me there was ABSOLUTELY NO WAY I’d suffer any health effects from eating something someone spit on, I’d still not do it: It’s undignified. Obviously our attitude about this dignity interest emanates from this aversion to infection, but it becomes something very different.
Now I’m not 100% sure how that interactions with my aversion to eating johnny’s burger. My feeling is that I’d need some pretty substantial gain, like $10,000, but I can’t explain exactly why.
I think Michael Pollan talked about this in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” People won’t eat chocolate they see get reshaped into dog turds right in front of them.
My mom was an ICU nurse and every Halloween she’d bring milk duds in a (well-sterilized) antique porcelain bedpan for the other nurses on the floor. But “ha ha look how easily we can handle gross stuff” was part of their deal.
however much I could swindle out of someone willing to pay me to eat a burger
Aha, Conrad Honcho, I like the cut of your jib and should have considered that in my own answer! If the hypothetical burger restaurant or friendly aliens are willing to pay us to eat burgers, then take ’em for as much as they’ll give us! 🙂
Like drinking from a never-before-used, sterilized bedpan.
Mmmph? If it’s never used before, then I’d drink out of it. If it’s “been used frequently but I swear we boil washed it in bleach”, then not so willingly unless absolutely desperate and couldn’t drink out of my hands or something, or I got to wash it to my own satisfaction with my own hands and “you’re paying me a nice sum of money to do this”.
Does wearing a (surgical) mask count as ordinary yet?
for the purpose of this hypo no. John did everything an (American) burger cook would have done in like, August of last year: Hairnet, washed hands, gloves, coughed only the normal amount, etc.
He didn’t do anything a burger cook wouldn’t have done last year: worn a mask, exposed the burger to UV light, avoided coughing AT ALL, breathing only a little, etc.
John tested positive but is asymptomatic the same morning he made the burger?
Eh, so long as it’s cooked properly and he took the usual precautions, nothing needed to induce me (so long as it’s a burger restaurant I know are usually not dodgy). There have been some places that you’d be taking your life in your hands on an ordinary day, never mind during an epidemic!
~$5,000
Less and I’ll feel like an idiot.
Not too worried about getting it, under 40 and healthy.
Low chance of getting it too
Even though I think transmission through food is possible, I’d be willing to do it. Because I probably already have eaten food prepared or handled by an infected person, given how many people are asymptomatic.
All in all, I feel like when I’m being ultra rational about it, I probably have less risk of actually picking up a serious infection from the burger than I do picking it up on my trips to the supermarket (what with the lines, the ubiquitous buttons and handles I need to manipulate on the way, the confined spaces with other people, and so on).
but I still feel like I want low five figures…and I love burgers.
$1000, at the very most. In fact, I’d probably settle for $500. I either have a weaker disgust instinct or a greater need for money than many of the people here. But I’m an otherwise healthy 20-something with no dependents, which certainly makes a difference.
Hey, free burger!
I stick it in the oven for a few minutes just to be sure though.
So, I got my Trump Bucks today. Since I’m still employed, I’d like to donate it effectively. Being almost brand-new to effective altruism, I’m not sure how to do this. What will you all be doing with the stimulus money/where will you be donating it if you’re lucky enough to still have a job?
Split between the unemployed in my church and the Salvation Army.
The short answer is “shut up and buy malaria nets.”
I still have my job, but I’m going to put it all into my savings account. Because I have no idea how long the lockdown will last and while I see no immediate threat to my job things can change on a dime. One day you’re doing your work with no worries, the next there’s a company wide meeting where layoffs are announced. I plan on hanging on to it until things look better.
+1
This is going to be worse than the 2008 recession, P > 0.9.
Reasoning:
A large fraction of businesses amounting to 10-20% of the economy is currently shut down and is going to have little or no demand for the next year. They will lay off employees, fail to make loan payments, stop paying their lease, stop buying supplies and equipment, etc. That will ripple through the economy. Monetary policy will have a much harder time having a useful effect here than in 2008, when the problem was mostly concentrated in big financial companies.
This is what I’m coming around to. Even if you’re in something vital, like healthcare, okay great we reopen and there’s pent-up demand for the non-critical services put off during the lockdown, 20 million people have lost their jobs and presumably their health insurance.
I still just don’t know what to think about this whole thing. I think it’s too early for all the brickbats and bouquets going on in the Failure But not of Prediction thread. We still don’t know how bad this is going to be on the humanitarian side, or on the economic side. I do not know what’s going to happen, I do not know if what was done was right or if there should have been more or less of it.
This is definitely my perspective as well. Think of how bad 2008-2009 was. All of that came about because of, basically, nothing more than “A single digit percentage of Americans can’t afford their mortgages anymore.”
I don’t know what exactly is coming in terms of COVID-related economic disruption, but it seems to me like it will definitely be worse than that…
That was the disruption, the proximate cause. But it could only do that because of the house of cards that financial institutions had built on top of those mortgages.
Here we have a much greater disruption, but likely a much stronger financial foundation (if only because the weak ones got wrecked in the last event). So it’s hard to predict how big the financial disaster is going to be.
Though with the NJ governor attempting to get a blank check to issue debt against future tax revenue (with pledges to raise taxes by any amount necessary to cover the bonds), I can’t imagine it will be at all good here.
Well, my belief is that nothing was really “fixed” in 08/09 and we still have an economy that is sitting on a house of cards…
My intuition is that the problems in 2008 were largely problems with financial arrangements made between big companies. That is probably the class of problems that the fed and treasury departments can most easily deal with via monetary policy and bailouts and such.
You can imagine making credit easier to come by or even implementing some kind of payment holiday and making debts magically not be considered overdue or something, which might help out businesses that got clobbered by the shutdowns but will reopen to nearly 100% of prior business as soon as the shutdowns end.
But a lot of industries are looking at much less business for the forseeable futures–this isn’t due to government actions, it’s due to customers being afraid of getting sick with a nasty virus that might kill them. Extending some additional credit or letting businesses stay out of bankruptcy for another few extra months isn’t going to save a theater or conference center that finds itself with like 10% of its former level of business for the next two years. Nothing we do is going to save those businesses. When they fail, their employees and suppliers and creditors will all take a hit, as will local governments that were taxing them for revenue. And that’s going to happen a lot of times, for a lot of different industries. Restaurants and bars and amusement parks and concert venues and hotels and rental cars and airlines and cruise ships and tourist traps are all looking at huge losses. Consider all the towns along the ocean that rely for their income on tourists coming to the beach for the summer–how much will business be down this summer? Probably quite a bit. Lots of the restaurants and hotels will be closed in 2021 or 2022 when people come back.
There’s a subset of those businesses that could maybe keep demand up by working out risk-limiting ways to use their products. A beach vacation where you’re never on a very crowded beach and you’re mostly eating takeout and staying in your own room wouldn’t be so high-risk. But someone has to work those things out and figure out how to market them and get them past whatever local authorities might find them upsetting for good or bad reasons.
I don’t know how this will all work out, but I do not expect it to be pretty.
Frickin’ IRS, man. They give us this money, yet make me prove for the third year in a row that my wife is still alive to file my tax return this year, despite giving them letters from the Social Security office declaring “Yeah, this chick’s totally right in front of me, and I don’t usually see dead people, please update on your end.”
My wife was saying the same thing when we got our money, but I’m not sure there is an effective COVID place to donate the money right now. The Feds and the states are spending money like crazy on the crises, and I think money donated will have little incremental effect in helping people. I certainly don’t agree to give it to people newly unemployed that are getting unemployment insurance, because they are already getting help. IF you have some special knowledge on people that have fallen through the cracks, that have lost their occupation and don’t get unemployment, like gig workers or other small business folks or illegal immigrants, it might make sense to give it to them. Otherwise, I think Matt is right, the best place is the same as it’s always been, so give for malaria nets.
I’ll be keeping it because the check is made out to me. I am no better off than any one else in the world so there is no one whom I can help. Claiming otherwise is just bragging.
Please steelman/provide mitigating evidence (should you know of any) for this: https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/opposition-samaritan-s-purse-central-park-field-hospital-grows-n1184216
On the face of it, based on the report given by NBC, the protesters seem to be very much in the wrong. The organization is providing a life-saving service, and the protesters are upset because the staff are all pledged religious traditionalists. They insist they will not discriminate against or among patients, the city is watching to make sure they don’t, and there’s no evidence that they have. Is there another, more progressive organization offering to provide equivalent emergency medical care, which got turned down in favor of Samaritan’s Purse? The strongest argument I can find is that the one guy wanted to volunteer with them but couldn’t because he wouldn’t sign the statement of faith. Even so, this seems like a nitpick, given the insanity going on in NYC right now.
If the Aryan Nations wanted to set up a field hospital and insisted that they would treat black and Jewish patients the same as white Christian patients, would you trust them to do so, even with the city watching?
Yes, this is an extreme example, but it illustrates the general point: there are some organizations whose ideology is so hostile to a particular group that it’s reasonable not to trust any commitment they make to treat members of that group fairly. Whether evangelical Christian organizations reach that level of hostility to LGBTQ people is a case-by-case empirical question, and I think the answer is very probably no in this case– Samaritan’s Purse is not the Westboro Baptist Church. But Franklin Graham’s history of anti-gay rhetoric mentioned in the article, while not decisive evidence of anything close to that hostility, is reasonable grounds for suspicion.
Whether evangelical Christian organizations reach that level of hostility to LGBTQ people is a case-by-case empirical question.
Oh for crying out loud. When/if a crowd of sick people of all ages and colours turns up, you really think that in each individual case the people running this are going to go “But first sir/madam, while we take your details, are you a damned homosexual who is going to burn in the fires of perdition for all eternity, in which case we will chase you out of here with whips and scorpions?”
This is the trans bathroom kerfuffle all over again; how are they going to know unless the person makes it known? Okay, maybe by “next of kin” or “person who brings in sick person”, if it’s “oh yeah this is my husband, yes we’re both men”, the organisers will know. Otherwise, unless someone turns up in a rainbow T-shirt with “Gayest gay that ever gayed” on it, how will they know?
I thought the whole paranoia over “Christians are in power in the USA!” was overblown and exaggerated both by fearful types of the “As Vice-President, Pence will set up gay torture camps!” progressives and “They want to use this as an excuse to persecute us!” conservatives of a certain flavour, but that people can seriously put forward “Yeah, an evangelical charitable outreach is the exact same thing as the Aryan Nation, it’s just a difference of degree not of quality” makes me think I’ve been too incredulous about how ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NUTS YOU AMERICANS ARE.
Many trans people are easily recognizable as trans. And while many gay people don’t have any particular “look”, there’s certainly some fashion and body modification choices that make it very likely that a person is on the LGBTQ spectrum.
And if the hospital did in fact discriminate against gay people, I’m not sure that “they won’t know you’re gay” will be a very helpful thought. Having to go to the hospital is bad enough without having to worry about whether they know.
Now, I’d expect most Christians to help a sick person just the same regardless of how they feel about that person’s personal life. It’s in the bible after all. But empirically, there have been cases of Christian charities discriminating, so it’s not a totally unfounded concern.
Hello, and welcome to “SSC Comment Boxes: Doing More For Ecumenism Than ARCIC, or, How The Heck Am I Sticking Up For Protestants???, Part II”.
Now, my first and immediate response was intemperate. Having thought about it a little more, what we are seeing is a clash between competing defintions of sinfulness: the old, traditional, Christian notion (as exemplified by Graham and his organisation/ministry) and the new, secular version as exemplified by, well, let’s pick a handful of dissenting voices from that particular article and whom they call upon:
The Piskies did an abrupt “ugh, you want us to partner with icky traditional Christians???” about-face but that’s nothing unusual for the modern The Episcopal Church especially the John The Divine lot (where hip is happenin’ but the Gospel not so much):
Congratulations, New York City, you have re-discovered the Venetian Inquisition.
The tactic used here is the assumption of victimhood: we need to protect the vulnerable LGBT people from the powerful and oppressive Christian establishment!
I wonder, between LGBT (around 5% of the adult population of the city by this study) and Evangelical Christians (1%, according to this survey), who is the minority in New York City? Who is the party getting the support and assurance of the secular government that they will make sure Badness is not permitted to happen?
Imagine the shoe on the other foot: after, let us say, Hurricane Katrina or some other natural disaster, an activist LGBT organisation sends a relief mission to Redneck City, Mid-Nowhere. But! Enraged local interest groups set up protests outside the camp! Local papers run articles on how this charitable action is linked to the leader who has said things about “homophobes and transphobes and haters”! The city mayor is scolded for letting them work with local churches even though they are explicitly non-religious!
And then, in response to “isn’t this a bit much?”, someone solemly writes a comparison between the LGBT group and Neo-Nazis with the disclaimer “Yes, that may seem a bit extreme of an example, but it’s the same thing in principle”.
Now, my friends, what do you think the reaction to those Redneckians would be?
I remember a certain amount of commentary, back in the run-up to the 2016 election, about Republican nominees talking about “New York values” in a critical way and that this was racist or anti-Semitic dog-whistling to nod-and-wink that “New York values” were not really “American values”.
Well, what have we in this affair but an attempt to demonstrate that “New York values” are not the same thing at all as “Franklin Graham and his group’s values”, and that the latter are Bad Wrong Incorrect?
This is the new secular version of orthodoxy, sinfulness, and struggle to socially dictate what are correct ways to think, act and believe.
“These people coming in are not like us, do not think, act and believe like us, and we call on the secular powers to make sure they get no chance to corrupt our innocent youth with their perverse ideology or carry out their unnatural behaviours on the persons of our citizens!”
If you want to know how Galileo could possibly get into trouble with the Church, this is how it happened: interested and hostile persons formally complained to the Inquisition, which had to investigate all complaints made to it.
Your thought experiment:
incidentally reveals an important truth: One cannot imagine that happening. At all. The rest of the hypothetical is true enough but ultimately irrelevant.
@Doctor Mist: Could you unpack that?
@Le Maistre Chat
I’ll take a stab, with a question: are there LGBT organizations that do that kind of relief work, period? I can think of at least a half-dozen Christian organizations, a few secular, half-dozen other religions, but none from other identity groups be they LGBT, atheist, whatever.
Now, that’s not to say all LGBT and atheists are uniquely hateful and want rural people to die (there’s at least a handful like this, but there’s a handful that fulfill the “Scary Christian” stereotype too, but not enough of either to be concerning to me). Organizations that form around those particular identity groups just don’t do that sort of thing. It’s not in their wheelhouse, generally. Outside of the quirky sliver of EA, charity isn’t their thing.
I’m sure lots of atheists and LGBT people work with the secular relief organizations like the Red Cross. But there’s no specific “LGBT Cross” the way there is Samaritan’s Purse, Church of Christ Disaster Relief, the Methodist Relief Committee, the Convoy of Hope, etc.
Though I got curious: 75% of disaster relief charity comes from explicitly religious organizations.
Thanks, profgerm, that’s it exactly. I’m glad it was obvious to somebody.
@profgerm:
Yeah, that’s what I figured Mist was implying. It’s quite true so far as I know: LGBT organizations that want your money only help the in-group, while 75% of disaster relief has the trajectory religious org -> the needy indiscriminately, plus the Red Cross is vestigially Christian (why else would Muslim countries have the Red Crescent?). Plus many communions run health care networks, with the Catholic Church being the largest.
Of course vast amounts of money go to secular charitable donations, but in these two particular fields they’re a small fraction, and it seems religions are the only identity groups doing it for the outgroup.
@Le Maistre Chat
To be fair, a lot of the religious orgs also make some attempts to convert people by helping them. So they’re not really doing it for the outgroup, they’re more like a propaganda wing of expansionist religions. And while secular organisations are mostly small and have a limited purpose, there are definitely examples of them helping the outgroup. For example, various AIDS related charities (in western countries) are heavily organized by gay people, but also serve straight people.
So the AIDS organizations that help straight people are obviously not trying to change people’s minds about gay people. They deny who funded them, they never mention gay people, and they never try to improve the status of gay people with AIDS.
Religious charities don’t usually try to convert people, but they do try to raise people’s opinions of their church. Like, Mormon charity makes you see them as the nice normal people instead of the polygamist cultists. But they don’t preach directly to you. And every charity preaches indirectly.
The thing is, every charitable organization is, in some sense, publicity for the organization and those who fund it, especially when they do much better work than other charities. Getting the social benefits is one big reason why people donate. And yes, religious people seem to donate more to charity than humanists, with the exception of EA types. That shows that being able to raise your status/your group’s status is a factor in donating, for everybody.
@Kaitian: What ana said, and furthermore you’re trying to make it sound inherently insidious to want Outgroup members to join your Ingroup. Arguably treating Ingroup and Outgroup as immutable essences has a more harmful track record!
Well, one thing I know is that Samaritan’s Purse is definitely using this to try and get me to give them money. Like, the adds have been near constant. Not usually what I consider a positive signal.
If those protestors were running the hospital and Moldbug or Richard Spencer or a mysteriously resurrected Fred Phelps showed up (and were recognized), do you think they’d treat him?
Quite possibly not, alas. I didn’t mean to imply that social justice types can’t also embrace bigoted and exclusionary hateful doctrines; they sometimes do. That’s not an excuse for the more traditional sorts of theocrats who do.
Do you really think they’d recognize Moldemort? I certainly wouldn’t. Hell, I’d be surprised if any of the protesters even knew who he was. He’s not nearly as famous as the SSC commentariat seems to think he is. And they probably wouldn’t recognize Richard Spencer either, though in that case there’s at least a small chance they might.
Instead of hypotheticals about high-profile extremists, a better question might be: Do you think they’d deny treatment to a random person wearing a MAGA hat and a Trump 2020 shirt? That seems more analogous to the situation of visibly LGBT people potentially being denied treatment by an Evangelical Christian group. And in that case, my answer would be yes, I’d trust an ultra-progressive anti-Trump doctor to treat a Trump supporter far more than I’d trust an ultra-conservative anti-gay doctor to treat a queer person.
I’d be inclined to trust either simply because most doctors are terrified of malpractice suits AFAICT. IDK if refusal to treat counts as malpractice, strictly, but it’s certainly a huge breach of medical ethics unless there’s a clear conscience exception (e.g. elective abortion).
@theredsheep: Overall I’m inclined to agree, but the percentage of progressive doctors who’d refuse to treat conservative patients is approximately zero, while the percentage of anti-gay doctors who’d refuse to treat queer patients is some small but non-zero/non-infinitesimal number.
I’ve heard too many horror stories about doctors refusing to treat trans patients, even for things completely unrelated to them being trans like injuries or pathogen-based diseases. I knew a trans woman who died because she went to the emergency room with a bad fever, and the doctor sent her home, claiming that he wasn’t experienced at treating trans patients and there was nothing he could do. Are situations like that rare? Probably, but not so rare that I wouldn’t have some serious concerns about a field hospital run by a fundamentalist religious group with ties to an explicitly anti-gay preacher.
That’s not an excuse for the more traditional sorts of theocrats who do.
Error hath no rights, eh, salvorhardin?
I know the Samaritan Purse and Graham are religious and hold religious tenets. I am mildly surprised nobody recognises the equally religious tenets on the other side, but that’s probably not unusual.
The offence here is the imputation of sinfulness. Nobodly likes to be called a sinner, and the LGBT lot are saying “You think what we do is a sin, but we don’t think it’s sin”.
Well, no, of course they don’t. And of course they’re genuinely hurt. Nobody likes to be called a sinner, I don’t like it myself when the Gospel says “This pet flaw of yours is a sin”. And so it is theocracy to say “Sorry, if you say, do and think this about sexual morality, it’s sinful. That’s just how it is”.
But the new sin on the other side is also “Sorry, if you say, do and think this about sexual morality, it’s sinful. That’s just how it is”. If you do not accept the new view on LGBT, then it’s the sin of intolerance and homophobia/transphobia, such behaviour is sinful, and you’re a sinner.
And we in New York don’t want to encourage sin, allow sinners to sin publicly, or give any kind of support or tolerance to sinners. Sorry, that’s just how it is. No, it’s not the same thing at all – they’re wrong and we’re right! Look at all our scientific and medical evidence that such thinking causes harm to the vulnerable and impressionable! Look at our right-thinking citizens whose common sense tells them, whose innate morality tells them, whose sense of decency tells them, that such persons and their deviant from the majority ways are unnatural, immoral and wrong! They’re acting out of bias and prejudice, we’ve got Reality on our side!”
(Do you really not know that religious and formerly social conservative views also adduced science, the Man in the Street, and common decency against LGBT rights before they were even rights? Do you not see the family resemblance?)
You are aware how ‘ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NUTS SOME AMERICAN ORGANIZATIONS ARE’ ?
Many organisations are fucking nuts. It takes Americans to put that special “Land of Liberty” brand of totally feckin’ crazy on the thing.
If the Nation of Islam set it up, would you trust them not to unhook younger white unbelievers from ventilators to give them to black believers even with obviously fewer QALYs if triage conditions are reached?
And if a national alliance of synagogues used their charity cash to set up a field hospital, would you trust them to treat Muslim and other gentile patients as well as Jews?
This is merely a question of who you’re already suspicious of.
The Nation of Islam I might, as a person of Jewish ancestry, indeed not trust and I think I would have reasonable grounds not to trust them. I would definitely trust an alliance of synagogues unless they were Kahanist or similarly chauvinist, as most Jewish organizations are very clearly not.
Not all organizations have the same level of actual material grounds for suspicion; whether the head of the organization has fulminated hatefully against the supposed iniquity of some particular disfavored group, as Franklin Graham has against gay people, is a relevant question for determining what the level of reasonable suspicion is.
Can a get a quote for that hateful fulmination? As far as my research shows Franklin Graham has repeatedly states that homosexual behavior is a sin: an idea shared by the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, Islam, most Hindus, and most American Christian Churches. Franklin Graham also believes publicly that adultery and fornication are sins, and has publicly stated many times that he himself is a sinner. Do you have a quote where he says something more hateful than that, or is that belief sufficient?
Sure, most Jewish charity is not chauvinist against gentiles but they exist, and if a gentile who doesn’t know Kahane from a Karaite raised the alarm on the wrong side of the line, they’d get shouted down as a Nazi.
No similar superweapon exists for excessive prejudice against Christians. Heck, where you’re drawing the “evil” line is exactly the level of opposition to homosexuality Jews traditionally have:
What you’re calling “hateful and evil enough” comes straight from the Laws of Moses (unless you consider the stricter commands against polygyny and serial monogamy unless the divorce be for adultery attributed to Jesus part of it!), which makes singling out only Christians for this widespread belief unjust unless you have a Phelps-level smoking gun from Franklin Graham, something beyond what was said by still-respected rabbis who lived before the late 20th century gay rights movement swam past.
Of course, but there also shouldn’t be double standards where we can only dig up what Christians have said to denounce, while Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch digging up verbal smoking guns from Islamic leaders makes him such a Nazi that the legacy media have “accidentally” called him Richard Spencer.
I’m not singling out only Christians. It absolutely ought to be easier to condemn homophobic statements from Muslim and Orthodox Jewish leaders without getting called Islamophobic or anti-Semitic. But the fact is that Christians have a lot more cultural and political power in the US today than do Muslims or Orthodox Jews, so prioritizing condemnation of Christian homophobia in a modern US context is reasonable.
salvorhardin, would you like me to go dig out some anti-Jewish “you can’t trust them even if they’re ostensibly working as a charity” propaganda of this very type, because I’m damn sure there’s plenty of it out there? If you’re going to use Christian Identity-tinged loons as your exemplars, I’m going to swear blind The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are trustworthy historical documents (Narrator: She did not believe they were trustworthy historical documents).
That’s about as trustworthy a kneejerk reaction. That you jump straight to comparing Aryan Nations (from what I can find with online secondary sources, some link with heresy that started out as crankery and, once again when it hit America, degenerated into outright lunacy with heavy political and racist colouring) with Samaritan’s Purse (statement of faith here) is troubling to me, but it may well be that you feel evangelising religious people of whatever denomination to be truly threatening and controlling.
The major substantive complaint cited seems to be from an activist who went to volunteeer but was turned down when he refused to sign the statement of faith all those working for the paraministry have to sign. There was nothing, so far as I can see, put forward saying that they would refuse, turn away, or unfavourably treat LGBT persons needing medical services.
As to the statement of faith, well this is a religious entity. Same way if an organisation wanted to restrict membership to African-Americans or some other grouping as members and officers even if they provided more broadly-based services – you might be able to bring a discrimination case against them because “I’m white but they wouldn’t let me run for president”, but I’d say good luck with that because I think opinion would be against you.
Shouldn’t that be just the opposite? What is “cultural power” if not “the ability to exercise your culture?” And openly, without fear of reprisal. If Christians, Muslims and Jews all have similar basic teachings about homosexuality, but only the Christians need to consider whether or not they should announce their Christianity for fear of reprisal by a mob of protestors, then don’t they have less cultural power than the Muslims or Jews, against whom no one would dare protest?
I actually agree with you there. If the only issue here was they refused to take on a volunteer who didn’t share their faith, I wouldn’t have an issue with them, and the protesters would seem incredibly petty (much like your example of a White person complaining that he couldn’t become President of an African-American group).
My problem with this specific organization is that it’s run by a prominent anti-LGBT activist who’s specifically devoted a great deal of time, energy, and money to fighting against pro-LGBT causes in American politics. That goes well beyond simply thinking that homosexual acts are sinful. The Catholic Church maintains that homosexual acts are sinful, yet no one is protesting the many Catholic hospitals and charities in this country. But Franklin Graham chose to get involved in US politics, and so now, US politics are involved with him.
Not so!
When poor Wisconsin people protested cutbacks at a Catholic hospital, journalists and the ACLU used it as an opportunity to get the Catholic hospital system protested for being Catholic.
Indeed, it verges into Constitutionally-protected expression of that idea.
Yes, which is why no one is talking about arresting him, fining him, or otherwise using the state apparatus to punish him for expressing his views. The protesters are expressing their Constitutionally protected views too, after all.
My point was more that there is a significant difference between someone who merely says that homosexuality is a sin, and someone who actively crusades for anti-gay policies.
I don’t know. It looks like the protestors are trying their hardest to get the state apparatus to punish the Christians, and the state wants to do it, they just can’t figure out how to finagle it yet. From the article in the OP:
So they’re calling on the mayor and governor to do something.
The mayor seems to agree with them, being a “champion of LGBTQ rights.”
The AG is going to vigilantly watch them, ostensibly looking for “discrimination,” at which point I assume they would shut them down.
And then this guy is trying to get them shut down by the city, via trolling. No harm is actually done to him, since he doesn’t really want to join the relief effort, he just wants an excuse for the city to be able to shut them down.
They’re not currently punishing the Christians with the state apparatus for their beliefs, but it’s not for lack of trying. And it seems like the mayor and the AG are ch[a|o]mping at the bit to do it, they just can’t figure out quite how to yet.
So the real problem here is “this initiative comes out of an organisation headed by a guy who expresses views we don’t like, and also has the temerity to work for those views”.
It’s not about “we’re scared the evil bigots will burn gays at the stake”, which is the impression one would get from “even though the forces of the state are watching” language used. It’s not about “we’re afraid they will refuse to treat sick LGBT people”. It’s about “we’re going to force this to close down just to show off our power”.
@LadyJane:
Yes, and? The political landscape is chock full of parties fighting pro-this, contra-that. Pro-military-intervention-in-some-country, or contra. Pro-increasing-minimum-wage, or contra. Pro-enforcing-50%-female-corporate-board-membership, or contra. This is known as “politics” and there is hardly a shortage of topics.
But do you see any of those pro-X (or contra-X) actively working to dismantle a volunteer effort of the contra-X (or pro-X) that helps scores of diseased people, in a crisis amid a capacity shortage? Just because they’re otherwise known to be contra-X (or pro-X), and we can’t have that?
I do not see them. Not even over the pro/contra military intervention disagreement, in which a large number of real lives is at stake. Whereas Graham is fighting for what stakes, again – for the marriage to be recognized only between a “genetic man and genetic woman”? How can an appropriate and commensurate response to that be to stop the deployment of dozens of extra beds in the worst-affected city on the planet? Solipsism, anyone?
From a purely utilitarian perspective, I would agree that engaging in an unjust war is a vastly worse crime than prohibiting gay marriage. But this isn’t really about right and wrong in some absolute cosmic sense, it’s a matter of trust.
Given the amount of pro-war propaganda that Americans were exposed to, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, it’s not hard to believe that a lot of them might’ve simply been misled into supporting unjust wars. Bob the Neocon probably doesn’t hate Iraqis, nor does he see them as mere obstacles to be eradicated in the pursuit of resource acquisition and geopolitical influence; in all likelihood, he genuinely believes that the U.S. government was helping the Iraqi people by overthrowing Saddam Hussein. So if Bob was a doctor, I would trust him to treat Iraqi patients to the best of his ability. I might strongly disagree with his foreign policy decisions, but I wouldn’t be concerned that he’d refuse them or give them deliberately poor treatment.
On the other hand, if Bob was known to be racist against Middle Eastern people – for instance, if he explicitly stated that he supported the Iraqi War because he viewed the Iraqi people as barbaric savages, and had a bumper sticker on his car about how the U.S. should nuke the entire Middle East into glass – then I absolutely would be suspicious of him. At that point, there’s a very real chance that he wouldn’t provide fair and equal treatment to Middle Eastern patients, just like there’s a very real chance that Franklin Graham and his followers wouldn’t provide fair and equal treatment to LGBT patients.
I absolutely would not trust the Nation of Islam to provide fair and equal treatment to people. As for Jewish organizations, it really depends on the specific group. I’d trust most of them, but there are definitely a few that I’d be highly skeptical of. I’d probably do a small bit of research and double-check to make sure the Jewish field hospital in question wasn’t run by one of the worrying groups before recommending anyone to it.
Was this supposed to be some kind of gotcha? Were you expecting people to say “oh I’d trust the Nation of Islam just fine” so you could criticize them for singling out Evangelical Christians specifically? Because I strongly doubt anyone here (or anywhere outside of Nation of Islam meeting halls) is going to give that answer, and if you think they are, that suggests you really don’t have a good model of how progressives/secularists think.
In 2018, there were plenty of news stories on how a Jewish doctor and Jewish nurses treated the synagogue shooter, so it’s definitely a case of specific groups
My guess is that in an emergency almost anyone would help outgroup members in need, especially when you select for people who study medicine.
I would trust Muslims, but I wouldn’t trust the “Nation of Islam”, which is more of a black supremacist movement than an actual religion (and isn’t actually Muslim).
Would you think it equally as reasonable for people not to trust them to treat divorcee’s well, or adulterers, or fornicators? (It might be hard to find anyone in NYC to treat if that’s the case!) I know Mr. Graham has had similar “rhetoric” to say about those groups as well as homosexuals.
Yes, absolutely it would be similarly reasonable. Again, the Westboro Baptist Church is an existence proof that there are organizations that crazy in the evangelical Christian continuum; and again, I think the probability of Samaritan’s Purse being far enough along that continuum to worry about is low, but I also think traditionalist Christian doctrine is hateful and evil enough that it’s not zero.
The Westboro Baptist Church is just a family of nutjobs. It’s not an organization, not in the sense people usually give it*. Their existence is not proof of anything, other than you’ll find families of all types of weird beliefs everywhere.
*Which is, a group of like minded individuals who work together, joined with ties other than kinship, or not just kinship.
I also think traditionalist Christian doctrine is hateful and evil enough
Okay, that’s an honest answer and I know where you’re coming from now; any Christians are not trustworthy and only purely secular organisations fully in tune with the Zeitgeist should be allowed do this kind of public work.
Everyone knows where they stand on this question, but it’s also not worth refighting the Wars of Religion over it, so I’m dropping out now.
If it were a trust issue, protesters could just tell LGBT types not to go there.
This is a culture war issue, protesters don’t want open Christians getting good PR
That doesn’t hold up, because there’s no risk of hateful evangelical groups getting good PR short of disbanding.
Are you joking?
Setting up a field hospital to treat overflow of Covid-19 patients would count as “good PR” in my book. Probably the books of 98+% of adult humans would agree
Is it still good PR if ultimately you have to tear it down after it failed to see a single patient?
Unfortunately the press are drawn from the remaining 2%, and they’re the ones who count for PR purposes.
@Matt M
I don’t see the connection with the Seattle hospital. The Army probably got some good PR for setting up the hospital, and won’t get bad PR for shutting it down because it wasn’t needed after all.
It should, as the creation of that hospital was a complete and total waste of resources.
When you prepare to deal with emergencies, you are going to end up paying for some things that you didn’t really need.
Yeah, this is the flip side of wanting “nimbleness” and avoiding “rules-bound bureaucracy.” (I should note that I work for the Corps, though I’m not involved in the COVID response–I know very little beyond what’s in the papers–and I don’t speak for the Government.)
If they had taken the time to fully analyze and dial in the model, they’d have avoided wasting money–but taking the time to do that also means it would have been too late if it turns out it was needed.
Here, the Governor made a request to FEMA with a list of sites, and FEMA pushed the sites to the Corps, who evaluated them and sent back up which ones were suitable, then FEMA and the Governor determined which ones would go forward.
Not that the Corps is a bystander in this process–earlier on, the District Engineers were instructed to be proactive in making sure that cities that our internal modeling* showed would be coming up next as needing beds knew that we needed sites and had to evaluate them ahead of time and contacting them. LTG Semonite discussed one of the colonels calling a mayor who we thought would need extra beds, only to be told that the city had two hospitals that were about completed and could be ready in time, so they didn’t need external help.
The rules-bound way of doing things sprung up in response to rolling over local concerns, especially with projects that turned out to only be marginally beneficial, if at all. So a bunch of processes were stood up to try to mitigate that. Study everything to death, do the EIS process, etc. This is what happens when you sweep that aside and do what feels right.
* from Columbia U, IIRC
And of course, we could go all EA on this and ask questions like “How much wasted money” and “How many malaria nets could we have bought for that?”
Wasting money matters. We shouldn’t shrug it off as “oh well, who cares?”
@Matt M
I’m not advocating for wasting money–if I could Thanos-snap my fingers to get all the hospital beds we needed without wasting money, I’d sound like a Doo-Wop group backup singer–just pointing out that there’s tension between avoiding wasting money and getting something done on time.
Most of the bureaucratic rules that people complain about making government “fat” and “arthritic” were justified to prevent corruption and wasting money, and getting stuff done fast requires forgoing those; there’s going to be additional wasted money as a consequence.
If you want things to be done nimbly and quickly, this is the failure mode–somebody’s going to make a decision, the decision will be carried out without a lot of further analysis, and it’s going to turn out to be wrong.
Of course, we’re probably far down the problem where the rules are costing more than they save. There’s also the issue, of course, that when a private company moves quickly and makes wrong decisions it’ll actually go out of business, where the government will live on making bad decisions continually.
That’s a good reason to make everything possible be done by the private sector, but I’m pretty comfortable with “selecting emergency hospital locations to be built in two weeks” being well within the region of “should be done by government” and “acceptable if it turns out to waste money during a pandemic.”
I’m not sure it’s intentional, but to me this implies killing a lot of current occupants of hospital beds.
This is a situation where overshooting was exactly the right thing to do. Yes, some idiots will complain about the waste of resources, and some of those idiots will have prominent positions or big media platforms. But not having enough hospital beds if we’d needed them in NYC would have been so catastrophic that it was worth paying some money for the insurance of having extras.
@Randy M
Hah, no that definitely wasn’t intentional. I was using it in place of “wave a magic wand” to create new hospital beds, and the “just kill the current occupants” possibility didn’t occur to me.
“Spent time and resources on activities that subsequently turned out not to have been needed this year, again” is pretty much the job description in a national standing defence force’s annual performance report.
@Del Cotter
Call it a training exercise and you probably actually saved money!
What would Thanos say if you told him he really only needed to kill ~0.1% of the total population in order to trigger a galaxy-wide freakout that would result in a grinding halt to most economic activity?
He’d say “That’s why you don’t deal in 1/500th measures”
I’d at least give them a chance to see if they keep their word.
I’m not totally on board with this comparison, but since we’re running it there seem to be some pretty obvious and important failure modes for that strategy.
I can’t think of any failure mods, honestly.
Refusing to treat [chosen hated group] is not the worst thing you can do to that group in a medical setting.
You mean that they’d take in a patient with a rainbow-striped #LoveWins T-shirt, then either decide to deliberately neglect them or treat them in such a way as to make their condition worse? Bearing in mind that these doctors, nurses, etc. willingly came to NYC, where they have fair cause to assume that the majority of their populace are unrepentant fornicators of one kind or another?
IMO that’s not a failure mode as much as it is an actively evil person choosing to engage in active evil. IMO nothing can stop an intelligent evil person from doing evil whenever they want, so I rarely bother thinking up ways to stop them.
I’d much rather go to a field hospital with some chance of being horribly, irrationally prejudiced against me, than not have any field hospital to go to at all.
Actually, even if I know for a fact that they will refuse to treat me, their existence is quite possibly still net positive for me since they free up space in non-biased hospitals.
Yes, absolutely, they are in the wrong. Politicizing medical care like this is crazy. Note that the mayor is taking these nutjobs seriously. They are not just fringe people that no one pays attention to. Usually social justice folks only have a harmful effect on political discourse by making it more difficult for people to give their true opinions, but they rarely have a direct effect on how people live. This is an exception. These protesters are killing people by making it more difficult to do medicine in NYC.
Let’s say that, hypothetically speaking, the field hospital did turn homosexuals away, but treated other people. This seems like a strict advantage over them treating nobody at all. Unless someone else is standing at the ready who will treat more people, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why SP should be prevented from running this hospital.
But then you’ve broken a very useful social norm. Once you allow one hospital to turn homosexuals away, where do you stop? This can lead to systematic effects that make the treatment option for gays worse. An analysis “at the margin” like you’re doing does not capture this danger.
Perhaps, but there are a great many policies in effect right now that we hope not to continue when we no longer consider it an emergency. This would be among the least of those.
What strikes me about this whole discussion is that everyone is taking for granted the assumption that preventing private discrimination is more important than saving lives.
Suppose the Nation of Islam sets up a field hospital and only accepts black patients. That’s a thousand black patients that other hospitals don’t have to treat, freeing up a thousand beds for other patients to occupy. Similarly if the fundamentalists only treat heterosexuals, Orthodox only fellow Orthodox, … .
Several people have already said that, including @Two McMillion right above.
I believe the culture war fear is that fundamentalist Christians will get good press. The justification (without cause, as far as I know) is that fundamentalists may provide actively detrimental healthcare to those we don’t approve of.
If I’m a {transphobic, homophibic, racist, anti-Semetic} doctor or nurse, what’s to keep me from providing lousy care to patients when I’m working in a normal hospital? I don’t see a whole lot of reason why the risk becomes worse when it’s a hospital set up by a fundamentalist Christian denomination. In both cases, there are (imperfect) remedies we’ve set up in our society–you can sue doctors who provide lousy care for malpractice. I don’t see why that would work differently either way.
And indeed, this works the other direction, too. Jewish doctors do sometimes treat guys with swastika tattoos; gay doctors treat fundamentalist Christians, etc. Hopefully they provide the best care they can, but I’m sure sometimes, people being people, they provide shitty care or otherwise mistreat members of a hated outgroup in their power. And again, if the patient can show evidence of that in court, he can sue the doctor for malpractice, and he can complain to the hospital management and maybe cause the doctor some problems, but those are obviously imperfect remedies.
Nor do I, to be clear. In fact, articles about how wonderful {Jewish, gay, immigrant} doctors save the lives of evil racists are stronger arguments against racism than anything else you can make.
Which is why I think the attempt to prevent Samaritan’s purse. Because that works the other way, and evangelical doctors saving the lives of gays is just as strong an argument for them.
Presumably an organization set up around bias would hire and set policy on that basis, quietly enough to avoid whatever discrimination laws apply but more pervasively and with greater pressure on individual actors to follow the hateful policy.
Of course, I happen to think the Christian church in general is the exact opposite of such an organization, with notable early growth specifically because they served the pagan Roman plague victims in a society.
Nothing can guarantee that you won’t. But the risk of facing consequences, both internal (from the hospital administration, supervisors, co-workers) and external (from lawsuits, medical licensing boards, activist groups, and so forth) serve as a strong deterrent.
But in a hospital that’s run by bigots, the internal risk goes down to almost zero, since the hospital staff will presumably share your views. And the administration can also work to protect you from external risks by stonewalling inspectors, tying up investigations in red tape, and so forth. The administration might even actively encourage doctors and nurses to refuse or give subpar/deliberately harmful treatment to patients who belong to the hated outgroup, even if those doctors and nurses wouldn’t normally be inclined to do so. So yes, while there’s always going to be some risk of malfeasance, it seems clear that the risks would be much higher at a hospital controlled by people who view you as their enemy.
@LadyJane
Well, I think you have now won the “least charitable take on the outgroup” award for this week.
Gosh, we’d better hope no-one in that chain of command missed the memo about out secret gay-bashing operation and got the impression we were actually trying to help people.
More seriously – that only makes sense if you assume the vast majority of Catholics have a personal hatred of gays and such. Do you actually believe that? If so, what would someone have to show you to convince you otherwise?
Eh, it’s perfectly okay, as long as we also fire all social justice warriors from positions where they could come to contact with or discriminate against white men.
Signal boosting my LW post on how we probably could solve the Corona crisis through wide spread mask use. If someone can draw Scotts attention to this please do so. Spreading this idea may have quite a lot of value.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yKYg6D7HNxLuJDcLS/hammer-and-mask-wide-spread-use-of-reusable-particle
I see people lowering their masks to talk to eachother a lot.
Masks are often uncomfortable.
Putting masks on properly isn’t so easy apparently.
Public adherence to usage guidelines needs to be taken into account.
The fundament of the idea is solid. Corona is a respiratory virus, ergo having a quality seal on your respiratory parts is, for practical purposes, the same as social isolation. How good a seal is equivalent to what degree of social isolation is a good question, but intuitively both are imperfect so I expect them to be within an order of magnitude of each other.
I can see a set of standardized measures that allow businesses to open. Just masks is not enough, but something like maks + temperature controls + ethanol dispensers + proper eating arrangements + ventilation/air purification + some amount of social distancing. Costs aren’t prohibitive, and efficiency…well, that one will vary a lot based on cultural differences. I know in my country the department of public health is much better of shuffling papers than actually doing useful stuff, but well, everything is culturally dependent anyways.
I don’t think it’s practical to go for rubber seal respirators (is this what you’re talking about? a quick google suggests there are p3 disposable masks. If your goal is to prevent spread of disease the standards are much lower – even cloth may be ok.
I think the best thing to do right now is to switch to an engineering perspective. You need 1-2 measures to stop spread, plus 1-2 measures for safety (since people _will_ fail to implement), and a very careful look at 80-20 and lowest hanging fruits.
I’m trying to figure how masks and dine-in restaurants is supposed to work.
I keep seeing people suggesting that restaurants will be among the first to re-open, just with limited capacity. This has always seemed unlikely to me, for two reasons.
One: even with significantly limited capacity, there is a lot of touching shared surfaces, breathing the same air, and obviously the staff is moving around all over the place.
Two: Being closed or doing takeout only is hard for restaurants, but I think running at 1/4 to 1/2 capacity would probably be even worse. You now have to run at full operating cost, but you never get peak business hours to make it profitable. At least if you’re just doing takeout you can do a skeleton crew and make other cost-saving adjustments that wouldn’t be possible or practical if you have a handful of dine-in customers. It also means employees are going to be making next to nothing.
Emergency Induction Port?
@HeelBearCub
Very badly. Restaurants will likely be a long term victim.
@acymetric
Which means that places that are built for takeout win by a large margin – no expensive and useless table space to pay rent for. Even if rent is lowered – it’s not just the space itself, it’s the location as well.
Yes? I’m not sure what point you’re making, takeout places are winning now for those reasons. My post was about people thinking dine-in restaurants will be among the first things to re-open, how take out places compare isn’t really relevant.
I agree. Point would be they’re screwed medium term. Little chance to make money if they open, and they lose if they try to switch to takeout as they are now.
To be honest, I also had a larger point when I clicked “reply” but realized it’s not very well formed. Something something decentralization of valuable commercial locations, which is probably a good thing.
What are the food ingredients that have been most widely adopted outside of their native region into other cuisines? My guess is the tomato.
Black pepper might be a contender, but most of those cuisines had other forms of pepper available before, whereas the introduction of the tomato actively transformed some cuisines into the form we know them as the “traditional/authentic” version today.
Olive oil is widely used outside of italy, but not as a defining ingredient.
Honorable mentions to noodles, black tea, and orange juice/lemonade.
Potatoes. I don’t think it’s even a contest.
+1, all hail the nightshade which conquered the world.
Do you mind elaborating? How limited was their original native region?
I believe that at the time of Columbus, potatoes were only grown in western South America.
Peru and Bolivia. They were a staple crop of the Incan empire and only spread outside the region after the conquistadors did their thing in the 16th century and brought it back home. That means in only 500 years the potato went from a regional staple to a worldwide staple. Wikipedia claims that “According to conservative estimates, the introduction of the potato was responsible for a quarter of the growth in Old World population and urbanization between 1700 and 1900.” And it’s now eaten everywhere from Alaska to Indonesia and everywhere in between. And look what sweet potatoes alone have done to world cuisine!
I’d say the three nightshades, but it’s hard to pick just one: potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers.
Rice would be a contender as well–it seems to have been cultivated for several thousand years in what’s now China before spreading beyond that.
Peppers seem like the one which has become central to the widest variety of cuisines. In most parts of the world the potato is just one vegetable among many, and even in its stronghold in Europe it is weakly interchangeable with either bread and other cereal products, or with other root vegetables.
Tomatoes I’m less sure about. The highest per capita consumption seems to be in the Eastern Mediterranean (Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Libya) plus Uzbekistan, all cuisines I don’t know so well. But I can just about imagine Italian food, say, hobbling on without them.
Could we say the same for central Chinese (eg Sichuan) and southeast Asian cusines regarding peppers? It’s unimaginable. They’d have to be razed to the ground and started from scratch. (Possibly applies to cuisines from India and the surrounding countries too, less sure of that.)
I’d guess peppers have spread to the cuisine of most warmish climates, and potatoes have become a staple in most coldish climates.
Warm climates can grow rice and wheat, so they don’t really need another starchy food. But they do need ways of preserving things in the heat, which peppers do.
Tomatoes are used in many cuisines, but I don’t think they are a super important ingredient anywhere. Even pizza doesn’t always have them.
You could substitute peppercorns (which is what the Indians, Chinese and Romans ate before the Columbian exchange).
And IMHO, they have a more interesting flavour.
I understand that peppercorns, fresh and dried, prepared the way for chile peppers in these areas. But the subsequent development of the cuisines seems to rely so heavily on chile peppers in particular – how could you make anything approximating a Thai green curry with peppercorns? Or doubanjiang?
There is an old Thai curry rarely seen in the west called geng liang, which is flavoured very heavily with white pepper rather than chilies. I like it, but it wasn’t going to make Thai cuisine an international heavyweight on its own merits.
They are called peppers precisely because they were regarded as a spice of the same type.
But within half a century of Columbus, there’s a poet in India hymning the wonders of the red pepper, and black pepper only managed to hang on to its place in dishes with ritual requirements.
And long pepper. And cubebs. And grains of paradise.
I’m gonna go with beer, if we’ll take a finished product as opposed to an ingredient. Otherwise I’m going with rice.
Potato, tomato, and rice are probably the strongest contenders. I believe vanilla has been incorporated into cuisines worldwide. Cocoa has become a dessert ingredient worldwide. The humble peanut made it all the way to Sichuan’s Kung Pao Chicken.
And much New World cuisine relies on Old World ingredients, which gets you an enormous set of candidates.
Is it clear that noodles have a native region? The standard story crediting Marco Polo with bringing them back from China is bogus, since there were noodles in Islamic cuisine earlier than that. The question of whether they existed in Europe in classical antiquity is, I think, still open.
They seem like the sort of thing that could easily be invented multiple times in different places.
Noodles seems like a specific thing to invent, though. The intuitive thing to do with dough is a flatbread. You have to invent a specific eating utensil like forks or chopsticks as a prerequisite to noodles being viable.
Did noodles ever get independently invented in Africa?
Noodles are easier to make than raised bread and they don’t require an oven, just a fire to boil liquid over. Unraised flat bread cooked on a hot stone or metal pan over a fire would be the one alternative that might be easier.
Both bread and noodles require flour, and turning your wheat or rice into flour is a good deal of work. Why didn’t people just cook the whole grains instead?
Roughly ground maize makes polenta. Not sure what the wheat equivalent would be…
There’s bulgur (cracked wheat) and there’s “cream of wheat” which I guess could be described as wheat gruel made with fine-ground wheat, but I don’t know of anything in between. Coarse wheat flour is sometimes used in bread though.
Nybbler’s comment is mostly good, but I’d say semolina is the true equivalent of polenta. Cream of Wheat is a brand name of semolina porridge.
“Cream of wheat”/ farina is normally made from roasted wheat (I’ve made it at home). Cracked wheat that’s unroasted has a very different texture when cooked.
Processing and cooking are ex-vivo digestion.
If you just boil up unthreshed grains or unmilled wheat, the nutrients of the endosperm and germ remain trapped in the undigestable cellulose bran.
Smashing the kernel mechanically or using fungi that produce cellulase (Koji) makes the nutrients from the cereal easier to absorb than just boiling them.
At least one food documentary said the same was true for corn, something like corn tortillas are more nutritious than just eating it off the cob?
The big thing with corn is treating it with alkali (nixtamalization) to free the niacin and otherwise make it more nutritious. However, that’s with different varieties of corn than those you eat off the cob; the niacin in that sort of corn (sweet corn) is available without such treatment.
I’d say wheat (from the Middle East), corn (southern Mexico), or chicken (southeast Asia).
Yeah, surprised you’re the first one to say wheat; wheat-based dough and batter preparations are pretty much universal now, you won’t find a single country where they haven’t been worked into several traditional dishes. Breads, buns, wraps, cakes, pies, tarts, pizzas, dumplings, fritters, noodles, cookies, biscuits, crackers, breadsticks, bagels, doughnuts, bretzels, pastries, brownies, muffins, tortes… take your pick!
I have to disagree on corn, because it hasn’t become an integral part of the cuisines it has migrated to. You can excise corn from much of the overseas dishes it’s in.
Wheat, it could be, since I’m not educated on the subject, but it seems like most cultures had some form of grain they could make bread and such beforehand. Wheat was the superior grain to do it with, but it wasn’t like the tomato, where new dishes were invented wholesale, instead of just substituting a preexisting ingredient.
Potatoes and peppers seem like the big winners.
Cane sugar?
I suspect it depends on how strictly you define “native region”, after all, every widespread staple was domesticated somewhere.
Hot pepper and relatives have gotta be up there. Didn’t exist in the Old World before the Columbian exchange; is now a defining ingredient in cuisines as diverse as Sichuanese, Indian, Thai, and Hungarian.
A bootstrapping AI would be naturally bootstrapping its own software, unless we provide it with the tools to bootstrap its hardware into computronium. Indeed, a less powerful computer could run the same algorithms at a slower speed. It will lack the resources to scale up in terms of speed and memory, but it can discover and run through the same fundamental mathematics. If general intelligence is simply a certain magic algorithm, then the difference between a regular intelligence and a hyper-intelligence is running that same algorithm at a much faster speed with much lower constraints on memory.
If this is true, and we look at attempts like this going on right now, is it possible that if we repeat research like this enough, then we will reach the pinnacle of algorithms much much sooner than we will reach the pinnacle of hardware?
If we have various approaches for building general intelligence from evolutionary algorithms, and that produces general intelligence that emulates human operation running slowly on a modern supercomputer, that would be much much better for AI safety than if computers become hyper-powerful and then we discover general intelligence after that point. Since it’s easier to search the algorithm space than the hardware space, wouldn’t reaching the general purpose algorithm with the best trade-offs and/or even reaching the best algorithms for each special purpose and then bolting them together, be a process that reaches its apotheosis sooner than making the most powerful computer nature will allow?
It seems that circumstances that promote algorithmic development while stalling hardware development should be good for AI safety because they give us more time and experience with general AI before it’s running on absurdly quick hardware of the future. Discovering general AI sooner rather than later would be beneficial. Not just because a whole brain em running at 10,000ths real speed on a modern supercomputer is better than the same thing running at 10,000 times real speed on some exotic quantum computer, but also because as time goes on, more and more industrial processes will be controlled by wire, and the “internet of things” is going to unfortunately grow in prominence. We don’t want general AI to appear in an environment where computers are even more connected to everything than they are today. Avoiding both these scenarios makes it harder for hostile AI to defeat us before we have Friendly AI, and once you’ve tested it in an environment where failures cause comparatively minimal damage, you can optimize for Friendliness through that learning process rather than through preconceived theories. The more Friendly AI exist, the more they become the world’s best cops against any Unfriendly AI that are built after that point.
So we can talk about bootstrapping algorithms “summoning the demon”, but the real demon is when a bootstrapping algorithm is running on a computer the size of a building that controls much of our critical infrastructure. Discovering general AI and putting it in a robot so it can ape about in a room learning how to do absolutely everything is the process that makes putting that same mind in a building size computer that controls much of our critical infrastructure safer, if we insist on doing such things like that, which we surely and unfortunately will.
Don’t underestimate how hard it is to search algorithm space.
There are some extremely simple classes of problems – finding the shortest vector in a medium-sized lattice, solving small systems of multivariate quadratic equations over finite fields, finding a subset of a set of bit vectors whose sum mod 2 is unusually sparse, etc – where it is widely believed that no algorithm which will solve a random instance of that class within the lifespan of the universe on a universe-sized computer exists.
I think that designing better AIs may well turn out to be similar – it wouldn’t in the least bit surprise me if there was a theorem stating that programming a Turing machine with at least n Thinkons of intelligence always required at least O(2^kn) work, putting a fairly hard cap on how far AI could get.
Indeed, those examples are the basis for various public key algorithms that will be secure (we hope) even against quantum computers.
Isn’t that more so about the efficiency of algorithms within the algorithm space than the size of the space itself? Algorithms that allow you to pick up a shoe with 99.9% efficiency probably might not be resource intensive but perhaps an algorithm to squeeze out an extra 0.0999% would be orders of magnitude more so, and then everything for the extra 0.0001% would be on the same exponential curve of absurdly increasing complexity?
Donald Trump, or someone close to Donald Trump, has read the Constitution carefully.
Article II, Section 3 gives the President the power to adjourn Congress in an emergency. Trump has stated that he is considering using this power, which has never been used before, because Congress has recessed until May.
Trump believes that he needs either Congressional authorization or recess appointments to execute his pandemic response, which a recessed but not adjourned Congress does not give him.
And thus, we edge ever closer to dictatorship.
With many of the various state governors ruling by decree and many state courts not in operation (so if you’re arrested you’re in for the duration), we’re way past “edging closer”.
Yeah, basically. Of all the people who have been dictatorial in this, Trump is not even top 10.
And don’t forget–Massachusetts last year (pre-COVID) shut down an entire class of legal businesses* for months, on the ground that they might be a threat to public health–even though it was fairly well established that the threat was black-market products that those stores didn’t sell.
*Vape shops
There have been quarantines in democracies for as long as there have been democracies.
Yes, literally.
I didn’t believe it at first, but maybe Bill Mahar was right in predicting that Trump will find some contrivance to stay in office after losing the election. Hope it doesn’t come to that.
The last time I nearly believed that was when they told me George W Bush would do it.
What makes me suspicious now is not that there was an election, the Democratic candidate won, and Bush left office like a lamb. It’s that as soon as Bush left office, all his critics stopped caring about what a bad man he was. Suddenly he was America’s grandfather and isn’t it wonderful what friends he is with Michelle, and did you know he paints?
So I think this is just stuff the opposition says, while whichever president is in office (sorry, I missed out the Obama presidency: it went without my saying that “Obama is preparing the concentration camps now!” was bonkers)
In this case, it’s something the President said, rather than something the opposition said about the President. That should be weighted a little heavier.
(Assuming EchoChaos is accurate, as he didn’t give a source. But he is a pro-Trump poster, so presumably he’s not lying to make the President look bad)
Which is safe, of course. Always trust EchoChaos brand analysis.
Well, he hasn’t said anything about extending his term, just being able to get recess appointments in place so he can govern more effectively.
Does he need to even go that far? Surely he too has a pen and a phone?
Sorry to be laughing about the doom-laden tones of COMETH THE ETERNAL DICTATORSHIP, but lads, ye were there beforetimes, yea, even unto the “but surely the Demon of Republicanism will not loosen his clutch upon the sacred office but will invoke emergency powers and martial dictatorship to remain illegally and perpetually in power!!!!” fringe frothing at the mouth running up to 2008 when Obama won, as well as some reasoned commentary from 2006.
The imperial presidency is dangerous, and any expansion of the presidency’s powers (or demolition of norms around the exercise of those powers) makes it even more dangerous. I’m less afraid of governors overreaching their powers; they don’t have an army.
I’m gonna go with someone close to Donald Trump.
No, it does not. Have you read the section? It’s short.
“…in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them…” Without disagreement between the houses there is no power to adjourn them.
Indeed, you seem to have the right of it. What I’m wondering about, having read it, is the previous part of that sentence: “he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them…” Does that mean he has the power to call them back from recess during this extraordinary occasion? If they’re in recess, are they technically still convening?
Well, technically I think McConnell could create the disagreement. But I don’t see what that would accomplish.
Edit:
As I point out below, it’s probably extremely relevant . Pelosi is the Dem with the power to block recess, not the minority in the Semate
Well *that* sure seems like something that doesn’t belong in the Constitution. What was the original rationale? And why would the House and Senate need to agree on the time of adjournment as opposed to just running things on their own respective timetables? If the House wants to work through Christmas I don’t see how that’s any of the Senate’s business.
Because the House can force the Senate to stay in session.
It’s one of those “we need some way to ultimately resolve this” rules that you need in any working system.
But why should the House be able to force the Senate to stay in session?
My guess would be so the one of them can’t adjourn and leave the other unable to get anything done.
I believe it’s Congress that adjourns, not the House and the Senate separately.
As to why you need the House and Senate to agree on things? Well, the whole system is based on checks and balances. The whole idea is to force people to come to agreement, rather than making decisions unilaterally.
Doesn’t always work out. No system is perfect and every one has its downfalls.
It most certainly does. It is indeed conditional, but it absolutely gives him the power to adjourn them.
Has the condition been met? Are the House and the Senate in disagreement on when to adjourn?
Legally speaking, I have no idea.
Isn’t the Senate currently in recess? Why would he need them to adjourn?
Edit: Unless what he is really trying to do is get some prior recess appointment vacated, which I believe would happen at the end of the session. Not sure why he would find that helpful.
No, they’re having pro forma sessions.
Note that President Obama ignored the pro-forma sessions and made recess appointments anyway, which is a less flashy but just as constitutionally uncertain way of challenging Congress on this.
Already ruled as unconstitutional by SCOTUS, IIRC.
@HeelBearCub
Correct. Pro forma sessions are sessions, so those appointments were invalid. Trump would be able to make genuine recess appointments if this works.
That ended with a decisive court loss. NLRB vs. Canning
I suspect if Trump tried it now the SC would allow it.
@eric23
I think you are quite overstating partisan effects here. Party nomination matters on close issues, but NLRB v. Canning was 9-0.
If it happened now I doubt the SC would even hear the case. They would either not grant cert or would issue a per curiam reversing the DC circuit if it didn’t follow Canning.
Ah, my fault for believing the short hand headline.
And now that I look at the relevant case, it does paint a different picture. It’s actually the Speaker of the House, not the minority in the senate blocking recess. Pelosi almost assuredly is blocking recess, and would block adjournment.
So, this does represent a serious power gambit, if McConnell goes along with it.
If McConnell goes along with it before more money is passed for the Paycheck Protection Program, then the lack of funds is on him and Trump. Whereas now they’re saying the lack of funds is on Pelosi.
Sounds to me like the Democrats are playing the age-old game of saying:
“We won’t allow X to be passed until you agree to also pass Y; if X isn’t passed it’s on you.”
My preference would be for none of it to be passed.
So, I noticed something potentially interesting. Looking at the top ten news articles on “trump adjourn congress” in Startpage (ignoring one article that only mentioned it in passing but about something else), I looked at which ones quote the relevant section of the Constitution:
The Hill quoted it pretty much in full.
The Washington Post didn’t quote it at all.
SFGate didn’t quote it at all.
Newsweek quoted one really short passage.
The Week didn’t quote it at all (but to be fair the article is only three paragraphs).
The Washington Times quoted it pretty much in full.
Bloomberg quoted a couple of really short passages.
The Washington Examiner didn’t quote it at all.
Reuters didn’t quote it at all.
USA Today quoted it pretty much in full.
That’s 3 articles that quoted it in full, 2 that quote super-short passages, and 5 that didn’t quote it at all.
Make of that what you will.
It looks like the clause doesn’t prevent what it might see, like it prevents, so it’s not necessarily super important , unless you want to wonk out about the internal rules of the Senate.
It does mean the McConnell holds the “trump” card in this, though.
I’m not sure I understand your reply. Skimming the article you linked, it seems to be about whether one house of Congress can prevent the other from taking a recess. I’m talking about whether Trump can force an adjournment if the Senate tries to adjourn and the House refuses.
Yes, he absolutely can. That’s black letter Constitution.
I believe what @HeelBearCub is saying is that without the Senate trying to adjourn, Trump doesn’t have the power to do so, which is probably true.
Agreed. I just thought it was odd that so few articles were quoting the actual text, especially given its obscurity.
Ah, that makes sense. And, yes, that’s how I read it as well: the Senate has to cooperate. According to one article I ran across, there might be a way for Senate Democrats to block to attempt to adjourn, in which case Trump can’t do anything.
I cannot emphasize enough how not a lawyer I am. I am SUPER not a lawyer. Have no idea about the intricacies of the Senate rules.
But Mitch McConnell is the absolute master of them, so if it is at all possible, he knows about it.
@Iago:
My main point is that the key thing preventing Trump from making recess appointments right now is (likely) Pelosi preventing recess. If so, that means we already have a disagreement about ending the pro-forma sessions, so it’s not super relevant that Trump needs disagreement to adjourn, as we very likely already have it.
However, it would mean that McConnell would have to force the Senate back to DC to vote to adjourn. I assume there might be procedural shenanigans from the Democratic Senators as well. That’s probably more relevant.
I can only imagine the howls if Obama had tried this. If it happens, it’s another norm broken.
Obama tried to say the Senate was in recess over the Senate’s protests, made appointments over the Senate’s protests, and lost 0-9 at SCOTUS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLRB_v._Noel_Canning
“Senate” is not exactly equal to “Congress” but I doubt Trump would fare any better.
It appears the Senate can move on a motion to adjourn without a quorum, so McConnell wouldn’t need to drag the entire Senate, or much of it at all, back; the motion to adjourn could be done in a pro-forma session.
@Edward Scizzorhands:
Yes, I know as I referenced that earlier. Although he actually tried to claim that the senate was in recess in between two sessions. That’s not so much “over their protest” as “attempting to find something technically correct”
Of course, never recessing is a norm broken, and depends on a technicality as well. Note that everyone says the Senate is currently in recess, despite being in session.
And simply refusing to confirm anyone at all to an appointed position is another broken norm.
@The Nybbler:
I think “pursuant to a previous order entered by unanimous consent” applies to adjournment as well.
Why does the constitution specify that the president can convene one or both houses if having only one house convened is a problem that the constitution needed to give the president adjournment power to fix?
On further reading, I think “to recess pursuant to a previous order entered by unanimous consent” does not apply to a motion to adjourn, but a bare motion to adjourn (which is different from a motion “To adjourn to a day certain, or that when the Senate adjourn it shall be to a day certain.”) would simply adjourn until the next scheduled pro-forma session, which would not create either an opportunity for recess appointments or a conflict with the House. So McConnell would need the quorum.
Can anybody explain why nobody put together a remote-voting system at any point in the last few decades? We can do secure remote nuclear release authorizations, why not also votes on recognizing April 16 as National Corona With Lime Day or whatever?
For transparency reasons, I suppose. See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
I think Statismagician is talking about voting within Congress. For voting within Congress it’s not secret ballot, so each member can look at their vote as a part of the final count to make sure it’s correct.
As for why they don’t do it, I imagine part of it is that they’re mostly old and not comfortable with computers. (My parents are old and use the internet all the time, but congresscritters are different.)
Also, the internet has too much transparency. You can’t be sure of the privacy of a backroom deal if it’s over the internet, and you can’t use voice votes to obscure how individuals are voting.
@GearRatio,
I recall from a previous open thread that you were in danger of losing your job, or that that had already happened. What’s your status, sir? Are you OK? … and are you by any chance a software developer?
[If you’re out of work: I feel for you, mate. Join the club. -Ludovico]
~~~
@Theodidactus,
Ludovico tells me he emailed you his silly little something of a text-adventure game. Were you able to give it a look? If so, do please get in touch via email (click my username.)
If you’re up for a collaboration, I have quite some free time on my fronds. Your taste for the baroque and maximalist resonates with us!
~~~
My industrious assistant has set up a website for me, to host Slate Star Showdex and other writings I have posted/will post here. All six episodes to date have been uploaded, with improved formatting. You can reach it by clicking my username or going to canyonfern.neocities.org. [I’ll see about a custom domain soon. -L]
@Three Year Lurker:
I reached the point in Hollow Knight that you mentioned. Thank you for the tip, it definitely helped!
Awesome. I didn’t realize respawning enemies was tied to using benches until my third playthrough. Made that sidequest harder.
If you want an odd challenge later, try winning without rescuing Sly or buying the lantern. There’s only one dark area required for beating the game, and it’s doable if you use the garden entrance because then it’s mostly falling straight down in the right places.
It’s harder to come up with original titles to introduce these Dutch fixed expressions, than to find them
‘Hij ligt op apegapen’ = He lies on monkey gaping
He is exhausted or dying.
This is a peculiar one. Before this expression existed, there was another with the same meaning that was first used in the 17 century: ‘hij ligt op gijpen’ = he lies on gasping. This Dutch word for gasping is no longer used.
It is speculated that ‘apegapen’ was developed in the 19th century as a rude variant. Instead of a yawn, it refers to someone having their mouth open permanently.
There are other words in Dutch (and German) with monkey as a prefix, in the meaning of silly or foolish. So ‘apegapen’ would mean having your mouth gaping like a fool. The word also rhymes internally, similarly to how the two parts of Humpty Dumpty rhyme with each other. This probably played a major role in popularizing it.
Grammatically, this expression is also peculiar, with the ‘op’ = on. This construct is used in only a few other cases, like:
– ‘Hij ligt op sterven’ = He lies on dying
– ‘De New York Yankees staan op winst’ = The New York Yankees stand on won (= the New York Yankees are ahead)
This construct indicates a more likely outcome, but also implies that it is uncertain, when and if it happens. For example, if someone is expiring now, you wouldn’t say that ‘he lies on dying,’ but the Dutch equivalent of ‘he dies’ or ‘he is dying.’ The construct with ‘on’ is only used if it is a more lengthy deathbed. Similarly, ‘they stand on won’ is only used if the advantage of one team/player is small enough that winning is sufficiently uncertain.
However, this grammatical construct is limited to a few fixed expressions, suggesting that this grammar is no longer part of Dutch and merely endures in fixed expressions.
‘Naar adem happen’ = Biting (to) air
Gasping for air. This is what Dutch people typically would use where English people use ‘gasping’.
‘Apenkool’ = Monkey cabbage
(Talking) nonsense.
‘Eieren kiezen voor je geld’ = Choosing eggs for your money
Accepting less than what you really wanted (because of the likely costs or unlikelihood of getting what you prefer). This refers to accepting payment in kind, where eggs were a rather poor way to get paid even then (as they are perisable and low value).
‘Een appeltje voor de dorst’ = An apple for the thirst
Having saved something for a time of emergency.
‘Iets met argusogen bekijken’ = Looking at something with the eyes of Argus
Being very wary. Refers to the Greek myth of Argus Panoptes, a many-eyed giant, who would look in all directions and who kept some eyes open while sleeping.
‘Baard in de keel’ = beard in the throat
The voice of a pubescent boy is changing.
So ‘apegapen’ would mean having your mouth gaping like a fool.
Similar to (dated) German “Maulaffen feilhalten”, literally: offering mouth-apes for sale.
I have an economics question about recessions. At my company we are trying to forecast demand as best we can so we can plan for the next 8 months. How well we can plan will make a huge difference to us and the well being of our staff.
I’m in NZ, but let’s use the USA GDP numbers. According to Goldman Sach’s we are facing a GDP loss of 6.1% for 2020. We would have had growth of about 2% per year the last few years. So does that mean that standard of living and discretionary income would be about the same as in 2016? It would seem obvious that it doesn’t, but why not? Is it because of all the other disruption to an economy that doesn’t show up in GDP?
I am not an economist, but…
GDP fails to capture huge psychological costs of lockdowns, but as far as what might be called “material” standard of living goes, sure, that is what GS says more or less says. Whether this is anything close to correct prediction I have no idea. With the caveat that GDP contains both investment and consumption goods, so if you would see drop in consumption accompanied by increase in investment, then “material” standard of living would take bigger temporary hit that those 6 %.
But common sense suggests that capital goods that are not useful in sectors booming during the pandemic (surgical masks, delivery vans and so on), will take bigger hit to demand than general consumption.
I expect surgical masks and respirators will continue to do a brisk (though not pandemic-level) business after the lockdowns are released, as everyone prepares for the previous disaster. Probably also some specifically American demand for such, as a few places (e.g. state-funded facilities in red states) adopt made-in-America requirements.
That’s not so clear–this manufacturer wasn’t even running additional shifts as of that story (he’s since started doing so according to some articles I found while looking for that one, apparently with guaranteed purchases and personnel provided by the National Guard?).
He spun everything up for the last epidemic, bought more equipment, and hired more people, then nearly went bankrupt and had to go through painful layoffs when demand for his equipment evaporated overnight when it ended. The instant there wasn’t a problem anymore, every hospital wanted to save 8 cents per mask and went back to Chinese-produced equipment. It made him really gunshy about capital investments for something that may only last a few months.
I did read that story. But I think there’s a major difference: The last epidemic fizzled. This one didn’t. And also China has covered itself with more excrement this time, in various ways (e.g. sending defective PPE to France, repurchasing PPE while still claiming there was no problem) — enough that the Washington Post is willing to speculate on this virus being a Chinese lab release.
I still would expect things to return to the status quo of “cheapest masks possible”, but more slowly this time.
And this is one of the really cheap things that the Federal government can do: promise a market for masks so the suppliers make them.
On the top of my head:
1) The crisis has a very different impact on different regions, industries and social groups creating new economic imbalances.
2) There is psychological effect which is likely to affect spending patterns.
A loss of 6% would also be spread out pretty unevenly. Making up some numbers, perhaps 75% of a population would chug on approximately as before, 20% would lose 20% of their income, and 5% would lose 40% of their income.
No. Discretionary income is (lazily speaking) the gap between earnings and obligations. If obligations rose at the same rate as GDP and discretionary income was say 1/3rd of household income then a 6% decrease in GDP would mean an 18% decrease in discretionary income (as an example, don’t take this as an estimate or guideline or anything).
Thanks for the responses, all.
Follow up question: the 2008 GFC involved a 2.5% GDP drop from 2007. If this one is a 6.1% drop from 2019, how is this one different?
And if you feel like being really helpful, how do you think it would effect an NZ based tourism operator reliant totally on foreign upper middle class clients going forward in 2021 onward? For reference, our market in 2019 was basically 4x the market in 2011.
International tourism is now literally an illegal activity in most instances, right?
So, if we proceed on an uncertain assumption that it will be allowed in 2021 (in economics lingo, lifting of supply restrictions), there is still a problem that recessions tend to affect wealth of rich people much more severely than wages of us normals, and that they obviously affects spending of every class on luxuries much more than their spending on food, housing, normal entertainment…. or anything else, really. If GDP falls x %, I would expect luxury consumption to collapse much more than x.
The Bank of Canada (our central bank) deserves some sort of award for honesty:
What movies are best capturing the spirit of American nineties?
The Matrix is the one the immediately leaps to mind foremost.
Since it came out in ’99 I always saw The Matrix as a 90s ender. It’s in that 90s-2000s culture zone.
Oh it’s a common misconception. The 90s actually last from the mid 1990s to around the mid 2000s. They were preceded by the 80s which lasted from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s, and are followed by the second 80s, which started in the mid 2000s and show no sign of stopping since.
The 90s started with the election of Bill Clinton and ended on 9/11.
The 2000s started then and ended March 13th, 2020 with COVID-19.
We don’t know what we’re in yet, but we don’t like it.
Really? I would have thought Trump’s election was a definite breakpoint, and maybe Obama’s election or the financial crisis (or both; they were pretty close to each other) as well.
@eyeballfrog
Did the world really feel different under Obama than under Bush than under Trump?
I know for me it didn’t, despite major life changes personally, the “US System” felt basically the same under all three of our recent Presidents.
COVID makes it feel genuinely different for the first time in the past 20 years.
People said that Trump would usher in a sea change, but honestly, did he?
To me there’s a very clear difference between the ’00s and ’10s, but it’s hard to pinpoint right where it happened. Crash, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is a very 2000s movie. It won the Oscar on its release, but in the ’10s all right-thinking people despised it and wondered how it ever could’ve been made.
Though to me the most 2000s movie is Saved!, particularly how it pulls its punches where a ’90s or ’10s movie would’ve gone much further.
For me, the “make shit up and call it a law” aspect went from mostly-invisible to huge during the Obama administration–but that was really more driven by the courts than the administration.
@BBA and @SamChevre
I think the fact that both the left and the right now agree that Bush and Obama were the same “faction” tells you that 2008 didn’t fundamentally change anything.
I could be talked into 2016, but other than loudness, I don’t feel like daily life genuinely changed.
@EchoChaos
I either don’t understand, or disagree.
The financial crash of 2008 and its aftermath changed the world; both Bush and Obama were on the “yay internationalism! yay finance!” group–after 2008, people started looking for alternatives to that view.
Now you’ve got a fairly strong nationalist faction in the Republican party (Trump et al) and a fairly strong anti-finance faction in the Democratic party (exemplified by Elizabeth Warren).
@SamChevre
Sure, I don’t disagree that there were massive political effects that will one day change the world. But day to day, life in 2009 was basically life in 2002, which was basically life in 2019.
Trump wasn’t immediately able to effect the change from internationalism that he espoused, although COVID may finally allow him to do so.
There HAVE been some areas where things did matter a fair bit, and I think @BBA put his finger on a few of them, especially the court cases and ruling by fiat.
This is the same reason that I think George H.W. Bush was still an 80s President. The USA acted like it was still the Cold War for his entire Presidency even though it wasn’t. Clinton finally broke that.
Not sure how I got caught up in this anti-common law circle jerk, but I thought we were talking about movies.
– The 80s end with the fall of the Soviet block (1989 – 1991).
– The 90s end with 9/11
– The 2000s end with the great financial crisis (2006 – 2008).
– Culture War starts brewing up, explodes in 2014 (Gamer***e), and peaks in 2016 with Brexit and Trump.
– Now it seems that the Culture War died of coronavirus and we are in a new cultural phase. We’ll see how long it lasts.
C´mon, nineties obviously started with the fall of the Wall and ended on 9/11. Everything that was filmed during that era is nineties movie.
See my comment above. George H.W. Bush was an 80s President and nobody can convince me otherwise.
I think 9/11 to the 2008 meltdown was one epoch, and 2008 meltdown to COVID-19 was the next.
The 90s started on September 24, 1991.
I’d mostly agree with johan_larson, although Windsor/Obamacare seems like another major milestone.
Obamacare doesn’t seem world-changing now that is has been effectively defanged. Even limiting it to just the US.
What is the Windsor?
9/11 had many global effects.
Windsor
First case where the US Supreme Court threw out a recently passed law with strong bipartisan support to rule in favor of normalizing homosexuality. Sorry, that was very unclear before.
Well I was joking above, but the reality is that movie styles associated with a particular decade often extend far beyond that decade, with a fair bit of overlap with styles of preceding and following decades.
I’m more aware of this with the 80s style, but I’m sure it’s true of other decades.
So for the 80s in cinema we have:
1) A pre/proto/archaic 80s style already showing up in a number of 70s movies, making these movies quite ahead of their time and contrasting sharply with the rest of the production of the 70s: THX 1138, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, Alien, Apocalypse Now, Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, Dawn of the Dead or Midnight Express are some prominent example of movies released in 70s that already have many element of the 80s style and not so much of the 70s one.
2) A Classical 80s period, which is the canonical 80s: The Blues Brothers, Raiders of the Lost Arch, Blade Runner, Tron, Conan the Barbarian, Ghostbusters, The Terminator, Back to the Future, The Goonies, Aliens, Big Trouble in Little China, The Fly, Highlander, Predator, RoboCop, Die Hard, They Live, Batman – just to name a tiny segment of what the period produced in epitomic 80s style.
3) A Silver Age/Post-Classical 80s period, lasting until the mid-to-late-mid 90s and in which, even as the 90s are starting and their distinctive style is progressively taking over the cinematic landscape, we still find a fair amount of movies that cling at least in part to the style of the 80s and resist 90s trends: Home Alone, Dances with Wolves, Terminator 2, The Addams Family, Jurassic Park, Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys, The Mask or Stargate are some examples.
4) A revival/Neo-Classical 80s period, which start showing signs of a nostalgic return/re-exploration of the 80s style as early as the mid 2000s, but really takes off in the 2010s, and doesn’t seem to be over yet: We Own the Night, The House of the Devil, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Drive, Nightcrawler, Turbo Kid, The Void, Blade Runner 2049 or Mandy illustrate this somewhat niche but still significant revival.
Certainly the 17th of that month was still the 80s, so the changeover must have happened some time that week.
– Several Richard Linklater movies, maybe especially “Suburbia”
– Most Pauly Shore movies
– “Singles”
– “Clerks” and “Mallrats”
Solid choices there. Kevin Smith was definitely one of the bards of the 90s.
Hah, at first I read that as “beards of the 90s” which I guess is also true.
Clerks is a good movie, but does it “capture the spirit of the 90s”? The nineties were an optimistic time. Things were mostly going well. The Cold War was over and we are talking about peace dividends and the End of History. Clerks is about a bunch of marginally employed not-quite-losers. It doesn’t really fit.
I think the 90s might have been different things to different people. Consider music, where some of the most iconic 90s music was hardly optimistic. The Cold War being over was really only interesting to people who grew up during the Cold War.
This. I suspect that the “spirit of the 90s” was very different for adults in the 90s vs kids/teenagers in the 90s…
Yeah, we had GnR and grunge dominating the first half of the 90s, music wise.
Not sure I’m buying your take on the zeitgeist.
On the contrary, the fact that even total loosers are employed fits the spirit of the era well, I think.
This is a great point. In the 90s, being a loser meant you had a crappy job. In the 00s, having any job at all basically keeps you out of the lowest quintile of loserdom in and of itself.
@Well…
Thanks for recommending me Suburbia, I finally got around to it (I am familiar with Linklater´s more famous movies), and it is really good.
Oddly enough the first internet boom came and went in the nineties without leaving behind a movie that captured the frantic spirit of it.
Much of the film “The Wolf of Wall Street” happens during the nineties, even though it was made a couple of decades later. How does it do as a snapshot of the financial industry in the nineties?
“Hack the planet!”
“The Informant” does a better job, I think. At least in terms of look and feel. I can almost smell the 90s in that movie.
There was The Net, with Sandra Bullock, though I’m not sure “frantic” is an adjective I’d apply to it.
Not an American film (though it did get a cut-up theatrical release here) but for the spirit of the ’90s internet you can’t go better than Mamoru Hosoda’s Our War Game. Even has lag as a plot point!
Ghost in the Shell was released in 1995, and it’s based on a 1989-1990 manga. It actually predates commercial internet, though it doesn’t really capture the internet of the 90s, but rather the modern internet where everything and everyone is constantly online.
Honestly, I feel like The Matrix should count for this, too.
While it’s not really a movie “about” the internet in any meaningful sense, I don’t think either the premise or the general aesthetic it uses comes about in a society where the internet doesn’t exist.
The Matrix is just the Jesus story for people who can’t handle it if the hero doesn’t get the girl and dies.
Eh, you’re talking about the sequels, which I prefer to forget existed.
No, the first one.
Neo is told Morpheus is needed to save humanity by the oracle and that Neo has to choose between himself and Morpheus at some point. Neo decides to risk his life to save Morpheus and is shot in the chest and lies dead. But then Trinity tells him she loves him (why? who cares, she’s hot and wears tight clothes) and he comes back to life and kills a bad guy.
Nineties were Lost Decade in Japan. And that movie is totally saturated in the spirit of persistent, gloomy economic slump. How anyone can think that it captures some frantic spirit of internet boom is beyond me.
If you can find it, I recommend extremely cheesy Galaxy Express 999 (1979), as a movie that captures the spirit of Japanese economic boom.
Space Jam
My brother and I wore out 2 vhs tapes of that movie. My parents have a really heartwarming picture of us ecstatic over receiving that second copy for Christmas. Given that it was a time in the empyrean of youth before it all went wrong I cannot take any criticism of such a masterpiece seriously.
I vaguely remember watching it several times as a kid, and now that it’s on Netflix, I’m sorely tempted to watch it again just to see what it was like through adult eyes.
Boooo.
Also, the still existing website is a time capsule of 90s web design.
AHHHH FRAMES it’s adorable!
This is fantastic.
FRAMES!!!
Still better than plenty of modern websites.
The design is simple but without conscious minimalism, that being a problem with a lot of modern web design.
Just removing that star-field background would help a lot.
I don’t know about movies, but if you’re willing to go with TV, I think Home Improvement probably does best, followed closely by Seinfeld.
For animated TV, King of the Hill and Beavis and Butt-head.
I’d pick Daria over either, although that may have crossed into early 2000s territory, I can’t quite remember…
I never watched Daria, and King of the Hill ran well into the 2000s, but it remained a very 90s show.
You should. Daria is probably the most intelligent and cutting modern social commentary of upper-class American teenage life I’ve ever seen.
Daria is definitely ’90’s, and hilarious
For those unaware, Mike Judge also created insightful and culturally relevant stuff like Idiocracy and Silicon Valley as well.
I once read a pretty long-form piece about him that claimed his primary theme was agency. It cited Beavis and Butthead as a story of what happens when people have entirely too much agency, and Milton from Office Space as an example of what can happen when people have none whatsoever.
Oooh, I thought of a few more TV series:
Wishbone
Batman Beyond is the perfect “what the 90s thought the future was”. My friends and I still talk about “the future of the 90s”.
Bill Nye. Yes, he may have become a pompous jackass that nobody on any side can stand, but his 90s show was so very 90s.
I didn’t have a feeling it was specifically American nineties. Did it appear that way to Americans? More than other films of the time?
I just thought it was a great film, despite having a completely wooden Keanu Reeves as it’s main character.
ETA this was in response to EchoChaos suggesting The Matrix as the film that most captured the spirit of the American nineties. Somehow 23 comments appeared before I posted a response….
Doesn’t everything appear that way to Americans? 🙂
Seriously, it very much summarized the view of the increasing “Internetization” of the 90s plus its a solid encapsulation of what 90s “cool” looked like.
Rebelling against an authority that wants you to all be interchangeable units in a pod is very 90s.
Absolutely agree to it epitomizing the 90’s zeitgeist.
I guess it didn’t seem especially American because most films I watch are American, and they mostly just seem like films to me.
Having said that, there are things that really do seem very American e.g. House of Cards, Homeland, The West Wing. For obvious reasons, I suppose.
really do seem very American e.g. House of Cards
You might think that; I couldn’t possibly comment
Both Homeland and House of Cards were based on foreign series. Which may make them American after all…
Actually it was literally only film that I thought of as an answer to my own question before posting it. Yeah, it is very American.
American Pie is up there. Also American Beauty.
I second American Beauty as an interesting portrait of upper-middle-class life in the 90s. Everyone was superficially prosperous, but all kinds of problems lurked within most households. There was a generational values and outlook gap between the competitive and straight-laced Baby Boomer parents and their Gen X/Y children.
Retrospectively, I think it also captures how idyllic the 90s felt. it Was a time when a movie about how terrible it was to be boringly prosperous could have mass appeal.
The kids in American Beauty are (early) millennials, born in the early 80s.
On skimming I thought this comment was about over rated movies. American Beauty qualifies there, imo.
I’m the king of guy to dislike overrated movies (sometimes on general principles) but I thought American Beauty actually had stuff to offer. True, don’t think anything could have lived up to its hype at the time so yeah, it’s technically overrated, but still a solid movie.
Whereas I think the widespread revisionism around American Beauty is pretty much deranged, and it’s a legitimately great film that suffers the misfortune of being about an unhappy middle class white man played by a sex offender.
Independence Day captured the American triumphalism and sense of military supremacy that reigned at the time.
Fight Club captured the sense of malaise among a large minority of men who hadn’t found satisfying niches in the postmodern economy (I think this problem has only gotten worse since then).
I feel like this movie couldn’t be made today, because Hollywood would want nothing to do with it because it would be seen as “glorifying incels” or something.
Politely disagree because Joker got made (and was amazing).
Independence Day came immediately to mind for me as well. Also interesting to contrast its tone with the tone of the 2000s’ War of the Worlds. A sign of shifting attitudes?
There is a whole youtube video on that.
That was excellent. Highly recommend.
Also I loved the part in the middle when she cut together Schumacher’s Riddler with Nolan’s Batman. I want to see a whole movie like that.
Lotta good suggestions in here, I’ll throw in the following:
– Hackers: Spunky young people defying The Man via technology! Rollerskating! Hack the planet!
– Tank Girl: Spunky young people defying The Man via extremely whacky hijinks! Comic book aesthetics! Ice T as a mutant kangaroo!
– Jurassic Park: Oh no, our technology has exceeded our grasp! Just the right amount of CGI!
Airheads, Brendan Fraser is a wannabe rock star who holds a radio station hostage in order to get his music played on air and make a break for himself. It was a simpler time.
… so exactly like now except they were going to use Pepsi instead of Nikes?
I don’t know why they’re dinging the 90s for that, it sounds like every year from 1971 (buy the melting pot world a Coke on a hillside) to 2017 (Kendall Jenner gives Pepsi to a riot cop)
The United Colors of Benetton ads ran from the mid to late 80s
Maybe Atlas is right, maybe the difference is activists have moved on from talking of peace and now talk of smashing; and the ad men are out of step if they miss that.
Just thought you all might be interested to know that our host was mentioned on the facebook page of the British TV programme QI.
I’m afraid I don’t know how to link to an individual facebook post, but at the time of writing it’s the most recent post on this page.
Did Scott actually coin that term? I thought it was in use before…
I’m not sure. He doesn’t attribute it to anybody in his original post. And some random guy on the internet describes the term as “popularised, and perhaps coined” by Scott.
Unintuitively, you click on the time of the post.
Ah, thank you. That’s good to know. 🙂
Some sheriffs in Michigan are refusing to enforce parts of the governor’s strengthened lockdown order.
It’s going to be really interesting to see the arguments for why local authorities must submit to the greater knowledge and power of state authorities, but also why state authorities shouldn’t submit to federal authorities.
Whichever authority is controlled by Democrats is the one that should be submitted to. I think that’s in the Constitution somewhere.
Wha?
Things need to be in the constitution?
It is my understanding that everything is in the Constitution because penumbras emanate.
D, I hereby make you an honorary American! Whether you want it or not. You understand this country too well.
It’s a good argument philosophically (and always has been, not just suddenly now), but legally I think it is fairly straight forward in most cases that municipalities cede a lot of authority to the state.
Yeah, I don’t know what the legal arguments would be, but philosophically I see the Federal government as something created by the states, but cities are something incorporated within the states, more beholden to their rules. States > Feds > Cities is not unreasonable.
Yeah it’s not even that municipalities cede a lot of authority to the states; it’s that they’re creatures of the state government. There may be constitutional or statutory limits to how the state can use its authority, but absent those the state can do what it pleases.
This is called Dillon’s rule, and it is legally the case in all but 12 (possibly 13) states.
It’s pretty straightforward: the federal government was notionally created by a compact of the states, so they possess whatever police powers they didn’t cede to it, while the local level governments were and are 100% state creations.
In Michigan for example, the counties these sheriffs are in charge of were created by the state government as population increased, being created, destroyed, and subdivided as needed. City governments are also creations of the state, coming into being when the state legislature passes a bill. (I know the most about the UP, which when it first was annexed to Michigan in the aftermath of the Toledo War was one big county–I forget where the notional seat was, but it wasn’t Marquette, which is now by far the biggest city in the region and the seat of its own county. After the discovery of iron and copper and the attendant increase in population, that big county was divided into two by the legislature, then divided and rearranged more and more as people moved in.)
Chicago’s Newberry Library has a fantastic atlas of historical county boundaries for each state in the United States. There is a list which contains the dates of each time there was a change in boundaries. You select the date, and it shows the map current after the changes on that date. You can then mouse over each division in the map and read the annotations. Michigan’s map is here.
There’s no real connection between those cases. States and the Federal government are separately sovereign and have different (but often overlapping) areas of authority as defined by the Constitution. Municipalities and other subdivisions of a state, from the Federal point of view, are entirely creatures of the state and subject to it; there’s no Federal question here.
Whether or not Michigan sheriffs (who are elected officials, not employees) have any wiggle room to defy the Michigan governor’s decrees is a question for the Michigan state courts.
It’s basically the same argument that e.g. Yorkshire has to do what the British government says, but the British government doesn’t have to do what the EU says. Town, city, and county governments are things that State governments create to simplify their internal affairs, and their charters pretty much always require them to do what the State says unless the State is too busy to bother. The Federal government is a thing created by State governments to simplify their external affairs, and its charter says that the States don’t have to do what the Federal government says except in certain specified areas. The specifications are a bit fuzzy in places, and a lot fuzzy in other places, but the basic principle has been black-letter Constitutional law for as long as we’ve had a Constitution.
This (and most of the other replies) strikes me as a very legalistic sort of thinking. Which has its purpose and value, but isn’t what I’m thinking about.
There are strong practical arguments for local government. And there are many people who disagree and prefer a larger government. But in terms of actual practicality, I’m uncertain to what extent one can simultaneously argue “Trump shouldn’t be able to boss New York around” AND “Those crazy sheriffs and local county officials need to shut up and listen to the Governor!”
Without the legalistic thinking, there’s no basis for not extending the argument all the way to the Rolling 60’s Crips not having to do what Los Angeles, California, or the Feds say.
Because one sees the state governments as the real authority from which everything else derives? The several states came together and made a federal union, ceding power to it. The states incorporated the towns, allowing them to exist. All the real power flows from the state governments, not the towns nor the feds.
Why yes, I am an anarcho capitalist, thank you for asking!
My city was founded ninety-odd years before my state existed in what was then a personal possession of the King of France; I don’t think I agree that it only exists because the state government said so.
So this is sort of like how some municipalities have a policy of not arresting people for marijuana possession, regardless of what state law says? It would be a question of Michigan law if the governor can fire the sheriffs or if she would have to use state troopers (of which there only so many) to remove the great disease spreading vector of…paint cans from those counties.
Sheriff is (almost?) always an elected position, and therefore cannot be fired.
Yeah, and my historical understanding is that the local sheriff was elected specifically with this sort of thing in mind. The idea that he’d be accountable to the local populace and would thus not just blindly enforce whatever crazy dictates the crown came up with…
@Matt M: Funny enough, before sheriffs were elected, they were appointed agents of the English crown. The shires (sheriff = shire reeve) were pretty much the same as counties. Over in France, counties were ruled by their hereditary comte, leaving a weaker crown.
Indeed. That’s why the Sheriff of Nottingham is the bad guy who is all about enforcing the arbitrary dictates from the crown.
If you want shutdown orders to function and be respected, you need to implement them with some common sense. A lot of places have implemented what seem to me to be dumb and overly-restrictive rules. Those rules have two bad effects:
a. They reduce respect for the remaining rules.
b. They impose added pain for no benefit.
Now, the example of 9/11 tells us that we can expect a lot of “quarantine theater” in the same sense that we got a lot of security theater. Giving people lots of power and urgency doesn’t make them smarter. But if you value shutdowns (I do, FWIW), you should want them to be really focused and minimally invasive. The more pain you cause, the less tolerance the public is going to have for them.
One thing I think is actually counterproductive is shortening the hours that stores can be open– it leads to more crowding.
And reducing the number of trains and buses that are running. It crowds people, who may by the state’s own rules be essential workers who must continue to travel to and from work, into the remaining vehicles.
Are the shortened hours coming from the authorities, or from the store owners who are trying to limit pay or are short of workers willing to work during a plague?
The bus and train service reductions here around Seattle are primarily because a whole lot of drivers are calling out sick, either because they legitimately are sick or because they understandably don’t want to go out and be in close contact with a whole lot of people.
I’ve read that grocery stores set the shorter hours because demand is a lot higher and they need some time where nobody’s in the store so they can restock.
I thought it was also to give them time to do some deep cleaning. At least in my area grocery stores reduced their hours before any order came from the city or state.
My local grocery store explicitly said it was to provide time for restocking when they cut their hours.
This seems silly. If that’s the case you’d have a siesta in the middle of the day to restock. I mean, Costco already has absurdly short normal hours: 10-8. 10-6 isn’t helping you restock any more when you are already closed more than half the day.
The thing that worries me is that the conversation around lock downs is so heavily dominated by discussions of what’s ‘essential’ and what’s not. It reeks of privilege / performative signaling / theater / command vs. market thinking etc. that just seems to be catnip to a particular set of chattering / political class.
What of course should be dominating things is what actually spreads the virus. Or since, we don’t have complete scientific evidence, what’s most likely to be spreading the virus based on what we know of this and related viruses (I have, sadly, long since given up on actual, intentional policy experimentation [e.g. some areas do this, some areas do that, check the results etc.], it just seems completely incompatible with politics even though it would be really helpful in cases like this where there’s so much legitimate, not inherently political, uncertainty about the correct policy choices).
I don’t fault initial lock downs for being overly broad or a bit panicked in their implementation (particularly in NY). But we should constantly be evaluating the tradeoffs, relaxing things that can support lots of economic activity at low risk or tightening things that are higher risk even if ‘essential’. Instead the discussion seems way too binary and in some places it shows all the signs of being a ratchet, of people trying to outdo peer cities / states.
In northern CA the lock downs has had two strengthenings since implemented. 2.5 weeks ago (iirc) they closed parks and beaches which were previously open; and also shut down tennis courts and similar all of which were open before [excepting playgrounds]). 1.5 weeks ago they banned ‘non safety essential’ landsacping / gardening services. The latter is being widely flouted from what I can see. I’m not convinced either of these measures is at all justified, even at the time. Neither seems particularly likely to materially effect the course of the outbreak in ways that much softer measures couldn’t have addressed.
This is all based on models that (at the time the lock downs was implemented) predicted that even with the lockdowns hospitals would be full by early April from the existing momentum and overflowing at the peak ~April 14th. Here we are and the hospitals are ghost towns in northern CA. Those models were clearly way off; the health system is not going to be overwhelmed anytime soon, now is the time to start experimenting with targeted relaxations
I’d mostly strong second this, but one caveat: something that spreads the virus but is genuinely essential would make sense to keep open, but limit use as much as possible–the biggest example is probably the health-care system.
Right. The reason they can’t base lockdowns on “places where the virus is likely to be spread” is that there’s no way you can reasonably define that such that Wal-Mart and Kroger get to stay open.
Or CostCo… small local stores should be less likely to spread then the giant box stores with huge lines at mix people from the whole metro (last time was past the CostCo there must have been several hundred people waiting in line). Though prob. harder to enforce risk reducing things like mask wearing etc. at many small store then fewer large ones.
You’ve got to keep it open (to some degree), but open and shut aren’t the only choices. It’s at least certainly where we should be focusing our effort / policy fine tuning.
Agreed with both of you. We want to open up essential services–those that people will die without, those that enable those, etc.–and all others that are safe.
Of course, the latter category can shift as behavior changes. Like hiking trails being closed as people out of work and with few other venues started using them more.
Even then, how big of risk are hiking trails? My guess outdoor spread in passing risk is pretty low and this doesn’t have any material impact on the course of the spread, but even assuming there’s enough risk to worry about there, what about making loops one way, blocking off some parking to limit total occupancy or otherwise limiting entry, a reservation system, requiring masks, saying only those 50 and younger allowed etc.. There are lot of options, but nope, it’s not ‘essential’ bring out the ban hammer.
I agree with you too, there was probably a better example.
Though the last time I went to Redwood national park, the popular hiking trails looked like Walmart check out lines, this could be kept open with some reasonable restrictions like you suggest.
Closing tennis courts and lawn services reeks of privilege?
Yes? Though perhaps more performative on the first (closing golf courses would be a more clearly performative example). The people who work landscaping usually aren’t considered all that privileged, many are self-employed or seasonal or off the books or of questionable immigration status etc. that probably makes navigating unemployment and other current remediations challenging. They tend to work at most in small groups, mostly outside, often already wearing masks sometimes; it seems like some softer recommendations could have been an alternative unless there’s some big outbreak among gardeners no one’s reporting on.
From the top of the nearby hill I can see dozens of private tennis courts and way more pools (public pools are also [quite reasonably] shutdown) as well as number of small putting greens. The elite tend to have options…
Travel restrictions would be an example of a non-performative (they very likely help limit / slow spread) mostly elite affecting restriction, so this is not some blanket elites = performative kind of argument.
Outdoor activities where you keep 2+ meters away from everyone else are probably about the least likely way to catch the virus. Telling people not to go jog on the beach/in the park but letting them crowd into closed-up stores to do their shopping is nuts.
Given that all those choir members got sick, I’m not sure that we know that jogging 6 feet behind someone is all that safe. Lots of air being moved, from an to deep places in the lungs.
I’m not saying we know that it isn’t safe, but we can’t say we know it’s the least likely way to catch the virus.
The choir members were indoors and sitting relatively close to each other (1 foot between chairs, and no effort mentioned to space out where people were sitting).
I get the worry about deep breathing. I wear a mask on my bike rides. But being outdoors leads to significant dispersal of everything. One of the cruise ships (I forget which) went under quarantine but still had people regularly sitting on balconies to talk with people in neighboring cabins. Cases didn’t explode there. (I hope some epidemiologists are studying the cabin numbers of people who were sick.)
“I’m not saying we know that it isn’t safe, but we can’t say we know it’s the least likely way to catch the virus.”
Even if it’s not the least likely way to catch the virus it’s stil a cost / benefit comparison (a binary essential it’s open no matter what the risk [and surprisingly little attention paid to mitigations of that risk, I haven’t seen the grocery clerks wearing masks yet]; not essential it’s closed if there’s any risk is exactly what I’m worried about). The criteria can’t be that no one ever catches it from bumping into someone at a park. Maybe require masks, maybe limit total occupancy, ban jogging/running even. If the virus spreads in any significant way, outdoors, in sunlight, with people mostly keeping 6ft apart and wearing masks then I’ll churn in my Bayesian card.
I’ve also been trying to convince my somewhat elderly father in law to stop going to the grocery store so often (I’ve been once in the last month, he seems to be going every other day). I think he’s bored and grocery store is one of the only things still open, he often hits up more then one looking for particular things / things in short stock (he’s been doing a lot of cooking). He wears a mask, but still. If the golf courses were open in some fashion or another he’d be doing that instead.
The grocery store nearest me won’t let anyone in without a mask and the clerks are as well.
A promising sign! Last time I was at the local grocery they weren’t (~1.5 weeks ago) but I haven’t been since. Though that was still 3 weeks into the lockdown…
Grocery stores here seem to reflect how seriously their customers are taking distancing. I’ve been ranking on a scale from Piggly Wiggly (not a single person other than us wearing a mask in the store) to Whole Foods (all customers and employees wearing masks).
@Beck
Likely true. For the record, I was referring to a Vons in Orange County, CA. They also had 6 foot waiting spaces taped out and one way signs on all the narrow isles. On the up side, I wasn’t ever close to anyone, on the down side I was like a rat navigating a maze trying to pick up a few things in my normal scattershot manner.
A profile of Vermont Governor Scott, a Republican whose coronavirus response was praised even by his Democratic challenger.
This seems relevant to previous discussions about which people were handling things well. Luckily not everyone is Trump or DeSantis.
This is fascinating to me because he doesn’t seem to have been dramatically ahead of either the other states or Federal response. His reaction came on the 13th of March, which is the same day that Trump cut travel to Europe.
Vermont’s per capita death rate is 5 per 100,000, higher than Florida’s 3, comparable to Georgia, another criticized state. This is, of course, partially just because they’re small, but as far as I can tell he isn’t dramatically better or worse than any other state.
What’s wrong with DeSantis? I thought Florida was doing fine and had things under control, with their peak over weeks ago…
Most likely, Florida is just getting started.
How do you figure? Here’s the Florida COVID-19 dashboard. It looks like they peaked two weeks ago and are steadily declining in new cases per day and deaths per day.
I’m operating off of the U. Wash. IHME projections, which were very accurate in the case of NYC. They predict peak deaths per day won’t be hit until early May.
@broblawsky
That model is from April 12th, it looks like, since it has partial data from that day and projections past there.
On April 11th it has 48 deaths while the Florida official number has only 23. I don’t know why that difference. On April 12th it has 23 deaths, slightly below the official number of 32. Between those two days it has slightly more than reality, but not disturbingly so.
On April 13th it predicted 67 deaths with a best case value of 24 and a worst case of 154. Florida actually had 18. On April 14th, it predicted 20-156 deaths. Florida actually had 6, although it looks like this is a partial day.
@EchoChaos
I dont know if it is the case here, but ive seen some places using date of death, and others using date of onset, making it confusing to compare
We’ll see what happens, I guess. I’m not optimistic.
Solved. Floridas dashboard is only showing deaths of florida residents. Total deaths in florida is currently at highest.
@meh
Thanks for that. Where did you see that so I can get a more accurate set of data?
https://covidtracking.com/data/state/florida
they have info for all states, and you can download in csv
@meh
Thanks! Looking at that, it seems like new cases are still running at a rough plateau, which may be a testing artifact. Their highest day was over a week ago on April 7th, but they aren’t far off that peak.
I wish I knew what “non-residents” meant, because it could be a totally valid thing to show (e.g. no community spread because infected folks from NYC are flying down) or just goosing their numbers.
Deaths are rising, as they would even if they had hit a peak, since deaths lag. But I wonder if it’s a reporting lag for deaths from the weekend. You see that every week where fewer die on the weekend. Only 27 and 18 deaths on the 12th and 13th.
I appreciate the better knowledge on the data.
Certainly they were not, unless you count the revisions made to the model after the data had come in. Here’s an old NYS prediction of theirs.
Slightly different data, but here is PA’s hourly-updated per-county dashboard showing number of cases, ICU beds, etc.
It also shows that even in the hard-hit counties we have a lot of ICU capacity to spare.
@broblawsky
@EchoChaos
fyi, the UWash IHME site seems to have had a recent update which does put Florida past its peak
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/florida
@meh
Thanks. I am glad my skepticism of models has been vindicated.
DeSantis definitely looks much better now.
@EchoChaos
I agree with you about DeSantis. I live in Florida, and the only reason I voted for him in 2018 is because the Democratic nominee was Andrew Gillum, who is absolutely awful. I have been very pleasantly surprised with how he has handled things lately, since he has avoided becoming a tin-pot dictator, despite enormous pressure to do so. I grew up in Michigan and have a lot of family still there, so I’ve become very aware of what the possible alternatives can be. If there were a gubernatorial election this year, I would more than happily vote for him again.
@Garrett
In my country, we peaked at ICU beds used, above the regularly available number of beds. We fortunately increased the number of beds, though.
Why would you think this? Florida has been off its peak of new cases for over a week. They peaked at 1300 on 4/2 and hasn’t had a higher day since.
Deaths will obviously lag new cases, but their deaths peaked on 4/5.
Edit: Ninjaed by @Conrad Honcho
Market watching: I would say that there is about a 20-30% chance over the next week that we start a major down leg in the markets. I wouldn’t expect it to be as violent as the previous drop but this one would be heading toward 2400 on the S&P if it happens, I put a small short position on yesterday that expires May 1st, otherwise I have no equity exposure, and am 100% bonds, gold, GLD (including a small call option for September) and cash.
I just got access to enable options trading on my discretionary brokerage account, and deposited some money in it for the express purposes of buying some SPY puts. Haven’t actually bought any yet – but I fully agree with your premise.
If you have any questions about what I have learned (hopefully a lot, maybe nothing) in the last few months with options I’m happy to give my thoughts.
I’ve watched some Youtube videos and I think I’ve got it mostly figured out.
My biggest concern is doing something that accidentally triggers the “leverage” portion and leaves me on the hook having to actually buy 100 shares of SPY. But my understanding is so long as I make a conscious effort to sell my option contract before the strike date, that won’t happen (for buying puts/calls, obviously it’s different if you’re writing them).
Basically if I buy a call/put and sell it before the strike date, my maximum risk exposure is the value of the contract itself (*100).
You have the basics right, but the difficult part of buying calls/puts is figuring out your profit taking points. Instead of just needing a decision on the price of the underlying instrument you have a combination of price/time/volatility that is very different from regular stock owning. Beyond that when you make a big win in an options position the implied return on a similar sized move drop a massive amount. Figuring out risk/return for options in mid stream is really hard and very easy to get over enthusiastic about.
Basically it is very easy to reverse martingale yourself with options.
My current plan is something like “Buy an SPY put priced ~10% below the current price.”
My investment thesis is that by the time it expires, SPY will be way below this level. I don’t really have a specific figure of how much below in mind. But assuming my general thesis is correct, wouldn’t “buy this put and sell it the day before expiration for whatever it’s worth then” be a decent strategy?
Options are currently expensive. Current 10% ootm puts for May 1st expiry are ~$2.10, so at expiry you would need SPY down 11% between now and May 1st (11.25 trading days) to break even. To buy a month more time at the same strike price you are paying almost 3x, at $6.00 a contract so you need the SPY to go down 12.5% by May 9th to break even*. For mid July puts, buying you 2 months of time, prices are ~$11 for that put, so you need a ~15% drop from here to be break even at expiry. Oh, and if you buy in now and the market moves up 3% before it rolls over you then need a 17-18% drop from that peak to be break even for the July puts. You could easily be dead on about the size of the drop and buy have a short term bounce right after you buy or miss your timing of when most of the decline happens by a couple of days (I had an SPY put expire on Feb 21st ootm and worthless that would have doubled my initial purchase price if I had bought one that expired on the 25th, and quadrupled if it was a 28th expiry).
Then there is the question of when to sell. Say you bought $1,000 of puts that expire on May 1st, and tomorrow they have increased by 50% what are you doing? When you sell your first load of options how will you determine if you are going to roll that over into more puts? What is the largest decision in dollar terms you have every made in your life? I had experience with this before options, I played poker professionally in the early to mid 2000s and had a hand where I literally had to make a decision worth (iirc the largest) $15,000 and the last 6 weeks of my options were more stressful than any poker hand I ever played (without any actual action being worth that much on its own, and really adjusted for EV probably not worth 1/4 on its own).
*for all of these a drop of 5% tomorrow would put them dramatically up, but a drop of 5% the day before expiration and flat prior to that would put them down, I’m just using price at expiration for simplicity.
Eh, I see all your points… I’m not looking to become a professional options trader or anything. Just to place a few bets with totally discretionary savings that I can afford to lose. My biggest concern is just making sure I fully understand what my maximum exposure is.
You still want to have a shot at winning a decent chunk of money right?
To do this you need, at a bare minimum, to understand
1. How to size in your positions
2. How to determine if your gains are from a price change or a vol change
Edit
3. What a reverse Martingale is.
I would put it closer to 50/50 personally. 2400 is a fine level and a second wave would be textbook, which is my primary reason for having 50% uncertainty. It’s a little too clean, almost.
50/50 is to high for me because
1. My time frame was only over a week, which is pretty short for calling a reversal, plenty of opportunity to go sideways for more than 4 more trading days.
2. The Fed at any time could announce another measure, they have been very aggressive in both timing and size and any announcement could push the decline back by a week or easily.
Oh I see your time frame now. Yes too short to confirm a major reversal. 4/9’s spinning top was the nail in the coffin in my opinion.
Added a small short position on QQQ to hold over the weekend.
What’s the logic behind shorting QQQ rather than SPY or something like that?
Isn’t tech better positioned to weather this storm than non-tech?
I have a short on QQQ and SPY, so its not like I am taking one over the other.
Tech has weathered the first leg of the storm better, but parts of it are vulnerable to supply chain problems and long term UE. When there is a second leg down off the bounce it is often driven by the stocks that handled the first leg down well, and the tech bounce has made the put options somewhat cheaper than SPY options compared to the downside. If SPY broke its 222 range there is some technical (theoretical) support at 218, and then 209, and if QQQ broke its 170 low it is 156 so if there is a retest and break crash then QQQ could accelerate down in that zone faster than SPY.
I didn’t think Uber Eats was that disruptive. 😉
When did clothes and shoes get cheap enough for average people to afford to buy whole wardrobes of them?
In cave man times, the average person had only one loincloth. In cold climates, maybe it was one, big rag wrapped around the body.
The next era in history I know anything about is the European Dark Ages, when the average person had two outfits: a daily work outfit worn six days a week, and one nice outfit worn on Sundays to church.
By the early 20th century, the average person in a Western country had a different change of clothes for each day of the week. Today, clothes are so cheap that even the poorest humans on Earth have multiple outfits and can even afford to throw away clothes that are still serviceable. There is such a glut of clothing that people give away for free to charities like Goodwill that those companies send large amounts of them to landfills.
When did we hit the inflection point between one or two outfits per average person to three, four, five, etc.?
Good question. I recall being amazed when I saw the BBC’s wonderful “Jeeves and Wooster” series , taking place in the 1910s, and seeing that Wooster’s shirts had exchangeable collars, so as to keep them fresh and wearable for multiple days. Wooster was aristocratic, so his shirts were certainly more expensive than the common man’s, but so were his means.
Oh, I think I actually know the answer to this – I believe I mentioned finding some of my great-grandfather’s journals recently. He talks about clothes pretty extensively; at least in the rural southern US, the change came in the late 40s/early 50s. Apparently cheap cloth + relatively inexpensive sewing machines becoming much more reliable was the key.
Could this have been a result of war industry that had to make millions of uniforms with millions of spares suddenly shifting to civilian work?
That parses pretty accurately to me.
Almost certainly, I’d imagine. I think a lot of people got more comfortable working with machinery, too, either in war production or in the military.
What are countries without single-payer health care [1] doing to keep their citizens’ health needs covered during this massive economic shock?
[1] This is most countries.
(Somewhat with tongue in cheek) Why is it the business of any country to ensure their citizens health needs are covered?
One answer: for ethical reasons, you have to help people who are in acute distress, whether or not they have paid to cover their health needs. Given this, health services work better when they’re financed collectively.
Another answer: you have good health until suddenly you don’t. Not paying in advance for your health needs is almost always a bad idea, but this only becomes obvious in hindsight. In situations like these (see also smoking), the government steps in and incentivizes people to do “the right thing”, with varying levels of force.
Yet another answer: because people repeatedly state their collective preference for everyone to have their health needs covered (for reasons of dignity, feeling good about ourselves, etc). In a democracy, this results in corresponding policies being implemented.
ETA: why is it the business of any country to do anything?
That’s the only answer that seems correct to me: the sovereignty of government is inherit in the people, so the government’s business is what the people want it to be. But in the case of countries without single-payer healthcare (that are democracies) it is apparent that the people do not think it is the government’s business to ensure that citizen’s health needs are covered. So why would they have a responsibility to do anything about it now?
Governments can ensure that the people’s health needs are covered without directly covering those needs.
Germany has a system of private health insurers that take a flat percentage of the income of the insured. It produces results compoable to those of well-run socialised health systems.
There are ways to do healthcare well other than single payer. The USA seems to just anomalously suck in this regard.
By that argument, rights of any sort only exist if they are codified. In this case, the relevant right would be the right to property as all of this healthcare is non-voluntarily funded. Which people might like the idea of, but at the extreme leads to the “Nazis did nothing wrong” conclusion because the stuff they were most criticized for was in compliance with German law at the time. Alternatively, “antebellum slavery was fine” because it was in compliance with relevant State and Federal law.
On a general level, governments are instituted to protect citizens from externalities, usually human caused whether malicious or negligent. Invasion, robbery, fraud, reckless driving, etc. Usually this comes down to prevention via punishment, but it doesn’t seem a stretch to include spreading debilitating and costly disease under this rubric, in a way that it might to cover lifestyle choices, like cosmetic surgery, or, more controversially, something like lung cancer.
It’s also a collective action/coordination problem inasmuch as the answer justifies things like quarantines or other preventative measures.
That’s my off-the-cuff thoughts as someone typically in favor of smaller government and more voluntary charity.
I have a hypothesis that it’s because we’re at a level of development where healthcare is cheap enough to no longer be considered a luxury for the rich, but not cheap enough that nobody struggles to afford it:
https://alexanderturok.wordpress.com/2020/02/11/positive-rights-across-countries/
Health care is cheap enough that nobody in the first world should struggle to afford it. What is almost impossibly expensive, and will remain so, is the illusion that everybody is getting The Best Possible Health Care.
It doesn’t help that, as someone noted here a couple of OTs ago, we’ve nearly banned whole swaths of affordable health care because they can’t be plausibly advertised as The Best Possible Health Care. See also the loss of SROs and boarding houses on the housing front, and be very afraid of what happens if anyone manages to do that with food.
banning GMOs is a primitive version of this…
Yeah, willingness to invest in collective healthcare is clearly the kind of thing that depends on a country’s development, technologically and economically and otherwise. The ability to provide healthcare that makes a big difference is relatively recent, as is our general level of comfort, and expectations involving life span, caregiving, and many other things. And the ability of medicine to help just keeps increasing and often getting more expensive (because it is more complex and long-term, so it doesn’t get cheaper with scale). Having so many people working for companies that could provide insurance benefits is also recent. People saw a lot of unrelieved suffering for most of human history, and then that got cut dramatically for many in developed nations, and people are just generally much less comfortable with it. But it is just impossible to think we can pay for everyone to have the best possible care, and that’s a discussion we’ve tried to dodge as medicine improved. I think John Schilling’s point below is a big part of it. I think we’re also very loath to talk about mortality in general. A more realistic conversation would help us assess various options, but there’s no best policy everyone will agree on.
Cost of health care is unpredictable and potentially ruinous, so you want to have insurance. But markets for health insurance tend not to work very well; they’re full of adverse selection, moral hazard, information asymmetry, etc. So, if there is a market failure, a non-market actor (i.e. the government) should step in and regulate away the failure (as done in Germany, Japan, etc.) or provide the good themselves (as done in Canada, Taiwan, etc.).
Speaking as someone with faint Libertarian leanings, if the government (read: the general will of the people) requires me, a young healthy person, to stay home and lose my job to keep others alive, fairness dictates that they are responsible for lessening the burden that puts on me somewhat.
Since when has fairness ever entered into it?
It’s pretty much this attitude that turned Great Britain from a driver of the world economy to a backseat passenger.
Finding out that most “citizens’ health needs” were luxury items that weren’t actually essential to survival, I’d say!
Are you saying “most” countries don’t have single payer? Or the opposite? Why are you distinguishing this from “universal” coverage?
I believe that the vast bulk of the countries we are hearing reporting on do have universal coverage.
Most countries don’t have single-payer. They have price controls. https://archive.is/uagZ1
I get how Canada or the UK or Taiwan keeps everyone insured during a crisis: they have single-payer and so they keep on getting what they’re getting. What do the Swiss or the Dutch, who have systems like the US, do when a bunch of people are suddenly and rapidly unemployed?
That link isn’t accessible for me.
The Swiss don’t have a system like the US. They have a universal mandate that everyone have health insurance, and the coverage of that insurance is regulated/mandated. That’s why I drew a distinction between single-payer and universal coverage.
Not sure about the Dutch.
It’s an archive link to https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/13/what-liberals-get-wrong-about-single-payer/
How do the Swiss make sure that people have money to buy insurance?
Presumably the same way they make sure people have money to buy food and shelter.
@Edward Scizorhands:
Here is an article about how Germany achieves universal coverage despite having a multi-payer health care system.
I’m reading it now. Thanks!
From Wikipedia: “The insured person pays the insurance premium for the basic plan up to 8% of their personal income. If a premium is higher than this, the government gives the insured person a cash subsidy to pay for any additional premium.”
I assume this means that if your personal income is zero then the government pays it all, but I think that in practice having zero personal income is rare because of the various forms of social security, including unemployment benefits.
The Dutch system- @Aapje or other Dutch posters correct me if I’m wrong- is like the Swiss one in that there is a universal mandate to buy insurance that covers certain things. This is subsidised by the government, partly in the form of ”risk equalisation”- insurance companies are required to charge all customers the same premium for the same mandatory cover, regardless of how high a risk they are, and the taxpayer compensates them for the increased risk. Treatments not covered by the mandatory insurance, including things like dental care, are usually covered by add-on policies- insurers can charge people different amounts for these based on risk.
People on low incomes receive a payment from the government towards the cost of their premiums. A typical premium is about €100 per month, the government benefit tops out at about 80% of this- unemployed people are expected to pay the rest from their unemployment benefits.
If you choose not to buy insurance, you are fined and eventually the government will buy insurance for you and deduct the premium from your wages. The exception is those who have a conscientious/religious objection to insurance, who can open a healthcare savings account (in practice these people are mostly orthodox Calvinists, I don’t know how Islamic law interacts with the Dutch healthcare system).
Here’s a Vox article about it.
@AlphaGamma
Yes, that is correct. Basically, they try to make insurers compete on providing care efficiently, rather than by doing risk selection.
So the government calculates the historic healthcare costs of various groups (elderly, poor people, people with diabetes, etc) over all insurers and then compensates for that.
For example, insurer A has 10,000 people with diabetes and insurer B has 5,000. Historic data shows that these people cost EUR 300 more a year on average, across all insurers, so that is the compensation. So even when insurer A has a larger group of people that they have to spend EUR 300 more on, they don’t have to increase their premiums because of it.
The idea also was that insurers could specialize in providing care more efficiently for certain groups. For example, if insurer A only spends EUR 275 for the average insured person with diabetes, while B spends EUR 350, then insurer A actually makes more profit on these expensive clients with diabetes, than their healthy people. After all, they get the EUR 300 in risk equalization, but only need EUR 275. So the gap of EUR 25 is profit from giving cheaper care to people with diabetes.
However, this doesn’t actually seem to happen in practice (I don’t have much faith in large gains by preventative medicine and the like, so I doubt there is even an opportunity here). In fact, the entire plan of a highly dynamic market with a large percentage of the population switching insurers each year hasn’t worked out as planned. IMO, there is not really much opportunity for insurers to do something different, because of regulation, but also because it is just very hard to make healthcare cheaper, so the coverage mostly determines the costs.
Another Dutch person here.
There are a number of lines of defense.
1. These ones are unique to corona
1.1 The Dutch government has pledged €90 billion (about 15% of GDP) to helping out employers with up to 90% of their employment costs (wages+social insurance etc.). Criteria are not firing employees and expecting at least a 20% loss in annual revenue this year. Proof isn’t required up front (but fraud will carry fines, of course). So you can see how having strong government to help out with black swan events can already help to avoid mass layoffs and all attendant problems of restarting the economy post-crisis.
1.2. Self-employed people can claim up to 1500 euros per month, which is considered a social minimum. So say you make 750 euros a month, you can get 750 euros from the government. No questions asked up front, implemented on a municipal level. You will have to be able to prove that you worked 70% of full time last year, or about 1220 hours. Again, this makes sure that small businesses that do well except when some ridiculous circumstance force the economy to shut down, don’t go under. Much better than muh markets and muh own responsibility.
1.3 Without further detail: postponing tax payments, lower interest rates and emergency business loans.
2. Unemployment benefits. 70% of last income for up to 18 months, based on how long you worked, for a minimum of three months. Only applicable after wage-based labour as far as I know.
3. Bijstand (literally ‘standing with’). Permanent unemployment benefits with lots of additional requirements for job applications (you need to do dozens a month). Around 950 euros a month. I think you also have to have run out of your own savings, but I’m not sure about that.
4. Specifically pertaining to insurance: you can get a tax rebate for up to 70% of the Basic Insurance premium. (Basic insurance covers procedures as decided by the Ministry of Health, for a maximum premium which rises each year.) Usually this amounts to about 80 euros a month. This also works for people on permanent unemployment since those benefits are taxed, so the usual rebate system can function.
5. Lots of other things. Mixed markets and social democracy are awesome. The Netherlands are incredibly wealthy, extremely equal after taxes and transfers, world-leading in innovation in several sectors, very happy and the destitution common in the US is/was virtually unheard of (cuts in the social safety net have made things a lot worse for the bottom 20% over the past decade, for instance doubling the number of homeless).
Well, assuming laws like EMTALA and COBRA are decently standard, I think they’ve already done it.
COBRA, while better than not having COBRA, can be rather expensive to pay for.
Sure, but that’s a different problem and not one government policy has been intended to address.
That’s what your emergency fund is for.
What is the problem for them to solve? Most such countries with an insurance model will have some way to insure the unemployed.
Well, the private health insurance companies here just announced (I heard it on the tea-time news) that they’re giving customers a partial rebate, and the private hospitals are making services available to the general public, and the HSE is there for the rest of us:
Countries without single-payer health care that are not the US or third-world countries have mandatory health insurance, with subsidies to those who can’t afford it.
This!
In Germany for example your health care is payed (automatically) by your unemployment insurance (which is run by the government). So health insurance is (almost) mandatory and if you are in need you it will be paid for you.
One of many great systems. It’s amazing what you can do in a functioning democracy and with a proper left-right spectrum of ideas being considered.
Never fear, citizens! We’ve finally found out what can save us from this entire mess. All hail our new MBA overlords!
What do y’all think of IBM? It significantly lagged the late bull market as it tried to reinvent itself from its old computer hardware business to an AI on the blockchain cloud company, which should make this quarter a tipping point for good or for meh.
IBM reports Q1 earnings after hours on Monday 4-20, and Mr. Krishna the new CEO is being tight-lipped about what the COVID War means for them. More positively, by announcing a dividend increase this month the corporation would become an S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrat, and with a payout ratio of 11.23% there’s no good reason not to attract another class of investors like this. But do you see serious growth in this new business model, or will it be an also-ran as young companies innovate in AI and cloud computing?
Aren’t you leaving out the middle of the story, where they tried to become a consulting firm and mostly (per my limited understanding at least) failed at it?
Yeah, mea culpa. Thats a revealing part of the story.
Generically not good after glancing over their q4 2019 numbers, declining cash on hand and rising total debt is a bad look going into a crisis.
I can’t think of any good reasons for a company that is trying to reinvent itself to pay out cash right now. That would signal a money grab for its executives and push them closer to a bankruptcy short than a buy.
Yeah… dividends make sense for companies who are firmly established in their industry such that they don’t have any logical growth options.
But if you’re in the middle of pivoting into a new industry… WTF is your excuse for not having anything better to spend that money on???
If the new bosses had entered office on a mere 20-year dividend streak I would totally agree with you, but suspending the dividend in 2020 to spend that cash pivoting the company for the future means you throw away for a generation (of humans, not computing) the ability to get conservative income investors increasing demand for your shares.
Look at AT&T: with a diverse array of subsidiaries in such bad businesses as cable TV, where would they be without Dividend Aristocrat status?
They’d still be a telecom in a market with far too few providers. A nationwide cell network will pay for a lot of bad ideas.
The impression I get is that IBM hasn’t been hot stuff in at least a generation. Their glory days were the mainframe era, but that peaked back in the 60s. They must still be making steady money on all sorts of legacy applications and services, including backward compatible hardware. But when was the last time IBM made anything that was broadly popular? The IBM PC AT? And even that business got eaten by clone makers.
I think you’re going back a little too far. 60 years is a long time to last for a company that has lost it. Things were still being marketed as “IBM Compatible” at least into the late 90s, which says something at least.
The PC doesn’t matter. One architecture had to arise as the one everyone’s hardware wanted to be compatible with at around its era, to unify software. It happened to be the IBM PC mostly by accident, and not really because IBM made such a good design. I don’t think that shows that IBM is relevant. It especially doesn’t show that they’re still relevant in the late 90s, when “IBM compatible” just meant better machines of that architecture made by other companies.
The model M keyboard, on the other hand, is an actually good contribution of IBM in the 80s and 90s.
Cannot speak to the stock part of it, but the AI and Blockchain business is all smokes and screens. Their Watson business is a big failure. They tried to sell it to build diverse areas, notably medicine, and they were met with disappointing results. Their AI software is way behind the competency (Amazon, MS, Google) in almost every way. Blockchain…well, it hasn’t found any good applications. There’s few things you can do with a blockchain, it’s more of a solution looking for a problem.
They just dropped the price of some of their cloud services. IBM cloud services are, again, way worse than the competency, and they weren’t particularly cheaper. They do have some unique advantages, in that you can put particular IBM software in the cloud for cheaper than you can in the competency, but if you aren’t already using IBM, that’s not gonna change your mind.
What’s worse, is that IBM has not been spending as much as their competency in the cloud, so they are behind in infrastructure. The cloud is about big data centers, and Amazon, Google and MS are buying more of them than IBM so they are continuously being left behind.
They still get money from old business that built on IBM decades ago, but every year, an IT executive here and there decides to bit the bullet and rebuild everything without IBM. Eventually that well will dry, but today is not that day.
Dunno. Buying RedHat may have been a revitalizing move, but history tells me they are going to suck RedHat dry and then leave it to rot.
Their Watson business is a big failure.
Do you think this is because “IBM screwed it up” or is it more indicative of “AI is not going to be like this model”?
Personally, I suspect that “AGI with less than human intelligence” is going to be very difficult to monetize.
Unless you get into a hard-takeoff superintelligence scenario, task-based AI is just going to be much more useful than general intelligence…
Based on everything I’ve been reading, the main kind of engineering IBM does today is financial engineering. I don’t know what it will do in the short term, but in the long term their stock is bound to decline like all the other companies that have followed this path. The mainframe cash cow won’t last forever, and in the end, their loss will be AWS and Azure’s gain.
I’m suspecting it’s a house of cards. I’ve worked with several people who’ve done stints as engineers there and they all have this haunted look when they talk about their experiences. You know how you get refugees from war-torn areas who are delighted to live 20 people to a house because it’s got heat and potable water, and work minimum wage doing back-breaking labor because at least the paychecks clear and you don’t get shot doing it? Yeah – the corporate engineering suit-wearing version of that where you just have to wonder how bad things are such that they consider just about any current thing you’d consider hardship a blessing. It’s really weird.
If it is actually invested in block chain, as opposed to “has an office with five programmers to keep up to date with it in case someone finds an actual use”, then very, very bearish.
Plumber,
Are you alright? If you’re just too busy to comment, no worries. But I know you’re an essential employee in a pretty high risk location and am starting to get concerned.
Wishing you and your fam the best.
Cheers
Plumber did say his cell phone was having problems and he would probably not be posting until it got fixed–which, under present circumstances, would be hard to get done. But yes, I too have been worried about him and his.
If you put an @ in he’ll get notified.
@Plumber Are you well? If too busy to comment here, please place a note in a plastic bag and wash it down a drain.
I emailed him a while back and got no response, which is worrying.
It’s possible he only checks email on his phone, but it’s still at least mildly worrisome.
Just a few weeks of looking at hockey-stick graphs, and I’m already sick of it. I’d never have cut it in venture capital.
What are you going to do with your TrumpBucks? I’m going to be responsible and instead of spending it, I’ll invest it in the stock market, making this dead cat bounce and the inevitable crash EVEN BIGGER. – Everyone, apparently.
Where are you going to spend it now anyway, black market toilet paper? (Actually I’ve been involved in some barter TP transactions, please don’t tell the IRS).
Where are you going to spend it now anyway, black market toilet paper?
You jest, but there has been an explosion in a paper mill that produced paper for – toilet paper.
Black market toilet rolls could be the new gold – invest now and then price gouge the desperate! 😀
I’m going to put it in the stock market and don’t expect any dead cat bounce because I believe that economic wealth comes from production, not spending.
I prepaid rent and utilities for May, my other bills (internet, phone, insurance) for this month, bought groceries, and am holding onto the rest in case I need more for groceries or other unplanned expenses while looking for work/returning to work, depending on if my employer can re-open soon or just goes belly up.
More corporate stuff: who else is mad about bailouts, and if so, which ones?
I feel like calling out the government giving away money to airlines as particularly bad crony capitalism (unless cruise ship companies get bailed out, of course!). The airports are municipal property, the airliners would still be able to operate if the corporations that own them had to be liquidated by their creditors… what common good does it serve to give these particular corporations money?
Is that actually how it works? If American Airlines declares bankruptcy, how much disruption does it cause to the customer? Do they not notice anything more than the logos on the planes changing?
The logos don’t need to change.
Yes it will cause disruption to the customer. The question is who should pay those costs. I say it should be the customers, as is standard in a capitalist economy.
Customers will probably even keep their frequent flier miles.
If an airline is not making enough money to pay its expenses even with the loans its capable of getting (corporate bonds), it can file for either Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection under US law. This allows it to do important things like slash the wages of its employees even in the face of existing labor union agreements. The idea is that employees can keep working under these sustainable bankruptcy wages while its assets become the property of those who loaned money to it (this is kind of the ultimate risk of holding common stock: a bankrupt company’s bond holders have priority property rights, followed by preferred stock if it exists, and lastly you if there are any assets left). In extremis, the customer will notice the airline completely going out of business: the most recent budget airline this happened to was I think Independence Air, but it can indeed be as minor as changing the logos. The famous PanAm was essentially swallowed by Delta because the latter had that much more responsible management/balance sheet.
How much would it have been worth to the American common weal to keep PanAm logos on planes? IMO those are the stakes when our federal elected officials give airlines money.
You’re eliding some details of what happened when Independence went Chapter 7. As I recall, all tickets immediately became worthless and travelers in the middle of round trips were stranded with no way to get their money back. That was bad when it happened to a small regional carrier, and an utter disaster if it were to happen to every airline at once, though I suppose now would be the best time for it to happen with almost nobody traveling.
There’s also the question of how much disruption we’re willing to tolerate. If all the airlines dissolve and their assets are distributed in bankruptcy auctions, I imagine it’d take months before the new airlines are ready to fly, and in the meantime all the planes are grounded and the crews are unemployed. And that’s certainly not something we’d want to happen just as the virus recedes and people are starting to travel again. So for the sake of keeping things running, I’m willing to support the minimum possible loans to keep the airlines out of Chapter 7 and (probably) in the far less disruptive Chapter 11.
Not going to happen.
So you delay your vacation by two months. I don’t see the disaster there. Crews are unemployed for two months, also don’t see the disaster.
It’s a relative risk of holding common stock vis a vis preferred stock, but for stock holders in general, being at the back of the line for remaining company assets is also part of the fundamental protection afforded by limited liability. Stock holders frequently paint themselves as a badly-treated kind of creditor, but they’re actually a well-treated kind of debtor.
what common good do cruise ships serve?
None at all; which is why I’d be madder if they got a bailout. As BBA pointed out above, airlines serve enough common good that all the national carriers going bankrupt over the pandemic shutdown would actually hurt the economy for everyone through ripple effects (I’m skeptical of bailouts because I don’t know that they all have bad enough balance sheets… and if they do, bailouts mean they always will: who’s going to make the trade-offs involved in maintaining cash reserves or AAA credit if Uncle Sam makes it rain on the just and the unjust?). Cruise ships can go sink.
I’m pretty pissed about all of it because of the moral hazard argument.
I’m repeatedly told I should keep 6 months living expenses in cash or something very close to cash and that to not do this is recklessly irresponsible because sometimes shit hits the fan in unpredictable ways at unpredictable times. Who told any of these companies to cut it so close that a few weeks without income bankrupts them? They all took on debt to finance dividends and share buybacks. That’s what’s irresponsible. Without the debt payments on their balance sheets, a lot of these companies wouldn’t be declaring bankruptcy.
I say let the companies who are able sell shares to raise money, diluting their shareholders by doing so. Those who can’t will go bankrupt and their assets transfer to their creditors. There’s no reason to even ever have the day-to-day operations of these companies change — just who holds the shares. That’s the only thing that sends the appropriate signal and will improve future behavior. Bailouts privatize profits and socialize losses.
You are advocating for the complete destruction of small businesses.
There is no way a restaurant or bowling alley or lawn service company can keep 6 months of rent and salaries in the bank.
The biggest companies with big cash hoards are doing fine.
They could if it was a norm, they can’t if they are competing with businesses taking advantage of cheap money from the Fed.
I’d like to see some accounting rule that you can’t pay dividends or share buybacks while there is outstanding debt on the balance sheet. Debt holders should theoretically have the priority to any extra cash the business generates. Why aren’t they the first to be paid?
This is not true; if a company is not in bankruptcy, the only thing debt holders have a call on are the payments specified in the note.
What Nybbler says. Otherwise, the bank that holds your mortgage gets to claim all your wages beyond minimum cost of living, however we define that. Or if you’re going to say that households don’t count because they aren’t a “business”, then at least any net revenue from anything you do out of your home office, anything your wife sells on Etsy, etc. And if you take out a car loan and wind up driving for Uber, the bank gets everything but gas money.
This isn’t how debt works, and shouldn’t be.
There’s a bunch of different kinds of debt, but the long-term debt we’re talking about comes with fixed payment terms. Getting the right to windfall cash has 2 issues:
1. That’s really NOT fair to the shareholders. Debt-holders have certain rights in court that shareholders don’t. If the company goes bust, they get first dibs. They ALSO get first dibs on any windfall cash, in excess of what they contractually agreed to? “Heads I win, Tails you lose.”
2. Debt-holders might not want to get paid back quickly anyways when interest rates are declining because it means their higher-interest loans are being retired.
I don’t know, I might think about this differently, but if you and I own a restaurant, and I want the full profits, taking out a loan collateralized by the restaurant’s assets to buy you out seems like an economically useful activity. And it makes more sense the lower interest rates are.
@chrisminor0008
What you’re asking for exists: “Dividend Covenants”, which are frequent, though their usual form limits the amount of dividends as a fraction of net income, instead of banning them entirely:
believe this to be a good provision (hence why you want it to be mandatory), you should be able to build an out-performing bond portfolio by preferring bonds with such covenants.
I remember many years ago, there was a wave of arsons going on in a town close to where we lived. My dad was friends with the owner of a pool hall, and asked if he had insurance in case it was burned down. He said it didn’t matter, because if the building burned down, he’d be shut down for several months, and he would never be able to reopen. That was an apparently prosperous pool hall in a prosperous Midwestern college town. One that stayed open many more years, in fact, since the police caught the arsonist and the fires stopped.
I think this is a very common situation. Surviving several months with no revenue will kill a lot of small businesses. Lease, loan payments, insurance payments, taxes, depreciation of expensive equipment, deterioration of whatever stock they already had on hand when they closed–all those expenses just keep coming. A lot of retail businesses are already dead, and when we reopen things, that will be the moment that we notice.
Consider how many retail businesses have spent a month now with expensive inventory (probably bought on credit) sitting in a locked store, with no way to sell it. Or maybe they’re allowed to sell it, only the customers are staying away in droves for fear of the plague, or for fear of spending money they’ll desperately need if they get laid off from their job in the next few months.
Even the small businesses that come back from that will come back with all their cushion depleted, and probably their owner having taken out a second mortgage on his house, cashed in his retirement, and maxed out his credit cards to be able to reopen at all. Those companies may eventually come back to being very successful, but for the next decade or so, they’ll be paying back debts, the owners will be working 14 hour days so they don’t have to hire so many people, they’ll be super reluctant to expand in any way, and they will be in maximal penny-pinching mode.
There are a lot of old people who will be retiring at 80, and a lot of 18-year-old kids who will be going to community college instead of State U. There are a whole lot fewer people who will be taking vacations in the next few years, too. All that will have knock-on effects that last long after everyone in the first world has gotten vaccinated against COVID-19.
To put this in productive terms, how should this be handled? My instinct is to go for a universal set of rules that can be applied everywhere, so we minimize favoritism and corruption.
For example every company can benefit from some of the protections in chapter 7/11. Personally I’d also suspend minimum wage for the duration, in this context it’s just a dead weight.
If the gov decides to give cash to strategic industries (yes, I realize in some cases you want to minimize disruption) it should be done 1. allowing the gov to end up with a proffit 2. without interfering with normal market mechanisms. For example a standing offer of buying stock at at most March 1st prices minus 30%, with a mandate to sell said stock at market price sometime in the next 5 years. This way if Warren Buffet thinks the stock is worth more, he’s free to buy at -20%. And the company is of course free not to sell, and another companies are of course free to buy others whole and so on.
Of course, companies benefiting from this should be from hand picked domains – you don’t want to do this to everybody. And in particular some industries will likely never recover enough to make a profit from this – I wouldn’t buy restaurants right now.
To put this in productive terms, how should this be handled?
In very broad strokes: Going forward, every company, even small businesses, create “living wills” that say what they need in case of emergency. This can be just a few sentences.
“Non-essential” [1] businesses pay a small tax on that amount, say 0.5% or 1%. This isn’t intended to necessary be actuarially accurate, but is intended to slightly discourage those businesses.
Then when something happens that requires a shutdown, they are given money to fully pay their rent and 75% of salaries for the duration.
Since the incentive is to cheat and make their “what I need to live” number as small as possible [2], the businesses are required to actively declare their salary and rent numbers[3]. This is compared with the counter-party’s number in tax forms, and the business’s “what I need to live” must be greater than this number.
[1] What is non-essential will depend on the crisis. We also want to be able to allow businesses, like restaurants, to dial down to half-power without completely closing.
[2] because they have to pay a small premium on it, and in most years they will not care about the rare event
[3] because we don’t want to find out when the disaster happens that 80% of businesses were lying about what they needed.
I’m mad about all of them. I’m mad about the corporate bailouts. I’m mad about the individual bailouts. The shear volume of spending being done looks more like “bread and circuses” than it does any particular attempt at useful governance. And, as usual, I got to pay for it without the benefits.
I’d actually say it’s even worse than “bread and circuses” because the vast majority of it isn’t actually going towards buying things the average common person can actually consume.
It’s more performative signaling. It’s a grand gesture designed to make sure the common person understands that the leaders are “doing something.” They don’t even really pretend that the something in question will actually help the common folk. The common folk wouldn’t believe it even if they tried to claim that (and with good cause).
I don’t really understand why helping out businesses that are greatly hurt by the virus is a bad thing. Which is certainly the case for the airlines, and the cruise ships. It’s the same concept as beefing up unemployment insurance because so many are losing jobs. It’s trying to keep commerce alive while everything is upside down. I haven’t looked into the details of how these firms are being helped, but it certainly makes sense to help the ones who might go under because of the virus.
I think the one-time shot to everyone of $1200 was a waste of money. Beefing up unemployment helps those who are hurting; the money to everyone is just a stimulus payment in an economy where we are actively shutting down production. This isn’t the time for that.
If your perspective is that wealth just falls out of the sky and lands in the government’s lap, then of course it’s not a bad thing.
The government giving away money is not “commerce.”
Why just because of the virus? Anytime a firm is about to go under, have the government step in and provide free money. Reward failure all the time!
No this is only because of the virus. It is not a good thing if 20% of our businesses go bankrupt while businesses are forcibly shut down. That would make recovery much more difficult.
It is difficult to know how much and what kind of help to give business during shutdown periods. If a firm would have gone bankrupt absent the virus, we shouldn’t interrupt that process. Somehow it would be good to give all businesses the same amount of help, so the weakest ones fail anyway. But I don’t want all the airlines to go out of business during this crises just because none can make money when they lose most of their passengers. I don’t see how any company can make money when the government tells them they can’t sell their product, so it won’t be just the weak ones failing.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/16/early-peek-at-data-on-gilead-coronavirus-drug-suggests-patients-are-responding-to-treatment/
This article suggests early, small-scale results for a drug called remdesivir are promising. My general sense is that this is likely to be a leak to make the medicine look good and we should regard it as extremely low-signal at this point. Anyone have a good sense?
Derek Lowe was an early proponent of remdesivir’s chances, but he has soured based on the fate of the Chinese trials (link). I think he may be just a bit too skeptical in general, but he’s extremely credible on pharma topics.
There are so, so many promising drugs that end up showing no actual benefit in humans. It’s definitely the way to bet.
You can safely disregard any medicine-related article which doesn’t directly link to a PubMed article. This one doesn’t.
For real. Gilead’s name is dropped three times in three paragraphs and then we learn this is a recording of a video stream “obtained” by STAT news? Haha stock pump go brrrrr
It was open label not double blind with no control group.
Leaking early data makes it harder to compare with rest of the trial data and normally would invalidate the study for the FDA
RCT or it didn’t happen. Also, this result is particularly likely to be BS because it’s based on a mischaracterization of the baseline likelihood that the subject patients would recover anyway, per https://twitter.com/jeremyfaust/status/1251018179981316097
So related to below discussion of spreading foods, what are people’s go-to spices? I’ve been a big fan of Aleppo pepper lately; it goes well in marinades, salad dressings and taco spices.
Coriander. And Cilantro.
Is that a joke?
That was my second reaction. First reaction, huh? they’re the same? Second reaction, are they the same? Thanks for confirming.
Earlier this week I had a bowl of couscous that reminded me how much I dislike the soapy taste, since I’m one of those who lost the genetic lottery. It doesn’t bother me in Indian cooking, but it does in North African.
My impression is that Indian cooking usually uses the seed – I’ve seen the leaf but it’s less common. Which is North African? My impression is people who complain about cilantro tasting like soap don’t usually seem to mind the seed.
More an ingroup reference.
In common cooking parlance, “coriander” is the seed, “cilantro” the leaf. They are different ingredients, even though both terms are names for the same plant in different languages.
I like both of them.
For meats, cumin. I love it so much, I’m not sure whether I even make good food with it or if I just enjoy it because I’d be about as happy eating spoonfuls.
whats aleppo
A spice grown in Updog.
A slur describing someone with leprosy.
Smoked paprika: Goes well with most bean dishes, a lot of pasta dishes, and also eggs.
Red pepper flakes: pleasantly hot, and the flakes look prettier than just using cayenne or hot chili powder, and it’s more satisfying to shake them out of the container.
Thyme, because it just smells nice and is (imo) underrated.
Can’t go wrong with cumin, red chili flakes, and black pepper. Also garlic and onion, but to my mind those are a different thing.
Aside from the basics, Szechuan pepper.
Cumin and cinnamon at about a 3:2 ratio for sort of a Persian flavor. Good in a rice pilaf with onion, nuts and raisins, good on carrots, good on meat. Normally cilantro is my most used herb, but we don’t have any.
I’m not adventurous in cooking, so it’s pretty bland. A short list as below:
Fish – dill (because I love all that set of similar flavours – Liquorice, aniseed/anise, fennel, dill); juniper (the traditional for smoked salmon).
General, both sweet and savoury – garlic (if you’ll permit it classified as a spice/herb); black pepper and mixed peppercorns (I disliked white pepper as a child and it wasn’t until I encountered black pepper that I liked it as a seasoning/spice); bay leaves; allspice; caraway seeds; cardamom; cayenne pepper (as long as it’s not too hot or you don’t go overboard with it); cinnamon; cloves; celery salt (yes this is cheating but I love celery; throw in onion salt and garlic salt and lemon pepper here too); mace; paprika; tarragon; vanilla; wasabi (in extreme moderation). YR sauce/HP sauce, which means tamarind as well.
Ones I don’t like/can take or leave: coriander/cilantro (the faintly soapy taste, sorry Indian cooking which uses a lot of it! but in a curry I can ignore it mostly); mustard seed; smoked paprika/sweet paprika (thought I would like it better than I do as I like paprika but no, for some reason it doesn’t sit well with the taste buds); chilies (in general too hot for me); oregano, thyme, rosemary (oddly enough – not that I dislike them but I don’t care either way even though they are very traditional herbs/spices); horseradish (yeah I know this is odd because if I like wasabi why not horseradish? take it up with genetics, I have no idea why). Anything “BBQ flavoured” because at least over here, the mix tends to be too sweet for me (and it’s very probably not one bit authentic at all).
Recent discoveries I find I like very much (here’s where you all groan and roll your eyes, because this is commerical products not ‘authentic picked, ground and roasted by my own fair hands’ blends) – Japanese 7 Spice seasoning
I’ve got a reasonably well-stocked spice cupboard, but in order by most-used it’s black pepper with a solid lead, and garlic next. I use a lot of different chile peppers–I’d probably pick chipotle if I could have only one.
Frying stuff (at least scampi, chicken, and pork) and marinades: fresh chili, ginger, and garlic.
Fresh herbs and a squeeze of lemon on…lots of things.
Bay leaves in stews, curries, soups and similar things that boil.
Sesame seeds on/in baked stuff.
Are we including herbs in this list? I’d go with Bay Leaves since I make a lot of stocks, soups, and sauces. Paprika gets busted out on damn near anything. Sage is highly underrated, particularly on pork, and I particularly love Rosemary and Thyme.
Not a spice, but I got a tub of white miso paste, and having tired of miso soup, have started experimenting with putting it in a variety of things. The big winner was hummus, somehow the umami and texture profile was such that my tongue registered it as cheese.
Miso paste worked out in mayonnaise on sandwiches, but I’m curious to see how it will interact with mustard (in a pasta/potato salad setting.
I was planning on trying to use it with curry paste, but the curry brick I used was salty enough. I’ll try again in a few weeks.
Otherwise, it’s all about garlic and onions, with cumin a likely new go-to. Sometimes ginger, sometimes 5 spice. For heat, I’ve enjoyed white pepper powder. And MSG is great, of course.
For fried or baked poultry or fish: ground black pepper, dried celery leaves, taragon, oregano, maioram. For meatballs cooked or fried in tomato sauce: basil, cinnamon, thyme, plus all the previous ones.
Most hated spices, because they’re overused: parsley leaves, chives.
Propaganda posters from a less-common source than the usual WWII et al: the Iranian Revolution.
My favorite is the one implying the Shah was a virgin.
The re-opening guidelines are out. They leave discretion to State and regional authorities and appear pretty reasonable. Testing expected (including basic sickness checks at work locations), multiple levels of gradually loosening restrictions, and only moving to the next level if an area maintains two weeks of declining cases under the previous level.
There’s a good article in The Atlantic about the WHO and how it messed up in the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis. I think it’s interesting that the author is ultimately pro-WHO as an institution. We really need some sort of institution that does what it does. And realistically, any such institution is going to have to be pretty respectful of the major political powers, who ultimately provide its funding. But in this case, the leadership of WHO seemed pretty darn frantic to toe the line Beijing pointed to.
The incentives are to be respectful of the major political powers who demand respect and will punish them if they do not kowtow. And to ignore the wishes of any major political powers who take the allegedly more enlightened view that WHO is doing good work and should be funded regardless of their political behavior. Thus “unenlightened” behavior is rewarded.
The US pays the WHO about $400m a year in voluntary donations, yet China pays a fraction of that. Apologies for being unable to find an account of how much each country pays in either compulsory fees or voluntary donations, but I have the impression China is surprisingly far down the list even compared to quite small countries, and yet who the WHO is respectful of doesn’t seem to match who funds it.
Here is the assessed fees for 2020, a total of $250 million, of which 58 from USA and 29 from China. Here are voluntary contributions from 2018, a billion dollars from states, a billion from other organizations. 6 million from China, 281 million from USA, 229 million from Gates.
Refusing to fund the WHO because it is too deferential to China seems like it would make them more dependent on China because they now provide a greater share of its funding – and could even actively increase it to make up the shortfall. If the various member countries said “you do what is best and if China (or any other individual country) objects and pulls its funding or cooperation, we’ll commit enough to make up for it” is presumably a better way of getting the WHO to improve and limiting its dependence on a single country.
Funding for the UN is not the reason the current leadership is riding China’s donger. It’s the billions that China has poured into Ethopia’s infrastructure. Removing funding will make the representatives that are not from countries who’s infrastructure is being funded by China presumably vote for different representation.
If we need them, we need to wipe that bullshit and start over. Cause they suck at life.
Of course, I haven’t thought them worth a shit since they were pimping (and still do!!!) Stanton Glantz’s debunked nonsense.
This is largely a function of the current director owing his job to China, no? If so, “fix the governance structure so that censorship-happy dictatorships don’t get a vote” would seem to be a pretty good simple strategy for improving the WHO. As indeed it would be for a lot of international institutions.
The WHO doesn’t recognise the Catalan Republic nor the Tamil Republic nor the Abkhaz Republic. All the crocodile tears over Chinese influence is just poorly disguised sinophobia.
Do any of those have independent public health services with which the WHO could collaborate in any significant way?
Yes.
OK, you’re right that at least Abkhazia does have a Minister for Health. (I didn’t check the other two.)
But, I at least have much more respect for Taiwan’s political process and system of government than Abkhazia’s. Perhaps if I knew more about Abkhazia (I currently know next to nothing), my respect for them would rise and I’d be similarly upset at the WHO for excluding them – but I think many Americans are in the same place as me.
@Evan Þ
There’s nothing particularly interesting or unique about Taiwan’s system.
@An Firinne
Except the fact that their covid 19 response was one of the most successful.
But hey, why bother studying that? There’s way more bullshit secondhand smoke and vape studies to uncritically push on the world. Afteralll, they aren’t gonna push themselves. I mean really, studying successful covid 19 responses? Who has the time?
Trump is being criticized less for delaying taking necessary measures, and more for repeatedly taking actively harmful measures.
Well I can’t sleep. I’m tossing and turning over the economy.
I’m very worried this is going to bad. Very, very bad. Not necessarily “the living will envy the dead” bad, but like “Great Depression 2,” except you can’t subtitle it “Electric Boogaloo” because people are going to be so despondent about their life situation they’ll give you a really nasty look for making a dumb joke.
I just don’t see how you stop 80% of the economy for months, and then…just fire it right on back up. No. There’s already like 20 million people out of work. They’re not going to have any money to buy goods and services when “the economy” opens back up. Since no one’s spending money, no one’s going to hire them. And we still have weeks, months even to go, for that 20 million to climb higher and higher.
In the beginning, I said it probably wouldn’t be a big deal because I pattern matched “oh this big scary virus is going to kill everybody” to SARS and H1N1 and Ebola and all the other big scary viruses that were going to kill everyone that wound up having zero impact on my life.
But then I shut up because I don’t actually know anything about virology, medicine or biology, so I didn’t argue when the hue and cry about how bad it would be ramped up. The millions of dead projections and the overrun hospitals. “Maybe it really will be that bad. Maybe this one really is different, and it really is that scary.” Nobody even seems to remember two week ago when we were all going to die because of lack of ventilators. And that just went away, I guess. And then the hospital ships saw no patients. And the hospitals in my town are empty, and are forcing employees to take vacation time for lack of work. I guess that would eventually turn into furloughing or laying off if the virus continues…not overrunning the hospitals. But then the healthcare workers will be out of jobs anyway because the 20+ million people who lost their health insurance can’t get those non-critical surgeries they put off during the plague.
And we’re still shutting down the economy. And the pre-post mortem is…we should have murdered the economy harder and faster?
If things get as bad as I think they’re going to in the economy and not nearly as bad as I think they’re going to be in the plague, I think the correct answer will have been, “it’s just a really, really bad flu bro, wash your hands, wear a mask, try to work from home, make your own individual decisions for yourself, your health and your business, but the government isn’t going to force you to be unemployed out of fear you or someone else might get sick.” Basically looking approvingly at Matt M and DavidFriedman about now. But, I mean, of course the AnCaps are going to say “the right answer is ‘the government does nothing!'” I’m thinking they were right this time.
I really, really, really hope I link back to this post in three months to laugh about how dumb I am, that of course the economy is going to bounce right back, because there was pent up demand and “the fundamentals” were strong or whatever.
But right now I can’t sleep.
Well, I can sleep, because I drink every night before I go to bed and just slumber into sleep.
But I also worry about the economy. People who were doing fine before, doing great even, are not so great anymore. I’m going to have to start looking for a job in September-November. I don’t think I’ll find one.
My brother was at a company that was heavily hiring and had months of orders. They’ve started furloughing people. People who have just personally recovered from the 2008 crisis are losing jobs before they gained any kind of cash cushion. At least the 2008 crisis came to people who hadn’t suffered a recession this bad in more than a decade, with the economy growing since the early nineties.
I also hope we are all wrong, and it’s going to be a V shaped recovery. But I don’t think it will be.
“If it was” is the wrong question to ask. I think that it’s very likely that, at least at the relative values I attach to quality of life vs preservation of life, the countermeasures will inflict more – possibly much more – harm than the virus will.
But that’s not a useful thing to compare, because it ignores how much more harm the virus would inflict if not for the lockdown.
Essentially, we’re in the old joke about throwing balls of paper out of the window to drive away tigers. How do you know it’s working? Look, no tigers! But while that’s incredibly easy to mock, the overwhelming consensus among the people who actually know about these things is that without the balls of paper, Shere Khan would be squabbling with Tigger for our entrails before you can say “Judith Kerr”.
It’s the nature of exponential growth that small changes in the exponent produce massive changes in the output. At present the US death toll is in the low tens of thousands, which makes the lockdown look pretty disproportionate. But before the lockdown, cases were doubling every three days or so; a month of that is a factor of a thousand, and you’d be looking at a death toll in the high hundreds of thousands or low millions before herd immunity kicked in and the curve started looking sigmoid rather than exponential.
At the risk of making your anxiety even worse, I’d point out that our expert overlord class isn’t even proposing to allow us to try and do that.
Like, even if you believed a V-shape recovery was technically possible in a scenario where the state says, “OK, the disease is gone now, everybody go back to how it was before!” (and as you say, it almost certainly isn’t), even the most hardcore politicians in favor of reopening are being quite clear that this isn’t even on the table.
Well, I think I’m tired enough to sleep now, so I’m going to go try, but I guess to distill my thoughts:
I read all the comments on the “A Failure, But not to Predict” post, and it seems like the lesson is, “it didn’t take experts to predict a pandemic would spread, just a basic understanding of exponential growth, so I should have been panicking early about the obvious looming pandemic.”
Okay, well, it doesn’t take a Nobel prize winning economist to understand that unemploying 20, 30, 40 million people in the span of a few weeks will wind up crashing the economy so hard it may not be recoverable, just a really basic understanding of how goods and services are produced and then trade hands between people. So to people not panicking…why?
Like, “man, all the signs were right there, I totally should have been panicking in January over the virus. Now I’ll make sure to panic at the appropriate time for the next obviously foreseeable catastrophe. La, de da da de da.” Umm, it’s right there. This is next time. A thing that no one has ever seen before is about to happen because look at the unemployment numbers. The whole “shut everything down” idea was really, really, really bad and it’s very, very obvious.
Some of us are panicking, but we started 6-12 weeks ago and are more or less in as good shape as we could hope so we aren’t spreading the panic.
What people not panicking? I haven’t seen anyone arguing that the economic consequences of a lockdown won’t be catastrophic.
Whoever keeps buying shares of the Dow, S&P, etc…
The politicians who want to keep the lockdowns going on. The media types who keep writing about how we should have locked down harder/sooner and are finger-wagging at governments not locking down hard enough.
We’ve clearly locked down too hard. We can tell because the medical capacity isn’t even whelmed, much less overwhelmed. So now we’re going to be tanking the economy way, way hard. And the suffering from that is going to dwarf what we’d get by whelming the medical system.
There are lots of people voicing concern, there are relatively few people actively making the changes you should make if you are facing a depression.
This. Basically everyone is saying “there’s going to be a depression” but virtually nobody is actually doing anything about it…
But what can an individual do?
I’ve reduced expenses and have all my savings in cash. I’ve also increased my savings rate. What else can I do? I need the money too much to risk it in the market.
Broad out lines are
Tier 1
reduce expenses
save cash
buy gold
stash 3-6 months of calories if you can
Tier 2
Expand your skill sets where you can so you have more job options
Get out of all long term contracts that you can
Extend your mortgage out as long as you can if you have one (as long as the cost to do so isn’t to high)
Tier 3
Improve your habits. It is much better psychologically to give something up voluntarily than to be forced into it. I quit drinking this past week (I had been drinking more with more time at home and I knew I should have done this sooner), am hanging up the laundry on a line instead of drying, and a few other things like this.
Not just that, but they are paying people not to go back to work, reinforcing the expectation that their specific jobs are coming back and preventing needed shifts.
I’d be more inclined to listen to the people saying “omg the lockdown is the real killer” if there weren’t so much overlap between them and the people who were saying “lol it’s just the flu bro and it will go away in April.”
People don’t want to admit they fucked up. And instead of manning up and admitting they got it wrong, this is just a continuance of the same denial we saw in February and March.
Because if it turns out that the lockdown is the real killer, their original mistake of saying there was nothing wrong was actually the right call. They were right all along!
I think I’d fit into that set, with the caveat that I don’t think “the lockdown is the real killer” YET. But I think it would end up being if it lasts as long as many people seem to be asking for. Somewhere in the 2-3 month range I think you really start ramping up the death effects from a lockdown (but of course we don’t get to see those in a spike, because they are mostly delayed by years), probably at going over 3 months I’d estimate we’d start to hit something like 100k over 5 years, plus some million+ people with dramatically reduced life expectancy, but you wont see that affect for 10+ years.
Certainly I am someone who has consistently said here (and elsewhere), “I am frustrated by not knowing things.” There was a thread where someone asked about it and I said something like, “this is one of the things I’m least certain about.” I’ve consistently tried adjusting my mental model based on the data I saw. A week+ ago my model was that it was very very infectious and about 10x as bad as the flu in kill rate. Recently I’ve adjusted both down slightly. I’ve also adjusted downward my estimates of the casualties from lockdown. Last month I expected more unemployment claims than we have now. Now, perhaps that is also a lagging indicator and I will be proven wrong about being wrong. IDK.
There is just too much uncertainty, and it feels to me that institutionally there is no motivation to try and give certainty. Media, CDC, WHO, FDA, they all give me the vibe of intentional lack of curiosity about the questions I am asking.
I think it’s definitely worse than the flu. But I also think the response has been an overreaction. The goal of the response was to prevent the medical system from being overwhelmed, and while the flu is bad, the medical system is clearly not overwhelmed, and we don’t seem to be in any rush to reopen. This is going to be catastrophic for the economy.
I wonder if, as we try to get the economy re-started, marijuana legalization starts to pick up steam. Job creator, generates revenue for the state. Helps pacify an angry/upset/unemployed populace. Seems like a win-win.
This won’t help you sleep any better….
Stock and Bond markets aren’t functioning as pricing mechanisms now, which is probably a pretty bad sign. Its pretty hard to reconcile oil prices collapsing overnight to lows 10-20% lower than the pre-opec production cut lows, China’s GDP numbers coming out 13% worse than expected and a stock market that is up 2.5-3% on top of 3 weeks of gains.
The 10 year Treasury is back where it was on April 1-3, Oil is back well below its lows set April 1-3, gold is up ~ $100 an ounce since April 1 and is down off 7.5 year highs, and the S&P 500 is set to open at ~ 15% up off the April 1 close. Now it could be that the stock market is right and the other markets wrong (I don’t see that) but it is pretty clear that there is a disconnect in expectations across these markets.
Yeah I’ve noticed that too. Madness.
Oh, and props to you for being right about the economy collapsing. I mentioned Matt M and DavidFriedman, but that was more about the virus, but you’ve been dead on about the economy.
Okay, so I did have one other investment asset that was not part of my retirement. About 20 years ago when my grandmother passed I came into a few thousand dollars and I had nothing to do with it so I opened an index fund. I then forgot about it except once a year when I’d get the 1099-div form. I planned to just hold that through all this because, meh, it’ll go up, too, eventually, and i don’t want to pay the capital gains taxes.
With the market bounce this week, which I think is completely nuts, I took the opportunity to sell it. I just sold it with the market back up to 24,000, and will be stashing that cash for the foreseeable future. I’m not touching my workplace retirement account, though.
It’s been hilarious watching Wall Street Bets recently. They all went short since they were expecting an economic collapse, and now they’re all running around with their puts on fucking fire, pissing and moaning about how irrational and retarded this bull market is. The memes and shitposting have been fantastic. Stonks only go up!
Are you saying I’m smarter than /r/wallstreebets?!?!
You’re not gambling with your life savings by trying to day trade, so yes, yes you are.
It’s true that most of our institutions (and most people, including myself) underestimated this thing to begin with. And when things started getting bad in Italy and Washington State, we corrected somewhat.
And then we overestimated it; we were supposed to have people — and not just the old and the sickly, we were told, but many young and healthy people too — dropping dead around us. Hospitals full, patients dying in the hallways, bodies stacking up unburied in the streets, etc. And most of that didn’t happen; in New York, hospitals got busy but only a few were literally overwhelmed. Morgues _did_ overflow — COVID-19 is indeed quite lethal — but contingency procedures sufficed; bodies stacked up in refrigerated trucks and ice rinks, not uncontrolled on the street.
We are not, however, correcting for the overestimation. Probably for several reasons, but the major one IMO is that the governments like these lockdowns. Governors are ruling by decree, which any power-seeker must love. Public health authorities get outsized influence, and they’re naturally inclined to a precautionary approach; if lifting the lockdowns could kill people they’ll advise against it. Various articles have been published about how the disease is actually worse than we think (I’ve seen estimated R0 numbers of up to 7, up from the original 2.3), which gives more excuse (I suspect some of these articles are CCP propaganda designed to convince the West to destroy itself). The feds are showering money on the poor, so they’re not going to riot for now. And nobody cares about landlords and other such people being hurt (in NJ, many landlords are getting no rent but still have to pay property tax on time). There’s simply no incentive for governments to lift the lockdowns, and many reasons not to.
Probably the best thing would be for Trump to announce that the lockdowns should absolutely continue forever. Cuomo would then lift the NYC lockdown on Monday and Murphy (NJ) on Tuesday…
Agree. So long as “supports ending lockdowns” is even roughly correlated with “supports Trump and Trump’s policies” we are going to see a huge segment of society fight tooth and nail to keep the lockdowns in place as long as possible.
I am worried, for precisely the reasons you list, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do bedsides all the things one is already supposed to do to prepare for the coronavirus (stockpile food and water, get into guns, etc.), except maybe being as frugal as possible in case I lose my current job (which I still have, thankfully; my hours even increased because now I have to drive to work an hour early to beat the curfew!).
Virtually all of my net worth is in my checking account, with the only real exceptions being my car and a relatively small amount of cash I keep at home, so I’m not worried about the stock market. But, like, how likely is it that my bank is going to fail? Should I be keeping more of my money at home under the metaphorical mattress? For that matter, how likely is the dollar to collapse (surely the money printer can’t go BRRR forever without consequences)? Should I be getting into gold and bitcoin?
That’s kind of where I’m at too. I don’t know how you stock up for a depression. It’s not like the power goes out or the water gets poisoned. I also still don’t think my job is in serious danger. I will not at all be shocked about not getting a raise this year, but my job is in…little danger. My organization cannot fail, and my place in it is pretty damn secure. I’m getting personal compliments from the CEO about how exceptional and useful my work has been during all this. I think I’m fine.
I guess I should cash out my 403(b)? I wasn’t planning on retiring for 25 years so I figured I would ride this out…but I also wasn’t figuring they were going to do the lockdown thing for more than a few weeks. And the market is bizarrely optimistic right now. I should probably figure out how to do that. I still don’t know anything about finance.
Beyond that I have no idea what to buy to prepare. More bullets, in case people try to take my stuff? It’s crazy.
A depression (or virus) won’t cause these things directly. But routine problems with electrical/water system will probably be more difficult to quickly restore in an environment where workers are sick, or engaging in absenteeism because they’re worried about getting sick, and local public governments have no money, and even if they wanted to hire replacements, nobody is showing up for interviews, etc.
Basically, you should revise downwards your general estimate of the reliability of everything, from “the lights will come on when I hit the light switch” to “there will be food to buy when I show up at the grocery store.” Maybe that revision is just updating from 99.9% to 99% or something like that… but it’s still worth thinking about.
If you’re looking for cases on which to calibrate what a first-world country looks like when going through an economic meltdown, maybe look at Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain during the European debt crisis, and maybe some Asian countries during the Asian debt crisis a couple decades earlier?
@albatross11:
What does it look like if most developed countries are going through it, instead of just a handful at a time?
The European debt crisis was the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, so lots of countries were going through it at the same time. Greece felt a lot more pain from that than Germany, but I don’t think Germany was flush with cash either. But I’m curious what people who lived through that time in Europe have to say.
I remember trying to get a side job as a student during the worst of the crisis.
One thing to note is, the only “jobs” in the online job sites are MLM scams. Avoid* MLMs. Why are MLMs legal? The behaviour of MLMs during this time of need is incredibly scammy.
*Not like I’d think anybody in SSC would end up in an MLM, but I wouldn’t think anyone would. I, a naive inexperienced sheltered autistic teenager, immediately felt that paying to get a job is a scam. But I guess desperation does strange things to people.
Conjecture: coronavirus does not spread through hands.
There’s a lot of variation in physical cash usage among countries. Some are almost cash-free, some are almost cash-only. But the data looks like all countries have the same rate of spread until some isolation is imposed. That must mean cash isn’t a significant vector, but why wouldn’t it be if the virus spreads on touch?
(Apologies if already discussed – I’m unable to read all COVID-19 threads here due to sheer volume)
Maybe the effect of cash is lost in the noise? There’ll be a lot of cultural factors.
In some countries, it’s normal to hug and kiss people you know whenever you see them. Some countries have very crowded mass transit, others don’t. I’m sure background hygiene standards vary by culture. And so on.
I’d be really surprised if a country that generally uses cash didn’t have a higher rate of transmission than the same country mostly using contactless.
Not sure why. The degree of contact infection is questionable, and the virus survives poorly on cardboard (which I imagine would extend to paper bills). And I may have missed later developments, but it still looks to me at facemask-rich countries do better than those following previous advice of not using them – so breath-borne droplets seems likely to be the most important vector.
Add to this that cashless doesn’t mean touchless. Basically every transaction I do at a store or restaurant involves me putting a plastic card into a slot and pressing a button or two. (And if I’m going through a drive-through I have to actually hand my card to someone who hands it back. Most of the lately time that person’s hands are gloved, but I doubt they use a new pair of gloves for each transaction, and only once have I seen the person in a facemask so most of them have been breathing on my card too.) I try to use a knuckle for the button-pressing, and then clean my hands as soon as possible afterward, but not everyone does this and it’s still plenty clear that there’s an opportunity to transmit a virus.
Don’t you have contactless cards? or are your purchases above the limit?
In Spain, they’ve raised the limit on contactless payments to 50 euros. In the UK, it’s gone from 30 to 45 GBP. That’s usually more than enough for most of my purchases, even now that I spend more on groceries.
As ana says, contactless does actually mean touchless, if you’ve got the hand coordination. Most people tap briefly with their card or smartphone because trying not to is like trying to play a note on a theremin with precision.
I can imagine a maximum hygiene version where the static device has a brass stud whose purpose is to halt the card at a standard distance. Brass for antiviral properties, and stud to minimise the contact area from transaction to transaction (unfortunately everyone would still be touching the same stud, you just hope they’re touching a minimal amount of card or phone)
Perhaps a brass ring rotating through a soap bath would be better? Or perhaps I’m overthinking it all, and a brass plate that you’re encouraged to only touch with the corner of your phone would work.
Huh? I’m talking about a credit or debit card, most of which have little chips in them. You take the card out of your wallet, slide it chip-first into a slot (some of the older machines still have you swipe it down the side), then you press a couple buttons authorizing the payment. At gas stations you often have to enter your zip code. If you’re paying through debit you have to enter your pin instead and then press a button if you want cash back, and if you do you have to press one or more buttons to select/enter the amount.
As for the thing where you tap your phone, I have a flip phone so that isn’t a thing for me. But even if it was, Del Cotter points out that getting the phone close enough to the machine but not touching it is too fine a task for most people.
I am talking about credit or debit cards. They work like the phones, you don’t have to touch the card reader.
Apparently, they’re much less common in the US. But if so, I agree, I think that if you can count exact change, for example, there’s less touching than having to insert a card and key in the pincode.
I don’t think I’ve seen one of those.
I have some cards that have that contactless point. I’ve only ever seen readers at CVS and Walgreens.
The contactless card is the original technology, the phones are just “being a card”, the same way they’ve taken over the functions of cameras and other devices.
My musings on how to remove the last trace of touch shouldn’t take away from the fact that they’re much less handsy than slots and rubber keypads.
The phones aren’t being credit/debit cards, they’re being SIM cards.
The chips being used for android/apple pay are very similar to those present in SIM cards. The idea has been around for decades, but it didn’t catch on in the developed world.
OTOH, mobile payments processed on the SIM are vital to the growing African economy. It’s the method GiveDirectly uses to make payments, for example.
In the last couple of years I’ve started to get contactless chips on my credit cards as they expire and are reissued. They have a middling track record of being accepted, and I often have to fall back on inserting the EMV chip or [shudder] swiping the magnetic stripe. (Do they still use carbon paper anywhere? A lot of cards don’t have the embossed numbers anymore.)
At least in America, G-Pay and Apple Pay (and Samsung’s?) are processed as credit card payments, and bill to my card instead of showing up on my phone bill.
Regardless, I still have to press a button, and sometimes sign the touch screen, so it’s nowhere near “touchless.”
All of the above supports the idea that there are a lot of local factors, right? Where I live, most transactions these days are contactless, which means tapping your card on the reader or waving it within an inch or two. This is a fairly new thing, but it was in place in time for coronavirus (by sheer luck).
Similarly, there are presumably a lot of things that nobody even thinks about on a day-to-day basis – like whether or not it’s usual to shake hands with someone when you see them – that have a serious effect on how transmission rates fare per country.
I live in the UK, where if you go out for a drink you generally go to the bar and get drinks for the people you’re with. Which means you’re inevitably in contact with everyone else at the table, because they just ferried your glass from the bar to your hand. Most other places I’ve been use table service, which could be better or worse. I have no idea either way, and that’s part of the point. Comparing countries directly feels difficult.
BBA: re carbon paper for embossed cards, yes, on some airplanes, because they don’t have the reliable mobile phone reception that would be required for other forms of payment. (I’m in Europe.)
Unfortunately the visualization hides a lot: for example, the difference between 175 and 195 cases last week per 200 cases total is barely visible, but the former is 7x increase last week and the latter is 39x.
But still. Here are 4 countries: France, Spain, Estonia, Sweden. I picked Estonia because I know they’re not huggy-kissy and I picked Sweden because I know they’re very cashless. Right of the bat I’d say Spain would have the fastest spread because they’re huggy, then France (France is relatively cashless), then Sweden or Estonia which isn’t crowded and doesn’t have subway transit. And yet… their spread rate is indistinguishable. How can that be?
Off the top of my head, Sweden refused to lock down until a few days ago. It was at least a few weeks behind France and Spain. I have no idea about Estonia, though.
Our friends the aliens wants to build a couple of gigantic generation starships. Each ship (lets call them “worlds” from now on) will hold about ten million people (they are really big). The aliens have chosen you to be the architect. All kinds of advanced alien technology is available (replicators, artificial gravity, almost-indestructible nanomaterials, etc.) and it is possible for the world to contain gigantic biospheres . These biospheres may be basically indistinguishable from Earth in the small scale (but you can’t copy the entire Earth, that’s too big). Advanced genetic engineering is possible, but the aliens want you to keep it plausible: Dinosaurs are ok, dragons are not.
The aliens want to do the Fallout thing where each world has a specific social structure. But they don’t want to have the world AI enforce a certain ideology, or something similar, since that would be inelegant cheating. Instead, each world should be designed so that a specific social structure naturally arises in an organic and elegant way. Just like how universal culture naturally arises from industrial society. (The aliens are big on historical materialism.) This is your job.
The worlds will be populated with humans drawn from random among all humans in the world (the aliens think this is hilarious). The aliens understand that it will take time for the passengers to settle into the “correct” societal forms, so they allow a couple of hundred years as grace period before they want to see the desired result. The desired society should be stable for at least a hundred years, preferably longer.
Once again: it is important that no “world intelligence” is observable by the human populations. The world should act like nature, not like a god. A couple of examples: The world should not detect that someone is violent and react to that. The world should not identify individual people and treat them differently. The world should not have a memory of peoples actions. The world can still be obviously artificial, as long as any machines etc. that the humans interact with are “dumb” from the human perspective. So it is ok if typewriters randomly materializes on the world, or if a typewriter materializes at a specific place each year, but it is not ok if a typewriter materializes anytime someone is born.
The aliens wants to see worlds where the population is living in the following societies (interpret as you want). They are happy for you to come with more suggestions.
1. Tribal societies
2. Feudal societies
3. Libertarian societies
4. Socialist societies
5. Fascist societies
6. Scott’s archipelago
(I’ve used the plural “societies” here, but the aliens don’t care much if there’s a single society or multiple ones, as long as the chosen social form dominates. You will solve 5. regardless of if you make everyone live in a single fascist society, or in multiple (rivaling?) fascist societies.)
My designs are in a comment.
(The end goal of this exercise is to speculate about historical materialism and if it is possible to force societies into certain patterns. I also find it interesting to see if there are “bugs” in our artificial designs that e.g. could make our imagined socialist society collapse into tribalism.)
My designs:
1 (Tribal). This seems like the easiest one. Lets copy some big region as it was before the neolithic. Let’s go with South America for now (it won’t be that big since we only need the top kilometer of surface, no crust or core). Then remove:
* All plants and animals that are easily domesticated (maize? lamas?)
* All accessible metal ores
* All accessible fossil fuels.
Add an artificial sun, some weather generators and some hidden redundancies that keep the biosphere from collapsing. Make the climate cycle between hotter and colder periods to further prevent agriculture. Encase the thing in unbreakutronium. Done.
The people on this world should be stuck in the stone age forever, and should form nice Dunbar’s number tribes like all paleolithic societies do(?).
2 (Feudalism). Also seems kind of easy, but that might be a trick, and I’m not sure about my solution. Lets start with a copy of medieval France (we need less area now that we are agricultural). To make it easy for people to settle in, lets leave everything as is sans humans: wheat is growing in the fields, cows are gracing, villages still stand. Now we need to keep people from centralizing too much and from industrializing (those two seem connected).
Removing fossil fuels is a good start, but it could be argued that industrial society started unrelated to fossil fuels, and medieval Europe was full of post-feudal city states. Keeping the world France-sized will remove a lot of trade (no silk road etc.), which will reduce our risk of city states and keep land the main source of wealth. How do we keep the land from uniting, roman style? I guess we could “improve” the geography of France with some more rivers and mountain ranges to keep people separated, but we still want an elite of mounted warriors so we can’t overdo it?
Change seem bad for the stability of feudalism, so we want the climate to be stable, and we should remove pandemic diseases like the Black Plague. But the general disease load should be high enough to keep the population Malthusian, which should help keep the “land=wealth” zero-sum economy going.
Hopefully this will create a nice medieval stasis that lasts the ages.
3 (Libertarian). This is the hardest one for me. It is definitively time to stop copying history and start being speculative. That alien super tech will be needed.
We want each individual to be free from violence (in the libertarian “you entering my yard without permission without me knowing is violence”-way, but we also want to stop them from exerting violence on others.
Design 1: Let’s make it rain guns (at a reasonable rate). After all, they are the great equalizer, and libertarians like guns, right? But this seems like it would just cause anarchy or Somali tribal warfare. Maybe not.
Design 2. Make a world of small islands. Each island is big enough to feed one or two people. Mount an irremovable death laser on each island, with a range that is just short of the next closest island. Now we have a my-home-is-my-castle world. Trade is possible, but invading an island would be a death sentence (unless you sneak in at night and take control of the laser). But this would create an agrarian world where urbanization is impossible. Nah.
Design 3: Lets make a treadmill world. If civilization is constantly expanding into a new frontier, the man can’t keep you down. Make the world 10 miles wide. In one end, everburning fire. In the other: the void of creation. New material is added from the void at crawl space (stones, earth, trees etc. comes flying from the void and attaches to the world). The fire consumes the old at the same pace. Could this be something? On seconds thoughts, we could just as well end up with “feudalism on wheels”. Nah.
I think I give up here. Libertarianism seem to be to tied to abstract ideas like freedom to be easily “grown”. Anyone got ideas?
4 (Socialism). Lets first make sure that we have an industrial society with lots of workers: Dot the world with an abundance of gigantic machines. Each machine can be activated by a thousand humans doing intricate, hard to automate movements for an eight hour shift. At the end of the shift, the machine spews out a bounty of food, clothing, medicine, building materials and other material wealth. (Is this machine against the aliens rules? I would argue “no”, since there’s no interaction with the humans. The machine is deterministic: you push the levers, food comes out.)
Now, lets prevent tyranny and slavery. Each worker must work from a small cabin that only fits one person. The cabin must be closed to operate, shielding the worker from outside harm. While in the cabin, the workers can control death lasers attached to the machine. These can be used to fry any eventual slave drivers or god emperors.
It seems like this would make for a socialist society of worker collectives organized around a machine. There would be little use for intra-machine violence since most of the capital is the work force itself which is unconquerable. Maybe we can make the machines produce different things to promote trade and cooperation between collectives. A big problem is that the workers don’t really own the means of production, since they don’t have any impact on what the machine produces. So lets have the movements of the workers influence what is finally produced by the machine. Socialist utopia is guaranteed?
Finally, this world needs a way to prevent overpopulation (which is famously tricky since evolution is a bitch). Let’s just put in some viruses that lowers fertility and hope it can keep the population balanced long enough.
5 (Fascism). Design 1: Put a big mountain in the middle of the world. Put a temple on top of the mountain. Put a console with a world map in the temple. From the console, it should be possible to select an area of the world and make it rain fire there. This creates a dictatorship, the person who controls the temple controls the world. But this dictatorship might be too efficient, the dictator might just sit on the mountain collecting taxes, not caring about the rest of the world since nothing can hurt them anyway. We want Blut und Erde, stoormtroopers etc.
Design 2: Same as 1 but make it about 10 different areas, each with a regional fire-death mountain temple. Divide the areas by mountain ranges, deserts, swamps etc. in the classic “lets make different countries” way. These border areas shouldn’t be in range of any temple. Make the world have all the prerequisites for industrial civilization (but no nuclear). Make important resources (oil reserves?) randomly appear in the border areas from time to time to give our countries something to fight over. This should create a world of heavily centralized nation states in everlasting conflict. Only problem I can see is that there won’t ever be any “mortal threats to the nation” and such to inspire the correct zeal, since each country will always be invulnerable in their home territory. Maybe make the temples stop functioning a month per year or something to make decapitating blitz invasions possible?
Or maybe I’m at a dead end here. I’m making a “warlike industrial dictatorship”, and fascism is more than that? Maybe we should build for strong nation states and let the wars and the dictators come naturally from that?
6 (Scott’s archipelago). We need an archipelago with a ton of islands, of course. Now we need to:
* Make it possible for the island to defend itself from outside force (i.e to stop invasions from other islands)
* Make it impossible for someone to take tyrannical control of an island
* Make it possible for people to leave the island if they want to
Leaving can be solved by having teleports, or stealthy drones, randomly appear. Anyone who wants to can step into the teleport, or grab hold of a drone, and it will take them to new islands until they find one of their liking.
Tyranny is kind of prevented by giving people the possibility to leave.
Invasions are harder to prevent. Maybe we can bio-engineer some sea monsters that attacks larger boats and flotillas? This will keep intra-island trade open (but limited) while making invasion fleets impossible. Or we can make the randomly occurring one-person teleports the only way to travel between islands (but this would limit trade a lot).
Scott’s experiment is eventually doomed to fail anyhow, since each island will eventually end up with the same social system, since each island has the same preconditions (remember that we are historical materialists!). Maybe we need to make each “island” a mini-copy of the other worlds to prevent this? But who will voluntarily live in e.g. the fascist world? And the teleporters will mess up the dynamics of the other worlds a lot.
5, Design 2: Only problem I can see is that there won’t ever be any “mortal threats to the nation” and such to inspire the correct zeal, since each country will always be invulnerable in their home territory.
For a threat, have famines (increase risks taken, maybe inventiveness) or (perceived) overpopulation (ditto, and ‘Volk ohne Raum’ for historical likeness).
BTW, the slogan was ‘Blut und Boden’, probably because of the alliteration.
Your alien machines can spit out hordes of invading killer robots at random intervals. which will provide an external threat that everyone agrees requires a centralized and militarized society.
Killer robots crosses the line for “no human interaction”. Maybe we could have some kind of bio-engineered animal, but that also have a host of problems (first of all: no plausible animal would be much more than a nuisance for an industrial society).
Makes sense. If the population keeps growing, every nation will need Lebensraum. What happens when one country has taken all the territory? The plan would be that each territory would rapidly form its own nation (“the one true heir of the [old nation]”) and continue the cycle. But are there fail cases?
On second thought, it seems like my socialist world wouldn’t work. Nothing is stopping the tyrant and his cronies from simply entering the machine and doing the work, thus shielding them from the death rays. Once the work is done, then can beat up everyone and steal the good stuff. We can remove the shielding, but that would probably cause a host of mass killings by accident and craziness, so maybe not. People could run away to a new machine, but they need to form a big enough band to operate it, and that band could have a new power struggle, and the hierarchies would reappear. Over all it seems like we would end up with something more like post apocalyptic machine cults than Marx’s workers paradise.
I think I’m being to speculative. Lets just start with a ten million population industrial nation in 1900. Add extra natural resources to compensate for the lack of trade and colonies. What twist can we add to guarantee socialism? Maybe we can reuse the idea of a machine that requires mass cooperation to somehow enforce democracy? (But is that possible?) Anyone got ideas? The aliens have started looking at their watches.
Have you considered that socialism is not compatible with human motivations? Rather telling that god-like aliens with unlimited resources and strong incentives can’t create a socialist utopia.
If you mean socialist to be like one of the modern European socialist countries, (as opposed to worker collectives) that’s easier. But those are about as close to socialism as Communism with Chinese Characteristics is to Communism.
“It’s impossible” is the easy way out. I don’t think that’s true and it’s definitely boring. Mostly the issue seem to be that our modern ideologies are quite abstract and it is hard to guarantee that a society will evolve its culture in that direction. Like, the material conditions of fascist Germany, socialist Germany and liberal Germany were quite alike. So how do you build a world that you are sure turns out in one of those ways but not the others?
There are no socialist European countries right now as far as I’m aware. There are lots of social democratic European countries, but they are liberals, not socialists. Quote Wikipedia:
The aliens would not consider a social democratic country to be socialists. But if you want to do the challenge for social democracy the aliens are interested.
(It seems like an US thing to be confused about this? Like Sanders who says he’s a democratic socialist while being far right of my social democrat prime minister. And if my PM called himself a socialist the outroar would be big enough to make him resign.)
Responding to Indiana blog:
I got the difference, just wanted to clarify. No offense to socialists, but I imagine that would look very similar to the tribal setting. Dunbar’s number communes. Unless I am an ignorant American again and described communes instead of the workers paradise.
I just can’t imagine it bigger.
Inspired by Lady of Mazes?
Never heard of it, thanks for the tip!
I have no answers, but I’d like to praise this as an interesting question with well-phrased boundary conditions.
I posted here a couple weeks ago about the Nextdoor Fabric-of-Society Index (well, I didn’t call it that, but you get the idea).
Yesterday, the Raleigh city authorities posted that they were extending the stay-at-home order to April 30. As of this morning, that post had over 500 responses, including a ton of ad-hominem attacks, along the lines of “You call yourself a good Christian, but you’re really a Communist.” Attacks on politics, attacks on religion, attacks on personal habits. Not just a couple of trolls this time, but lots and lots of angry people in this otherwise very civilized part of the world. (I just went to check again, the entire post seems to have been taken down.)
Make of this what you will, but I think the sooner the lockdown is lifted, the better. I would rather have slightly increased COVID-19 fatalities than a civil war in my neighborhood.
This is the same Raleigh that has declared that “protesting is not an essential activity”, right? (and with the courts closed, who is to gainsay them?)
It seems like they’re going to have to do something eventually to accommodate people waiting for court (recently arrested, people on probation or parole who should be getting off but can’t because they can’t go to court and/or complete the terms of their probation).
Of course, nothing will be done because nobody cares about such people, and they’ll just get squeezed even harder than they already were at a time were (economically) most people are already pretty darn squeezed.
If they can shutter religious services, they can shutter protests.
Courts closed because a few defendants left quarantine and spent a few hours milling around the courthouse to ask a judge for an extension.
“Hey, we can’t make it to trial because we’ve got the virus.”
Everyone freaked out and things shut down quick.
At least the courts are still open for domestic violence and certain other criminal offenses.
Edit: If anyone cares, I see a car pass by outside my window about every three seconds. This is about the same as normal traffic in my area.
I don’t care why courts closed and I wouldn’t believe these just-so justifications for it anyway. The point is that courts are closed, and therefore all your theoretical rights (that depend on courts) have gone up in smoke. If you get arrested you go to jail and stay there until the governors decide otherwise.
And if you had 12 months probation you are now on indefinite probation.
Does that constitute a suspension of Habeas Corpus?
Probably, too bad nobody can go to court to challenge it (not that I have any confidence the courts would rule on it correctly anyway).
At least in NJ only the lower courts are closed, so you could theoretically (from jail, where no visits are allowed) get someone to file a writ of habeas corpus with a higher court. But you can’t get a “risk assessment” hearing (NJs replacement for bail, where they score you to determine if letting you out would square with the governor’s political goals. Am I too cynical? There’s no such thing.)
Not when discussing the criminal justice system, anyway.
> who is to gainsay them?
Anybody with a gun who’s willing to stand up.
And get shot down.
Nextdoor’s population is already pre-selected for screeching Karens, so I wouldn’t take it too seriously.
But in general I think you’re right that this is bad, and getting worse. Pretty much any time I post about wanting to end the lockdowns in any forum that isn’t already strongly pre-selected for other people who want to end the lockdowns, I get multiple screaming accusations of essentially being a mass murderer.
Isn’t that why the instance on widespread lockdowns went virtually unopposed? From governments points of view they had to accede to the meme that said every death was a tragedy and it was their job to do absolutely anything and everything to get the numbers down. Pipe up against that and you do come across (to everyone on board with the meme) as a mass murderer.
Indeed. I think this whole mess is basically an episode of the Twilight Zone where the premise is of a society where the reductio ad absurdum of “if it saves just one life, it’s worth doing” is taken literally.
As a culturally-right anarcho-capitalist, I’m already used to being routinely denounced with the most vile insults the internet is capable of mustering, so it doesn’t phase me much. But most normal folks just aren’t equipped for handling it, so they just shut up and let the Karens take over.
Just to clarify, I don’t disagree with extending the lockdown for another couple of weeks. I was actually surprised that the order was only until April 30, rather than something more drastic. But how will the community react when the shutdown is extended (as I’m almost certain it will be) to the end of May? Why not just bite the bullet and announce that everything is closing down until then, rather than giving people false hope?
And I have more faith in Raleigh government than some, since I imagine they’re receiving good advice from epidemiologists in Research Triangle Park and our three big universities.
BTW, a guy who lives across the street from me is not only an epidemiologist, but he was also on the ground in Africa during the Ebola outbreak. He posted a reasonable and friendly analysis on Nextdoor about why the lockdown is inconvenient, but necessary. Of course, the inevitable contrarian responded, “that’s only your opinion!”
I really wish I saw more evidence of everyone preparing for when the lockdown ends. Do we have enough people and testing capacity to do test-and-trace? Or enough tests to do the kind of massive testing that would remove some of the need for shoe-leather epidemiology? Do we have good data on what measures we can use to reopen things without having a second flare-up of COVID-19 cases? Have we got the mask/PPE situation under control enough that everyone who wants one can have a mask? How’s the supply of hand sanitizer and bleach doing–can we at least make sure that reopened offices can put hand sanitizer dispensers everywhere and wipe all the high-touch surfaces with a dilute bleach solution?
If we end the lockdowns without having some way to prevent the disease flaring back up, then we will almost certainly get rapid expansion and filling-up hospitals again. Perhaps not in NYC, because a lot of people have already been exposed there, but in most of the rest of the country. It would be easy to oscillate between lockdowns and flare-ups.
Also, without some confidence in the public health response, I think a lot of sectors just won’t reopen anytime soon. Now, it’s possible to achieve that with safety theater for awhile, but only until the second flare-up, and then even actually working preventatives won’t be trusted and nobody will go back to theaters or board airplanes until they’ve had a positive antibody test or gotten a vaccine.
So working out what preventatives would work is pretty urgent. Symptom checks + masks + 6 feet + hand sanitizer/disinfectant looks pretty reasonable, but how would we know for sure? We could find out with a lot of testing, but nobody’s got the testing ramped up enough to do the job. (In fact, it’s quite possible the apparent good news of peaking infection rates is driven wholly or partially by the limited numbers of tests being done.)
I have heard rumors that NYS is preparing for contact tracing.
But honestly, I think it’s all theater. The long incubation period and asymptomatic cases mean that without absolutely herculean effort early on, there’s no way to get ahead of this thing; by the time you notice it, it’s out of control. “Early on” is way past. Note the NYC hospitalization data; we didn’t see the start of the trend upward until the second week of March. That delay will apply to any subsequent outbreak as well.
Yeah, if you wait to see people showing up at the hospital to decide you’ve got a problem, you’re several weeks late.
Unless you’re testing asymptomatic people regularly, what other choice do you have?
You can test anyone with a fever, or if you have enough tests even anyone with cold symptoms or recent contact with a person with cold symptoms.
> Yeah, if you wait to see people showing up at the hospital to decide you’ve got a problem, you’re several weeks late.
Cynical take: that kind of assessment won’t help any more. There’s a population of people who abuse the system on a regular basis. Some are crazy, some want attention, and some just want a warm place to sleep and a turkey sandwich. One of the go-to complaints for these folks is “chest pain” because it’s almost-always a multi-hour workup and it’s severe enough that they can’t make you wait in the lobby for hours.
They’ll learn quickly enough that complaining of “shortness of breath” or “weird cough” will get them in and now you have a much larger noise floor you have to sort through to start seeing the upswing.
North Carolina isn’t hit that hard (with Governor Cooper having closed the schools on March 15 and most everyone else voluntarily closing at that point), and the Durham area isn’t hit that hard for NC. The biggest county, Mecklenburg, says it no longer sees a need a field hospital in the future.
So maybe May 1 is valid for re-opening some things? We will see as we get closer to that.
Like albatross11 said, I have no idea about the test-and-trace systems, and we need those to already be running.
I found the Nextdoor thread again. 750 comments. They are now discussing abortion. “You liberals say you want to save lives, but you don’t mind killing babies!”
This is like an episode of The Simpsons where all the townspeople start shouting at each other and running around in circles. I want my normalcy back.
The citizens of South Park shouting “rabble rabble rabble” is an underrated bit of social commentary…
That is normalcy.
94% of the 4,800 sailors on the USS Theodore Roosevelt have been tested for SARS-COV2.
Over 600 (12.5%) test positive.
60% of positive tests are from asymptomatic sailors. It’s not known how many of them will develop symptoms in the coming days.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-military-sympt/coronavirus-clue-most-cases-aboard-us-aircraft-carrier-are-symptom-free-idUSKCN21Y2GB
I guess this will provide a contrast (or something) with the Diamond Princess statistics. I’m expecting the implied IFR will be low and many people say even louder ‘We’ve been over-reacting, it really is just a bad ‘flu season..’
People will argue anything of course, but it seems like NYC data should definitively rule that out. 12,000 deaths so far divided by a population of 8 million gives a death rate of ~0.15% which is higher than the ordinary flu even if every single person in NYC had been infected and deaths stopped immediately today, which of course they will not (and they’ve been undercounted so far anyway).
The IFR of 1% that people have been tossing around for months still seems like a pretty decent estimate.
And going the other way, if the death rate is actually 1%, that implies that 1.2 million people had coronavirus by 3 weeks ago (average time to death), and by now are either recovered or in terrible shape. That’s 15%, which is substantial, and not nothing compared to the point of herd immunity (50% probably). Pretty interesting.
I think it’s likely that the population of people who get the disease is skewed in one way or another from the true population statistics. For example, I’d believe that people in nursing homes are actually more likely to get coronavirus because of group living, not just die from it. Which would make both of our calculations inaccurate.
I’d kind of expect it to skew young and middle-aged in NYC, as the subway commute and schools are the obvious way for it to have spread so widely. NYC also has much more group living at all ages than most of the rest of the country.
Agreed that there is much we don’t know yet.
The 12,000 deaths figure is counting all “presumed” deaths as COVID-19, so I think it’s not an undercount. I suspect it’s an overcount (since positivity among the tested is ~40%, and they’re testing only those with severe respiratory symptoms, many people must have severe respiratory symptoms caused by other-than-COVID, and some of them probably are dying of it). And there’s some fuzziness in the denominator; I suspect more people from outside NYC are treated in NYC hospitals than the reverse, so the proper denominator is somewhat higher than the city population. Agreed that 1% is a reasonably good estimate.
You’re right, it was definitely an undercount a few days ago, but NYC has revised. I’m not sure I agree it’s an overcount now (they’re going to have missed some deaths) but it’s probably not way off either way and it is good enough for this very crude analysis.
New York City is reporting 6589 confirmed Covid deaths (positive PCR test), 3778 official “probable” Covid deaths (no test, but doctor/coroner writes “Covid 19” or similar on the death certificate), and 8184 other deaths for the period March 11 through April 13.
Assuming a baseline death rate of 4500/month this time of year (based on eyeballing this graph, originally from the New York Times), the total excess death rate in NYC was a bit over 14,000, or 1.4x the total officially-tallied confirmed+probable Covid death tally. Not all of those are directly due to Covid: no doubt some excess deaths are due to things like people being more reluctant to go to the ER with chest pain for fear of catching the virus there. On the other hand, the lockdown would probably be reducing the death rate from several other common causes (seasonal flu, traffic accidents, etc), so the non-Covid death rate might be quite a bit less than usual for March/April.
These are mostly younger, healthier people; we shouldn’t be surprised to see more asymptomatic cases.
Agreed. And a tiny number of deaths, even among the symptomatic.
This also tells us something about how hard it is to catch the virus. Even in the close quarters of an aircraft carrier, only about 1/8 of the sailors caught the virus. We may not be past the incubation period for all of them–I don’t know–but this tells you right away that this virus isn’t spreading all that effectively.
About 20% of the people on the Diamond Princess caught the virus, probably with a longer period of people being stuck together on the ship, but also with a much more susceptible population and with a lot of that time being spent in quarantine with everyone trying not to spread things.
Once again, this suggests that the virus doesn’t spread all that easily–most of the post-lockdown world won’t be as good at spreading the virus as sailors working together on a Navy ship or even as a luxurious cruise ship. By contrast, my guess is that in a population with no immunity to measles, one case of measles would probably have spread to nearly everyone on the ship in that time.
So how might that inform our post-lockdown world?
First, we know there are a lot of asymptomatic and presymptomatic people carrying the virus. They’re probably not as contagious as obviously sick people (if you’re coughing constantly, you’re spreading a lot of respiratory droplets in a cloud everywhere you go), but they’re still contagious. Imagine that the total number of new infections is (a + i), where a = the number of people infected from asymptomatic people and i is the number infected from symptomatic people. Whatever (a+i) is on any given day, we know that in the pre-lockdown world it was summing up to around 2.5 per infected person.
The best we can possibly do with symptom-based stuff (fever checks, generous sick leave policies) is to set i to 0. Realistically we won’t do that perfectly, but we can decrease it quite a bit. If we assume a=i (that’s pessimistic–you should be a lot more contagious with symptoms), then we could decrease new infections by at most half by isolating visibly sick people.
To do that well, I think we need:
a. Fever and symptom checks for workplaces, schools, airplanes, and maybe other stuff like church events.
b. Generous sick-leave policies. You really don’t want the salad chef at the restaurant or the cashier at the store coming into work sick so they can make rent this month.
c. Support for helping sick people self-quarantine. Probably that should start with a COVID-19 test, and if you’re positive, you get moved to the front of the queue in terms of deliveries of food and groceries, masks, etc. Maybe even make hotel rooms available for self-quarantining away from family.
Now, for young healthy people, we’re looking at a majority of cases being asymptomatic. Whatever else we do needs to lower a as well as lower whatever fraction of i isn’t already blocked. For that, the best measures I can see are masks, hand sanitizer, >= 6 feet of distance, and wiping down surfaces. Probably I’d add staggering work hours to add distance (maybe alternating days in and out of the office), reorganizing schools so the students stay put and the teachers cycle in and out of the room, etc.
What else?
Another thing that would really help is to prioritize asymptomatic periodic testing for people we know are more likely to get it and/or more likely to spread it to others. I would hope ER docs already get regular tests even if asymptomatic. Would you pay more to go to a grocery store where you knew the cashiers and stockers were tested weekly regardless of symptoms, or take an Uber ride with a driver you knew the same about? I know I would.
Relatedly, I am super frustrated every time news reports make it clear that symptomatic people already isolating at home are getting tested, because the test tells you nothing actionable (it would tell you something if we were doing rigorous contact tracing, but we aren’t) and that test could go toward a population prevalence study or testing an asymptomatic essential worker.
> I would hope ER docs already get regular tests even if asymptomatic.
My aunt told me that at the hospital she goes to (in California), the nurses said they were being tested every day. Of course, that’s just one hospital, and I imagine it is variable based on availability of testing and hospital policy, but it shows at least some places are doing it.
My better half was watching a documentary on Taiwan and its response to the virus. They seem to be unbelievably laid back about it – all wear masks, practice social distancing and carry on with their lives. Oh, and to respond to your question about ‘What else?’, they take everyone’s temperature as they arrive at work. Anybody with a raised temperature gets to go home for the day ( and gets tested)
It would be more than a little embarrassing if it turned out that Taiwan’s approach was sufficient to keep R0 below one.
Well, that and the culture necessary to actually stick with the measures. A lady selling fruit at my favorite shop keeps wearing her mask on her chin for like a week.
But yeah, that’s pretty much what I suggested in a previous comment.
Keep schools, churches, restaurants and other congregating places closed, set a number of measures like those, and reopen everything else.
Indeed. One extra advantage places like Taiwan had was that they had a 30% mask-wearing rate before the outbreak.
South Korea, Japan, and Singapore all did the same thing. No lockdown, yes masks (except in Singapore), yes thorough tracing of sick people and their contacts (except in Japan). Each one eventually had to do a real lockdown once the number of cases in a particular location got too high.
Once we get down to East Asian levels of cases, then we can rely on masks+tests+tracing to protect us without a lockdown.
So, I just learned my mayor, Lori Lightfoot has issued a booze curfew. If you want the hooch you gotta get it before 9PM. This, allegedly is because people were “congregating at liquor stores.” This excuse is implausible on its face, but even if true, reducing hours will inevitably increase density. Its not like Binnys is particularly crowded at 9:30 anyways. This is generally similar to my objection to the reduced hours being implemented at retail locations generally. We should be expanding hours not reducing them.
Yeah, my suspicion is that this is actually a curfew to keep the many newly bored and idle people out of trouble. If you’re going to the liquor store at 10 PM, it’s probably not because you just got back from a double shift at your essential job and want to pick up a nice bottle of wine for dinner.
Which is not to say that the measure is justified or legal, necessarily. I have not been impressed with the city’s actions in the crisis. They have demonstrated neither a coherent plan, an understanding and appreciation for the governor’s order, nor a respect for the limits of their authority, which Lightfoot at times seems to view as boundless. And of course there are the shockingly tone-deaf things like her haircut hours after the lockdown was announced.
Pulling down basketball hoops and welding metal over skate park features is being done for similar reasons, I suspect…
Well, the basketball hoops and soccer fields were one of the main attractants for crowds during the few days of good weather we had early in the lockdown. I’m not sure anyone has evidence to suggest that a game of basketball in an outdoor, windswept, lakeside park posed any real contagion risk, but the governor’s order did prohibit them.
Even less justified was the closure of the lakefront path and all of Lincoln Park. Even in the crowded periods, most people using the path for walking, running, or cycling were staying 6 feet away from others. There’s no way that the activities posed any material risk.
Instead, Lightfoot and the city seemed motivated by an annoyance that people weren’t “taking it seriously enough” and decided to shut down a public space as, in effect, a show of force. I suppose the city has pretty broad authority to shut down its own parks, so that decision might have been legal. But from a public policy perspective it seems unjustifiable.
About people who close parks: “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” — H. L. Mencken
Playing basketball would be terrible for contagion though if you just played within your bubble it would be fine of course.
I’ve read experts quoted as saying that intensive exercise, causing you to inhale and exhale deeply, is especially good at transmitting the virus. Such that the appropriate distancing radius is maybe 30 feet rather than 6 feet.
Did she push the liquor curfew earlier, or do you not have a liquor curfew at all?
Many places have liquor curfews, which precede this whole thing. In Russia, there’s a ban on liquor sales in stores between 11 pm and 8 am. In the UK, this depends on the location, but in Scotland, it’s 10pm-10am. In Spain, it depends on the municipality.
This seems more like one of those policies they wanted to implement anyway and are using the coronavirus excuse to push. Has Chicago tried these kinds of curfews before?
Its normally either 1 or 2 AM. I forget which. Its never really affected me. Although pre C-19 I did a lot of shopping in the 10PM-Midnight window because I like having an empty store.
Lightfoot, heavy hand
(Sorry)
I expressed mirth.
@Clutzy
Does building bridges reduce traffic?
IDK, but I know that stores are less crowded at the late times I normally shop than they are now at the times I am forced to shop.
Are the times you are forced to shop more or less crowded than before the restriction?
I mean, I don’t really know if the restrictions will increase density or not; but you are implying that total # of store-goers will remain constant with or without restrictions. It is not obvious this is true.
Thanks for sharing! Did you like the book?
A draft plan for a phased reopening in the Canadian province I live in has been circulating today: https://huddle.today/new-brunswicks-re-opening-plan-a-draft-framework/
It’s not an official plan, but the authors are locally influential and it’s written in a forum likely to be read by decision-makers. They suggest the following measures for May (we have had several days in the past week with no new cases, and the timetable is based on active cases continuing to decline):
They propose opening the borders with adjacent provinces in June and the rest of the country (but with 14 day isolation required for travellers from outside the immediate region) in July; international travel would remain restricted for the rest of the year, however. So even if the local economy can get moving again soon it will be a long time before things are really back to normal.
Anyway, I thought this might interest some of you.
The big difference between these, and the US guidelines, seems to be re-opening schools somewhat earlier–in the US they are proposed to re-open with restaurants and bars.
I’d naively think schools would be one of the hardest places to manage social distancing (ever tried enforcing a PDA rule?), and would have relatively large populations, so would be late to re-open. Any idea why in both the US and Canada they re-open before other similarly large, crowded venues?
Children are the least vulnerable group. Very few children die if infected. And lots of families really do need to be able to put the kids back in school (or at least in child care) in order to return to work.
Also given that public schools function primarily as day care for dual-income families, they basically have to re-open before you can re-open a lot of other things…
I think that’s the rationale.
That seems short-sighted if you think of the children as vectors, rather than as victims.
In countries where they’re doing more tracking, do you know how many cases of transmission from children to adults have been documented?
That’s not meant as a gotcha; I’ve been looking around but haven’t been able to find much of anything on the subject. And it seems pretty important, given the disruption caused by closed schools.
I have not been able to find anything about how many children were infected likely at school, or transmission from children to adults.
Children may be the most dangerous group, running around spreading the disease to their teachers, parents, grandparents, all collectively because they’ve long since given it to each other, and without even “Little Timmy has the sniffles” as a heads-up to the adults around him that they should get themselves tested.
Or maybe not, but I’m going to want to see the data on that before reopening the schools.
Would have been nice if someone had taken a few hundred early test kits and done a focused study of students, teachers, parents at a COVID-adjacent school. Might even be possible to do something like that now. But that would require sensible planning and a willingness to accept bad news, which is ever so much less fun than the wishful thinking our leaders seem to prefer.
There’s a bit of a scuffle in Indian Country.
The controversy is that $8 billion was set aside for Alaska Native and Indian tribes. Many tribal leaders in the lower 48 are upset because some of that money will go to Alaskan Native Corporations. The current head of Indian Affairs, Tara Sweeney, is an Alaska Native and was once on the board of a Native Corporation and is being accused of bias. The short version is that the lower 48 tribes say that Native Corporations, which are for-profit entities, shouldn’t get any money at all and it should all go to the reservations. Sweeney says that the law requires that some of the funding to to Native Corporations, and that if the money doesn’t go to Native Corporations then Alaska Natives won’t get any help at all.
Which is probably true: Alaska doesn’t have reservations. Instead due to a settlement in the 1970s about a dozen Native Corporations were formed spread out over different regions of Alaska. Each Native Alaskan got a share of ownership in their Native Corporation, and the Corporations were given a cash settlement and large tracts of traditionally Native owned land. The Corporation uses that cash and land like any business, to make profit for it’s shareholders. Many rural tribes rely on cash dividends from their Corporation, and the Corporations that were lucky enough to have land with oil on it have become quite wealthy. Naturally many in the lower 48 who are on poor reservations are resentful of any stimulus money going to a wealthy Native Corporation, but it certainly seems like the law was designed to help Indians and Native Alaskans, with money specifically meant to go to Native Corporations. Alaska’s Senators have both said they voted for the bill with the understanding that Native Corporations would receive some of the money.
Now Chuck Shumer has weighed in, tweeting “Tara Sweeney is diverting funds for tribal governments during coronavirus to for-profit Alaska Native Corporations. We can’t put these corporations before tribal governments & people. Sweeney used to be an exec for an ANC, and she wants to profit!” It’s an understandable tweet coming from a Democrat, but it might land him in hot water. For one thing, like many on the left he has forgotten that corporations are organizations of people, and for Native Corporations 100% of the owners are Alaska Natives. Tara has already fought back tweeting “Even for you, this is an ignorant and despicably low attack that could not be further from the truth. Perhaps you should read the law you negotiated and voted for as Alaska Natives are entitled to receive the funding from @USTreasury.” Fighting to keep money from “indigenous peoples” is not a great look on the left these days, so who knows how it will fall out.
It should also be noted that American Indians and Alaska Natives don’t always get along. Just try calling a Native Alaskan an Indian (or even a Native American): they’ll correct you sharply. They see themselves as different from the tribes in the Lower 48, and I think they reciprocate the feeling generally.
I have lot of experience with foreign language learning. I find that learning and even using foreign languages once mastery has been acquired makes me unhappy.
I suspect that a decent minority of the population(~15%) is in the same position that I am in. Language classes seem uniquely hated by a minority of students. Yet people seem unwilling to talk about this and so it gets neglected for policy questions. If I had been grown up knowing Welsh instead of English, sure I could use English, but I would be unhappy if I did. If even 5% of Welsh people have the same experience that I do it seems that the reintroduction of Welsh was a horrible idea.
Does any one else have my experience or insight into this question?
In my experience, formal classes are a highly inefficient method of learning foreign languages. Especially if it’s something like a high school where the students are generally unmotivated, rather than say, the FSI.
I notice that a lot depends on the environment. School environments tended to result in me not wanting to open my mouth for fear of making a mistake. I got a bad case of “if I can’t be perfect, I won’t try at all”. Dealing with humans who’d immediately switch languages on me, because they evaluated my accent as indicating I was inept, simply reinforced this problem.
Then I met an experienced ESL teacher, who’s also somewhat of a linguistic polymath. She taught me that babbling ineptly in a partially leaned language can be fun. She believes that the ulpan method developed in Israel for returning Jews who didn’t speak modern Hebrew, is the most effective method for adult learners. In her adaptation, it involves asking and answering questions, using variants on the modelled form. We’ve been using it to improve my German. (She’s a friend, not someone I’m paying for teaching me, by the way; this may matter.)
We get into silly sequences like “where is my head?” “on your shoulders” “where are my shoulders?” “on your torso” … or taking a different path, “where is your head?” The result is that huge numbers of normally difficult phrases have become routine for me. And comfortable as well as routine. Moreover, I associate German with fun – what kind of outrageous thing can I say next, following this pattern?
So I’ve switched from not liking speaking non-English languages, to experiencing it as a whole load of fun.
It also helps that I’m Canadian, and moved to the US. In Canada, I’m a very smart person who’s comparatively inept at languages. I can only read French at perhaps a grade 6 level [for a native French speaker], and my accent is horrific; I feel like a loser. But when I moved to the United States, I became brilliant at languages – I can actually read and enjoy a simple novel in French, when most people can’t speak anything but English. So I get respect instead of contempt, which is surely encouraging.
Anyway, the point here is that some people switch from one category to another over the course of their lifetime, and I’m one of them.
As someone who has a French Immersion certificate in Canada, I will agree that however they were teaching languages, it definitely was Not Fun. Especially since French has a whole bunch of grammatical structures which are designed to act as Shibboleths rather than add to effective communication.
Formal classes can be suffocating, ohh yes!
She taught me that babbling ineptly in a partially leaned language can be fun. [ … ] In her adaptation, it involves asking and answering questions …
Similarly, hitchhiking alone through a country of that language was my most effective way. Drivers were happy to explain the local pecularities, the history and politics of the country, their business, or they confess and discuss things to a stranger they are sure they’ll never see again… The desires to understand, and to make yourself understood, are ginormous motivators in language learning. (And then there were insider tips where to go and what to see, and job offers, etc.)
The second best way was books from the local library. After I found out they had French thrillers, a language marred by ‘The Little Prince’ was interesting again.
The term you’re looking for is “polyglot.” Literally, “many tongues.”
What counts as a language? Does learning a new musical instrument count?
Anyway, I enjoy learning languages but I suck at it. I’m good at accents.
Also, learning stuff like chemistry, physics, and statistics, which felt like learning a language, was really painful to me and I was never good in those subjects.
Last anecdote: I know enough of a few languages to carry on very simple conversations (e.g. telling someone what time it is). But I’ve never, while in the places where those languages are spoken, actually gone ahead and did it; I always resorted to English. In fact, even though I can put on a pretty native-sounding British accent (helped by the fact that I once was a native), I don’t ever use one when I’m in England. I think it’s not entirely lack of confidence that stops me, either; it feels like it’s partly a kind of pain-avoidance. (Maybe those are the same though.)
That’s so strange. I find that using and further learning about a language once mastery has been acquired very enjoyable.
Like, if I wasn’t able to read Pushkin in the original I wouldn’t find knowing Russian as enjoyable. It’s once you go beyond the ordering a meal at a restaurant level that you can start enjoying the subtleties of a language.
It’s getting fluent and the initial bump that I find most hateful. You seem to be the opposite?
What Russian Lit is relatively readable, for non-native speakers?
If someone makes a passable translation of Dr Zhivago, I won’t bother learning Russian. But I don’t see much chance of that happening soon.
I’m not saying learn Russian to read Dr. Zhivago*. Do it to read Pushkin. I’m saying, reading Russian literature once you have mastery of that language is nice.
And I guess the OP meant something different, but he says, “learn a language once mastery has been achieved”. And I say that learning the intricacies of a language, once you’re fluent and don’t have to learn the colors or the numbers, is the most enjoyable part.
*I don’t like a lot of the Russian literature that is popular, because it is very gloomy. Pushkin, though, who is considered, unquestionably, as the best writer in Russian, ever, in history, has been badly served by translations. To the point where people like Flaubert considered him flat. Flat? Pushkin?
The Falen translation of Eugene Onegin is a wonderful froth of conversation and pure melody, and I’ve heard it strays from the original text in order to harken back to the original sound-tone of the Russian. Nabokov’s translation in contrast is a thudding literalist nightmare. I don’t know which is a greater crime to Pushkin, but I’m thankful to have both. Both for introducing me to Pushkin and for the intuitive lesson on the limits of translation.
I think it’s Nabokov’s, but then, I don’t like him. I think form is very important in good literature.
If you have a really talented translator who is a poet is his/her own right, then you can have translations of great quality. Of course, the only reason a great poet would bother translating somebody else’s poetry into their own language, is because they can’t produce/publish their own.
Which is why you’ve got Lorca’s or Hernandez’ poetry translated into Russian. They were Spanish Republicans, after all, so their poetry didn’t get censured. There’s also the “people’s poet”, Burns, who also had great translators.
There’s no reason why talented poets would bother translating Russian/Spanish/whatever, unless it’s for their own entertainment. There’s no censure anymore.
Not sure whether “Biospace” is a reliable website, but this article says that SARS-Cov1 and SARS-Cov2 had significantly different transmission vectors (h/t Kevin Drum):
The CDC guidance telling everyone to not wear masks for 3 months is going to go down in pandemic history as a criminally negligent error.
Japan has 190 deaths still. Taiwan has 6.
Prediction: This will be memory-holed as it’s not useful to either side in the Culture Wars. Trump is the Chief Executive and ultimately responsible, and CDC maps to (Blue) “Scientism” Experts.
If you feel secure because you have a mask on, you are doing it wrong.
Note the post just above mine complaining vociferously about being asked to wear a mask for the benefit of others.
I certainly don’t feel secure with a mask on.
OTOH I would definitely feel more secure in a timeline in which all Americans were wearing masks starting 1/20, when Taiwan issued their mask order.
And I do feel less secure in our actual timeline in which the CDC changed its mask guidance on 4/6, and most states still have not made them mandatory.
I’d love to hear our theory on what steps could have made that happen.
Ya know, for comedy purposes.
More seriously, the CDC can only make recommendations to the population it has, about what it knows, not the population it wishes it had about some desirable potential disease. NOW everyone is taking the pandemic seriously AND we know that transmission through the air (but NOT aerosol) is the most likely natural vector.
So mask guidance now can make significant population level changes to behavior. Mask guidance in January most probably leads to a small minority attempting to protect themselves via masks, which isn’t actually very helpful, and likely is net negative.
@HeelBearCub
How would it be a net negative?
Risk compensation
@HeelBearCub
That would only be true if the people wearing masks were also ignoring social distancing guidelines because they thought the masks made them unnecessary. Were there any of those in January? Wouldn’t it be more likely to be a net negative now, that mask guidelines came after social distancing guidelines?
@HeelBearCub
I respect your opinion and suspect you are correct, a low trust dysfunctional civil society cannot easily enforce a social norm of mask wearing.
Criminally negligent guidance from the CDC still harms on the margin.
But yes you’re obviously right and many would have ignored CDC guidance anyways.
Sigh.
@rumham:
We are operating under a presumption that the CDC would have suggested wearing cloth masks was beneficial in January, instead of April. There aren’t any social distancing guidelines, and few people choose to wear masks.
We have to types of users, let’s say Polly Paranoid and Cautious Carl.
Polly Paranoid wants to take all possible precaution and wears a mask and social distances and washes hands and all that. She doesn’t derive any benefit from wearing the mask, but is very slightly benefiting others by lowering their risk of being infected by here.
Cautious Carl is choosing between various things he could do to protect himself. Sometimes he might do one, sometimes he might do another. He feels that the mask gives him some protection (even though that isn’t how they help in this situation) and so any time he chooses to wear a mask in lieu of doing something else he is substituting something less effective at preventing infection and something more effective. He is engaging in riskier behavior than he would have if he didn’t even have the mask option.
@HeelBearCub
So you’re postulating that a significant portion of people were social distancing before the guidelines and would not have if the CDC hadn’t told the noble lie about the masks? Or is it that a significant portion of people were social distancing before the guidelines and would not have if the CDC hadn’t suddenly discovered the uses of masks through science on 4/6 that other countries had figured out in January?
Either the social distancing guidelines help in this scenario or they do not. If they do, the mask guidance should have come at the same time, and the CDC was negligent in not doing so. If they don’t, then by this risk compensation argument, the masks are still doing more harm than good. Yet you called people assholes earlier for questioning it.
> being asked to wear a mask for the benefit of others
Might I note that the post you are referring to talks about “require”, not “ask”. Some people chafe under compulsion, even if it’s to do what they would otherwise do. I fully support the idea of strongly-encouraging mask wearing and making strange gang signs and/or hissing at someone who doesn’t comply. But actually making that as a mandate (especially when mask bans were totally cool just a little while ago) really irks me.
The government wasn’t banning people from wearing masks. I saw lots and lots of people wearing yard and garden dust masks and gloves, thinking they were protecting themselves.
(Here is where you cite one offs and private employers that aren’t particular material and I ignore that).
Sorry people are going to “chafe”. The virus don’t give a shit. The public health experts have to make judgements about whether the needed compliance will be met by “optional” measures. See suggesting not to have your restaurant open, suggesting not to have large gatherings, etc. Sure, many people will comply, but you don’t need many people, you need the vast majority of people.
The mere fact that so many Americans “chafe” at being required to do what is in the public good shows the culture we are in. Many times you have to require something so that you get enough people to do something close to the required thing. That’s just life. Not fair. Too bad.
That use of “ask” is a really irritating rhetorical trick. It’s meant to indicate that you’re a rude person refusing a perfectly reasonable polite request, when you’re actually objecting to an order being given with the threat of force.
That’s nothing, you should see this country that had a revolution over a tax on tea!
And some people will defend the incompetents trying to ‘protect the public good’ no matter how badly and recently they have demonstrated that they don’t have the first idea how to do that.
I disagree with their assessment over what constitutes the public good.
@HeelBearCub
That depends on which government – wearing a mask in public is illegal in many states (mostly, military-occupation-era laws designed to suppress protests, but still on the books and occasionally enforced.)
@SamChevre:
@HeelBearCub
Convenient to ignore New York, Alabama, Florida, West Virginia and D.C. (D.C. is only after 10pm)
These have anti-mask laws in general. Many other states have them as enhancements to other crimes, but these listed are absolute. But sure. Just a one-off. Afterall, not many people live in any of those places, right?
When Scott posted his parody “Legal Systems Very Different From Ours”, based on David’s “Economic Systems Very Different From Ours”, I wanted to mention John Keegan’s A History of Warfare, because it might as well be called “War Systems Very Different From Ours”. It takes Clausewitz’s aphorism, and, noting that it doesn’t really describe war as many societies have waged it, takes a tour of military cultures in history that were not just different, but based on a different understanding of what war is.
Actually, my book is Legal Systems Very Different from Ours.
Scott expanded the title a little.
I should have done my research.
In the latest in local security theater, the powers that be have decided that since current measures appear to be working, with R < 1, they will now require everyone to wear face masks whenever they go outdoors. They aren't supposed to wear medical quality face masks – anything cloth will do, or perhaps even anything at all. If we do this long enough, they hint, this might let them relax some of the existing security measures.
AFAIK, stores that sell either cloth face masks or sewing supplies are non-essential and not open, so even though this requirement won't apply until next Wednesday, the odds of receiving mail-ordered masks in time, ordered today (when I first heard of the new rules, which were in fact announced yesterday) are approximately equal to zero. (It's taking 2 weeks or more for any mail order I do.)
Since I don't believe that random scraps of cloth will impede transmission in any measurable way, I plan to have a little fun with this. I found a cheap online vendor of burqas with prices comparable to mask prices on etsy (which are mostly running >= $10 each). I’ve ordered two. Hopefully the material will be washable.
I refrained from ordering any of the claimed-to-be-actually-medically-OK masks from the site where I found the burqas, which “smells” likely to be fraud-prone (false and/or misleading advertisements, lower tier chinese products, and possibly completely unreliable delivery dates.) If they are medically effective, other people need them more than I do; if they are some kind of scam, I don’t want to support the scammers.
I did order some “fashion” masks that appeared likely to be launderable. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any in really outrageous colours.
This weekend I suppose I should try to rig something that will pass inspection – but not cause heat stroke as we get into summer temperatures – from whatever scrap cloth and thread that may be lying around the house, in case the rules actually get enforced.
Does anyone have ideas for a washable way to express my opinion of the order, on the burqa, in a way that’s readable from 6 feet away? 🙁 OTOH, probably wearing the burqa will say it all, since I won’t otherwise look remotely like a Muslim woman.
Why the hate? It’s probably the best thing they can do. As for not being medical grade, well, that’s secondary. Point is to stop spread, so if everybody had a bandana on their face we’d be 90% there. Medical grade also happens to protect the wearer a lot more, so that’s your benefit, but the common benefit is having a clear mask-on rule.
Because they don’t have, and haven’t earned the authority to make these decisions.
I realize this is more coming from a place of anger, but yes, they do. Were they democratically elected? Then they have the authority to institute emergency measures such as this to prevent the spread of disease.
Unless you are specifically questioning the constitutional ability/legality of these orders?
This is not coming from a place of anger for me, closer to resignation.
No, it is not established that any democratically elected person can enact any policy to fight any emergency.
@baconbits9
ah, yes i agree there, they definitely don’t have the authority to enact any policy. But they (used as a catch all for local leadership: governor, mayor, etc) do have the authority to enact a good number, certainly. What about this mask one makes them not have the authority?
At a bare minimum, it would seem like any government that wants to even pretend to have any sort of separation of powers or checks and balances might set things up such that the people who decide whether or not we’re in an emergency aren’t the exact same people who get to decide which of our rights suddenly disappear because we’re in an emergency.
Most localities will require me to wear pants in public. Mask-wearing requirements during a pandemic are at least as justified as that.
Were those ordinances passed by vote or by decree? Did those areas go from a norm of not wearing pants to suddenly mandating pants?
Its a complete red herring to use these analogies, we have a system which is grounded on individual rights with recourse through the courts. The fact that local, state and federal authorities have some powers that they can enact with some similarities does not automatically translate to ‘anything we see fit in a time of crisis’.
We’ve already reduced spread locally, to the point where it appears that each new infection creates less than one additional infection. How low do you want it to get? We could lock everyone in individual cells, with nothing whatsoever going into those cells. They’d eventually die, of course – pretty fast if even air wasn’t allowed in; slower if we allowed water; slower still if there was food delivery, but that last would require some people outside the cells – but it would reduce transmission to zero.
Also, where is the research that says that whatever R is today, simply mandating face coverings on top of all the other current restrictions, would produce a 90% improvement – which I’ll interpret as changing today’s R value to 10% of whatever it currently is?
I don’t buy it. Maybe I’m slow to update my priors, which were formed when I was being told that wearing masks wouldn’t help. Has anyone even done research about contagion via crappy cloth masks that probably don’t fit? Even a simulation with particles of the right size? I’m seeing some discussions of aerosal transmission, but nothing connecting the dots, and if our health officers cited any studies, that didn’t come through in the newspaper report.
I have more confidence in our local public safety officers than in e.g. the CDC, given what they’ve done so far, but this pattern matches to forbidding knitting needles on airplanes, while allowing more common implements of similar efficacy for e.g. stabbing or threatening to stab pilots.
I feel for the poor slob who has to pull the switch that relaxes a lockdown. You have to do it sometime, and from what we read you have to do it pretty darned soon or people will just do it themselves. But you know with certainty that when you do it, people will die who would otherwise not have. (Yes, some are dying from the effects of the lockdown, but that’s not your mandate.) If you are really unlucky, a lot will die. So you do whatever you can to mitigate that — if it turns out it’s just theater, it could still help if it reminds everybody to keep their distance whenever they can and to keep washing their hands. But the lily pads are always going to get the last word, and anything you do will be wrong by some measure.
In short, I am quite put off by how peevish you seem about it all. Show some charity to the poor slob.
It’s not just this, it’s that one would like the easing of restrictions to be successful, thus not necessitating further lockdowns.
Horse:water or something
HBC,
I’m just curious… do you see any scenario in which we can return fully to normal (excluding say, events over 1,000 people) by the end of 2020 in the absence of both a vaccine and herd immunity?
If not, are you confident that governments will posses the political will to do what is necessary to enforce lockdowns for at least that long?
The primary reason I favor ending the lockdowns is because I see them as just delaying the inevitable. A vaccine isn’t coming soon. And we simply aren’t going to do this for “as long as it takes until the vaccine comes.” Flatten the curve had some plausibility back when it meant “delay the peak long enough for the hospitals to get ready” but… well… we’ve already done that. If they aren’t ready by now, we can’t just keep saying “another two weeks” forever…
I’m not HBC, but the time locked down potentially buys us better treatments (could reduce death rates by a significant factor), time to produce face masks for everyone, time to ramp up testing capacity, etc. It’s not vaccine or nothing.
In another few weeks we will have much higher-quality evidence on various drugs, for example.
I’m optimistic that, once we get the cases “low enough,” a test-and-trace combined with “reasonable” social distancing will let us keep the untracked cases to a small nuisance such that our health system can deal with it reasonably.
By “reasonable” social distancing, I mean the government allowing all but the largest gatherings, combined with people taking this shit seriously now that they know what’s at stake, so they do the low-cost things: wash hands, masks everywhere, stay six feet apart, extra testing and vigilance around nursing homes. (I don’t know about schools.)
Ohio is looking at easing up around May 1. They shut down early and so they’ve got a good handle on the problem.
@Matt M:
Well, I’m not sure what all exactly you are including in fully normal. I don’t think is/is not “fully normal” is the right metric, because it is binary. Rather the question is “how far along the spectrum from lockdown to the way we were can we go?” So, an analog, rather than digital, question.
But let’s take it at literal face value and assume you mean we can go back to getting kisses from grandma after we went to that business conference last week.
So, the scenario where I could see that happen is a) we get a really good infection mitigation drug, and it is in mass production, and easily available at reasonable costs to the health system, and b) we have really ramped up testing, ideally both capability and accuracy, along with funding for teams to do trace contacting, c) we figure out that testing and trace contacting actually results in tracking down a
significant portion of those infected.
With just b) and c) I could see us moving significantly towards normal, but without good mitigation strategies, you are still look at slowly rolling towards IFRxTotal Infected deaths.
I guess we could modify (a) to basically anything that lets as substantially, like an order of magnitude, lower IFR, even if that really is just “Dude, everyone is already infected in NY so IFR is super low”, a possibility I think is highly unlikely, as we know from Roosevelt and The Princess, that Covid isn’t infectious enough to do that. The caveat to that caveat would be that our testing failure rate could be so high that, no, everyone on those two ships really was infected. Certainly there are rumblings that it is sometimes quite hard, and time sensitive, to get a positive test.
The poor slob is in my case the Governor of NJ. That sort of thing comes with the territory; it’s not all raising taxes and handing out the money to your party’s clients.
Won’t someone PLEASE consider the effect all this complaining has on the self-esteem of our heroic bureaucrats???
This video from the New England Journal of Medicine suggests (to me at least) that masks are helpful, if not 100% effective: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2007800
Which makes sense. I kind of bought into the original CDC position, but I’ve since come around to the idea that having something between you and your interlocutor is a good thing.
ETA: that article doesn’t say what kind of mask they were using though, which seems potentially important.
It says “a slightly damp washcloth.”
Well, the video linked by BlazingGuy is probably the best answer.
But yeah, in the end we have to put together disparate and unreliable info and make an educated guess. My intuitions tell me that surface transmission isn’t _the_ main vector. Also I’ve read, and makes a lot of sense, that droplet vs aerosol transmission is not a binary choice but a continuum. The better the virus resists, the smaller particles it can transmit through and at greater distances. Not sure if it’s very different from most flu/cold viruses – I’m betting lots of colds are just as infectious or more, but we don’t really care. But anyways, my guess is that it’s, at the very least, a lot more infectious than “sneeze directly in my face”.
And the last piece of educated guess comes from me wearing a surgical mask outside. I started to note how droplets of saliva sometimes come out of my mouth when I speak. It’s probably be interesting to do an ultraviolet test or smth on worn masks. I don’t cough, sneeze or shout, and yet if I were infected I’d still put the virus in the air. But not with the simplest of maks – anything, just a bandana still would catch a supermajority of saliva. Even on a sneeze. Sure, not 100%, but that’s irrelevant – only statistics matter here, and reducing 99.9% of what I believe is the main vector is pretty damn cool.
Also cost vs effect – wearing masks is something we can get used to doing long term – years, if needed. In time we’ll have more fashionable and comfortable ones. So it’s a reasonable cost, and what we may buy with it is a chance of a reasonably normal life.
And speaking of, I’m not in the mood to throw such chances away. So far vaccines sound like they’re really more than a year away, and pretty much all tentative treatments keep failing (serious) trials.
It’s probably be interesting to do an ultraviolet test or smth on worn masks.
Here
Before the lockdown, R0 was around 3 and the number of cases was increasing by about 33% per day. With the lockdown, as you say, R0<1. If the lockdown is ended, what exactly do you propose to prevent R0 from returning to 3?
Well, adding a mask requirement on top of the existing lockdown certainly won’t help improve things after the lockdown ends.
My best guess is that mask + no lockdown will merely reduce R0 [no lockdown] from e.g 3 to 2.9 Or maybe from 3 to 2.99. The reduction coming from perhaps as many as 5% of my local population having already had CV19, per the antibody studies, might be larger than any reduction from mask wearing, but of course mask wearing will be given credit for it.
Remember, I’m coming from a place of believing what we were originally told, and distrusting studies that use bateria as a proxy for virus particles when considering whether they pass through filters.
See also https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2764367/effectiveness-surgical-cotton-masks-blocking-sars-cov-2-controlled-comparison
There are problems with that study – notably it’s measuring at very close ranges – but basically it made my confirmation bias very happy, when it appeared in my feed this morning.
I thought the original point of the lockdown was to build up health system capacity. Haven’t we done that (eg turning Javits Center into a hospital)? The goalposts seem to be moving.
a. Keep anyone showing symptoms isolated/away from others as much as possible.
The estimates I’ve seen for asymptomatic spread range up to around 30% of spread happening before transmission, but mostly much lower than that. (That’s the worst case, as far as I can see.) Intuitively, we know that some activities (coughing, sneezing, singing, yelling) send respiratory droplets further away, and so probably help you spread the virus more effectively, and asymptomatic/presymptomatic people shouldn’t be doing a lot of coughing or sneezing. (Those may also help you make smaller particles go airborne–anyone know more?). Also, a more serious infection should correlate with more virus being made in your body, and thus with a bigger immune response and more fever/feeling lousy. So my expectation is that you are probably a lot less contagious when you’re not feeling sick.
But whatever the fraction of spread is happening from people without symptoms, preventing the people *with* symptoms from spreading the virus is a no-brainer, and doesn’t require as-yet-undemonstrated competence on the part of folks getting the tests widely available.
So the first step is going to be asking anyone with any symptoms of a cold or flu to stay home, doing fever and symptom checks when you come to work or try to fly or go into a public space (especially anything to do with food service or taking care of old people), and doing whatever we can to make sure people have some kind of sick leave so they don’t try to gut it out. Other than the sick leave part, all that is pretty cheap and easy to implement–taking a temperature doesn’t require expensive new equipment or lots of training. And just sending home anyone who comes to work coughing or sneezing will accomplish a lot.
All by itself, that should dramatically cut back on how many new cases we get per infected person. We’re pretty sure most transmission is from people with symptoms, after all.
b. All the stuff we were doing before the lockdown, plus masks. That is, keeping 6 feet of distance, washing hands, sanitizing surfaces, etc.
This is all stuff that’s cheap. Sanitizing surfaces is easy with dozens of household chemicals. (There are recipes for making disinfecting or sanitizing solutions from bleach widely available.). Washing hands is easy, and we can make enough hand sanitizer if we want to. (Much of the supply problem is apparently due to dumbass regulations; surely if we can shut the country down for a couple months, we can waive those regs.) Keeping 6 feet of distance isn’t hard in most environments, and can be made to work in most workplaces and retail stores.
Require anyone coming into the office/store/whatever to wear a mask. I expect we’ll have a glut of masks sooner or later (my wife ordered some KN95 masks online and they came, so it’s not like it’s totally unattainable to get some kind of mask). Surgical masks are easier to make, and even handmade cloth masks are probably a little better than nothing. Get the good masks on the public-facing people and the people dealing with food and old people first.
c. Go through all the places that it would be easy for a superspreader to make lots of people sick at once, and see how many we can prevent. Crowded public transit, bars, concert venues, movie theaters, etc., need to stay shut down for awhile, and when they do reopen they’ll need to be be modified to put 6 feet of distance between people and ensure good ventilation.
d. Somehow cause everyone involved in testing to get the lead out, perhaps by asking Russia if they have any patches of Siberia left to which we could exile obstructionist bureaucrats. (Or maybe Trump can negotiate something with Greenland–I hear he’s kinda interested in deals there.) When we get to the point where we can do a lot of testing, we can actually figure out where we stand and what’s working well/poorly.
SARS2 doesn’t spread all that well, which means that all this can actually work at reducing R_0 quite a bit.
@DinoNerd
Weird.
They looked at the sharpest air flow besides sneezing and had the petri dishes at 20cm distance — that is of rather low external validity for real life mask wearing situations. People should know by now how to keep distance (and 20 cm is rare even in normal times (maybe not in S Korea?)), and coughers (or sneezers) are supposed to be in hospital or self-isolation anyway. No useful conclusions for Western-world recommendations so far.
And that they could not detect virus on the inside of 3 of 4 cotton masks and of 3 of 4 surgical masks makes me suspicious about all the rest. Not even the tiniest number or droplets not making the sharp bend to the gaps, but after passing the gaps doing a sharp u-turn towards the outer surface? Did they mix up the swabs or the surfaces?
But a turbulent jet passing between teeth and lips does not deposit anything in the inner surface? Naaaaaaa.
Before lockdown, all Western countries (and China) had ~33% case growth per day, while Japan had ~8% case growth per day. Japan didn’t have a lockdown, nor extensive testing and case tracing like Korea and Singapore. What it did have was a ban on very large events, plus mask wearing and a culture of not talking in public. Apparently, that was enough to decrease R0 from 3 to something like 1.5 (I haven’t done the exact math). It therefore seems like mask wearing would be an extremely prudent measure for other countries to take, and significantly reduce the risks of easing the lockdown.
A burqa is a full-length garment, so yeah, you will. Even a niqab still comes down well below the shoulders, so unless you’re wearing it with a spaghetti-string tank top and short shorts or something you’ll still look pretty Muslim in it.
Maybe you meant to say a hijab — but a hijab doesn’t cover the face, just the hair, so I don’t see the point in using it to get around a facemask requirement.
I don’t know if you’re male or female, BTW (sorry if you’ve told us before — either I didn’t see it or I forgot); if you’re male the burqa and niqab might still theoretically allow you to pass as a Muslim woman! The hijab on the other hand will just make you look crazy unless you’re clean shaven with a feminine face, in which case you’ll only come off as crazy upon closer inspection.
I meant the head covering.
The picture was basically a combination of head and face covering, with only the eyes showing, in black.
I found it by googling for burqa, but I think they may have also indexed it as niqab. The other niqab pictures looked quite different however.
Tangentially…
there is a bit of a Twitter argument over whether an old Georgia law against masks should be relaxed. After all, the law was intended to make it illegal for members of the KKK to appear in public in their distinctive masks.
If you think the risk level of doing so is one you accept… would you try to wear a KKK-style hood and mask in public? With text saying “no, I’m not in the Klan” that is visible at about 6 feet away?
How about just keep making it illegal to wear masks while engaged in protests or political assemblies? I’d prefer still keeping it illegal for the klan to wear masks, and I’d want that to apply to antifa, too.
At least in Virginia, the convictions for mask-wearing often were associated with armed robbery.
@Conrad Honcho
That would effectively be a ban on protests or political assemblies…
“How about just keep making it illegal to wear masks while engaged in protests or political assemblies?”
This creates the odd scenario where you can go for a walk alone in the countryside with a mask on but have to take it off if you join a peace march with thousands of people.
Personally I favour people being allowed to wear whatever they want, all things being equal.
Assuming the burqa is black, get some white felt and sew (or iron-on) a facsimile of the ISIS flag.
On a similar note, this NJ man has effectively expressed his opinion that the order is pants-on-head stupid.
I love it; it might even be better than the islamic face veil.
In contrast to the efficacy of random cloth masks, we also have this headline (might be paywalled):
Coronavirus: Bay Area officials warn some N95 masks not effective against spread
Quoting the article:
The date of this article is one day after the new order for everyone to cover their mouth and nose.
It looks like the issue here is actually that these masks only protect the wearer from other people, but don’t protect other people from the wearer.
But talk about confusing messaging. And note that while googling for masks I might be able to buy, I found plenty with exhalation valves ;-(
That is important. It seems that masks in general don’t protect the wearer much (because the virus in the air will still land on you and eventually get in your system, maybe even through the mask), but do protect people from the wearer (because the mask slows the speed of air exiting in a cough or during speech, so the virus then spreads a shorter distance).
If you really feel the need to tell everyone that you resent being told what to do, you can just carry around a bluetooth speaker playing this rather famous comedic song on a loop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrgpZ0fUixs
Thank god for those assholes in 1776.
There is no reasonable prospect of everyone getting a daily N-95 or even surgical mask in the next few months. And improvised cloth masks, made used and cared for by amateurs, are of extremely limited value in preventing spread of COVID-19 (or much of anything else) between asymptomatic persons. Not zero value, but I’m rairly certain the role they are playing here is somewhere between a placebo and a safety blanket.
And I’m glad that there’s a thing people can do that will let them say “I’m doing something!” and not feel so helpless, even if it does very little good. For all people other than politicians, that is. Politicians, to feel like they are Doing Something, have to either mandate or ban things, and bannning things like showing your face to your fellow human beings kind of a big deal. We shouldn’t be letting them do that just so that they can feel better about themselves, and we certainly shouldn’t be letting them do that just so that they can look better to voters who don’t know any better.
Why? The virus is spread by saliva droplets spraying out of your mouth into other peoples’ faces (or much more rarely, onto some surface like another person’s hand that they then use to pick their nose). Any barrier between your mouth and their face is going to be primo.
I am not a doctor, and have no special knowledge that would inform this take, but my thoughts:
1) Saliva droplets get on your (fairly porous) home made mask. Even if we assume none make it through during the initial contamination (my guess is that some will make it through), you know have coronavirus droplets soaked into the fabric you are breathing through. It might reduce the amount you’re breathing in as some stay stuck to the fabric, but seems to me you’re still going to be inhaling virus in that scenario.
2) People are going to end up re-using their home made masks. This means leaving virus contaminated masks lying around (I’m assuming at least some large percentage won’t bother to do a thorough cleaning of the mask after each outing), plus if they aren’t careful to mark the sides of the mask the next time they might well put the mask on with the virus-side touching their face.
Those points don’t change the fact that if YOU are sick, the mask will slow your exhaled air and the virus will spread a shorter distance.
Well, first, the only study we’ve got says improvised cloth masks are worse than useless. As Scott notes, there are problems with the study and it’s highly counterintuitive, but it’s also difficult to turn the results into cloth masks doing much good.
Second, airflow is like electricity in that it takes the path of least resistance. For your typical ill-fitted mask of too-heavy cloth, the path of least resistance isn’t to filter itself through the cloth, but to flow out through the gaps. And it’s not at all clear that e.g. two droplet-laden airstreams going six feet out to either side, is an improvement over one going six feet forward.
And third, as acymetric notes, anything your mask does stop, winds up on your mask. Which you or someone else in your family are going to make a hamfisted amateur attempt to clean and reuse.
If you’re so certain it’s a good thing that it makes you feel better to wear a mask, knock yourself out. If you’re so certain it’s a good thing that you want to lock up other people for not wearing masks, prove it.
As best I can tell, the virus dies down to undetectable levels on most materials in three days or so. So why isn’t it sufficient to cycle through four masks, using one a day?
I have seen several articles online saying the opposite (i.e. that multiple studies have found masks do help). Who to trust? I don’t feel terrible about siding with national health authorities on this, over a blogger named Scott.
@eric23
Real masks or homemade masks?
When I see an article online that says “multiple studies have found”, I look for the footnotes.
If there are links to some of those studies, or to a meta-study, and those links lead to reasonable sites (not The Onion ;-), then I consider that the statement might be reasonable, though I’m inclined to click through and make sure that the studies appear to have been reasonable and relevant, and actually produced the results claimed by the poster.
If there are no links, then my level of belief depends on whether I have the knowledge to supply those links myself, and I try not to update my priors at all. (No new info, except that the poster believes something.)
Except for the how-far-do-droplets-go model, I still haven’t see any positive studies featuring improvised facemasks. I have now seen two negative studies. I’ve linked the second one in this thread; Scott already linked the first one.
I’m now interested in the source of the “spread by droplets in the air, mostly, not deposits on surfaces” hypothesis, which seems to now have become consensus belief. Where is the evidence supporting it, and how good is that evidence?
Properly-used N95 and P100 masks help a lot. Surgical masks help somewhat. Improvised cloth masks, we’re not even sure whether they help or harm. “Masks”, is too imprecise a category to say anything useful about, so anyone saying “masks” help without saying front and center what kind of masks, should be ignored. If your country’s national health service is talking up the virtues of “masks” and some random blogger is digging up studies about different kinds of masks, you need a better national health service and may have to make do with a blogger until you get one.
Wait, what? this is a review of 31 different studies; the conclusion was that the evidence base wasn’t great, but on balance they probably helped.
This apppears to be a review of 31 studies of “masks”, making no attempt to distinguish between different types of masks except to note that most of the data they could find was for professionally manufactured surgical masks. It does not seem to address the question specifically at hand, which is the effectiveness of improvised cloth masks.
@DinoNerd
I shifted towards that theory based on the story of the choir in Washington State. By the descriptions they were using hand sanitizer and avoiding touching each other, and singing isn’t an activity that involves much touching your mouth or eyes, but it involves a lot of hard breathing.
Other than that, though, I haven’t looked into it a lot; I’m mostly relying on what I perceive as expert consensus.
(And washing my groceries.)
In Bucharest you can barely see people on the street without surgical masks. Almost no N95 – but surgical masks are already around 60 cents online, or around $2 a piece in pharmacies. And I have good reason to suspect we’re at the tail end of western civilization.
The scenario I care about is a symptomatic person going in the same store as me at the same time. And in this case having absolutely anything between his mouth and my lungs is very very useful. 80-20 applies – I’m pretty sure a cough/sneeze/speech behind a mask dramatically decreases both matter expelled and distance traveled.
This applies very well to how much cloth masks protect the wearer. But having the social convention of everybody wearing some form of mask protects everybody, even if it’s cloth.
The best evidence I know for the benefit of surgical masks in limiting the spread of infection is this paper. They got people with seasonal coronavirus (the kind that causes a cold, not the kind that kills you), influenza, and seasonal rhinovirus (which also causes colds). What they found was a significant decrease in virus in large droplets (what’s important for close contact and contaminating surfaces) for seasonal coronavirus and influenza, and also a significant decrease in small droplets (what’s responsible for airborne transmission at a distance) in seasonal coronavirus.
The Wikipedia video linked elsethread also shows that there’s a pretty significant effect on airflow from sneezes by wearing a surgical mask or even using a cupped hand or tissue. That matters for limiting the distance your small droplets travel, and probably also for catching most of the droplets so they don’t end up on someone else’s salad or in their face.
I would be quite surprised if masks gave no value at all. They’re probably giving the wearer a little bit of protection (keeping them from touching their face, stopping large droplets from someone else’s sneeze), and they seem almost certain to be making it less likely that a given person will transmit the virus to someone else.
Because R_0 isn’t all that high for this infection, stuff that drops the probability that someone will transmit their infection by, say, 20-30%, is pretty worthwhile.
Makeshift cloth masks are probably not going to work as well as surgical masks, but they seem almost certain to limit the number and range of large respiratory droplets, and we’re pretty sure those explain a lot of disease transmission, so it’s almost got to be a win.
So someone decided to put masks on covid-19 patients, and measure how much virus wound up on a petri dish when they coughed at it.
https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2764367/effectiveness-surgical-cotton-masks-blocking-sars-cov-2-controlled-comparison
My confirmation bias loves the results.
The obvious issue is that the petri dishes were at closer than conversational distance, way closer than social-distancing distance, and the people wearing the masks were not asymptomatic.
For start note that testing indicates that masks reduce number of expelled viruses. And that scale is logarithmic.
So for me it confirms that masks help but are not 100% effective.
My confirmation bias also loves the results.
Some results are suspicious at best. Patient 4 has very weird results. Also, n=4.
Shh.. my reply went into the wrong branch. Please see further up. And then @matkoniecz ninja’d it.
The most important debate on reopening America, happening now at the WSJ
When did they start self-identifying as The Onion?
Eh, Jason Gay kind of has their “humorous pop culture” guy beat down, and has been doing stuff like this for quite some time.
https://politicallyincorrecthumor.com/daily-memes/2020/03/03-31-politically-incorrect-daily-2/
There must be someone here who can answer this question. How tough are shoggoths in H.P. Lovecraft’s original stories?
The reason I’m asking is that I’ve recently run into two portrayals of them that are really quite different. In the video game Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics, they’re tough but can be stopped with normal weapons. Shoot one with a rifle — and keep shooting — and it will die. But in the story “A Colder War”, by Charles Stross, shoggoths are depicted as utter murder machines, unstoppable by anything except possibly nuclear weapons. Which depiction is closer to canon?
Lovecraft mentions shoggoths in several works, but they are only described in detail in At the Mountains of Madness. If my memory serves my right they are described more like unstoppable murder machines, but they don’t really get a chance to do anything more than to chase the unarmed narrator for a bit. There’s no real opposition to the shoggoth, so who knows what it’s capable of?
I’ve only seen shoggoths “onscreen” in “At the Mountains of Madness.” In this depiction, gurl eha hc ntnvafg gjb oybxrf sebz n fpvragvsvp rkcrqvgvba, fb ab bar gevrf, yvxr, fcenlvat gurz jvgu znpuvar tha sver, ohg gurl qb evc n pbhcyr bs napvrag fgnesvfu nyvraf gb cvrprf, naq gur napvrag fgnesvfu nyvraf ner gurzfryirf cerggl zhpu hafgbccnoyr j/e/g uhznaf, so I think the Stross depiction is more accurate.
Thinking logically, a shoggoth is a massive shapeshifting blob of protoplasm, so if you shoot it a thousand times, you’d just get a shoggoth with some metal in it, not a dead shoggoth.
Mr. Willy Pete would like to have a word with you. There is a vast gulf between “bullets are not the right tool for this job” and “only nukes will do and maybe not even them”. It’s fifty or so tons of organic flesh without vital organs but terrestrial in origin; I’ll forgive a bunch of cartographers and geologists running away, otherwise man up and deal with it.
If I were writing the story in the Lovecraft/Stross tradition, I’d have the first grenade burn about half of one away, while the men cheer and the general lights his cigar. Then the remaining half would cook up something to neutralise the fire, and they’d get eaten, plus any other shoggoths that the demi-shoggoth touched would copy the mutation.
In “A Colder War,” though, the one they were mainly thinking about nuking was Cthulhu. That should at least make him go to sleep if you’re on target.
Mr. Willy Pete would like to have a word with you.
Well, let’s see. If Wikipedia is accurate, the effects of white phosphorus are:
So I don’t doubt you could indeed inflict burn injuries on the outer surface of shoggoths. But they don’t have organs like lungs etc. to be affected by phosphorous poisoning, and they were initially bred to be submarine beasts of burden only (the migration to land was discouraged until the society of the Old Ones needed their labour to replace the dead draught-animals they had used on land). Therefore I think their structure is a lot harder to pierce than soft human tissues, and that they’d be able to do quite well without oxygen and so smother the phosphorous particles, especially by permitting them to pass some way into the mass of the shoggoth then sealing off the entrance wound by reforming their matter around it.
Vapour inhalation is, of course, no problem at all for the shoggoths.
I agree that there’s a middle ground between rifles and nuclear bombs, but I also think that while you could use high explosives to render a shoggoth into lumps of protoplasm, there is nothing to guarantee that they could not slowly re-form, in the same way the material form of Chthulu did in the encounter below:
In order to destroy them, you’d have to obliterate any organic material completely, and that would take a lot of fuel and ammunition to do.
And in the meantime, while you’re trying to burn every last scrap of shoggoth protoplasm into ashes, the shoggoths are bearing down on you and ripping your head off. So yes, there’s a middle ground, but if an overconfident party sets off to an encounter where there could be shoggoths armed only with rifles and presuming that those are enough to deal with them, I think they’re in for a nasty surprise:
“…a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us”,
Suggests that Shoggoths are not only amorphous but continuously reforming, bringing unburnt protoplasm to the surface and quite likely bringing bubbles of whatever back into its interior. If “whatever” turns out to be air and burning phosphorous, that’s not going to be a very healthy Shoggoth.
If not, it’s unclear how much danger such a beastie will be when its entire exterior including the sense organs is a burnt-over scab (or scabbed-over burn). And an arctic-aquatic animal susceptible to burn
injuries is likely to be as afraid of fire as most other animals. If you encounter one in an aquatic environment you’ve obviously got problems, but on dry land fire is probably the way to go.
Hmm, the official role-playing game doesn’t seem to have rules for white phosphorous (a curious oversight), but it looks like a barrage of eighteen Molotov cocktails should do in the average Shoggoth.
The rules also allow bullets a nominal 1 point of damage regardless of caliber, but with the size and regenerative abilities of a Shoggoth, we’re talking full auto, preferably belt-fed. Hmm, looks like a skilled machine gunner could take down a Shoggoth with about 250 rounds of sustained fire. If you happen to have brought one of those, and he didn’t get eaten by the Shoggoth first.
What were distress flares made from back then?
The shoggoths in A Colder War seem tougher than that:
Perhaps this is simply Stross going his own way for the purposes of his story. He needs the Lovecraftian tools to be formidable enough to matter in the Cold War. Or if we want to fit his presentation of shoggoths in with Chaosium’s, these militarized shoggoths could just be more formidable than the regular kind, the way an assault rifle is a more useful weapon than a nail gun. The Soviets could have bred or trained their shoggoths somehow.
The only canon description is in “At the Mountains of Madness”, in which the protagonists all fail their SAN rolls and run away in abject terror. So we don’t really get an indication of their toughness. They are indicated as having defeated their creators in a series of uprisings / civil wars, which implies some sort of significant martial ability, but their creators were apparently handicapped by being dependent on shoggoth labor even as they were trying to defend themselves against extermination by shoggoth.
I think Stross is closer to what shoggoths are like; I certainly don’t think, from Lovecraft’s “Mountains of Madness”, that mere projectile weapons like a rifle would do enough (or any) damage to slow them down.
Imagine shooting into an enormous bowl of jelly with a rifle – sure, you’d do damage, but not in any meaningful way (unless you shredded it with a lot of weapons fire). Then imagine that bowl of jelly is able to come after you like a steam train.
The Old Ones, when the shoggoths became intelligent and rebelled, “used curious weapons of molecular disturbance against the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory”, so yes, something along the lines of nuclear weapons are necessary.
Strong disagree. They’re just cells (Dyer believes he finds evidence that the Cambrian Explosion fauna are descended from shoggoth matter that lost shape-shifting under natural selection) so while bullets should be mostly useless, fire should disturb their molecules just fine without requiring a nuke.
Shoot them with rock salt till it messes with the osmotic pressure?
Or see if tide pods degrade them?
There was a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie, The Horror of Party Beach, where it turned out that the weakness of the humanoid sea monsters was pure sodium, which reacts violently with water. … the protagonists ended up hurling metallic sodium with their bare hands.
I’ve never tried throwing alkali metals at a fish but I doubt they’d be best pleased.
And I think Na is safe enough that you could handle it with dry hands and *probably* not end up getting a skin graft. Especially if it’s coated in mineral oil.
I have to assume that a creature that could generate any kind of tissue could make itself effectively fireproof for at least a little while. Some extremophilic bacteria can survive for hours at 130 C; a shoggoth could probably beat that record pretty easily. I can imagine it growing layers of heat-shielding foam or reflective scales to deflect heat.
I think the difficulty is that if the shoggoths are working under even a remote understanding of biology, then the issue with fire is that we’re taking the gribbly energy source they have to fuel their strength and transformations and turning it into an energy source for burning more shoggoth.
And if they’re not working under an understanding of biology we understand, then there’s no way to say that small arms won’t work.
Hell, if we can infer anything about them, the fact that they’re chilling in Antarctica suggests that they don’t deal with breakaway oxidation reactions very well at all.
the issue with fire is that we’re taking the gribbly energy source they have to fuel their strength and transformations and turning it into an energy source for burning more shoggoth.
I think we can at least agree that rifles won’t be enough for a possible encounter with a shoggoth, you’re going to need a flamethrower or something in that area.
I think the original Pabodie expedition to the Antarctic only had rifles and the like, so they had nothing to handle shoggoths with (hence the sensible running away screaming, which is the only way the two remaining members survived).
I’m inclined towards the “extremely durable” end of the spectrum; I can’t imagine that a creature that could be destroyed by conventional weaponry would’ve troubled the Elder Things too much.
Some Mythos creatures are killed or weakened by conventional weaponry. Acid, boats ramming into them, and if I remember correctly guns are used in Charles Dexter Ward to great effect.
There is a reason that the Mi-Go hide and use guns (or human intermediaries with guns) in Whisperer.
If the monsters weren’t afraid or mortal, they wouldn’t be hiding. (Someone correct me if there was a different reason why the Mi-Go remained in out-of-the-way areas).
Mi-Go can be killed by dogs. Wilbur Whateley is a son of Yog-Sothoth and he’s killed by a Miskatonic University guard dog during an attempted burglary.
The narrative voice in At the Mountains of Madness tries to play “ooh unstoppable” with the Mi-Go but admits that Lovecraft described some species inconsistently:
The vulnerable Mi-Go are the true interpretation, because that happens on-screen rather than being some human’s interpretation of sapient crinoid murals.
I could go on all day about the Call of Cthulhu fandom’s wrong interpretations of Lovecraft.
Mi-Go can be killed by dogs. Wilbur Whateley is a son of Yog-Sothoth and he’s killed by a Miskatonic University guard dog during an attempted burglary.
Mi-Go are more traditional aliens, so they are vulnerable in the same way as humans are vulnerable. Wilbur Whateley was mostly human, or humanoid, and was in the process of becoming a monstrosity when the guard dog killed him. He had a twin brother who was more like the father’s side of the family:
The more material the entity is, the more it would be vulnerable to human weapons; Wilbur Whateley was the son of a human mother so his share of earthly materiality was enough to let him be killed. His twin brother, on the other hand, has had the material part that allowed it a toehold in our world destroyed, but the ‘outside’ part of it still exists.
Exactly. On-screen at least, the Mi-Go are traditional extraterrestrials with normal bodies. Wilbur’s twin is a supernatural being, and the relationship between his nature, the supernatural father, and mortal Wilbur follows Weird, faux-theological rules.
Sometimes HPL wrote science fiction or supernatural horror unmixed, then sometimes he got really weird by mixing them, like “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” where the hero experiences ego-death from meeting a benevolent Yog-Sothoth and reincarnates as an extraterrestrial wizard.
Is the MiG-15 better than the MiG-17 in any way?
The MiG-17 was built as a replacement for the MiG-15 so it is half a generation ahead and probably superior in most relevant ways. The MiG-15 is probably cheaper and easier to repair with duct tape, but that’s kind of a cheating answer. It is plausible that the MiG-17 had some pain points that the MiG-15 lacked (maybe the inner flaps jammed easily or something) but I can’t find anything and the Soviets probably didn’t go around telling people. And the MiG-15 probably had pain points of its own in spades.
Cool Mig-15 video (French pilots, turn on subtitles for English translation).
Amazing video. Honestly, if I were a multi-billionaire, what would be a better way to spend all that excess dosh than getting flights in fighter jets over the Mojave? Looks amazing, landscape and sky and the feeling of flight.
Thanks for the link!
It’s got a more powerful engine (with an afterburner) with more wing sweep to go faster. It had some other aerodynamic changes to be more controllable at high (above .9) mach numbers. Not sure how useful that was in practice because being that high in the trans-sonic range isn’t a good place to be, but theoretically it’s an advantage.
Various people have been comparing the consequences of the pandemic to the Great Depression. I think that’s wrong. WWII is a better comparison.
During WWII, U.S. production for civilian use was sharply reduced because resources were going into the military. Many people predicted that the end of the war would dump us back into the Great Depression, but that isn’t what happened.
Putting millions of people into the military and millions more into making tanks and bullets and airplanes has an effect on the civilian economy similar to the effect of locking millions of people in their houses — large resources diverted out of what they are normally doing to do things that, from the standpoint of the civilian economy, are worthless.
If I am right, then the end of the pandemic, assuming it really does end in some fairly clear sense, should see a fairly rapid return to normalcy. The only argument I can see against that is that the accumulation of economic restrictions since 1945 may make the economy substantially less flexible now than it was then.
It’s not really my subject, but is there a prospect of rising and then persistently high inflation? Very high unemployment as demand for most things remains suppressed?
The civilian and military economies were linked.
You could convert factories that made war materiel (back) into ones that made civilian goods.
And there were a buch of surplus jeeps, aircraft, tarmac, aluminium alloys etc. that could be repurposed.
Also the USA was Top Country. Britain had years of austerity post-war.
Yes…and last I checked COVID-19 isn’t destroying our factories. It’s just leaving many of them shut down or running at lower capacity as workers stay home. So just as factories went from making guns to butter after WWII, our factories could easily just start back up again. There’s no physical impediment, anyway.
But we’re not making a bunch more state-of-the-art gun factories* that we can turn over to butter production.
More realistically, radar/consumer electronics.
I partially agree, with the caveat that normalcy has not been that great for the last few decades, for the Western middle class. The big risk seems to me that we take on a lot of debt, have low economic growth, try to force it by cheating and then end up with that bubble popping.
After the war, there was a lot of technological advancement that drove up productivity/GDP, which eroded the debt. If we have productivity increases of low single digits for the next decades, the debt won’t erode away. So far, the central banks have tried to keep the impacts of debts low and maximize GDP growth by increasing the money supply a lot, forcing interest rates down. However, with few good investment opportunities, this goes to bubbles, rising housing prices, savings, etc. It seems to me that with our aging population and lack of technological advancement, there is a tendency to the Japanese deflation scenario, where the response to low interest rates is to save even more.
There’s a decent enough chance of a relatively fast recovery (although probably not the sub-4% unemployment and wage growth we had right before the shutdowns). Unemployment tends to recover slowly from increases because some large portion of the unemployed need to go find a completely new job. There are search costs involved with that. Most people don’t have a detailed understanding of the labor market in their area that would let them just go find another employer.
Some people do, though: Their old employer.
Somewhat less than half of a the newly unemployed end up returning to their old employers after a period of time, without being formal layoffs. That was the result for the twenty years prior to 2013, anyway. This makes some sense: Labor costs are high and relatively fixed for many employers, so sudden revenue crashes are often going to be met by shedding labor. However, as revenue recovers, you want to re-adjust back to the old pattern of production so you rehire as many of your old workers as possible.
Not everyone experiences this ‘recall’, because some employers change their business methods and don’t need the old labor force they had, some find alternative hires to the old employee (for a variety of reasons), and some employers just outright go out of business. If the government can successfully use massive credit assistance and bailouts to keep companies in business through the duration of the lockdown, there’s a decent chance that lifting the lockdown will lead to many of these companies re-hiring their old workforce at much higher rates than ‘normal’. Instead of 40% you might see 80%. Or 90%. Can’t really know ahead of time what the actual magnitudes will be, but there are good reasons to believe they’ll be larger than the historical norm because this isn’t a historically normal recession.
A kind of optimistic pessimism I like to call ‘realism’ makes me want to predict unemployment under 10% within a quarter after lockdowns being lifted, premised on successful Federal financial life support for business, and unemployment under 5% by the end of the second quarter after lockdown is lifted.
If there are rolling lockdowns in response to outbreaks and there are no serious treatments this picture is made more complicated, and some industries (like hospitality) are probably going to experience long term effects either way, but I’m not expecting long term elevated unemployment.
Right, if we are looking at the Great Recession, there were some systematic problems that led to it. But it doesn’t seem like there are any similar issues now. It’s just that we’re deliberately putting our economy on hold. I’m pretty skeptical of the claims that we’re going to be facing a new depression.
But I do think this will be a test of each country’s economic vitality. China should recover fastest, followed by the US, followed by Europe. Italy and Spain in particular will probably have the longest time to get back to speed, even if they get the Coronavirus contained sooner than the US.
Arguments for:
1) State governments will extend lockdowns too long, resulting in greater damage to the economy.
2) The overly-generous better-than-employment unemployment benefits in the COVID bailout bill will keep people from going back to work.
3) Many businesses will go under due to the extended period of no revenue while they still have to pay expenses (particularly including property taxes and/or rent). Landlords will lose their investment to the tax man.
4) State governments will get into financial trouble from the drop in sales tax revenues; they’ll raise taxes copiously in response.
5) Continued lesser restrictions will wreck what remains of restaurants, entertainment, and retail; they will not be able to operate profitably with their rush periods cut by 50%.
I understand those reasons but they just don’t seem that convincing to me. Sure, people are taking advantage of unemployment benefits but that’s temporary. There’s no banking crisis and without that, I don’t see that as really bringing down the economy to depression levels or even the Great Recession. Yes, unemployment is high right now but it should go down relatively fast. Some industries probably will be permanently damaged but that’s just the nature of the economy. It’s definitely not something I’m willing to bet on but it looks too different from our other big recessions to confidently proclaim that it will be one of them.
Why? If restaurants and other businesses can’t staff up because of 50% occupancy rules or other carry-over restrictions (because governments can’t just lift off the boot, it’s not in their nature), and many unemployed people are incentivized not to actually look for work anyway because they can collect more than their pay without working for four months, unemployment, it should stay quite high.
So are recessions and depressions.
There is a banking crisis, which is why the Fed has added 2.3 trillion to the markets in 6 weeks. JP Morgan/Chase, the largest bank in the US has suspended all mortgages to people without both a 700+ credit rating and 20% down, and has suspended all new HELOC applications. They have functionally removed themselves from ~90% of the home loan market with these moves.
There wasn’t much of a home loan market to begin with. Just a veneer of a private market in the form of loan origination companies skimming money from a system dominated by the government setting rates and terms arbitrarily.
If banks start going bankrupt, then I’ll be worried about a general market collapse. But I’m not running for the hills because the Fed is taking proactive measures. It’s going to be a couple months before we figure out what the economy is going to look like.
The banks probably won’t fail, what are going to fail are pension systems (Illinois already is on the brink due to crap management) and places without access to the Fed (only half the economy so no big deal).
I wonder if the coronavirus will give cover to the Federal government to bail out all the dead public pensions.
Are you aware that there was a repo crisis in October which resulted in the Fed having to release emergency funding that was supposed to be over a few nights, then weeks and then turned into months? How about that the Fed had to cut rates 3 times last year instead of following its projected rate increases that it was supposed to follow for normalization?
I don’t think I buy this, because in WW2 people working in factories were still being paid, so the demand was still there once the supply came back.
I think what we’re seeing here is simultaneous supply and demand side shocks; I’m not sure what constitutes a good precedent for that.
People are getting paid UE staying at home.
In terms of the domestic economy, watching netflix all day is no less productive than building a shell that’s going to end up embedded in various bits of France.
This seems obviously incorrect just on its face. To dig a little bit deeper, though, building war equipment in factories still stimulates the econonomy (energy usage, raw materials, transport/logistics/shipping) and the people were still spending that money on normal expenses. There is a huge difference between “everything (production or otherwise) is shut down” and “all manufacturing is geared towards war production but other things are still happening more or less normally”.
> (energy usage, raw materials, transport/logistics/shipping)
You can pay them to stay and home and
watch netflixlisten to the wireless too.But the rest of your objections stand.
To some extent yes, but there were large shortages of consumer goods during WW2. New cars were nearly impossible to get, as were new tires, shortages of basics like stockings and milk were common and war rationing was a serious thing.
@Lambert
I’m not sure what listening to the radio does to change that. I’m talking about industrial demand for all manner of things: oil/gas/propane, industrial chemicals, metals, fabrics, etc.
Sure they were making bullets instead of belt buckles, but that is quite different than shutting down entirely for all parties (employer, employee, and the suppliers).
I strongly disagree here.
1. The resumption of ‘normalcy’ in 1945 wasn’t a resumption of normalcy at all, it was a complete phase shift (that took several years). The decade prior to WW2 and WW2 was a low consumption period, and the decade coming into this crisis is a high consumption period.
2. The economy in 1941 was plausibly in full recovery mode before the US entry in WW2. The 1937-39 recession/depression had bad headline numbers, but the recovery was close to V shaped. UE hit 19% in 1938 and was down to a bit under 10% in 1941 (the lowest since 1930) and real GDP growth in ’39/40/41 was as high as real GDP growth in ’42 and close to the 1934 reading. ~1.5 more years of improvement at the same pace as 38-41 and you are near the natural rate of UE.
3. Total debt was much lower in 1945 than it will be coming out of this. The 1929-1941 period had deleveraged the entire economy, the US is currently at similar debt to GDP levels for the US government plus much much higher corporate and household debt levels.
4. 1929-1941 shook out every badly run company possible, everyone who survived had done so with streamlining, aggressive efficiencies, and general competence. When 1945 came those companies were well positioned to pivot into the new economy, now we have a very different situation where the government is trying to keep companies alive for the near future, and we will only find out which ones won’t survive in the new reality after the lockdowns are lifted and we restart. This will be a second wave.
5. The war had a distinct end, Japan’s surrender didn’t leave a whole lot of a chance for a full scale flare up. This situation is likely to have rolling flareups, with countries coming out of, and possibly returning into, lock down on different schedules with different paths. Rather than a clear near term horizon companies should still be hoarding cash etc and moving slowly into the recovery.
A study at Stanford tested random people in Santa Clara county for Coronavirus antibodies. They found a rate of Coronavirus infection 50-85 times more than the number of confirmed cases, and estimate a mortality rate of 0.12-0.2% in the county.
The study, which has not been peer reviewed, is here:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1
Thoughts?
I posted some back-of-the-envelope numbers on excess mortality rates in New York City in another subthread, which suggested that confirmed Covid fatalities trailed overall excess deaths by about a factor of 2.1x. NYC is also reporting “probable” Covid deaths (“Covid-19” or similar is the officially recorded cause-of-death, but the diagnosis was made based on symptoms rather than a positive PCR test), which cover a little less than half the gap between excess deaths and confirmed Covid fatalities. So that gives us a range of actual Covid deaths being somewhere between 1.5x-2x the recorded confirmed mortality rate (although NY recently switch from reporting just confirmed deaths to reporting the combined number of confirmed+probable).
Similar numbers are not available for Santa Clara County, nor for California as a whole. And as far as I know, CA is only reporting confirmed Covid deaths, not probables. California has also run about half as many tests as New York has, or about 1/4 as many per capita. There’s very likely accelerating and diminishing returns to increased testing (e.g. first you test health care providers, then you test inpatients with Covid-like symptoms, then you start testing outpatients with symptoms), but I have no idea where on the curve either state is, and I’m guessing what the curve is even shaped like, so I’ll use an oversimplified linear model. Likewise, I’m making no attempt to correct for the likelihood that per-capita test rates are different in NYC and Santa Clara County than in their respective states overall.
But based on a 4x detection advantage in NY, and a 1.5-2x undercounting of deaths in NY, naïvely multiplied together to get a 6x-8x undercount rate in California, that suggests a mortality rate between 0.72% and 1.6% (the numbers you quoted, multiplied by 6x-8x) in Santa Clara County.
That said, I think my 6x-8x death rate undercount estimate for California is more likely to be an overestimate than an underestimate.
There have been 11,851 deaths in Lombardy. .16% mortality extrapolates to 7.4 million out of 10 million infected.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/europe/italy-coronavirus-cases.html
Can it really be that high?
I think it’s interesting. We need more serological prevalence studies.
Concerns with the study’s estimation of prevalence (leaving aside IFR or whether “the ratio of confirmed cases to infections” is a parameter that can be extrapolated):
1. The sampling method (Facebook ads recruiting volunteers) seems likely to be pretty biased.
2. The study authors attempted to compensate for 1 by weighting their sample to equalize various demographic categories. This weighting roughly doubled their estimate of prevalence, and seems very dangerous to me (because their sample is presumably nonrandom in all kinds of less observable ways, this adjustment might be making things better or worse).
3. As the authors frankly admit, the prevalence calculation is pretty sensitive to estimates of the false positive rate (specificity) and to some extent the false negative rate (sensitivity) of the serological test used.
In terms of bounding IFR, New York City has reported 8,893 deaths which I calculate is a bit over 0.1% of the population of the city, and looking at the deaths curve it doesn’t look like it is about to hit zero. As @Eric Rall suggests the true death count may be higher, and it is not very likely that every New Yorker has been infected. I would love to see a serological study, preferably with stronger randomization, done in New York City.
If I read this correctly, the raw number of positive tests in their sample (50/3330, or 1.5%) is within their own 95% confidence interval for the false-positive rate of the test they are using (0.1-1.7%). So, pretty weak, should probably be treated as noise until we get better data.
Wait, you’re right, that doesn’t make any sense! I trusted that they did their math correctly, but maybe they re-weighted their sample for population demographics first and then tried to correct for test accuracy? Because that is just wrong.
Balaji Srinivasan’s critique (linked from Marginal Revolution) focuses on this exact issue, along with selection bias factors they may not have been able to correct for:
https://medium.com/@balajis/peer-review-of-covid-19-antibody-seroprevalence-in-santa-clara-county-california-1f6382258c25
But reaches the conclusion that “this is a good start but not good enough yet, let’s try again with stronger correction mechanisms for these problems.” It warms my heart that Srinivasan mentions jury duty to correct selection bias, because I’ve been emailing local elected officials trying to get them to repurpose prospective juror selection mechanisms to pick study samples, and maybe he’s in a better position to persuade them.
that’s a really helpful link, thank you.
Welcome to the weird world of early Dungeons & Dragons! Ever wonder what humans and other Non-Player Characters do to level up? Let’s look at the 1977 Monster Manual to see.
If you encounter a band of bandits, there will be 6 2nd level Fighter guards, a 3rd level officer for every 20 bandits, 4th, 5th, and 6th level officers in larger groups, and always a 7th level lieutenant to the 8-10th level chief (9th level is when players got a noble or priestly domain or wizard’s tower). Similar advancement opportunities exist if you’re a nomad. If you join a berserker gang you can advance to 7th level (6th to 7th requires your chief to level up) but then you have to leave or your career will stagnate.
If you’re a 3rd level Fighter, buccaneers/pirates will want you as a commander of 50 and their advancement opportunities go up to mate (4th), commander of 100 (5th), lieutenant to an 8th level Captain (6th), 7th if your Captain levels up (this requires him to lead 200+ pirates), and then a Captain yourself. You could also join the highly religious desert Dervishes as a commander of 30, but there are no advancement opportunities for a Fighter beyond 6th level.
One other career option at 5th level is to become the lieutenant of the leader of merchant caravan guards one level higher than yourself. If you become the leader yourself (leaders can be higher than 6th level, so career advancement is possible), you’re responsible for employing exactly 12 2nd level guards and 40-240 of 1st level! Trade must be very hazardous in this world.
The same groups often have Clerics. For every 50 bandits, there’s a 15% chance they’ll have a 5th or 6th level Cleric with an assistant two levels lower. Nomad bands always have two 3rd level Clerics and, for every 50 nomads, a 15% chance of a 4th to 7th level one. Another option for 3rd-4th level Clerics is to go berserk and live as assistants to a 7th level berserk Cleric. At 4th level, 10th level Clerics who head a Dervish fortress will be willing to employ you as one of their two bodyguards, which lets you advance as far as 8th level Cleric if your 10th level master advances to 12th… apparently at Level 9 you have to leave the community and run a normal temple.
Apparently another thing normal temples do is send teams of Clerics to lead lay pilgrims. Pilgrim groups range in size from 10-116 lay people (and possibly a Mage), but are always led by exactly 1 8th level Cleric, 1-2 of 6th level, 1 5th, 1-4 4th, 1 3rd and 1-6 2nd.
If a Cleric is 12th to 15th level, they may go off and make a pirate Captain their subordinate – 15% chance for every 50 pirates you meet!
Nomad bands always have a 4th level Mage and for every 50 nomads a 15% chance that (s)he will have a 5-8th level master. For every 50 pirates there’s a 10% chance of meeting a 6th-8th level Mage hired by their Captain, and for every 50 bandits a 25% chance they’ll have a 7th-10th level Mage (equal probability of each level in all cases). A Dervish fortress always has an 8th level Mage with two 4th level assistants. And for every 40 1st level Fighters guarding a merchant caravan, there’s a 10% chance their leader will be teamed with a Mage of 6th-8th level.
Is there some weird social system here where Mages are students in a tower/school from Level 1-3, then their only option in the outside world is to become a nomad or Dervish, and groups of tough guys only want their services from 6th level until they become professors in towers?
Low level mages in D&D kind of suck, right? I’m only really familiar with second edition, but you’ve basically got someone who can contribute meaningfully to a battle once, then they’re a pretty useless fighter who probably shouldn’t even try to help. Makes sense to me!
It’s interesting to see that kind of focus on large groups, knowing that original D&D started like a “mod” for a more expansive tabletop wargaming sim.
Even at low levels, good spell selection means you can turn a fight around with a single casting. At first level, you’ll only get the one casting, but that’s still often enough: sleep in early editions offered no saving throw, for example, and put 2d8 HD of creatures (ogre-sized or less) out of the fight for the duration. Color spray, web, and a few other low-level spells were similarly abusable. Good tactics for a first- or second-level mage is to hang back until the situation starts looking hairy, then be fire support.
Poor spell selection means you’re a crappy, one-shot archer or worse, but players of casters in early editions usually learned quick.
What he said. Smart first-level play is to walk down into a dangerous indoor environment with enough characters in plate armor to control choke points, the Mage behind* saving their well-selected spell for when it looks like PC death is on the table, and a Thief scouting ahead.
AD&D originally assumed (via tables in the Dungeon Master’s Guide) that unless you went deeper into a dungeon, you’d be encountering beings like a single human NPC 8% of the time, 3-15 humans with max 6-8 Hit Points 7% of the time, goblins/orcs/hobgoblins in similar numbers 22% of the time, 5-20 rats 13% of the time, kobolds – the weakest sapient species – 6%, parties of the non-human playable races, 1-4 of the weakest undead, 1-4 wild animals with Fighter-like hit points… you get the idea. Anything likely to one-shot even a Cleric looks consciously excluded, though of course PCs are going to die if you neither parley nor control choke points against the bigger numbers.
Once you’ve expended your resources killing and treasure-hunting on the first level, run for the exit and live to fight another day.
*Note that if a dungeon is intelligently designed for defense by its inhabitants, there will be many opportunities to sneak up behind you that you don’t know about, so area control could require four of those people in plate armor: if there weren’t 6+ players at the table, they came up with ways to compensate like nobody playing a Thief and instead driving sheep through the dungeon to trigger all traps. (The Dungeon Master was not collaborating to make sure you overcame challenges in a way that made you look like a good person.)
Someday I’d like somebody with a deep knowledge of tactics to take a long hard look at the D&D-inspired standard fantasy setting and see what kind of tactics should logically come out of it, once you scrap genre convention and the more obvious game-mechanical stuff (like hit points). I’m not that guy, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t look much like anything before the modern era.
Spells and magical items mean that small, well-trained and well-equipped units can trounce much larger but poorly equipped forces. That’s not so far off from our own medieval era, when expensive and relatively rare armored knights held an almost insurmountable advantage over peasant levies, but it also means that historical heavy cavalry tactics don’t work very well (you can disrupt a charge with any number of spells), and neither do their historical counters (pike squares are ideal targets for a fireball). Cover and concealment become much more important: if an enemy caster has line of sight on you, you’re vulnerable.
It might even end up looking more like modern fire and maneuver tactics, with small, widely dispersed forces jockeying to pin their opponents (or at least their squishier elements) down while their own casters get into position.
@Nornagest:
Very likely you’d get something that looks like 20th century bush wars. The most mundane form of dungeon crawl is Viet Cong tunnels, which were a response to the need for stealth in general and American air dominance in particular… and every Standard Fantasy Setting has air attacks like dragon breath.
While tactics should logically look modern, an interesting unknown is what size of armies there would be. Even ignoring economy-changing magic, Iron Age economies were capable of supporting empires deploying perhaps 300,000 (e.g. 60 legions between the sides in Julius and Augustus’s Civil Wars, or modern estimates of what Xerxes could bring to Greece without them dying of dehydration). Far larger numbers fought in loose formations with squad-mates constantly seeking cover in WWII (and if such empires exist, we can assume they’d figure out how to mass-produce some subset of the diverse Standard Fantasy Setting armors), so the next questions would be to figure out the numbers of spellcasters and relative roles of special units with them and common units without.
Now of course, armies in the World Wars fought over vast fronts since it was suicide to form up into phalanxes and lines. This required more advanced command and control… probably be basic magic for a SFT, so that checks out.
Honestly, it doesn’t take much OOC knowledge to kludge together a space program using the D&D spell book so tactics with a rational bent can rapidly expand into include interplanetary bombardment.
That said, I’ve seen it argued pretty convincingly that combining highly level adventurers with teleportation gives you such a concentration of force delivered at speed that conventional armies are basically useless. Any force in the field will be cut off from its supplies almost immediately with very little ability to do anything about it unless the adventuring parties are stupid or unfortunate enough to teleport directly into the army.
Instead, the tactics would be built around inserting elite special forces into the enemy’s strong points to kill wizards and other casters and then retreating. Employed successfully such a strategy would prevent any retaliation as you’ve killed or disrupted their ability to perform a counter strike to such an extent it doesn’t matter how powerful their forces are, they can’t reach you. Employed unsuccessful you’d seen a MAD like exchange where each nation burns down any mage colleges it can find and you end up with a fantasy version of the dark ages… Well, a darker age than when they started at least.
A small number of advanced, flashy weapons systems bolted on to a fundementaly pre-modern (Modernity starting somewhere between 1861 and 1918) army?
Sounds like Saudi princes in fighter jets.
I’d expect a lot of invasions to go like Iran-Iraq, quickly bogging down as mundane forces fail to effectively support magical assets.
@fibio:
Teleport did not work that way in D&D ’74, AD&D or “Classic” (Expert set et al).
A 9th level Mage owned a tower as part of the landowning elite, could cast teleport once a day, and could only bring 250 pounds along besides their naked body. Unless surgical strikes were carried out by Level 10+ magical lord professors (and with only one wiry armored guard each), getting in and out the same day would be impossible.
Furthermore, teleport was never 100% safe. There was at least a 1% risk of blinking into existence too low at the target, instantly dying inside the ground. Depending on edition, the chance of instant death was as high as 75% (’74 rules) without personal certain knowledge of the destination, or more generously 25% if the wizard had only “casual” knowledge (brief first-hand observation, scrying or a detailed description by a spy) with another 25% chance of appearing tens of feet in the air above the target.
IIRC, most of the better-known Standard Fantasy Settings in other media pre-date 3rd Edition’s broken magic system.
Take a ring of feather falling and set your teleport target 10 feet above where you want to be.
Then the supply of rings of Feather Fall becomes a top military-industrial question.
Nobody ever used teleport for ground level targets, that would be insane risk taking, the standard approach was to only use teleport in conjunction with feather-fall or flight, and target the sky above where you wanted to go. Which also meant teleport was actually a spell for “Travel to the general vicinity of anything”, not for breaching fortifications – porting inside a fortress would always be insanely dangerous, but travel to a city you have only heard just enough rumors about to be sure it a: exists, and b: to tell apart from other random cities is as safe as travel to your childhood home, because in either case, you are aiming at empty skies.
Tangential question: what would the terms of venery be for character classes? I’m thinking clerics would be a congregation.
A horde of barbarians, of course.
A raid of fighters. A tribe of rangers. A circle of druids. A piety of paladins. A rave of bards. A murderjungle of murderhoboes. An argument of wizards.
I like “a diatribe of paladins” myself.
@Nick:
A staff? An office?
Also, near the top in your link: “A bashir of auditors.”
What?
@Nornagest:
Nice. But not a Matter of paladins?
A gang of thieves (or House of Rogues). An order of monks.
Thieves and assassins can come in Guilds. And Bards come in bands – or if sufficiently numerous, in choirs and orchestras.
Suddenly I think there should be mechanical advantage for having three bards who specialize in guitar, bass, and drums.
No idea what greater advantage a bard orchestra should have.
All I know is that brass band members get a variety of bonuses when multiclassing.
A Matter of paladins is good too.
A dastard of blackguards.
I knew I lived in a fairly wealthy area. More BMWs than Honda Civics, few people doing their own lawn, that sort of thing. But I didn’t realize quite how wealthy until I went to the liquor store today, and two of the customers were wearing, not cloth masks or paper surgical masks (as the employees were), but blue N95 surgical respirators. Truly I felt in the presence of royalty.
Maybe they’re not so rich, just well-prepared. My girlfriend and I got 50 N95s back in January. We’ve been wearing them, combined with safety goggles, while shopping (we use one per week).
They might have some hobby that they use them for, maybe woodworking or spray painting or something along those lines. They might also have some job that hands out masks (asbestos removal expert? covid nurse?), though I’m not sure people with jobs like that live in rich areas.
Not the surgical ones.
The main difference is that normal N95 isn’t rated against high pressure blood spray (like you might see if an artery is damaged during surgery). This isn’t a concern with woodworking, unless someone’s not being careful with a band saw.
I have one. But that’s because it was left over from a training session we did on how to properly put on and remove the PPE for flu-like illnesses (read: Covid-19). Since we had to put one on, it would have been disgusting to have someone else reuse it. So we were told we could throw it out or keep it. I’ve kept mine in the car.
Not sure that anyone has posted this article from the Atlantic.
It makes the rather disturbing point that the apparent plateau in new cases in the US is highly correlated with a plateau in the number of tests we are administering.
That suggests we are at least somewhat likely not plateauing. We just don’t have enough tests to be able to tell that.
In the NYC area, hospital visits and hospital admissions have peaked, and deaths have at least plateaued (whether you count confirmed or confirmed + probable). Confirmed cases are meaningless, but actual cases probably peaked some time ago in the places which were hit early.
Not sure how that’s really responsive to the article?
Right now we are seeing these clustered bursts of case in places like South Dakota. We know the virus is basically within reach of everywhere in the US. The reported cases give us a sense that we are at least somewhat controlling the growth.
NYC, per capita, is much more tested than the rest of the country. The question is do we have an accurate picture of current growth in places that aren’t NYC. This data says that our testing isn’t growing fast enough to tell us that.
Reported cases are meaningless due to the low testing rate, so that sense is an illusion. But that doesn’t mean the opposite sense is supported either; you need to look at meaningful things. You cannot conclude from “tests are plateauing” that actual cases are “likely not plateauing”.
Reported cases are not an exact ratio of real cases, but they definitely aren’t “meaningless” either.
Until the percent of positive tests declines below 5%, we can’t be confident that we’re getting everyone.
Is the percent of false positives even below 5%?
I do not know what tests Americans are using, but in tests we are using here (Czechia), evidently yes, since last day when we had above 5 % positives was 29 March.
Perhaps, but the same point could be made that during testing ramp up we were not increasing the number of actual cases.
Using testing in your argument is mostly folly until the people tested is not primarily people who think they have the disease. Only testing of representative randomized populations is interesting data.
So, I´ve read in the comments on the post failure of something else than predictions that some of you regular commenters (i am looking especially at you, The Nybbler) think that lockdowns will stay in place for a long time despite their (supposedly) limited effectiveness, because government officials are enjoying their new found authoritarian powers. I find this line of reasoning unpersuasive, to say at least. Shutdown of almost the whole entertainment industry is dangerous for the governments that ordered it; bored and stressed masses will became restless very quickly. Unless it is extremely obvious that ending the lockdowns now will lead to giant pile of dead bodies, public defiance will grow fast.
So in an effort to catch you (or myself) for future purposes, is anyone willing to go on record to predict that current level of lockdown measures or worse will be in place a year from now? Or how plausible it is?
I am 90 % confident that a year from now, anti epidemic restrictions on public behavior will be less strict than now in both the EU and the US. That includes the possibility of completely different plague happening in the meantime.
It obviously varies by region but here in Ontario the (government-owned) liquor and cannabis stores were considered essential services (recently the cannabis stores were taken off the list, but you can still order online). Netflix/TV are still a thing. Tons of people walking outside (it’s allowed, not people defying rules).
FWIW I generally agree with your 1-year outlook, but mostly because the public pressure to end the lockdowns will keep climbing over time. The one I’d be most interested in getting predictions is when offices/factories (workplaces without visiting customers) will be generally allowed to reopen. That one is the biggest harm to long-term growth. And I think there’s a decent chance most US states will leave those workplaces closed at least until the boosted unemployment benefits run out.
I posted this elsewhere, but I think this whole ordeal could be a catalyst for legalizing marijuana in the US.
Here, on April 16 we have Governor Cuomo extending the lockdowns until May 15. Despite deaths apparently having plateaued or peaked.
And public defiance will be met with untrammeled government force, for a while. As the Raleigh, NC police put it, “protest is not an essential activity”.
It might take uncontrollable rioting to get things unstuck.
A year? No, they can’t hold it for a year, because there will be riots. Also the Feds can’t shower money on the unemployed that long, state and local tax revenues will collapse, and it’ll start looking very bad for the governors. But I don’t trust them to pay attention to this until someone hits them with the proverbial 2×4. NJs governor is trying to take advantage by having a bill passed to give him a blank check to borrow against future sales tax revenue (complete with a promise to raise rates to whatever is necessary to pay the bondholders)
Every part of this reasoning is terrible. Both the attributed motives, and the predicted reasoning for lifting the restrictions.
Restrictions will stay in place until some measure or other can be put in place that will limit the impact of lifting them. This does not have to be a vaccine, the minimum-possible-intervention is probably something like “we have made 7 n95 masks for every single citizen, and stamped them monday, tuesday, ect”, rotate through them”, which is a thing which is certain to be doable. A treatment regime could also happen, or just enormous amounts of testing capacity coming online. But things will stay locked down until there is something people can point to and say “This is why it is now not reckless to lift them”.
Lock down measures are being lifted in half a dozen European countries – is the US different enough (cases, death rates, lockdown measures, government mandate etc etc) for this not to happen State-side in a week or two?
There hasn’t been the chafing in Europe that there has been in the US – I guess we’re a bit more sheeple-like – but the governments have gone ahead and given us tiny bits of our freedom back anyway. We didn’t even have to moan!
As I said above, New York Governor Cuomo has already extended this to May 15. And restrictions in NJ (which generally follow NY by a day or two, because our governor has decided he likes being a puppet on Cuomo’s string) have been increasing as well. Michigan has been even worse, to the point where the governor is actually getting open defiance by other elected officials.
In Germany, new cases per day are 1/3 of what they were at the peak. In the US, new cases per day has plateaued rather than dropped. Cases will have to drop significantly before the US can loosen up.
New cases are meaningless. They reflect only testing artifacts.
New cases aren’t meaningless, even when under testing. They reflect the minimum of how the infection is spreading. There are many curves of presently infected that will fit over new cases, but none that will fit under.
The longer we are in a plateau, the more we eliminate potential (smaller) curves.
There are infinitely many curves of presently infected that will fit over new confirmed cases, and there’s no reason to believe the real one has a shape similar to the new confirmed case curve.
This is a) literally false, as there are a finite number of humans on the planet, and b) essentially false, as we have bounds on R0, how many infections turn into symptomatic and hospitalized cases, and how many turn into deaths.
All those bounds we have are quite wide.
We see deaths plateauing in the US at the same new confirmed cases are, which makes little sense. As long as we have far more cases than we have testing, new cases can remain at a plateau despite having peaked some time ago.
Also using the US as a whole is a bad idea; a far better model would be several separate outbreaks.
I don’t see any solid signal that daily deaths are plateauing.
I agree that the US is too fractured to expect a smooth nationwide signal. Given that NY does have a semi solid signal of being past the first peak, it’s even more concerning that overall the US doesn’t show that same signal.
New York may have peaked earlier because it is so much denser? Just pure speculation, but it makes sense intuitively.
Could also be that once New York started really getting hit people started being extra careful about it. Most places in the US just haven’t been hit that hard, so people can’t really “see” it (seeing it happening in NY on the news just doesn’t quite hit home for people 2,000 miles away that don’t even know anyone who has gotten sick yet).
New York hasn’t peaked earlier except in calendar terms. It’s the second oldest outbreak after Washington state, so it’s more days along, about 28 since third death. Other states haven’t reached Day 28 yet, but may plateau at their Day 28 too.
Time, however, is a continuous variable. So with sufficiently accurate information …
You’re sort of asking two different questions here, because “lockdown will be in place a year from now” and “lockdown will not be lifted for a year” are two different things.
It is IMO very unlikely that anything like the present lockdown will be maintained continuously for a year. But it is disturbingly plausible that it will be in place in a year, after having been prematurely lifted on the basis of declining numbers and wishful thinking and then reimposed a few months later after the entirely predictable rebound in deaths – thus “proving” that nothing less than a vaccine is acceptable.
Just to be clear, I give 10 % probability to an outcome that “lockdown will be in place a year from now” in its current severity, after being lifted and reimposed again. That it will not be lifted at all for a whole year is imho outside bounds of plausibility. As Anteros points out above, many European countries are relaxing lockdown measures right now.
I think that even if there would be some sort of an internal lockdown a year from now, it would be more selective and targeted, since we are going to have much better understanding how exactly is virus spreading from person to person.
Increased restrictions on international travel persisting for more than a year are very plausible btw.
I find it ironic that the tinfoil hat crowd doesn’t see the fact that the more ‘elite’ your lifestyle is, the more it’s been inconvenienced by the lockdown. The more hoi polloi it is, the less it’s inconvenienced by the lockdown. Think about it. You can’t go see a broadway musical, you can still watch TV. You can’t go to the microbrewery, you can still get your 30-pack of beer and drink at home. You can’t go to your fancy sit-down restaurant, you’d have to get take out, but you can still go through the drive-through and get your McDonalds just as you could six months ago. You can’t discuss your ideas at conferences, you can still post to blogs and comment sections. If you get exercise by jogging, bike riding, or lifting milk jugs filled with sand in your garage, you’re not inconvenienced much at all. If you get exercise at your high-end gym or go skiing or snowboarding, you’re out of luck.
Similarly, the closer you are to traditional American family values, the less you’ve been inconvenienced. Think about it: if you’re married or in a stable long-term relationship, there’s no inconvenience. If you want to have a string of short term relationships, well, you’re screwed. (Or not, if you catch my drift.) Or look at the problems with child care now that the schools are shuttered: some families don’t have to face them. If you’ve counted on the state to do 100% of the work to educate your children, well, how much are children learning now? From what I’ve heard the answer is: very little. Children have suddenly forgotten how to use the internet.
None of this is to say that the hoi polloi should be happy with the lockdown. But to see it as something ‘they’ are doing to ‘us’ makes little sense. The problem with tinfoil hat people is not suspicion of the elites per se but their inability to see the fact that the elites are people too, with their own wants, hopes, dreams, desires to signal to their associates, etc.
I’m not part of the tinfoil hat crowd, but neither group is able to do the things they want to do right now. The difference is that “elites” (however you’re defining that term at the moment) are generally still working, either because they’re essential or because they can work from home. The non-elites account for much of our ever-rising unemployment numbers.
Yeah, but on the other hand, who lost all that money in the stock market? Wasn’t the working class.
“Lost job needed to pay bills next month” is worse than “lost retirement money but might get it back if I wait”.
USA government decided to use massive amount of money on bailouts.
Designed to preserve wealth of owners of companies and to stop stock market crash. Yay for moral hazard and TBTF.
You can’t hang out at Cheers/Moe’s/whatever. Or even at the park or the beach, now.
“Lowbrow” social life isn’t atomized individuals and nuclear families living in isolation except at work, and just because the places they get together to socialize aren’t as fancy as Broadway musicals and microbreweries doesn’t mean that getting together to socialize isn’t every bit as important to them as it is to fancy rich people. Takeout and TV is no more of a substitute for them than it is for the rich.
This, and in the same vein, on-line church is a poor substitute for in person fellowship.
@Alexander Turok
You are reasoning like an introvert, ignoring that the lower classes also want to meet with their friends and family. In fact, they live smaller and more cramped, so meeting people outside their home is more important to them.
The lower class have had their traditional lifestyles fall apart, which we’ve discussed here a lot.
More importantly, these people often either still have to go in for work and take risks, or are home with no pay.
But the most important thing you are missing is that the lower class simply has a lesser quality of life in the first place, so this pandemic is not necessarily hitting them harder, but is causing them to have a very low quality of life in an absolute sense.
I’m ignoring it because the same could be said about the upper classes.
Unemployment benefits exist.
At least in my state, unemployment is still a terrible pain to deal with (source: been working for about a month now to help a close relative start collecting, still no luck and it is impossible to actually talk to anyone to resolve any issues, just letters/fax back and forth over periods of days/weeks), and despite what people keep saying here most who collect unemployment are making less than they made while working.
States vary a lot in how they handle UI. Florida is probably the worst.
I can confirm about Florida UI, even back in October it was a nightmare to deal with.
Now my new job (thank god) is asking for anyone with any Cobol (a coding language from the 60s and 70s) experience to step up to be loaned out to the state government help fix the system.
Just to add a little, the first (of several) issues was that the state didn’t think my relative was a real person. The second issue was the state undercounting their pay by about $22,000 or so (about 70% of their annual pay). I would guess maybe they will start receiving their UE benefits in June at the earliest, if they are actually able to collect at all. They have already been out of work for a month. If not for the stimulus check and some small savings they would be in huge trouble right now, and I don’t expect another stimulus check in the next couple weeks.
Alexander Turok,
It is definitely worse for the lower classes. Many of them are living paycheck to paycheck, for a start. As I posted a month ago:
This is a good example because it’s going to be harder to get craft beer and fancy wine than 30-packs at Walmart. The whole theme here is that SWPLs overcomplicate things, add a lot of moving parts, while prole tastes are cheap and functional.
What does this mean?
There needs to be a word for the seeming belief of so many people here that unemployment benefits don’t exist. Perhaps for a lot of people they don’t really exist, as many white-collar workers aren’t ever fired or laid off, they’re “asked to resign.” I knew a guy who worked as a teacher and was asked to resign, he refused. The principal was shocked and tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted on being formally terminated. Yes, I know unemployment benefits don’t equal one’s after-tax income, although given the level of competence shown by Congress and the President even that is doubtful in this situation. But many workers don’t like work and blue-collar workers don’t face a taboo in saying this. Many would prefer to sit at home and collect unemployment. Some have even told me that.
That rant was described as ‘populist talking points.’ They aren’t literal. That was a prediction of how people are going to feel in a few months. And the ones who are working, the ones who are essential, are going to feel overworked and underpaid.
A couple days ago a friend of mine had to lay off 25 workers at his 60 person lab. He’s been told that by May they will be down to 5 at the company. He was really upset about it. I guess I should have told him not to worry, they are all happier unemployed where they can drink their Bud Light and eat their McDonald’s and watch their TV like the drooling, belching, maga-hat-wearing proles that they are. Barely an inconvenience!
Well, I wouldn’t have used quite the same terminology, considering I wore a red hat at one time. But it may very well be true.
It’s kind of like the situation where boy and girl both like each other, but neither is willing to ask the other out due to fear of rejection. The standard solution is a third party automated system to fix the problem. I suggest a similar dilemma is faced by employers and employees. Employers don’t want to look like they have no loyalty to their employees, employees don’t want to look lazy. My idea is you have an app where the employee enters in current wages, benefits, tax info, state, etc., and sees an estimate of how much he’d get in unemployment benefits. If he likes what he sees, he can tell the app he’d be willing to be laid off. If his employer desires to lay him off, the app “matches” them. Call it Quitser.
Of course, I’m sure the lawyers would find a problem with it, but it’s fun to think about.
The reason your post comes across as very ‘let them eat cake,’ is that it presumes the only complaint people could have about lockdowns is temporarily not having their access to beer or restaurants or casual sex.
People don’t like the lockdown because it is destroying the economy, as acymetric said above. I have plenty of savings, which is making me feel fairly secure about things. The fact that I’m a pilot, and if my company goes under, which it probably will, I could be unemployed for years or have to start over in a different career is a bigger concern. But the savings will help. If I didn’t, and most of my employees don’t, and a lot of people who aren’t elites don’t, I would be very worried.
Theres a fairly big exception to that: if you live in a big house with a garden,you can send all day in the garden,but if you are poor and live in crowded conditions,you have to stay inside most of the day
This is a terrible time to live in an apartment.
I’ve been getting lots of yard work done — about half an hour a day.
I’d give 20% odds that current restrictions (or something roughly as strict) will be in place a year from today.
I’d give a 10% chance that reinfection/reactivation turns out to be possible, as South Korea suspects, at which point I’m 100% confident we’ll be in lockdown a year from now.
Failing that:
-I think there’s about a 30% hydroxychloroquine or remdesivir or something similar is found that works.
-April of 2021 would give researchers ~15 months to research a vaccine, so say a 70% chance of having a widely available vaccine by then.
-If both of those fail, I think we’ll vary between temporary loosened states and lockdown. I don’t think people will put up with the restrictions much longer but I’m not sure they’ll have a choice; despite the fact that infections are somewhat under control it’s not like the fundamental situation has changed and once the hospitals are over capacity the bodies will start piling up. I expect it to ebb-and-flow between loosening and restriction, so in a year there’s a 50-50 chance we’ll be in a loosening period or a tightening period.
So, if I do my probabilities right,
10% chance of reinfection+
70% chance hydroxychloroquine et al don’t work *
30% chance of no vaccine *
50% chance of tightening period
0.1+0.7*0.3*0.5=19.45% or roughly 20%
What security restrictions are still in place from 9/11? Virtually all of them, at a massive economic cost for almost no benefit. Has the US government rolled back the extra powers they took after 9/11? I’m not an expert, but I don’t think so.
No jobs will be shutdown in two years, but there will certainly still be extra restrictions even in five years. And any extra government powers that increased during this time won’t be going anywhere.
And the population of the US will be even further inclined to acquiesce to a really intrusive state.
I am not predicting that there will be zero restrictions, sensible or otherwise, maintained after a year. There is a huge space between return to where things were in February and current lockdowns.
I am skeptical that anyone here has claimed that the current lockdowns will continue for at least a year unnecessarily just because the government likes the power. Can you link to some posts please?
No, I never claimed that anyone had claimed that, just that there were claims that it will continue unnecessarily for an undefined long time. For example here. I picked a year because it is a round number and in order to make falsifiable predictions one has to be specific.
I basically agree with Nybbler’s post there but he puts too much emphasis on the government doing it because they like it. Using 9/11 security theater as an example:
-TSA created jobs, and now it is hard to get rid of those jobs
-Nobody wants to be the one who decides to get rid of TSA and then have another successful terror attack happen. Especially if your job description involves security.
And generally people like to respond to emergencies. If you know any firefighters, they like it when they get called out to an emergency. They don’t hope that people get hurt, but they enjoy the adrenaline, the excitement and getting to put into practice skills that they have trained for and honed.
Some (most?) people like to exercise power over others. Cops, security guards, Bloomberg. The occasional bureaucrat. The neigborhood Karens calling the police because so-and-so was breaking lockdown. Here in NZ you can see the same people on social media scolding others are also the ones calling for an extension of level 4 lockdown instead of level 3 (level 3 allows for restaurants to open only for deliveries and a bit more leeway around going outside, allows limited construction to take place etc, it is hardly much change).
Another motivation is that people are nice, and want to be seen as nice. It feels wrong to them to put a cost on a human life. And/or they don’t want to say that peoples lives are not worth an economic cost: it looks morbid and callous.
So while ‘liking it’ is a reason, there is also plenty of other motivation to keep these things going longer than necessary.
Most of the time, I am 99% confident that we will not still be in lockdown in a year–if we have to reopen and shutdown again, which is certainly much more plausible, I expect the shutdown to be set up differently, probably in a more targeted manner.
I veer a little on this, though, a few times a day thinking I’ve gotten this all wrong and lowering my confidence level significantly. Mostly because I thought the chance of locking down like this at all was incredibly small, at least until the virus raged out of control–and even then, I thought it would be more locally-focused and less top-down. And I thought we’d have more unrest after only a month, especially with no clear end in sight. So I’ve been wrong. Also, we don’t understand the immunity situation, or possible long-term effects, so if the news gets a lot worse, that will obviously make people more willing to shut down. But even in that case, and we decided that drastic measures aimed at virtual eradication were needed, it would still probably look different from what we’re doing now. Probably it would be severe regional shutdowns and travel restrictions.
But since the beginning, I’ve been convinced that a long-term national lockdown is untenable for a variety of reasons and simply will end within a few months, if for nothing else than because supply chain disruptions will eventually threaten medical care and other crucial things in unpredictable ways. I can’t answer every single argument against doing this, but I don’t think it’s going to come down to a logical calculation, which is probably an impossible thing anyway–it’ll just happen as a result of various pressures. It doesn’t have to “add up.” I’m not saying we’ll go back to normal; just that the shut down will be less extensive. I think the arguments that it doesn’t make a difference because no one is going to go out anyway is implausible. Many things will be greatly reduced, for sure, some enough to make them unprofitable and shut down the industry, but there will be a difference in activity if people are allowed to go out. I can’t spell out how it will happen exactly or why, but that’s just what I see as the result within a few months.
This kind of shut down is far more unprecedented than a pandemic. It’s clear from history that humanity as a whole is capable of pulling through far worse—the conflict with our modern expectations will be massive, but nonetheless it is clear many people can go on with people dying all around them and facing a risk of infection. I’m fairly confident this will not happen on a dystopian scale–I believe herd immunity is the end game, but that we’ll figure out smarter ways to manage and control it as we learn more about the disease, and mitigate it significantly. It’s not something with an 80% death rate. Life expectancy was 10 years lower even in 1960. If it turns out immunity is not long-lasting, that sucks, but while it’s not a world I want to live in, many people functioned even under repeated reinfection and chronic illness before malaria eradication. It still happens in third world countries. It requires a psychological shift, a downgrading in expectations, and until that occurs, it will seem unthinkable. But once it occurs, it is swift. This is not what I want to happen, but what I suspect will. The government may get more authoritarian, but if there’s a lot of unrest, I doubt they’ll try to, or be able to, impose a lockdown by force on a national level. It might happen in a city. I think many officials, even those power-tripping, are sort of following the public’s lead here—they’re cracking down so they don’t look negligent while people demand action. If that changes, they’ll exercise power in line with the new expectations.
EDIT – that was supposed to go under David Friedman World War II analogy to pandemic economic situation. Well, i messed up.
Hm. It reminds me of a post i read somewhere else and found quite interesting. It might interest people here, too. (it’s quite long although not Scott-long)
Where was that originally posted?
Paradox Entertainment off-topic forums.
Instead of anguishing over how to deal with turnstile jumpers, why doesn’t the NY subway system install the cagelike, floor-to-ceiling turnstiles at all its stations? They can’t be jumped. Problem solved.
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/cagelike-subway-turnstiles-bambooze-experienced-straphangers-paying-fare-article-1.474935
If, for some reason, a patron couldn’t use that type of turnstile (say, because they were wheelchair-bound or had a big luggage), they talk to a subway worker at the station, and he or she would electronically open a wide door that would be alongside the turnstiles.
It could be something like fire codes or crowd management. Maybe the fact that the turnstiles can be jumped is important for safety. (also you can’t get stuck in one, which would create a queue and maybe some panic)
Some stations and parts of stations do have those, but they have less bandwidth (and I find them claustrophobic).
London-style mechanical gates would be less intrusive and pretty difficult to jump.
In the other direction, many transit systems in Northern and Central Europe don’t have turnstiles at all, and rely on periodic spot checks by employees to make sure everybody has a ticket. This obviously wouldn’t fly in New York (though the MTA is trying something like it on some bus lines) but it’s puzzling why the likes of Munich and Prague can go without turnstiles while supposedly rule-abiding East Asian countries feel the need to put physical barriers in place.
The system in Madrid was odd.
I bought a ticket from station A to station B. I couldn’t use it from station B to station A because the turnstile at B would not accept it. But there is no check of the ticket when I get off, so I could use it from A to any station in the system. And the price of a ticket from B to A is the same as one from A to B.
I gather that when you buy a bunch of tickets they are unrestricted. But when you buy one ticket, the machine wants to know where you are getting on and where you are getting off, although the latter will not be checked.
What I saw in Germany were mass-transit systems where the majority of users bought season tickets which let them travel for free. Only a small fraction of journeys were paid for individually, so there’s little incentive to turnstile-jump.
When I visited, I was terrified when I got onto the train because I couldn’t find the place to put the ticket. I was worried I did something wrong. And being thrown into an East German prison was not what I was looking forward to dealing with.
When I visited Prague and took mass transit, I got the sense that it wasn’t rule abidingness, but fear that kept the whole thing together. That it was a very rational risk-reward calculation that drove behavior. In the time that I was there, I took the metro maybe a couple dozen times. On one of those there was a ticket check, and they happened to haul someone off the tram. I’m very certain that the experience was designed to make me think that avoiding whatever happened to them was worth paying the fare 1000 times out of 1000.
Turnstiles are much slower to operate. Throughput of passengers at the station entrance/exit is a major constraint on system capacity.
Also, the amount of money lost by turnstile jumping is small, relatively speaking. The cost of installing and maintaining fancy exits may outweigh the gains in fare collection. There are even transit experts who recommend removing fare gates entirely, and enforcing payment solely by “proof of payment” and random checks and fines.
So, can a clever programmer type soon explain this:
https://www.sciencealert.com/coders-mutate-ai-systems-to-make-them-evolve-faster-than-we-can-program-them
On the scale from something to nothing to worry about.
This seems like a modern version of genetic programming (wikipedia), which has existed for decades. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to be worried about, but I’ll list my level as “zero.”
0% worried. This is a very very old technique that we didn’t used to have the computational horsepower to actually pull off until now. This is a much better explanation of the same thing. All the editorializing on top of that is 100% bullshit.
Thanks, appreciate the reassurance.
So it is a traditional AI puffery, combined with “give me funding”.
I propose to mention also big data and blockchains.
[citation needed]
What is actually new here? I see no evidence in article that it used new technique or that it is actually better at its task than alternative or human.
I’ve been thinking about the effect of the pandemic on restaurants. Assuming that social distancing remains for a fair while, a restaurant of a given size will be able to seat fewer people, even after allowing members of a household to sit together. So we might see a new equilibrium in which the number of restaurants remains about what it was but the number of person meals goes sharply down, with each restaurant scaling down how many people it serves and how many it employs. Also, of course, an increase in restaurants producing meals for takeout.
That would presumably result in an increase in prices, since rent per customer is now higher and some economies of scale are lost. On the other hand, restaurants currently vary a lot in size, which suggests that economies of scale are not all that important.
I think it would require an increase in prices too large for them to remain viable (people aren’t going to drop $30 for 10 wings at the local sports bar). Restaurants depend on peak hours, and labor costs for waitstaff basically round down to zero so reducing staff doesn’t get you very far.
…No. Labor costs for wait staff are kept off the books of the business via the tipping system. In the US, and pretty much only the US. The percentage customarily tipped is thus what the waitstaff overhead is.
I do, however, think this is not where the pain will land. The pain will land on landlords. If restaurants cant earn as much per square meter, then demand will go down (via restaurants going out of business) until landlords buckle and set the rent to something the market can bear, at which point new restaurateurs employing the same chefs and so on will appear out of thin air.
Yes, I know that’s how it is done in the US, that’s what I’m talking about. The restaurant doesn’t pay the tips, hence reducing the number of waiters doesn’t reduce the operating costs for the restaurant. Tips are per order, not per waitstaff/hour anyway (so the tip amount is going to be the same whether you have 1 waiter running all the tables or 10 of them). I’m not sure I understand how you could disagree with that.
.. Tips being off the books of the restaurant is entirely irrelevant when it comes to considering what cost increases the market will bear.
The average potential customer considering whether to eat out will make that decision based on the cost of doing so inclusive of tips.
But is wholly irrelevant when looking at how a restaurant can cut costs, which is what I’m talking about.
The market won’t bear nearly enough of a price increase for it to offset the loss of 50% volume, so the question is “can the restaurants cut costs enough to stay afloat” and the answer is probably not because so many of the costs are fixed. Reducing waitstaff doesn’t change that because tips are per customer, not per staff member.
Wrong. Tips are per staff member, because they have to be high enough to support said staff member. Fewer customers, and either the restaurant has to move some of that cost onto the books by actually paying them real wages or the “customary” tip goes up.
That is all very relevant to whether it will be worth it to work as a server. It is not relevant to a discussion about how a restaurant can cut costs to turn a profit (they can’t) when doing 50% volume long term (they can’t).
Restaurants (in the US) aren’t going to start paying more any time soon, and people aren’t suddenly going to start tipping more in an economic crisis either. But it doesn’t matter, because again all the speaks to is how lucrative it will be to be a server which isn’t what I’m talking about (so, unsurprisingly, I wasn’t addressing it).
The only cost I can think of that is proportional to the number of square feet per customer, which is what is changing, is rent. Everything else — ingredients, salary for cooks, and the like — roughly scales with the number of customers.
The evidence for that is that large restaurants are not, at least in my experience, consistently less expensive or better quality at the price than small ones.
So a restaurant that used to seat a hundred and now seats fifty ends up with the same costs as a restaurant half the size used to have — except for rent — and half the revenue, plus whatever it gets by prices going up.
@DavidFriedman
I can think of two others: utility bills (very confident) and insurance (somewhat confident, I don’t know enough about how insurance at a restaurant is set up or how the premiums are determined).
I’m also not completely sure that cooks scale quite that well. My guess is that you can’t reduce kitchen staff by 50% when business is down 50% just because of the nature of how kitchens run (there is kind of a floor, as one or two people can’t do everything even when things are slow).
You’re also didn’t mention loan payments, which most restaurants are going to have. It is entirely possible that 50% of previous revenue isn’t enough to cover rent/bills/loan payments even if we ignore everything else.
Also various legal fees, accounting, salary if there is a salaried manager (I suppose this salary could be cut or the person could be let go entirely, but just another one I thought of).
I continue to believe that people won’t tolerate any meaningful increase in prices. Doubly so now that they remember they can eat at home.
@acymetric
I just tipped my pizza delivery guy about double what I normally would.
Somewhat related: I have always wondered why restaurants that offer both takeout and sit-down service don’t have lower prices for takeout. It’s very rare to see, for example, an item with two different prices, one for sit-down and one for takeout. (Services like doordash extract 25% of the cost, if I remember correctly, so in a sense the restaurants are charging less, but the customer doesn’t see this. And in any case, there’s rarely a discount for the customer personally picking things up.)
The answer to this should be relevant to David Friedman’s question of whether restaurant prices in general would go up or down, with fewer people per restaurant.
> It’s very rare to see, for example, an item with two different prices, one for sit-down and one for takeout.
Must be nice to live somewhere where food is taxed sanely.
Well whenever I get takeout I do not tip, so in that case it is ~15% cheaper than eating at the restaurant. But maybe I am a bad person for doing so.
Why Are Restaurants So Fucked?
There’s plenty to discuss, but here’s something that caught my eye: “Margins in the restaurant industry are notoriously small. Like tiny, actually. For reference, margins for banking, accounting, and legal services come in around 18–25%, healthcare 12-15%, and software 15–25%. Restaurants? 3–9%. Ya, like single digit”
In Austrian economics, rates of return tend to equalize, at least in the absence of forcible barriers, but here we have what seems to be a strong exception. Is there something wrong with the theory? With my understanding of the theory?
I think to some extent people start restaurants because they like the idea of owning a restaurant– it’s doing useful work, you can tell you’re pleasing people, you have control of it, it’s an easily understood sort of business, it’s got a lot of availability bias in its favor… However, I don’t think this explains why the margins in the whole field are that low. Restaurants are getting some of their investment from banks, it’s not just people digging into their own resources of capital and labor.
Margins aren’t a good measure of rate of return. Among the many issues with that post is that it doesn’t specify what “margin” it’s referring to (net margin? op margin? cash margin?). It seems like she’s roughly describing operating margin, so I’ll assume that’s what we’re talking about.
Operating margin basically is the ratio of your profit before financing costs (e.g. interest expense) divided by your revenue. The numerator accurately measures return, but the denominator doesn’t make sense for evaluating economic returns. You use operating margin for things like estimating how the economics of a business will change as you scale revenue up and down.
To measure return, you’d need to look at return on invested capital or something, which will roughly take the same numerator but divide it by the capital employed, which is closer to the “return” economists talk about. In words, it’s measuring how much money (i.e. return) an investor gets for each dollar of capital invested in the business.
ROICs are absolutely not uniform across businesses either, and I have no idea where restaurants stack up. Not well I’d guess. It isn’t a good business. But measuring economic return is also really difficult and is not well represented by accounting conventions.
Some ideas:
1. Restaurants don’t have much regulatory capture and rent seeking. The costs of entry aren’t high. This means smaller profits.
2. Restaurants are in fierce competition with each other, and with people cooking at home.
3. Restaurants don’t require formal qualifications. People who have a hard time finding work, like felons and immigrants, can still work at restaurants.
4. The gains from owning a successful restaurant are plausibly mostly non-monetary. Having a hip restaurant gives you social connections, status, access to drugs and young women etc. This means that the financial rewards can be lower.
5. Tax fraud, money laundering and/or other shady things are rampant so we can’t trust the official numbers.
Sit down restaurants have tended to defy contemporary trends in consolidation for the reasons you stated. In fact, they actually seem more competitive than twenty years ago. I would put more emphasis on consumer preferences though. It’s not that being a restaurant owner is high status. It’s that being a person who frequents a variety of restaurants is. Maybe this whole Coronavirus thing is just causing the market to fall in line with the norm, where a few brands dominate the majority of the market.
Oh good, I wasn’t getting enough of that everywhere else.
Are there such trends? My impression is that first Radio Shack and then IBM had a larger share of the microcomputer market than any firm does now.
My impression is that it always looks as though such a trend exists, because big firms are more visible than small firms. If the publishing market fragments, due to self-publishing becoming easy, while the book market consolidates, due to Amazon, people notice the latter and conclude that there is a trend towards consolidation.
If people try naming the largest industries, measured by employment, you tend to get a list heavily biased towards industries with a small number of large firms.
6. Lots of people want to run a restaurant as a life goal. I don’t get them, but they exist.
It’s hard to make a living doing something that other people are doing as a money-losing hobby. See also: journalism.
Since I moved from the city to a more rural area (small city, ~40k) I kind of want to run a restaurant to show how it should be done.
The cuisine here is comically bad. The best sushi place in reasonable distance that I am ware of is a grocery store ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEa8ufgNey4 ). I tried every “Italian” in the city – they were between “good enough when drunk” to “not even that’.
The spite-store theme from the latest season of Curb resonated with me.
A couple of friends opened a restaurant in a small town (it was going pretty well until Covid… now they’re screwed). One of the things they complained about was how difficult is to sell “cuisines”. Chinese flopped, and even Italian needs to be toned down. The more niche you go, the harder it is to succeed in a smaller town. Among things I noticed were missing there are a tea shop and a sex shop – but I did the math and realized there’s no point in trying to. Humm… now that I think of it, I wonder if it would be worth doing a “general specialty shop”, that only has products you can’t find anywhere else. But that has the risk of turning into the “international” section at the local hypermarket.
This reminds me of going home to rural Kentucky (my family lives there–I grew up in rural Tennessee which is similar).
There are two grocery stores in town; neither of them sells limes. There is a decent Mexican restaurant, though.
I have played with the idea of opening a medieval restaurant, but I’m never going to do it — although if someone else competent to run a restaurant wanted to try it, I would be happy to get involved.
Speaking of which, as of yesterday I now have a pre-17th century (Persian) recipe for baklava, something I have been looking for for a long time. Sometime this week I’ll probably try to make it.
Sports, music, acting, etc.
An exception: programming
Within programming, people who do boring stuff such as financial apps, make more money than people who do their dream job in the game industry.
Most programming jobs have little in common with programming as a hobby. Programming as a hobby is about ideas and algorithms. Programming as a job is digital paperwork with lots of meetings. It is like when a person who dreamt about being a writer becomes a secretary, and others are like: “but this is your dream job — you are writing on paper, aren’t you?”
That’s not the entire truth. Programming jobs are on a spectrum; some people really do have workloads that are 100% “change what it says on the button,” but for most folks you at least sometimes get to actually engage your brain. One might argue that these people aren’t really employed as programmers, just secretaries who know how to read Python.
Some folks are senior enough and at companies big and in-touch enough that they really don’t ever have to change what it says on the button.
And of course really smart companies, where management actually gives a damn, allow the programmers to build a system so that she who wants the button changed can change it her own damn self.
A nice young lady, the daughter of the woman who has done covers for three of my books, offered to redo the top page of my web site so that it would no longer look twenty years out of date. The one condition I made before accepting the offer was that it end up in a form I could still readily edit for myself.
Which it did.
I think this is the really interesting part, so I did some digging and here’s my best guess. I’m using the numbers here (scroll down to see the profit and loss statement)
First, the loan interest comes before profit, or the bank gets paid before the owner. In the example, the bank charges ~$13,000 in interest and charges. If the restaurant has a down period, even if it becomes unprofitable, the bank still gets paid and the owner takes a loss. I guess the bank really doesn’t care how profitable a business is, just that it doesn’t go out of business.
Second, there’s a lot of debt there. At $13,000 in interest a month, this restaurant must have >$2 million in debt (13000*12/0.06). That matches the anecdotes I’ve heard about debt in the restaurant business. And that’s a nice big loan for the bank. I can’t think of many legal services or accounting services or software companies that would need $2 million in loans to get started and you wouldn’t want to invest in anyone that did.
So, presuming you only invest in successful restaurants, you get to make relatively large loans and get a nice payday, even if the owners don’t. Sounds pretty nice for banks.
At a personal level, I am finding it hard to care since I have felt that the average restaurant in the US has a shitty quality-to-cost ratio, and I wouldn’t mind if most of them disappeared. At a more general level, though, I do understand that everyone who makes their livelihood in that domain will suffer, which is bad.
You do understand why those of us who do like frequenting local establishments might not feel the same way, right? I feel like I should link Scott’s “Don’t sound like a robot*” post.
*I forget the actual title.
Of course. You’ll notice that nowhere in my post did I say that anyone who disagrees with me is wrong, since I don’t believe that. If you take my comment at face value, you’ll find that I didn’t include an assault on people who might happen to disagree.
Yeah, that post presupposes we don’t want to sound like evil robots. But sometimes, as in this comment, I feel like that’s what I’m going for.
Not my experience. We have multiple local restaurants, ethnicities of various sorts, where we can get a good dinner at about twenty dollars a head, could manage for less if we were making a point of holding down costs.
Considerably more expensive than when I was a grad student and figured on four dollars for dinner, but that was a long time ago.
If my tastes and circumstances were different, my opinion would probably be different as well. In reality I’m often disappointed, but I might be hard to please.
I agree with you. I’m glad to live in a city where (until last month) I could choose from a broad variety of delicious dinners for less than $20/person. I hope that someday soon I can live in such a city again.
I expect it’ll happen. There’re a lot of people here in Seattle that love good local restaurants, there’re lots of waiters and cooks now out of work, and (as Edward Scizorhands says upthread) there’re lots of people who for some incomprehensible reason are eager to run a restaurant. Average quality will probably go down for a year or two while bad restaurants get outcompeted, but there’ll be a lot of options, and some of them will be good.
$20 a head is not some throwaway. I’m in the camp that if you find that reasonable you are a bit off your rocker.
It was closer to $15 back when I lived in Chicago, but that was some time ago. That’s if you order the cheapest thing on the menu and get water to drink.
Done that way, I don’t think I would have any trouble holding it down to $15.
$15 is decent, but really still egregious when you think about the scale of people most places serve.
Tonight I made steak and potatoes for 2. Ingredients were probably $12 total. My time spent 30 minutes, intermittent. If you bill at my attorney rates, well, yea its way over $15 a head. But if I was only $15/hour we are already getting down to the $15/plate range, with the caveat that I could have quadrupled the order without increasing my labor time at all.
TBH, this thread has just made me all the more apoplectic about ever eating out. In the end it seems like I’m paying for 1) Rent at a place I don’t like to be; 2) Service from a server who I don’t like interacting with; and 3) Labor from a mildly skilled person who I can replicate, and often do for fun.
The only exception to this if deep fried. Which I’d never allow in my house because of the smell. But deep fried chicken is like $5 a head anyways!
That’s why, when I eat out, I order stuff that I don’t have the skill to make at home.
(Or I’m traveling, or ordering lunch while at work, or in some other place where I practicably can’t cook at home.)
But you’re not a $15/hour laborer, and if you were you probably wouldn’t be eating at those restaurants except on very special occasions. This is a classic case of specialization of labor. Also efficient use of capital, because as a $15/hr laborer you probably don’t have as well-equipped a kitchen as a good restaurant, and if you do as an attorney it is an inefficient extravagance that is sitting idle most of the time.
As time goes on the probability of this dish existing approaches zero. The cost per head equivalent I’d estimate for my cooking at a Chicago restaurant would be ~$50-70 a head, without booze. Maybe I overrate my cooking because it is perfectly tuned to my tastes, or maybe I am good. IDK. But certainly the only difference I can find between my cooking and a place like Prime 112 is I don’t buy rib eye. Or most sushi places. I don’t buy that grade of tuna.
Now there are some sushi places that beat me by quite a bit. They have delightful rice and craftsmanship, etc. Those places are like $100 a head+. Pre liquor.
Kind of. TBH, as I’ve indicated above, most restaurants don’t appear to me as all that skilled or specialized. I think I indicated elsewhere that this is mostly the model of them, that they have marginal laborers.
Margins in the context of this article are not profits or owner benefit (which is profits plus what owners pay themselves). He’s talking about operating margins, which means how much money the business has after covering its basic expenses. That additional money is used for a variety of purposes, including paying investors and owners but also things like reinvesting in the business. Or, say, paying your employees to stay home during a crisis.
The fundamental argument is that the restaurant industry is especially screwed not because it’s a bad investment but because they have thin gross margins, which means they have less room to absorb shocks without cutting into vital things like employee salaries or the cost of the ingredients. There’s a similar argument to be made about airlines, for example.
The net profit margins are more stable across industries and tend to be lower: almost always below 10% except for industries with high barriers and software. Restaurants are actually slightly above average in this regard, though to some extent they’re part of the principle that percent returns tend to get better as absolute returns get smaller. (Ie, if you buy popsicles for $1 and sell them for $2 at state fairs you’ve got a 100% return. But you’ve only made $1 in a non-scalable model, so Wall Street isn’t exactly knocking down your door.)
Further, you misunderstand how returns on capital are set. Capital “dumbly” seeks out the best return. It doesn’t care if that return comes from dividends or stock price increases or profit sharing. This means that there’s not necessarily a strong relationship between a company’s margins or even return on equity and its return on investment. Amazon has an awful operating margin and has never paid a dividend but the company’s value (and thus stock prices) keep going up, so it has no trouble raising capital.
The Austrian school’s argument that over time and in the absence returns tend to stabilize is thus sort of true empirically: the returns on investment tends to stabilize. But it doesn’t predict (and it isn’t true) that the gross margins will stabilize. Gross margins will not be the same across industries and shouldn’t be expected to be, even in perfect competition.
Why do both of you, and Thomas in his comment as well, keep identifying neoclassical economics with Austrian economics? The Austrian school was an important element in the early development of neoclassical economics and there has been something of an Austrian revival in the past couple of decades, driven in part by libertarians, but it is still a fairly small part of neoclassical economics, and the things you are saying are not special to it.
Because Nancy’s question was about the implications on the Austrian school. Contextualizing the Austrian school is important for a deeper understanding of economics but it’s not important for clarifying Nancy’s misunderstanding of the claims in the article and its implications for economic theory. Her mistake has more to do with accounting than economics, mixing up gross margins and return on investment.
In the specific, because that is the question asked, in the general case, because most people who are neo-classical economics followers fall under the heading of Keynes “people who believe themselves entirely practical men, who are in fact the serf of some defunct economist”, while the austrians generally proudly proclaim their allegiance.
Austrian economics is just wrong. It is pretty much the most goddamn useless school of economics anyone takes seriously, and people only take it seriously because it is politically useful for top down class war. Mirror image of marxism
The rate of return that tends to equalize is the return on capital, which should tend to the market interest rate, meaning that economic profit, which is net of all costs, including the opportunity cost of the capital, tends to zero. That isn’t what’s being measured here.
And that’s true for neoclassical economics in general, not just for the Austrian variant.
It’s in Adam Smith too, though he called it “profits from stock”. I had assumed it was a general feature of economics, rather than any particular school.
A controversial take on: restaurants are so fucked because so many of their owners are so oh-so-passionate about food, and don’t spend any time thinking about everything else that goes into a restaurant, including but not limited to, the actual people who are going to pay money for that food.
In e.g. the software industry, if you say to literally anyone that you’ve just invented a new
compressionmachine learning algorithm and going to build a startup around it, people will immediately start asking you – how are you going to monetize? Who’s going to buy it, how and why? Where do you get new customers? How does it scale? School kids know that having a great technical solution worth nothing, and how you actually sell it worth everything.If the author to be believed, they went into business having a very precise formula for what an ideal döner is, but no clue that operational costs is a thing that exists. The restaurant industry is where even 6 weeks into the quarantine (and 3 decades into the internet era, mind you) many businesses still don’t have online ordering, or even menu, or they outsource it to grubhub and the like from, well, the software industry – for a large cut from order price, I hear. And where most “build-your-own-sandwich/bowl/salad/whatever” places don’t have default options which looks to me exactly like systematically missing a 100 dollars bill lying on the road. Not to mention the fact that the American restaurateurs, at least below a certain surprisingly high price level, seem to be largely unfamiliar with the concept of decor (you now, that thing where you put things on the walls, tables and floor to make the place look better – and don’t tell me about the price, I can find a freaking hand-painted Baphomet statue on amazon for 30 bucks). When I’m buying a movie online, I can choose between having a standalone subscription, subscription bundled with other services, buying a single movie, renting a single movie, or watching it for free along with a shitton of ads (yes the latter usually is piracy; a business model nevertheless). When I go – ahem, went – out for a dinner, I can’t so much as choose between the tips being or not being included in the price. Although now if I order online I can opt for somewhat less convenience and no tips – thanks to, who would’ve guessed, the software industry.
So in my uncharitable but firm opinion the restaurant industry has been putting zero effort to improve anything but food taste (not claiming whether it has improved or not, I’m just not sophisticated enough eater to judge), should’ve seen this coming and has zero rights to complain.
Restaurants also typically are started with the founders’ own money (or with a bank loan to the founder against the founder’s personal assets, which isn’t much better), which is directly contrary to the software industry’s conventional wisdom that you should never start a business with your own money beyond the stage where it’s 1-2 people working in their spare time on their personal computers to put together a business plan and a proof-of-concept technology demo.
There are two big reasons for this conventional wisdom. The first is that as a startup founder, you’re already risking enormous amounts of your time and effort on the business even if you aren’t putting up your money as well. The second is a sanity check: if you can’t persuade anyone else to risk their money on your business, then that’s a credible signal that your business isn’t as viable as you think it is.
Software start-ups are very unlike most other new business enterprises. Software start-ups are pouring most of their money into salaries, while other businesses need cash to get essential physical equipment.
They should have seen a government shut down coming? Not buying it.
No, many other things. That the less diverse the industry is, the harder it’ll be hit by pretty much any negative changes, and the less able to exploit any positive changes. That operating on paper-thin margins puts you at great risk and putting more meat or having better crusted bread on your doner isn’t the only way to increase customer loyalty (thus justifying higher prices and getting higher margins). That if you ignore obvious gaping holes in your business model begging for optimization, someone else is going to see them, close them and take the money for it. That you can’t just assume you already know what your customers want, but instead need to think about it for a while or even – gasp! – go out and ask them. Also that if your startup idea is a good candidate for the title of “the least imaginative business idea of the century”, the field might be a little too crowded, and a little too many of you are likely to go down when any crisis hits.
I don’t know if you have some kind of bias here, but you seem a little too hostile (almost angry) towards restaurants for your evaluation to really land. That wasn’t your intended tone, but you might want to dial it back if you want anyone to take your comments seriously. Right now it mostly sounds like a restaurant owner kicked your dog or something.
@Alex:
Have you successfully started a restaurant? If not, why do you believe that you know how to do it better than the people who have tried?
Too late to edit, but it’s going to bug me. That should read “Maybe that wasn’t your intended tone, but…”
@acymetric
Sorry that’s probably the cultural differences – I’m from Russia, where it’s much more accepted to be openly critical about (real or perceived) incompetence of others. So apparently in English I came off as angry rather than just astonished. I do understand that since it’s me who wanted to come into this culture and not the other way around, it’s none’s duty but mine to make sure I’m understood properly, but some subtleties are harder to get right than grammar. So again, apologize for unintentionally being too harsh and thank you for the correction. With that said, I think that a substantial answer in addition to the tone correction would’ve been more conductive to the quality of the discussion than the correction alone.
@David
No, and I don’t believe any such thing. I just genuinely don’t understand why all these things aren’t fixed everywhere, even though in most cases people from outside and/or some restaurants in some places were quite able to fix them. Maybe there’s some deep reasons, maybe it’s just many (not all!) owners being not very good at what they are doing, probably both. “Being able to tell an obvious flaw in X” is not at all the same as “being able to do X as good as one making that obvious flaw” – see e.g. laypeople criticizing any mediocre piece of art or software ever created.
That’s true. But to know that the way a firm is doing business is a mistake, you have to know enough about how it should be doing business to recognize it as a mistake. The clearest evidence available to an outsider that you meet that requirement is if you have done X successfully.
That doesn’t apply if “do X” requires some unusual ability, such as extraordinary coordination, or height, or voice, so in those cases it’s hard to provide such evidence.
There are a variety of contexts where it looks to me as though firms are making a mistake. But if lots of them are doing it, a more likely explanation is that I am missing something. If it were obvious enough that an outsider could spot it many insiders would have spotted it, altered what they were doing, succeeded, and been imitated by the rest.
Once in a while that argument turns out to be wrong, but it isn’t the way to bet. It isn’t the anger I’m reacting to, it’s the arrogance.
I think the answer is obvious. Restaurants get by because they can, most of the time, and they exist (mostly) kind of at the fringe of society. They employ marginal workers and via experience turn them into decently productive workers, but in a captured industry so wages don’t tend to explode when a person becomes good at the job.
So you employ all these felons, drug addicts, ect, at minimum wage, and you get a nice return, so long as the felons don’t unionize (as if) and there is no catastrophe (and if that happens you wait it out in bankruptcy and start over with the funds you banked).
I think you are significantly overestimating the % of food service workers who are felons or drug addicts, although a brief Google search didn’t turn up an immediate numbers.
Most of them are just regular people who don’t have the skill, desire, or need to work a more advanced job (and for some at very busy or high end restaurants, they would have to take a pay cut to do so anyway).
Perhaps. Chopped and other food network shows say otherwise, but even if its just C students that barely graduated high school it doesn’t change my mental model.
The high end restaurants have almost nothing in common with regular ones. Those do actually have outside investors, decent margins, and well paid staff.
@AlexOfUrals
I think that restaurateurs generally get bad feedback from customers. They typically demand more choice, but actually doing so means less fresh ingredients, worse dishes on the menu and a vague menu. The latter means that the restaurant stops being the go to place for X.
If you are a WW2 buff, you might find this website interesting: http://map.project44.ca/. I found it just now by random googling.
It’s basically a big interactive map of the Normandy landings and the following battles. You step the days forwards and backwards and see how the front moved and where all the divisions and battalions fought. And if you are lucky, you can select a unit and read its war dairy (works best for Canadian units). Super interesting stuff! I didn’t know that war dairies were available. Excerpt from the 6st Canadian Armoured Regiment (1st Hussars), 17 July:
Operation Goodwood started July 18. Amazing!
More on our governments enjoying the lockdown, via PJ Media
Our Attorney General tweets
If you follow the link, it goes here, where we learn, among other things
New Jersey, always a Second Amendment Free Zone, is now a First Amendment Free zone, and our attorney general is bragging about it on Twitter.
Black Lives Matter protestors have a similar belief that the first amendment gives them a right to protest wherever they want to, even on the highway.
When SCOTUS came up with that “time, place, and manner” language, I’m fairly sure they didn’t mean for it to be used to say “not now, not here, and not that way”. Though they should have known that’s how it would be used. Restricting protesting on the highway is one thing; restricting protesting in front of the state house is quite another.
Saw the same argument with Covington, people claiming it was somehow wrong of the Covington kids to express their political opinions in that particular place… the National Mall. The argument was specious then and it is specious now. In front of the statehouse is an central example of where protest may not be reasonably forbidden.
Unless there is a dangerous airborne disease. SARS-Cov-2 won’t refrain from infecting you just because you happen to be exercising your constitutional rights.
There is a part of me that agrees with this.
There is another part that hopes everyone remembers this when November elections are postponed. “Sorry, no protesting, it presents a significant public health risk. These nice uniformed men will now escort you to your
holdingquarantine facility until we are sure youwon’t protest anymorehaven’t exposed yourself to the virus.”There isn’t any such exception in the First Amendment. It amounts to “you can’t protest quarantine policy while it is in place”, which completely vitiates the right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.
And your political opponents won’t refrain from punching you in the face just because you are exercising your constitutional rights. There’s no “unless you might get hurt” clause in the Bill of Rights; if there were, there might as well not be a Bill of Rights.
According to SCOTUS, there is “time, place, and manner”, and protesting by forming a crowd during a respiratory disease outbreak can be argued to fall under “time” and/or “manner”.
And if the case ever gets to SCOTUS, keep in mind that 2/3 of the justices are over 60 and 4/9 are over 70, which puts them at relatively high risk of dying if infected. Nature doesn’t care about your rights, and neither do people who are afraid to die.
Which is a crime that can, and should, be punished. But you can’t punish a virus for infecting people.
But if you get infected you can infect others. The whole framework of personal liberties doesn’t really work when a pandemic is raging.
If you are only allowed to protest measures taken in response to a respiratory disease outbreak after the powers that be have declared the danger over and the measures rescinded, you have no effective right to protest them. That is abusing the time, place, and manner restrictions to eliminate the right entirely.
If the entire framework of personal liberties doesn’t really work when a pandemic is raging, then the US government isn’t set up for a pandemic. There is no escape clause that says “The governors of the several states may rule like Roman dictators if there’s a pandemic about”.
The self-interest calculation for old people is unclear. If they can safely self-quarantine, the best outcome for them might be for other people to all get sick as fast as possible, one percent of them die, the rest are immune, and the old can come out of quarantine.
And sometimes you can’t punish people for punching people who say controversial things. Is the government then allowed to say “We can’t guarantee your safety if you say that, therefore you aren’t allowed to say that?” Because I’m not seeing a fundamental difference between a virus and a sufficiently elusive masked antifa or whatever here.
@everybody in this debate:
“Legal norms, Schmitt argues, cannot be applied to a chaos. They require a ‘homogeneous medium.’ (Political Theology 13) No legal norm, in Schmitt’s view, can govern an extreme case of emergency or an absolute state of exception. In a completely abnormal situation, the continued application of the law through the normal administrative and judiciary channels is going to lead to haphazard and unpredictable results, while preventing effective action to end the emergency.”
(People generally strongly desire Schmitt to be wrong because he was a Nazi, which makes the whole Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article worth reading, especially if the Governors and Judges ruling in a state of exception are ignorant of his existence.)
Per the USSC, legal restrictions on constitutional rights are based on strict scrutiny. So restrictions aren’t completely forbidden, but they have to meet a very high bar:
1. The government must have a compelling governmental interest in enforcing the restrictions in question. They also have to be able to prove that, not just rely on the government decided it was a good idea.
2. The restriction must be narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. So nothing overbroad. No restriction where a similar result could be accomplished some other less restrictive way.
3. They can’t single out the right in question for tighter restrictions just because people are exercising that right. If the interest + restriction make sense, then they need to be restricting everything else similar in a similar fashion.
So a restriction that “All gun shops are closed, but grocery stores can remain open as long as they enforce a distance of 6 feet between customers” was found to violate the Constitution because it fails all three of the above:
1. The government couldn’t show that it had a special interest in closing down gun shops because of a pandemic. If anything, the reverse was true.
2. The restriction wasn’t narrowly tailored to the supposed interest. They could’ve allowed single customer sales by appointment, etc…
3. If a set of standards was good enough for “essential” stores like grocery, automotive, hardware, etc… but not gun shops, now you’ve singled them out for tighter restrictions. They’d have to make the case that they closed all shops if having shops closed was actually a requirement.
You can apply the same standard to restrictions on protesting. If a government said “All large gatherings are forbidden unless they are for essential services or for a protest, in which case participants must stay 6 feet apart.” then they could get away with that kind of thing. They aren’t restricting protesting more than any other type of gatherings and they’re making a point of restricting it the same as everything else.
But just a flat out ban on protesting? Not while they’re allowing any other type of gathering (in grocery stores, at the legislature, etc…) and not unless they have proof (not just speculation or supposition) that people standing outdoors 6 (or 10, or whatever) feet apart are going to be enough of a problem to create a compelling State interest without the possibility of a narrower restriction.
The main difference is that if you attend a gathering that is likely to be attacked by antifa, you only put yourself at risk, if you attend a gathering during an airborne disease outbreak, you put yourself AND other people at risk.
As I was mentioning before, the whole framework of personal liberties is predicated on the assumption that exercising your protected rights doesn’t create large negative externalities to other people. A pandemic is one case when this assumption breaks down.
And I know, the Constitution doesn’t have a pandemic exception, and yet it doesn’t matter, because those who are in charge of enforcing the Constitution will implement a pandemic exception anyway. They might try to justify with legalistic arguments based on previous SCOTUS decisions about “time, place and manner”, but fundamentally they’ll be acting pragmatically. As LMC pointed out, legal norms can’t be properly applied in times of chaos.
EDIT:
For instance, was the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during WW2 constitutional? Most likely not, yet it happened anyway, and nobody in the government opposed it. Decades later the descendants of those affected got some token reparations, and that was it.
Maybe 40 years from now your grandchildren will get a few
dollarsAmazon credits as reparation for the present infringement of your rights, and this is the best you can hope for.No, it isn’t? There are a lot of things that create negative externalities to other people, yet we allow them.
Alcohol and tobacco; driving a car or a motorbike; consumerism, etc., create negative externalities that are more physical.
Normalizing divorce, abortion, single mothers, loose sexual mores, creates negative externalities on the social level.
Your freedoms don’t end where you start inflicting negative externalities to other people. Your freedoms don’t even end when you are harming your own children by divorcing and shuttling them between two homes.
Yes, you effectively have no right for legal public protest in this situation.
But even if current measures are too strong and worth protesting, there needs to be a tool for “we have plague, everybody must stay home”. Unfortunately.
Note that you can still protest without public gatherings. Or if situation makes it justified – do what can be done with other unjustified laws and protest them illegally.
——
@ana53294
Banning alcohol created even worse negative externalities.
In Europe there is continued progress toward gradual elimination of smoking.
As you are probably aware people disagree on that. (see pro life vs pro choice).
And there are people who disagree whether the negative externalities of the lockdown matter more or less than the negative externalities of letting people decide for themselves.
Both allowing abortion and making it illegal creates its own set of issues. So far, we’ve sided on the more freedom side of the equation. But now, for some reason, every life is sacred even if the people in question would rather have a functioning economy?
EDIT: I haven’t met people who say divorce and single motherhood is good and optimal; just those who say that not having the freedom is worse than the alternative. So even pro-divorce people agree it’s not a good thing, just the least worst thing in some cases.
Innocent bystanders do frequently get hurt in fights, but I agree that this would be a stronger argument. But it’s not the argument that viVI_IViv was making, and so not the argument that needed rebutting. And, as sharper13 notes, if it involves an explicitly protected Constitutional right, you have to actually prove that the argument is correct and that yours is the least-restrictive possible solution.
Yeah, deciding which bad solution is worse is not easy.
Especially when what is worse strongly differs for various people.
In the US, we’ve precommitted to the solution. If I protest and as a result, the governor jails me for the duration of the emergency, I have broken no valid laws and the governor has broken several.
I think you intend to be snarky here, but I endorse that view. Protests protests function by causing inconvenience to the powerful until the powerful change things. Any ban on inconvenient protests is effectively a ban on all protests.
Protests function by causing inconvenience to people the protestors don’t like. For instance, in 2012 the Chinese started protesting against the Japanese, pelting the embassy with eggs and even attacking shops that sold Japanese goods. The staff of the Japanese embassy have little power in China, which is the point, the Chinese remember what happened to those who protested against those who do. It seems most protests in the world are demonstrations in support of the ruling ideology, rather than demonstrations against it. Legalizing these demonstrations allow the rulers to suppress their political opponents while maintaining plausible deniability, as can be seen in many liberal cities such as Portland.
It’s possible you’re using the social justice definition of “power,” where power is defined as being a quality inherent to one’s race or gender and having a weak relationship to the dictionary definition in terms of ability to command people or resources or influence the world.
I mean power in the sense of ability to influence the world on the particular issue being protested. In the case you mentioned, the protestors wanted the Senkaku islands to be Chinese territory, the government of Japan had the power to accomplish this and the protestors inconvenienced the government of Japan. I guess calling the government of Japan “the powerful” without provisos is misleading here, but I think it works well for the typical protest.
I’m not sure of the intention of the rest of your post. It looks like you are making the case for banning all protests? Viliam’s reply to 93 below gives a good account of their usefulness.
Given that highways work much better if the law prevents any random pedestrian from standing on them, why should we abandon our attempts to make highways work well when that pedestrian has a protest sign?
More broadly, what are the limits to this “protesting makes you immune to normal laws” proposal? Can I steal from the rich as a form of protest? Murder them? If you ban inconveniencing them in those ways, you’ve effectively banned all protests.
Well, yes, protests are on a spectrum. They are a demonstration of “here is a large group of people angry about something, willing to do something extraordinary if you keep ignoring them”, without immediately doing their worst.
If you immediately do your worst, it’s not a protest — it’s a revolution, or lynching, or whatever. The idea of a protest is to signal that you are able to do big harm, but for the moment you are only doing small harm, giving the other side the opportunity to address your complaints.
The proper calibration of “small harm” is, in civilized countries, as little as possible as long as it makes someone pay attention. In other words, it depends on what the other side reacts to. It could simply be hundred people coming to a place, standing there for an hour, and then going home. That still sends a signal that these people are willing to do more than merely complain on internet. But if people standing there silently get ignored, the next step is to start singing, or to stand in a place that incoveniences others, etc. And if this is ignored, then maybe throwing eggs, or blocking traffic, or something like that is in place. And if that doesn’t work either… yes, then you proceed to more and more damage… in extreme cases, burning cities and killing people.
The idea is to give the other side an opportunity to negotiate before things get completely out of control. If you have two sides unwilling to make a compromise, and willing to murder to achieve their goals, then you get a civil war. But often you have one side that thinks “this will make a few people angry, but they are unlikely to do anything other than bitching online, who cares”, but who actually wouldn’t escalate the conflict to open violence. A protest then is a costly signal of what a side is able and willing to do, without doing it (yet).
If there is a way to be annoying without breaking a law, it is possible to organize protests without breaking the law. But a protest that does not inconvenience anyone would be pointless. The idea is to signal that you are not afraid of confrontation, and you should be treated seriously.
This is a technical description, it works the same whether the protests are done in the name of a good thing or a bad thing. So it doesn’t say how the government should react to the protests. It’s only, as long as it allows “free speech”, it should also allow certain degree of protests, that would qualify as speech. Too much damage, send the guards. The other side sending a costly signal of willingness to fight, it is an information. You can still choose how to respond to it.
Some people are surprised that the rules of society are ultimately based on the threat of violence; and sometimes actual violence, if the threat is to remain credible. But that’s how it is. The only reason why anyone has any rights, is that someone in their reference group was willing to kill to obtain them. And the only reason why anyone has any duties, is that someone is willing to kill to enforce them. It’s just, because we use the threats and negotiations, most of the time the situation is solved without the use of violence. But at the bottom, the threat is still there. Otherwise, there would be no reason to negotiate or follow the rules.
Right or wrong, I believe there is lots of legal precedent of constitutional rights being limited in cases of public safety.
Just about the entire United States has been a First Amendment – free zone for the last few weeks, ever since church services have been prohibited. Now that protests are being prohibited, part of me is only feeling glad that it’s being brought home to other people as well.
The protestors are conservatives and libertarians, so the media is on the state’s side. Politico reported on the protest including the tidbit that last weekend, NJ was in danger of running out of ventilators; actual utilization was under 60% and dropping, but of course no one’s fact checking them.
Regarding ventilators… it gets worse. If the Feds had complied with the various State’s requests (like 40K! for NY), we may actually have run out where they were needed, but because the Federal stockpile was handled intelligently based on actual usage data rather than based on requests from States who wanted to be over-prepared, they got bad press, but were not only able to fulfill all the needed extras, but also setup a loan program to reallocate ones which weren’t needed at one hospital to hospitals which did need them.
What happens if a state governor goes crazy and tries to establish a dictatorship? Is there a certain line that can’t be crossed or else the Federal government comes in and arrests you? Are we just relying on the rest of the state bureaucracy to refuse to comply with blatantly unconstitutional orders? Do we just have to rely on something like the Battle of Athens happening?
can you be more specific?
I’m not sure how to be. State governments are supposed to have limited power. What actually happens when they go over the limits?
Like, okay, let’s go with a blatantly unrealistic example: the governor of Michigan gets tired of the people protesting outside her house and orders the National Guard to show up in tanks and gun them all down, and they do. What happens next?
I mean more specific at what you mean by ‘establish dictatorship’. US has shown it won’t let a state unilaterally secede (Civil War). The federal government will also enforce constitutional rights (civil rights). What you are proposing sounds somewhere in the middle; The Governor is ruling by decree but not formally establishing a dictatorship. Well in such a situation, depending on what the Governor does, they will eventually cross federal or state law, federal or state constitution, and if the National Guard is involved, federal military law, and international law. The governor would likely be arrested and tried. If they have the loyalty of local law enforcement, and the national guard, this may make it more difficult to arrest them, but then we are moving closer to the Civil War scenario, where the US military would get involved.
EDIT: I just want to add that I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I have no expertise in this area, the above is just my thoughts and what I think is a reasonable interpretation.
Clearly they won’t. Church attendance has been criminalized in multiple states and the federal government is silent on the issue.
@Matt M
That isn’t true. AG Barr has been pretty aggressive in bringing the DoJ in.
https://dailycaller.com/2020/04/14/attorney-general-bill-barr-mississippi-church-greenville-department-of-justice/
@toastengineer,
Replace gunning them down with teargassing them and beating them with sticks and you have Missouri from a few years back. What happened next was pretty much nothing.
States have constitutions. If a governor manages to get the various majorities and referendum to change it from whatever it is to absolute rule, then there’s fairly little the US government can do in theory so long as the governor’s crazy orders and dictatorial rule don’t violate any incorporated rights or Federal rules. If the governor is violating their own state’s constitution, then there are processes to get the governor removed. The Federal government (de facto at least) can then choose to back the side it considers more sane. You also shouldn’t overlook the role of other states. For example, in the Civil War Ohio supported some Unionists in Tennessee and West Virginia before the formal outbreak of hostilities. This was perhaps dubiously legal but Lincoln wasn’t going to complain.
This wrong. There is a s
clause in the Constitution called the Republican Governments Clause that specifically prohibits the establishment of any non-republican (e.g. “absolutist”) government in a US state.
Where? Article IV, Section 4? There’s no official interpretation saying that and the entire clause is about what the US guarantees to the states (security, a republican form of government, etc). It could be interpreted to mean that the US must remain republican, not the state. Further, there’s no enforcement mechanism.
So Ohio could crown a King if it wanted to?
Some of the original 13 states had laws that only landowners could vote. All but one (I forget which) repealed those laws early on, and there was talk of suing the state government on the grounds that restricting the franchise in that way made them non-republican. So, within living memory of the constitution being written, at least some people considered that clause to restrict the type of government a state could have.
I suppose it could be interpreted to mean that, but no one before you has ever interpreted it to mean that, including the people who wrote it. There’s no “official interpretation” of anything in the Constitution, and yet we all can agree at least on the broad contours of what it means.
I don’t know how it would be enforced in this silly hypothetical, but the Federal Government has all sorts of enforcement means at its disposal (e.g. the military, nationalization of the National Guard, etc.).
“We know no king but the King on the Eerie, whose name is Taft.”
Realistically, I suspect some form of chicanery would happen. You could interpret the Constitution to allow this. I doubt such judgments would be forthcoming.
Fascinating. Do you have a source for this?
I believe the courts pronounce “official interpretations”. If not, they at least pronounce ones with the force of law. And do you have any legal scholars you can bring up? Or are we just two idiots shouting at each other over the internet?
I have never really delved into this, but my understanding has always been that the republican form of government clause was understood to be a guarantee that the states (including any new states) would be required to have republican forms of government. If I were interested in exploring this further, I might look into the discussions/debates concerning the drafting and enactment of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which contained some limits on how the Northwest Territory could be divided into new states. I would certainly have a look at what the founders had to say about the clause in the Federalist Papers, and elsewhere.
The last state to restrict the franchise to landowners was Rhode Island. The pro-franchise movement eventually got fed up, wrote their own new constitution for the state, held a private referendum to approve it, and set up a new state government under it. The old government unsurprisingly objected and sent the state militia to arrest the new government. The resulting war saw the old government victorious without any federal intervention.
However, seeing the popular sentiment was against them, the old government finally decided to rewrite the state constitution and expand the franchise anyway. Subsequently, when a court case arising out of the war made its way to the US Supreme Court, they decided the Republican Form of Government clause was up to the President and Congress to enforce; as Congress had seated the old government’s Senators, the Court was bound to treat it as the real state government.
So yes, the Court did state the Republican Form of Government clause is talking about the states. Subsequently, the Reconstruction Congress agreed with that interpretation when they officially deemed the ex-Confederate states’ governments as non-republican.
@Erusian Just for you, I pulled out my copy of Tribe. There’s a brief mention on p. 133 and then a longer discussion starting on p. 908, largely but not exclusively in the context of the Reconstruction Amendments (all references to 3rd edition). Needless to say, there is no mention of your “creative” reading. Tribe also helpfully cites Federalist 43, which explicitly explains the purpose of the Clause as restricting the forms of governments the states can enact for themselves.
This is black letter law. There really isn’t a debate about whether the clause refers to the states or the federal government, nor to my knowledge has there ever been such a debate. Just because you can convince yourself of a reading doesn’t make that reading plausible.
@mfm32 What’s your take on the Republican Governments Clause-based argument against the National Popular Vote Compact?
Seemed like complete BS when I first heard about it, but I’d never actually done the research, and since the clause apparently has more teeth and specificity than I realized I’m now doubting myself
Well, I could have done with a politer tone, but nevertheless thank you for (sort of) telling me where your interpretation is from. Could you give me the full book so I could look it up? “Tribes” and a page number isn’t enough to go off of, I’m afraid.
This is a key point so many people here don’t seem to be taking. While the incorporation doctrine means the Constitution does increasingly apply to states, it in no way did at the time of the framing. When the Constitution says “the United States” cannot do something, that is binding Federal but not state power. For example, the US government was forbidden from establishing a state religion but many of the states had established churches at the time.
Exactly. But in this specific case, the very next section says “No State shall… grant any Title of Nobility.”
Technically speaking, “King” is not a title of nobility; it’s a royal title.
How exactly this plays out depends on the players at the federal level. Plausibly a Supreme Court judgment followed by something like Executive Order 11111. Alternative a bill enacted into law declaring a state no longer a republic and instructing / authorizing the President to use military force.
In Luther v. Borden (1849), the Supreme Court said it was a political question whether Rhode Island had a republican form of government; as long as Congress and the President hadn’t objected, the Court wouldn’t say anything on the matter. Subsequently, the Reconstruction Congress justified the Reconstruction Acts on the basis that the ex-Confederate states did not currently have republican forms of government.
So, your second proposal seems most in line with the historical precedents.
As long as enough people are willing to look the other way, it can go on indefinitely. In the American context we’ve known this since the Adams administration passed the blatantly unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts and went unchallenged. But just as a matter of common sense – the system is made of people and at some point there aren’t any more managers you can complain to. There’s no system anyone can set up that can’t be exploited. (And yes, ancaps, not having a system is still a system.)
I started writing this post out of idle curiosity earlier today, but I might as well put it here.
Can a state in the United States legally implement a monarchy in its state?
In practice it’s obviously impossible without some sort of world-changing event. Congress didn’t accept Utah into the Union for years over polygamy and fears about theocracy, so it’s hard to imagine them ever allowing a new state.
The biggest Constitutional question is Article IV.4 which says that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” Does this mean that the Federal government is required to act as a Republican Form of Government to all states, or does it mean that the Federal government must ensure that all states provide their citizens a Republican form of government? Is there any existing jurisprudence on this question?
The second big question is Article IV.2.1, which says that “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” This is vague and obviously doesn’t mean that all states must have identical governments, but I can certainly see this being used to try and dismantle a state monarchy on the basis that the citizens of the state are not being given the privilege to vote in elections.
Besides those there’s the big question of how many Constitutional injunctions apply to state governments. Does the monarch have to obey the bill of rights? Massachusetts required church attendance for all citizens with denomination chosen by town until 1834, which would be a clear 1st Amendment violation from the federal government. But jurisprudence on the general question has almost certainly changed, cf. rulings on things like prayer in schools (which are run by states).
Article I.2.2 says that members of the House must be “chosen every second year by the People of the several States,” and Article XVII says state Senators shall be “chosen by the People thereof.” This means the monarch probably cannot have the power to appoint Congressmen directly. You could maybe manage some tricky arguments that the monarch exercises the authority of the people, but good luck getting a Supreme Court to buy that.
What’s more Article I.4.1 says that Congress “may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations” about the times, places, and manner of holding Congressional elections. That in itself doesn’t make it illegal for directly appointed Congressmen, but it does make it a difficult state to maintain.
Article I.9.8 says that no title of nobility may be granted by the United States, which does not preclude a title being granted by an individual state?
The monarch would not have any powers that other states have, like entering into alliances etc., as outlined in Article I.10.
The amendments vary in their language. Article XIII, which abolishes slavery was clearly written to leave no room for states to implement it differently, and it specifies that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
That’s all I’ve found so far. Going deeper probably requires looking into historical jurisprudence.
The ads I’m seeing online on sites like YouTube seem fringier than usual: smaller companies selling more unusual products. No one has tried to sell me a car for some weeks now, for example, but one company keeps insisting that I should have a pubic-hair trimmer. Have the majors cut back on advertising?
Well, Amazon has cut its affiliate program (smaller %). It seems to be on trend with a reduction in ads in everything.
I’ve seen those ads too, but I’ve also seen ads for toilet paper. I can’t figure out why they’d want to advertise toilet paper; I’m not going to forget to buy it, and there isn’t enough selection in the store for me to pick out their brand.
I also got a tourism ad that pointed out I can’t go there now.
Something something forbidden fruit twice as sweet?
Maybe they’re planning ahead. There could be a lot of pent-up demand for vacation travel. It might be possible to travel to the Caribbean in October, say.
Toilet paper is on people’s minds right now, so even if their brand isn’t available at your local store right now, they’re probably hoping to imprint their brand name on your brain for the future when TP is abundant once more.
Where can I go to find statistics on legal punishments in the US? That is, I would like to see things like the average sentence for various crimes, preferably both aggregated for the country and broken down by state.
Here is a good place to start looking.
Thank you kindly.
I just finished reading an article on consciousness that does the rather neat trick of talking about several of the central philosophical debates without making me want to stab myself in the face (Wittgenstein, Nagel, Chalmers, and Dennett all get discussed). I tentatively endorse most of it, with the caveat that I need to re-read much more carefully.
A central point that I take from it is we should treat consciousness as probably a real and objective part of the world, but we may have a huge problem comprehending what certain consciousnesses might be like, and these two statements are not in contradiction, contra Nagel. (ETA: I’ve been arguing exactly that for years, though, so I may be centering my own prejudices.)
Thanks for the link.
I found Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel to be the best nonfiction book on the subject I’ve read. Books often have titles like “What is Consciousness?” and then on page 1 they admit “we don’t know.” Metzinger looks at how broken human brains think to determine what a properly working brain looks like. He dives into the out-of-body experiences and PIHKAL quackery near the end (although, perhaps I am being too judgmental on the issue of psychoactive drugs), but the first half is solid and grounded in materialism.
The Ego Tunnel is recommended by Peter Watts in the appendices of Blindsight (fiction). Blindsight, without giving any spoilers if you haven’t read it, is about consciousness and communication with alien intelligences. Blindsight features aliens written by a marine biologist, and they are very alien. Both books are available for free online (legally).
I haven’t read The Ego Tunnel but I’ve read Watts.
Personally my favourite nonfiction book on the subject is Garziano’s Consciousness and the Social Brain, which starts out by saying that he’s going to ignore the hard problem and concentrate on the easy one, and he ends up saying a lot that I’ve never seen anyone else say (in particular, that consciousness evolved from the capacity to simulate others).
I’ll check it out and likely put it in my Amazon cart as long as it is not metaphysics.
I made the mistake of reading Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos where he disregards the multiverse theory and the anthropic principle in a footnote and then says that he will only accept materialism if materialists can prove that the evolution of consciousness was inevitable. Otherwise, he suggests a teleological bent to the universe instead of Darwinian randomness.
Even bright minds can get badly confused sometimes when the subject matter becomes too conceptual.
Graziano is very much a neuroscientist and deliberately tries to avoid as much of the philosophical baggage as possible.
Personally I think Nagel and his ilk are a waste of my time. I’m not surprised you got tired of it.
Good article. There are the two large camps on this matter and they both seem obviously wrong to me. There are the people who say that an AI can never be conscious. Then there are the people who say that anything that is sufficiently intelligent is essentially conscious. Both of these seem obviously wrong with me and this author is one of the few I’ve seen discuss it that takes that seriously. Of course, that makes everything harder because we don’t know what separates a conscious from an unconscious AI but there’s a lot of intellectual space there to work on.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you, but this doesn’t seem obviously wrong to me.
Intelligence seems to require a certain amount of self-awareness. Or, at the very least, it seems highly plausible to me that intelligence requires it.
Ego Tunnel and Blindsight tackle this issue directly. Or at least offer a compelling alternative.
Imagine a very sophisticated chat bot that easily passes the Turing Test. When you insult it, it tells you that it’s sad. When you tell a joke, it says that it’s laughing. It obviously possesses a strong level of intelligence and self awareness. Would you automatically conclude that the chat bot is conscious?
Eh, this gets very close to the Chinese Room. I can’t imagine such a chatbot that isn’t very close to what I’d call conscious. Now that may be a failure of imagination on my part, just as the original Chinese Room is a failure of imagination on Searle’s. But… it might not be.
How sophisticated does a chatbot have to be before you assume it’s conscious? It just seems pretty clear to me that a computer that can mimic social skills isn’t anymore demonstrative of consciousness than the ability to master Go. Yes, it’s complicated but that doesn’t automatically give it the ability to have experiences. Very few are claiming that the chatbots we have now are conscious so I don’t see why we should assume one that’s a little more clever is necessarily conscious.
I think chatbots that could actually convince a suspicious and reasonably AI-savvy interlocutor that they’re human are decades away, at best.
And I think the innovations required to build one would be very similar to the innovations I think are necessary to build artificial consciousnesses. But this is perhaps because I’ve been somewhat convinced by Graziano that consciousness evolved to handle social interactions.
I hope it’s clear that I’m not at all dogmatic here – I think there are wrong approaches to consciousness (most of philosophy pre-2000ish with the notable exceptions of Dennett and the Churchlands), but I’m very agnostic about what the right way of thinking about it is.
I think I’m slightly more sympathetic to the second camp you mention – I think that it’s distinctly posslble that high levels of intelligence (maybe social intelligence in specific) require consciousness (or just are consciousness in some sense), but this is by no means obviously true.
Why both real and objective? If the article is correct in saying that we have no hope of understandiing the conscious experience of beings different to ourselves, then consciousness is real and subjective.
Covid-19 reinfection/relapse, is it real?
I initially dismissed the reports as implausible, most likely due to test errors or highly immunocompromised people, but I keep hearing news about it, so is there any truth to it?
If so how does it work? Reinfection as early as few weeks after recovery would imply that either the immune system doesn’t create adequate antibodies (but then how does it recovery from the first infection?) or that the virus mutates so fast that there are already multiple strains different enough that immunity doesn’t transfer between them (that’s how influenza viruses do it).
Relapse may suggest latent infection, at least for a short time. There are a few viruses that are able of long-term, even life-long latent infection, but Wikipedia doesn’t mention any coronavirus with such capability. How hard would it be to evolve it?
My initial reaction to the stories was they were slightly alarmist. They seemed no more than saying ‘Don’t get your hopes up, because your immunity won’t last forever’
None of the reports appeared to give a time frame for when you could theoretically get re-infected, but wanted to know you should add it to your list of fears.
I could, as ever, be completely wrong about this.
My understanding is that immunity to seasonal cold-causing coronaviruses usually wanes within a few months to maybe a couple years. You still respond to subsequent infections well enough to avoid getting very sick, and in fact I think you often don’t even notice you have the virus–maybe you just feel a little tired and your throat’s a little scratchy for a day or two. But you can still catch and transmit the virus. This was discussed on TWIV a few weeks ago. So it’s quite plausible that people lose immunity, and I think the oldest cases might be a couple months old. Could they lose immunity that quickly and also have managed to get re-infected? I have no idea, but it’s probably at least possible.
It’s also possible we’re seeing false negatives on previous tests–the claim I’ve heard is that nasal swabs are not so easy to do properly, so there may be some people who tested negative but weren’t over the infection. But that seems like it would imply people wandering around with the infection for a lot longer than everyone expects–guidance that you can go out again a few days after symptoms subside would be badly wrong then.
The positives on the previously-recovered people are for viral RNA, and it’s also possible there’s still viral RNA in some places in your body after the virus has been defeated.
If the virus is reawakening, that would mean it’s finding some reservoir of cells where it can either go latent and wait out the immune response, or is protected from the immune response and can reinfect the body later. I have no idea how that might work or if it’s even possible for this virus, and this sounds like the sort of thing that might be pretty hard to discover. (Have people done autopsies on folks that died of COVID-19 and tested individual tissue types from all over the body for viral RNA?).
Any of these (except for the testing failures) if they’re true, suggest that containing the virus is probably going to be really hard.
Feline coronavirus can cause lifelong infection in cats. It can also suddenly evolve into a deadly disease in a cat that has had it for years. There is a vaccine against this virus, but it is unclear how well it works.
Now, housecats are not people and FCoV is not SARS-CoV-2 (it doesn’t even affect the respiratory system). But it is a coronavirus.
There are some viruses where the antibodies go away very quickly. There’s also a weird phenomenon called immune enhancement, where a low level of antibodies (some time after an infection) actually makes a reinfection worse. I’m not sure I understand how this works, it seems to have to do with some quite specific characteristics of viruses and antibodies. Dangerous reinfections are apparently really common for dengue fever and have also been observed in some coronaviruses.
All that said, I think it’s too early to conclude that Covid-19 has these characteristics or can cause reinfections at all. So far, the cases that have been observed can still be explained by virus persistence and false negative tests. But it’s certainly something virologists are keeping an eye on.
Thanks for the information.
Why do some viral infections (e.g. smallpox, measles, rubella) usually cause lifelong immunity and other don’t? Are the mechanisms of the immune system that react to them different?
My biology 101 understanding of the immune system is that after the response to the first infection is over, a fraction of the activated B and T cells goes into memory state, ready to quickly reactivate if exposed to the antigen a second time, which usually generates a response strong enough to prevent symptomatic infection. So what goes wrong with coronaviruses?
The most thorough article I’ve seen so far.
The most likely scenarios all involve still being sick/expressing virus rather than reinfected.
More generally, can anybody recommend a source to give me a layman’s picture of how alll the layers of the immune system work separately and together? I see that there actually are some books out there very much like “Immunology for Dummies” (though not literally that one) but have no clear idea how to tell a good one from a bad one, or worse, from a crank one.
More specifically, my wife has CVID, which means she does not tend to produce antibodies. The treatment is monthly infusions of pooled immunoglobulin, so that she gets other people’s antibodies. (Thanks, other people!) Before she was diagnosed, when she caught a cold it might last quite a while — but she would still get over it, which makes me think that the other pieces of her immune system still give her some protection.
We would especially like to understand more, because (obviously) of Covid-19. We are among those Californians who kind of sort of think or speculate that we might perhaps maybe have caught it in February and recovered, except in her case she would have had to have done so without using antibodies. Does that mean the whole idea is ridiculous? We are both in good health but we are both 65.
I have not read it, but there is a book, The Immune System: A Very Short Introduction, 144 pages.
Don’t bet on vaccine to protect us from Covid-19, says world health expert
Not sure if he’s right, but I’ve seen this said rather casually and directly by some doctors for weeks. The fact that coronaviruses normally don’t cause immunity would seem to be a major red flag. Hopefully not, but the impression I’m getting is that reinfection is very possible. That’s why I’ve been so disturbed at the vaccine or nothing focus by people at the top–I understand that is the hope and a good way to keep people calm, but you can’t go in so hard on something like that when it seems questionable on the fundamentals. It seems to go beyond public reassurance to sincere denial, and that’s frightening, because we need a back-up plan. The publication of that article seems to indicate they’re preparing the public for the possibility.
I do not understand the technical details, but your immune system can defeat viruses with mechanisms other than antibodies. So it is possible for some people to recover without making them, or before making many of them. Seems to depend on various genetic factors. It’s also possible to create antibodies that don’t last all that long after the virus is defeated, which is how other coronaviruses work. In such cases, it is still possible to maintain a partial immunity, where the disease is less severe if you are reinfected.
If you’re looking for a war movie for a lazy cooped-up Sunday afternoon, check out “The Beast”. Made in 1988, this film is about a Soviet tank crew in the early days of the invasion of Afghanistan. They raid a village of Mujaheddin and get lost on the way back to base. A group of the Mujaheddin gives chase. It’s a harsh movie about a nasty war, with a lot of twists and turns, but it makes sense from start to finish. Recommended.
I found it on iTunes.
If you’re looking for a trippy war movie to watch on a stormy quarantined night, check out “The Cuckoo“. It’s a 2002 Russian / Finnish film about two deserters from opposite sides of WWII meeting in rural Finland. The isolated domesticity and looming unreality in the movie is very 2020, and it’s just a good film. Caveat: I love movies where no plot happens, and maybe you don’t.
Was it you who recommended “Their Finest” a few threads ago? We watched it two nights ago and quite enjoyed it. Charming; thanks.
Don’t watch A Quiet Place. It’s not a bar movie, but it’ll wind the appocalyptic mood up to 12.
Thanks to everyone who came to the meetup today.
We are changing our cadence, so the next meeting will be on April 26th at 10:30AM PDT.
Since we have such little time until the next meetup, I would like to emphasize that we always need a couple people willing to do a ~5 min talk.
If you work in an interesting area, have expertise in an unusual programming language (like APL say), are an undergraduate or PhD in a subject you think would interest others, have a historical event or case study you want to share, or paper or result you want to explain, or anything else interesting or humorous to share, please consider doing a talk.
Not only will it help our meetup, but it is a very low stakes way of improving your public speaking, too.
Ideally, your talk should have slides but this is certainly not mandatory.
You can click here to register: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfXYjB7I7FanmYrPj05aVnR7xH2ANRQOCM44_7GkQNIjphqCQ/viewform
An FAQ can be found here on my blog here: https://cephalopods.blog/2020/04/12/april-26th-ssc-lesswrong-meetup/
I’m assuming this was the Mozilla Hubs meetup I participated in today. Clearly a workable technology, although it will work better when we have more practice. One limitation was the space — a single room.
That may be a limitation of the software. I constructed a rough model of the downstairs of my house, with the idea of holding Hubs meetups in it. But when I tried to load it into hubs I was told that it was too big. I haven’t figured out yet what the size limitations are or how you know, other than by trying to load it, whether you have exceeded them. I also haven’t figured out how to select my entire scene and scale it down, in order to fit whatever their size limitations are.
If anyone here has experience using the software, perhaps you can give me advice via email: ddfr@daviddfriedman.com. Or perhaps someone else can make a better scene — the one the meetup was in was one of the premade ones. It’s possible that all of those are small because of the current limits of the software. What we want is the biggest possible, with at least two or three separate rooms, so as to make possible multiple conversational clusters, such as happen at our meetups.
The scene they used was fine for presentation, with one person speaking and others interacting with him — but Zoom works for that too. I gather some meetups are structured that way, but I prefer the more conversational style, which requires enough space so that not everybody is hearing every conversation.
Yep. That was mine. I think I was doing a little cargo culting off the LessWrong Israel Zoom, which inspired me to create the meetups. I have never been to an in-person SSC meetup, as I live in a very small city, so Zoom is all I know.
Next meeting we will have a few talks but less formal ones and a much, much larger room so people can peel off if they want. And if that works we can get rid of the talks altogether after that.
The parts I enjoyed most were the discussions after the talks were over.
Physical size doesn’t appear to be an issue. I’ve found a much larger room based on the Parthenon for example: https://hubs.mozilla.com/Zd85BZs/ssc-lesswrong-
You were likely using textures that were too hi-res.
I would recommend using a pre-built model for your meetup. Though there is not a wide selection, you will likely be able to find one that is good enough.
Note, sound doesn’t decrease as much with distance as it would in real life, so aim for a bigger scene than you would need in real life.
Thanks. That does indeed look big enough — I should have searched longer.
I will be holding our regular South Bay meetup, as usual on Saturday — 4/25 — starting at 2:00. We will meet at the Parthenon instead of our house.
https://hubs.mozilla.com/Zd85BZs
Since the Parthenon does not have a kitchen, we will not be able to provide dinner.
I notice that the meetups link in the sidebar has been removed. It should be put back up for virtual meetups, of which I hope there will be many more.
It seems I skimmed your comment in my first reply. See my updated post. There are Hubs rooms that are far vaster than any basement, so it was probably a matter of the textures being too large.
I wasn’t duplicating our basement, which is a bit cluttered for meetups, but what I would describe as the first floor, Europeans as the ground floor. I may make another try with a much simpler version.
But for the moment I’m using the Parthenon, until someone finds something better.
It would be quite amusing for your regulars if you did get a highly-accurate reproduction of your previous meeting space. If only there were software that could stitch together such a thing from photographs .
@Ghenlezo
ContextCapture from Bentley can create 3D point clouds with overlaid textures from photographs, so long as the photographs overlap.
I don’t know how many thousands of dollars it costs (we have a site license at work) or if there’s a free solution (see above).
Meta question:
Are questions about whether there should increased federal funding for Covid-19 testing culture war?
This is actually a serious question. On the one hand I would say it is, because it’s been somehow been made into something that Democrats have to make a demand for in the next covid bill.On the other hand, who the heck disagrees we need more testing as quickly as possible?
And I realize, contrarian nature of this board, 20 people are going to jump in with the hypotheticals. But I would think that, absent me actually asking the question, people would have been in favor of more testing ASAP.
It can’t be culture war, surely. Lockdowns seem to be becoming a culture war thing unfortunately, but no matter what side you’re on there we need more testing.
I think Trump believes that lockdowns are a culture war issue on which the anti-lockdown position is becoming sufficiently attractive to be used to expand his side of the war. That seems the obvious interpretation of his behavior. And it fits into the distrust of elites that’s part of what he has long been selling.
Whether he is correct in his tactical decision I don’t know, but he is probably better at figuring that out than I am.
Seems bizarre.
Can we get a link to the text? I’m not dismissing it out of hand but this seems suspicious enough that there’s probably another side to this….
WaPo:
To be clear, that’s not the only negotiation point, just one.
That is such a drop in the bucket compared to the bipartisan $2 trillion economic intervention that I think you err to interpret it as CW between Dems and Rs rather than inside baseball. Any disagreement between the sides on $25 billion for testing was probably jejune and pedantic. $0 to expand testing seems unlikely to have been the original R position and rooted in Red tribe culture.
I’m lost.
Where is the Republican anti-testing side?
It’s been widely reported. Originally, Republicans were saying they didn’t want anything in this bill but more small business loan money.
But here is more.
TBF, there are some Republicans arguing for more testing money. But they are having to lobby their colleagues, which means that, absent lobbying, they don’t have enough support. Hence, the framing as “Democratic demand”.
I’ve read through the Politico article and still don’t understand the two positions.
There’s a throwaway line about “federalizing.”
I’m still baffled.
My understanding is that the actual argument has been:
GOPers: The small business program for funding people’s salaries is already out of money, we need to fund it more right now with a clean bill rather than argue over another catch-all Covid bill.
Dems: Before we’ll pass more funding for that, we want to negotiate about these other things we also think should get funding.
So it’s not really about what to fund or not (likely both sides want to fund most of the things under discussion, including at least rhetorically the small business bill), but one side wants to get one done right away without having to negotiate for it while the other side believes they’ll get more of what they want in the end by delaying that in order to add more items and negotiate about them.
Just because something is a good idea doesn’t mean it belongs in every single bill that Congress passes.
It’s not going to be in every single bill Congress passes, and nobody is really proposing that. It is going to be in a draft of every bill Congress considers, until it is included in a passed bill once, because the chosen strategy to get it passed that one time is to hold up every bill Congress considers with tedious bickering and delaying over the same damn issue until Congress says fine, we’re going to have to do this eventually just to get you to shut up so we might as well do it now.
It’s a culture war issue as to whether the federal government should exist, let alone fund anything.
Not much of one. The constituency for disbanding the federal government is about the same size as the one for Full Communism Now — smaller, probably.
I would wager there are more members of individual Marxist tendencies than there are of serious groups trying to get the Federal level of government entirely disbanded.
There may only be a few, but every single one of them posts in this comment section.
I don’t think my old high school friend has found this blog.
(But if you have… uh, hi, Jason? Did you ever move to New Hampshire with the Free State Project like you were talking about?)
You know I am skeptical of the efficacy of testing from our previous interactions. I would only support this program if it was a randomized trial attempting to ascertain the % of already infected. Any other number does not interest me.
Am I culture warry on this? Probably, because there is a culture war about what “experts” (most likely educated but expertise not established) we should trust.
Yeah, I’d go further on the experts culture-warring. Like there are plenty of people (including myself) who think the experts are and have been flat-out lying. In some cases to please their political masters (in China). But in others, the other way around — they have a course of action they want to happen, so they use their expertise to produce “evidence” to support it. Such as that Imperial College study intended to scare the UK into lockdowns. Or any numbers based on the naive SIR model; epidemiologists must know it greatly overestimates real epidemics. Or (and I’m on thinner ground) the now-increasing estimates of R0. And in a few cases they just used their expertise to recommend things they wanted to happen without bothering to produce evidence, such as “masks don’t work”.
So no, I don’t trust the experts. Certainly if they don’t work for me (and none of them do) and possibly not even then. If there were any epidemiologists who had models which correctly predicted the course of this epidemic before the data was in, I haven’t seen them. Doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but I doubt they’re talking to the public.
Yeah. My esteem for “experts” in general has absolutely tanked during all of this. Any headline that starts with “experts suggest…” now causes me to immediately assume that whatever follows is political propaganda.
For me, it’s “scientists say.”
Links:
Viral load is the same in asymptomatic people as symptomatic people.
https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1251679969408884738
NYT on masks, no reference to science papers, but they are similar to our conventional wisdom here
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-best-face-masks.html
Gelman says of the Santa Clara sereology paper: “I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error.”
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in-stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/
And study of infection from Chinese restaurant (literally, one in China) shows that virus travels by droplet, not aerosol:
https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1251556084424347649
I think the restaurant case study also, although not strongly, supports the idea of cloth masks as efficacious. If simple AC currents can increase downwind risk, and apparently decrease risk outside of the current, simply reducing exhalation flow seems a plausible mechanism for reducing risk.
A mask that significantly reduces exhalation flow, will leave you with an intolerable feeling of suffocation within minutes, and probably dead of respiratory acidosis in the end. Masks can only either redirect exhalation flow, or filter it. And I’m pretty sure that for improvised cloth masks, it’s mostly redirection.
Then is covering your mouth when you sneeze or cough a waste of time as well? Redirecting a flow and spacing it out over time can obviously make a big difference.
See this infrared video of with a simple mask versus without:
https://twitter.com/engineers_feed/status/1249274790365384704
John,
Why do you think people find masks uncomfortable, stuffy, moist, etc?
No, pressure doesn’t build over time behind the mask, but if you maintain there is no pressure gradient behind the mask, I’d invite you to go fly a kite.
I find improvised cloth masks uncomfortable mostly because of the straps, and some of the airflow being directed upwards where it fogs my glasses. But, to the extent that pressure gradient matters, it’s going to matter by forcing the chest and lungs to generate a higher internal pressure to maintain the same volumetric exhalation. Long-term average exhalation is to a first approximation driven by CO2 removal, which depends on metabolic factors which aren’t going to change just because you’re wearing a mask.
And if flow restrictions result in a pressure gradient, then from a fluid mechanics standpoint that’s just going to increase the flow velocity coming out of the restricted flow passages.
I am generally in the camp that things homemade masks might be worse than not wearing one, but to your point see also pop filters for microphones. A homemade mask would probablydiffuse the exhaled air, making it travel a shorter distance, I would expect.
Shorter distance but higher concentration within that distance. And if the Chinese-restaurant study is correct (interesting and plausible but just one study), it may not much matter that you shorten the distance of respiratory dispersal because environmental airflow then takes over.
You really want to reduce the amount of contagious material in the air, not just relocate it. For that, you need a mask made from an effective filter material and made to fit well enough that the path of least resistance is through the filter. And you probably need it to be cheap enough to be disposable and a disciplined demasking-and-washing protocol, because every bit of infectious material the mask stopped you from inhaling is still sitting right there on the outer surface waiting for you to handle it and then scratch all the itchy parts of your previously-masked face.
If improvised cloth masks used by amateurs are an effective defense, it shouldn’t be that hard to at least coarsely measure their effectiveness.
because every bit of infectious material the mask stopped you from inhaling
Not if we’re talking about me wearing a mask to stop me from infecting others.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/21/list-of-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-of-machinery-of-freedom/
> I call it jitney transit; it can most easily be thought of as something between taxicabs and hitch-hiking.
> Holy !@#$, I think he has solved the problem of urban mass transit. There’s an obvious Uber parallel, but this system seems even better since it’s run by people going that direction anyway and each car will be packed, making the costs probably much cheaper. This is such an obviously good idea that I can only assume that it was regulation and the taxi lobby that prevented it from coming to pass.
Actually I’ve witnessed something very similar to exist in Peru, some years back. Not all private cars (of which there are few) engage in it, because not everyone wants to carry hitchhikers, and those drivers that engage in the practice tend to drive small minibuses for the most part, because revenues scale directly with capacity, and lines will exist iff cars are indeed packed. This exists in parallel with a strong taxi industry, and both tend to be more similar to each other than buses and taxis are in developed countries. Meaning, you can negotiate a private ride on the cheap if you’re going somewhere your taxi driver wants to go to (e.g. from faraway to city center), or conversely you can talk your minibus driver into going out of their way, for a fee.
tl;dr : It’s been very much tried before. Bus lines are what this naturally evolves into on the “packed car” side, and Uber on the “comfort” side.
This is basically just Via.
Uber was originally billed as a rid sharing app, too.
And sidecar.
One argument for flattening the curve was that we didn’t want the health care system to be overwhelmed. As best I can tell, in many places, including where I live, the number of people requiring intensive care for Covid-19 is substantially below the number that it can be provided for. If that is correct, doesn’t it mean that we are reducing infections too far, at least if the theory is to spread things out so everyone who gets the disease gets adequate medical care? The fewer we treat each month, the more months it takes.
Obviously that doesn’t hold if we are hoping to get a much better treatment or a vaccine long before everyone who could get the disease does, or if we hope to push the number down far enough so we can control it long before everyone has been exposed.
This is probably the only decent argument for relaxing the lockdown at this time.
I suspect this is what our(*) local health officials have in mind, if they haven’t simply gone crazy and/or succumbed to political pressure.
That’s not what I’m gathering from their public statements, mind you. This is from attempting to steelman their motivation, given what I know about the virus, local cases, the reliability (or not) of the local case numbers, etc., and presuming they have the same information, and nothing that significantly contradicts what I’ve seen.
But their original reaction was outstandingly good, so I’m still hoping they are highly competent, rather than merely lucky … once.
(*) “our” – David Friedman and I both live in Santa Clara county, California. (I’ve attended a couple of his meetups.)
The tricky part is that relaxing lockdown now have effects with delay.
1) new infections will start
2) asymptomatic period
3) full-blown infection with week/two delay requiring ICU beds
Merkel claimed that for Germany changing R0 from current 0.9 to 1.2 would overwhelm health system by June.
https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/merkels-covid-19-math-resonates-thanks-to-simple-explanation
Not sure what is the correct solution and whatever lockdows are justified.
That’s correct. And the numbers in Pennsylvania are showing the same thing.
That reasoning seems correct as far as it goes. However, the “most people are going to get sick but we can at least spread it out so we don’t overwhelm the health care system” version of flattening the curve never really was feasible. Even if we quickly build bignum ventilators and field hospitals and whatnot, trained personnel still puts an upper limit on system capacity in the near to mid term, and “flattening the curve” well enough to avoid exceeding that limit would require an impossibly precise level of control over a period of at least a year or two in the best case.
There’s a better argument, sometimes tied to the “flatten the curve” meme but not actually involving a flatter curve, that a relatively brief but intense lockdown could cause a rapid exponential decline in infections to the point that, in maybe a couple of months, less restrictive measures could take over. In that case, a more intense lockdown leads to a shorter lockdown. In that case, you might even want to go to extremes like a two-week period in which literally no one but uniformed police, paramedics, and national guardsmen are allowed on the streets with some of the guardsmen doing food deliveries. But wherever you set the intensity/duration trade, you need the followup solution ready at the end.
The only credible followups I’ve seen proposed are A: testing and contact tracing, or B: rapid deployment of a vaccine or treatment through e.g. challenge testing, or C: the second step of the underpants-gnome business plan. But I haven’t seen anyone around here recruiting and training contact-tracers in spite of lots of now-unemployed people looking for anything useful to do, and I haven’t heard of anyone anywhere doing challenge testing of a vaccine, so it looks like the plan is to implement as strict a lockdown as won’t cause serious dissent and then hope for the underpants gnomes to come through with a miracle.
In which case, we are probably reducing infections too far insofar as we are squandering institutional credibility and public tolerance on a “solution” that merely postpones the inevitable, because it is a Thing We Can Do and Something Must Be Done. But maybe we’ll get the miracle, e.g. summer weather being a corona-virus killer.
Yes. The lockdown was to prevent the healthcare system from getting overwhelmed. The healthcare system is currently underwhelmed. We should reduce restrictions so people can get back to work, and allow the healthcare system to at least be whelmed.
There were many reasons given, including that one. And our understanding changes weekly. (This is an improvement. It used to be our understanding changed daily. I still remember all the Wrong Ideas I had on 9/12/01.)
A lockdown gives us more time to do more things. And like I said above, we are also much smarter than we were a month ago. Most of us have a better idea that this is serious, and we understand that distancing is important, and we have the masks that we need for limited daily tasks. It is now Common Knowledge that a resurgence can lead to a return to a lockdown. Is that enough to stop it from happening? Depends how much people are dumb.
Speak for yourself. I think this disease is less serious and I am less inclined to social distance than I was a month ago.