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Our friends the aliens with the spaceships the size of small moons have decided to buy France. To do so, they will need Earth money.
They plan to raise funds by selling us little yellow pills that make penises bigger. Take one, and your penis will get 50% longer over the next few weeks, stay that way for a month, and then slowly shrink back to normal size unless you keep taking the pills monthly. The pills have no side effects, cannot be overdosed on, do nothing to people without penises, and offer no additional advantages in higher doses. But they really work. And they are made of quantum nanotech blah-blah that we couldn’t possibly duplicate.
The question for you worthies is, how much should our friends charge for these pills?
I’m reminded of the alt-text for this xkcd.
At this point in human society, even someone who successfully created a penis-enlargement pill would struggle greatly to sell it. Nobody would believe it, and there’s basically nothing you could do to convince them otherwise.
I think it’s also true that both men and women are pretty happy with the current size of the average dude’s manhood.
I thought you were going to link to this xkcd instead.
A substantial increase would mostly just be a lot of uncomfortable women briefly, then their husbands asked politely not to use it again.
Then you don’t market to the average dude. Somebody out there is well below average, and a lot more think they are.
I was expecting this one or that one
I had not appreciated before just how many penis jokes Randall Munroe has made over the years.
Like the your mom jokes, I think the penis jokes stopped around comic #1000. (Might be wrong though, it’s been a long time since I basically could remember all the xkcd comics.)
I think you’re right; xkcd definitely took a turn towards PG around 1000 or so. I definitely don’t remember any recent ones having overtly sex-related jokes.
Surely you mean the fourth graph in “https://xkcd.com/715/” Numbers.
Penis size is not necessarily about the woman’s comfort or enjoyment. In fact, the way we relate to sex might not always map neatly to anyone’s comfort or enjoyment. I just learned yesterday that broad swathes of Africa go to great lengths to have dry (unlubricated) sex. They’ll wipe out the natural lube, stuff leaves in there, use medications, whatever it takes to achieve that chafing consistency. It causes lots of abrasions and little cuts for both partners, and increases the spread of VD. And yet thousands or millions of men have persuaded themselves that it feels better, and women will struggle to give them the dry experience they (shudder) crave.
Which is pretty much what I said, yeah. I don’t think there are enough women who really want a bigger penis in them to sustain this. Men who have a single exclusive sexual partner make up the vast majority of sexually active men, which means the needs of their partner are important.
Viagra was a big deal because men’s wives want to have sex with them and men want to have sex. Both benefitted, and it was very popular.
I don’t see everyone having 9-12 inch dicks as being that popular.
My point is that male penis-size anxiety is only tenuously linked to female enjoyment. It’s more of a weird status and pride thing, and if you suspect that all the men around you have bigger dongs than you do it feels demoralizing. Even if you have no logical reason to suspect that you are in competition with them, or that they would have an advantage if you were.
Also I work in pharmacy and some men just want Viagra for weird pathological reasons. We had one customer who bought thirty every couple of days. Eventually one of the pharmacists cut him off because she assumed he was selling it, but I don’t think he was. I think he was actually swallowing all the damn things, or swallowing half and hoarding the remainder out of some deep-seated anxiety that disaster would strike and he would be unable to get a boner.
@theredsheep
Don’t get me wrong. There are absolutely people out there who would take this little pill just for some weird body hangup or something like that.
And there are women who want a bigger manhood from the man they are with.
But I don’t see either of those groups as large enough to sustain the multiple TRILLIONS required for this to be a viable plan.
Viagra’s market strategy is not that weird guy who wants to buy 30, it’s a war hero named Bob Dole and his loving wife who both want to be intimate. This yellow pill has no similar market.
I think this is half true.
That’s how Viagra marketed itself when it was a brand new thing desperate to be taken seriously and not the butt of constant jokes by Jay Leno.
These days, their marketing is quite a bit different (and its primary competitor, Cialis, goes with the “old people in a bathtub” marketing)
@EchoChaos
To your other point, I think it’s quite likely most prefer/enjoy at least somewhat above average penis, based on studies and personal anecdotal evidence. Probably not 50% larger.
Also, consider a culture like South Korea, where double eyelid surgery has become super normalized for young women (or even just like, makeup and musculature in our society), so this sort of “body anxiety” based on social expectations can be transmuted in widespread behaviors.
Depending on actual preference for larger penises, a penis pill might be useful for say, half of all men (maybe 50% larger is too much, say it just right-sizes it). Combine that with widespread penis anxiety and perhaps good marketing, I think you could total normalize it and generate hundreds of billions of dollars globally.
@sidereal
Some solid points, and I appreciate them. My anecdotal evidence is somewhat different and I haven’t looked at studies.
Note that Viagra is now generic, dirt cheap (if you’re not being scammed), and routinely used by people who don’t have ED as such; it does more than enable erections. I am told that it substantially shortens the refractory period, for example.
A pill that increased my penis volume by 50% proportionally (15% in each direction) would be much more interesting, and would probably make my wife and my girlfriend happier. 50% increase in length would be too much.
But there are a lot of guys between 4 and 5 inches long for whom a 50% increase in length would not be too much for their partner.
Maybe you could sell it with a porno-mercial series.
I think it would sell just fine. Word would get out easily that it actually works. You say nobody would believe it, but I don’t think you would be able to keep its effects a secret.
Exactly. We’re buried in spam for penis pills because that’s the kind of spam some people will actually click on (if no one did, the spammers would notice and start pushing a different product). Those people would notice that the sketchy pills they’d purchased were extremely effective, and from there it’d be hard to stop word from spreading.
You don’t have to advertise with spam, though. You can do a clinical trial at a reputable medical school and get your product talked up on the Today Show. Or whatever Viagra did to distinguish itself from ED quackery.
At this point in human society, even someone who successfully created a penis-enlargement pill would struggle greatly to sell it.
I find it interesting that Alfred Bester, in his 1975 novel “Extro” (or “The Computer Connection” as it’s also known) was able to forecast the kind of advertising the future would engage in:
It’s also interesting as a snapshot of historical attitudes: Bester has a kind of half-joking “demographics is destiny” attitude going on where white people are the minority and have greatly reduced intelligence (due to insistence on Racial Purity and so the resultant inbreeding to keep the White Stock Pure), and the X-Risk of the day is population explosion (the world is so crowded, that in the American context here, people are living in the rows of seats in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre).
I can’t believe the alt text used the word “helpless” instead of the more fitting “impotent”.
You could take your queues from the branded, heavily marketed ‘can’t get it up?’ campaigns. If their success is anything to go by, several hundred dollars per month.
Why not just ship the pills to France in bulk in exchange for land rights?
The only thing left to negotiate is how many pills the Surrender State is worth, which is something you should ask Macron, I guess.
I’m not sure how much France costs, but based on their GDP I’m guessing it’s at least ten figures. This suggests that our alien friends are going to need to take ownership of a noticeable percentage of all of the wealth in the world (which makes sense, because they plan to trade that wealth for France, which also represents a noticeable percentage of the world’s wealth).
While Pfizer had exclusive rights to Viagra, it was making them single-digit billions of dollars per year, and it represented a majority of the erectile dysfunction drug market. Obviously little yellow pills will not have the exact same market as little blue pills, but I think Viagra is a good jumping-off point to estimate from: there is probably not a hundred times as much demand for yellow pills as blue ones. Unfortunately, I think you need a hundred times as much demand: unless they want to spend centuries saving, the market doesn’t seem prepared to support any price that would let our friends buy France.
Seconded.
I forwarded your estimates to our friends, and now they’re asking about going rates for worm acts and lost waffles. I don’t know what they’re talking about half the time. Their pronunciation is terrible.
They are strange indeed. And why were they so concerned about “laws resting taunts”?
Maybe the aliens can make people worried about limited supply, driving up prices. Also, they could pitch the pills as something you stockpile (even for your kids and grandkids), converting future sales into immediate sales. Plus you know there’s people out there who’d feed such pills to their dogs, hamsters, and so on. Which reminds me, there might also be uses in agriculture (especially horse-breeding) and wildlife conservation.
How much would France cost? They’re one of the few countries that has sold real estate on that scale: the Louisiana purchase, which would be over $300 million in today’s money. For the metropole, the cost would be much higher—I’d guess even a factor of million might be reasonable. The population of the Louisiana Territory was 60,000 (not counting natives) and many of those were slaves; the population of France now is 65 million. In addition to the factor of 1000 on population, economic growth over the past two centuries has made fixes assets like land more valuable. Let’s call that a factor of 20, based on historic GDP estimates. Finally, to account for intangible and sentimental factors, and to get to a realistic multiple of contemporary GDP, let’s multiply by something in the range 10 – 50. The high end of that range works out to $4.6 million per person or $5.5 million per hectare; I’d hardly call these amounts unthinkable.
France is fifty million hectares, which at $5.5 million each comes out to 250 trillion dollars (similar results for $4.6 million per person). It’s not unthinkable in the sense that I think that much money exists (at least for certain definitions of money, that’s more than all the cash in the world), but it’s pretty wild to propose raising that much from pretty much any endeavour, let alone something as narrow as selling penis pills.
Boosterspice – that is, immortality in a pill – might just about do it. Penis enlargement, no.
Are you collecting all these inputs as some kind of social-science experiment? I imagine you leafing through an ancient ruled notebook crammed to overflowing with tiny, insectile, hand-written prompts. “Third week of April, time to ask the penis question!”
FWIW, my answer is–given that the world economy is crashing, eventually the pills will be negatively priced, and the aliens will pay us to take them off their hands. I plan to hold out for a million dollars per.
There’s no secret plan. I’m just bored and have a taste for the absurd.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if I started tracking thread lengths, and used some sort of ML algorithm to optimize for engagement. But I might just end up with something that looks exactly like every other site on the internet.
I think a blog/site featuring an “absurd question of the day” might be fun (if such a thing doesn’t already exist). I imagine you could build up an audience pretty quickly, but it might be hard to keep the comments in line.
Just what a man with a secret plan would say! We’ve caught you.
Price discrimination would be your friend here. I can imagine big players in the porn industry (which is multibillions per year, though no one seems to be sure exactly how much), and a certain number of rich, insecure men, paying four if not five figures per dose. The aliens could make more money if they offered a way to control the effect. There really is such a thing as too big (for normal use, not necessarily for porn), and 150% of average (eight to nine inches?) is getting there.
Is there a surgical procedure with the same effect? The price of that would probably be a good starting point (adjusted so the present value of buying a lifetime of pills equals).
What does buying France have to do with the price of pills? Do they need to make enough money to buy France or else it isn’t worth it? Is it just flavor text for “make as much money as possible”?
My general strategy would be to charge $0 for the first pill, $20 for the second, and double it from there.
So the largest market for these pills would of course be high school and middle school boys, who care inordinately about the size of their penis, most likely because of how little use they have had with it. On the surface, High school boys do not have the wealth to pay a significant amount of money to the aliens. However, the federal government has learned that there is a fairly effective way of extracting wealth from high schoolers. Give them deferred loans that they will not have to start paying until they are 25 years old that are not dischargeable by bankruptcy. High schoolers have no real concept of how much their loan payments will be in the future, and will pay large amounts of money without worry. I estimate you can charge them $25,000 over 4 years. From the US alone that is over $25 trillion in debt annually if you manage total market share.
Obviously the federal government wouldn’t help you enforce such predatory loans that they did not come up with themselves, but if the aliens have their own enforcement mechanism and way to deliver products, that would be the best way to make the money.
So, first sell enough pills to be able to hire effective lobbyists, and then Congress will pass your not-dischargable-in-bankruptcy-penis-enlarging loan package.
Or just reveal (or lie) that there is a literal poison pill that will cause action in the other direction if usage is discontinued.
Increasing the size of a hydraulic system without increasing the power of its pump is questionable engineering.
What exactly does “buy France” mean?
Are they just buying the land, so they become landlords of everyone in France? What if some of the current landowners refuse to sell at any price?
Are they buying sovereignty over France, replacing the Republic with an alien governor? Who would they need to pay to make this happen?
Are they paying all of the humans to emigrate from France? What if some refuse to do so at any price?
I was just handwaving about our friends needing a lot of money, and happened to bump into France.
Don’t worry about that. This thread isn’t about France.
Do they at least take France with them if they get enough money?
Landlords and soverign states? How terribly Westfalian.
Setup a kind of Angevin-Capetian situation where the Aliens get a Royal Demesne in the Ile de France and nominal overlordship over the whole Metropole, but most of the land is held in fief by human vassals such as Elizabeth II.
De Jure, the aliens own france but if they interfere too much, the
Landsraaddukes, counts and marquises who hold most of the de-facto power will start to get longbow-y.Culture war time is back!
So Donald Trump has banned all* (not all) immigration to the United States via Executive Order. This is very clearly within the powers of the Presidency to whatever degree he thinks necessary. Justice Roberts pointed out when upholding Trump’s prior travel bans that the President is granted tremendous deference to shut down immigration.
However, this seems to be a standard Trump shout that he is doing the extreme thing and doing a relatively moderate thing. This is probably the character trait of his that I find most annoying. It means he gets the negative press for doing the extreme thing, but not the actual political benefits of actually doing it.
In this case, while the ban is good, it does not go nearly far enough, especially for its stated purpose of protecting Americans who are out of work from competition from underpriced foreign workers, since it contains exceptions for some temporary workers.
We will see if the pressure from people like Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson, etc. will shift the order closer to the extreme thing that Trump promised or if this will be a self-inflicted wound where he takes flak from the left for doing something and from the right for not doing it well enough.
Eh, my guess is that it’s simply not at all feasible to ban temporary workers.
Even in normal times I think there’s some credence to the notion that Americans won’t be willing to pick strawberries all day for below-minimum wage. Now that there’s COVID, which includes scaring people that going to work means risking death, and also includes expanding and making unemployment even more generous than it was before, the incentive for Americans to work manual labor jobs for low pay are even lower than they were previously.
Odds are the COVID situation is going to result in key supply chain breakdowns and food shortages eventually anyway. If Trump bans temporary foreign workers, it’ll be that much easier to blame all of those on him.
That’s a solid point about short-term versus long-term impacts, since he is banning all long-term immigration.
Bingo. You don’t want to ban agricultural migrant workers when prudent reactions to a pandemic are hurting supply chains by their very nature. We don’t want food shortages in addition to PPE and toilet paper shortages.
Not that I agree with the concept, but I presume the idea is not that Americans will pick strawberries for below-minimum wage. It’s that Americans will pick strawberries for way-above-minimum wage, and you’ll pay more for strawberries.
I bought a Costco pack of toilet paper before prepping was mainstream this Spring, and still had to worry if TP would be back on store shelves at 7 AM on a day before that ran out. I can’t find hand sanitizer or Clorox product. I am not in thrive mode where I think dramatically raising the price of produce to reserve all agricultural labor for citizens is a benign intervention in the market.
There’s a similar row going on in Ireland, with respect to fruit pickers (in this case from Bulgaria): https://www.thejournal.ie/keelings-coronavirus-5076737-Apr2020/
I think it’s an issue in the UK too.
A farmer brought 150 Romanians in on one chartered plane. When challenged why he wasn’t using the volunteers who had specifically put themselves forward on a web site set up for it, he claimed they were to be trainers for the volunteers. I think that was just a reaction response, or he’d have said it first.
The more plausible explanation I’ve heard (not regarding that farmer in particular, but British farmers hiring East Europeans for the harvest in preference to volunteers in general) is that the farmers simply do not believe the volunteers will be willing or able to actually do the work, based on past experience hiring students. Whatever they may claim, very few Brits with no relevant prior experience will in fact do 60 hours a week of back-breaking, tedious manual work efficiently for weeks on end. In the long run, if one were willing to accept the concommitant price rises, one could presumably establish a viable but more expensive British workforce. One cannot, however, wish one into existence for this summer.
Green card workers, unlike visa workers, don’t need to undercut their prices to compete for jobs. They’ve got license to work and live anywhere in the US. They aren’t fixed to one company.
Given the amount of time it takes to get a green card, this ruling is effectively a “screw-you” to people who applied to permanently make the US their home anytime in the last 10 years or so.
This action banned old-school immigration like most of our ancestors used. The new-fangled ‘immigration’ of H1Bs and the like that everyone hated is alive and well.
Tucker Carlson hits the nail on the head: https://youtu.be/TWLA6si4Tak?t=323
“The ban will apply only to”…”people who like the United States enough to stay permanently, and would like green cards to be able to do it legally.”
“So if the point of this executive order was to protect American jobs – maybe there was another point – but if it was to protect American jobs, it failed.”
My ancestors didn’t immigrate, because the United States didn’t exist when they came to America.
I used the word “most” for a reason.
Sure, but the point is valid. The United States belongs to those of us who are citizens, and we can choose to stop letting in new people whenever it no longer serves our interests.
Note that for my political reasons, green card to citizens are as worrisome as illegals because they vote very differently from current citizens. They are substantially more left-wing.
Are you really prepared to definitively say that you have no ancestors who entered the United States in the last 244 years? At 20 years/generation, that’s about 4096 people.
Touche, I do have some post 1776 immigrants in my family tree. Not too many, but I do have some. None who are post Civil War, when there were actual procedures for immigration, though.
I have run my family tree quite a while, lots of fun folks in there.
Edit: My important point is the identification with the Americans who built our country originally, who I am descended from, not with those we allowed in.
Can you clarify this? If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that you support Trump’s action because you believe that you align ideologically & politically with pre-1776 Americans and that, based on your other comments in this thread, modern immigrants should not be allowed in because they diverge from your ideological and political stance.
@broblawsky
Anyone who has significant heritage in America is descended from both founders and immigrants, simply due to the quantity of both (as you pointed out, 4000 people). I’m a Son of the Revolution (descended not just from settlers in 1776, but from actual soldiers who fought) on both my mother and father’s side, and both have immigrants in their family tree as well.
The “these immigrants are just like your ancestors” line which has become prevalent in the USA recently is an attempt to make Americans identify more with potential immigrants (non-Americans, by definition) than with the Americans that they share a country with when choosing what policies to enact for whose benefit.
I reject that. My identification is with founding this country. It’s my homeland and has been my family’s homeland for centuries.
Note that @anonymousskimmer didn’t even attempt to argue that this ruling was bad for Americans, just that it hurt those potential immigrants. To sway me, he would have to show that this hurts us.
Because I think my stance is best for Americans. We are, after all, the ones who are actually here and who the country belongs to.
If given total control of immigration policy, I would indeed allow some immigrants, if it was shown that they were a benefit to all Americans. Immigrants who cause displacement and harm to one group of Americans to benefit another I have no interest in.
Why is what your ancestors did at all relevant to anything? One of the most important American ideals is that Americans should be judged by what they themselves accomplished or earned instead of the circumstances of their birth.
It is extremely contradictory to identify as a “son of the revolution” or whatever. This is America–your identity should be based on YOUR choices and actions.
That’s why the Sons of the American Revolution is reviled as an un-American group, hated by all?
Your weird idea doesn’t bear a resemblance to actual America, where our Constitution starts with “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”, specifically identifying being the Posterity of the founders as important.
Turns out, building for your children and honoring your parents who did it is pretty American.
Making things materially better for your descendents is very different from you descendents claiming special status just because they’re yours. I think the founders made their views on the second very clear when they talked about noble titles.
America caring about people being judged on their own accomplishments is basis civics–the whole “by content of their character” or “All men are created equal” thing. Part of the point of the revolution was to live in a democracy instead of a hereditary monarchy. One of the most resonant story archetypes in the US is rags-to-riches. The stereotypical American dream is rising from humble beginnings to greatness. This is almost the central ideal in the national mythology!
You might be surprised how many people would think the Sons of the American Revolution is a pretty strange group if you explain the membership restriction–covering itself with the symbolism of America while contradicting a core value.
I see a lot of comments from you emphasizing how important being American is for various things. Please try to understand the values of the culture and country you claim. If you don’t like them, there are a lot of places in Europe where aristocracy still exists.
MLK and Emma Lazarus were not the founders of America, no matter how much you wish they were.
And I’d bet most of those who would think that wouldn’t be descended from anyone who fought in the revolution. Somehow those descended from the founders lost the “founding ideas” only to have them rediscovered by some guy newly arrived in New York in 1881. A bit odd, don’t you think?
@StableTrace
My descendants do have special value because they’re mine. What kind of inhuman monster do you think I am? Of course my children are special to me. That response suggests to me you don’t have any yet. When you do you will think yours are special to you as well. As you should.
Just as I and all my siblings and fellow Americans were special to the Founders, which is why they made a whole country to preserve the Blessings of Liberty to us.
A noble title is the view that one of your children is more special than another and inherits a different status and rights based on that. Note that we didn’t fight a revolution to get rid of nobility. We fought a revolution to be independent and decided later not to have nobility.
You and I have very different ideas of the national mythology.
Plus everything @Alexander Turok said. If your idea of the national character didn’t show up until the late 1800s, you may be wrong about what the national character is.
If this is your position, don’t you have to identify what an American ethos is, and restrict immigration to only those who have previously demonstrated that ethos is a strong, longstanding, and non-performative way?
If you reject the idea that progenitors mostly do good things for the benefit of their progeny, and that this is a place that has been made good, you need some strong way to ensure that their goodness is preserved, including among immigrants.
Leaving aside the extremely controversial point that American ideals and culture match/should match what the they were in 1776, slavery and all, I’m referencing Jefferson and Franklin here too. A quick look at the wiki article on the titles of nobility clause defends that the founders were specifically concerned about descendents getting unearned privileges (here is the original source if you don’t like wiki).
American should be for those who believe in American ideals–I am perfectly happy accepting this. Ultimately it is up to the people here to determine what these ideals are. I’ve been giving lots of arguments that they do match what I’m saying and I can give some for why they should match if you want.
I will also 100% own that it is for partially selfish reasons that I want an America where your status is determined by your own accomplishments instead of your ancestors. Are you sure you want to be pushing the narrative that our positions on this issue are selfish though? It doesn’t seem very fair to yourselves….
@StableTrace
This is a very dangerous idea. I am willing to go on record that I will violently oppose those who try to put this into practice. Because its end is the removal of citizenship from those who don’t have the “right” ideas.
I’m ignoring the goofy circular nature of “you must have American ideals to be an American and what American ideals are is determined by what Americans believe”. That’s a tautology. Obviously you have a specific set of ideas you mean, which I disagree with.
I don’t believe in what you call “American ideals”. Should I be allowed to be an American? What actions are you willing to take to stop me from being one?
Do you advocate for only allowing the immigration of those who believe in your ideals? How do you test for them? What happens if you find out they were lying, or later change their mind?
I will give you the actual American answer: America is blood and soil.
That’s literally in the Constitution, by the way. You become an American citizen only by being born to someone who is already a citizen or being born on our sacred soil. Those are the only ways that confer unconditional citizenship.
All other citizenship is at the sufferance of other citizens and may be revoked for violation of its terms. That’s our current black letter law. And yes, we still do denaturalize people who violate the law.
Changing this is changing what American means.
I have no issue being judged on my own actions. I’m against titles of nobility. That’s different than citizenship, which is why the same Founders who argued against titles of nobility wrote that the Constitution was for their Posterity.
There’s a big difference between the question “who do we allow into the country” and “who should we kick out”. I thought we were discussing the first or at least “who should feel uncomfortable because they’re living in a culture that doesn’t match their beliefs”.
The answer to the second should of course be very different because violently uprooting someone’s life should only be done in extreme circumstances. For this reason I am not disagreeing with you that “blood and soil” should count for something as far as citizenship goes
Rather, the disagreement seems to be whether once someone proves themselves, they and their descendents should have the exact same rights and privileges as any other other citizen, no matter how far back ancestry goes. I have been trying to argue why this guideline the most consistent with American ideals, whether some corner cases in our laws agree with it or not. You seem to think that people with ancestors who fought in the revolution deserve special status. Correct me if I’m wrong here.
Then state your ideals and put them on the immigration forms and let us vote on those, or don’t. And make it clear you are expelling people who don’t share them as well. Otherwise your plan doesn’t make sense. You can have a nation like that, but it is a whole new concept that is a post-Westphalian world. And you better not be a hypocrite about it when Peter Theil and his friends establish libero-richia in Oregon where only people with $1 million+ net worth and a decade+ of advocacy for libertarianism are allowed to immigrate. Or when Echo and his boys split off and create 1776ia where you have to have at least one ancestor that served in the Revolutionary army.
That is, I feel your plan is inherently authoritarian, or hypocritical; unless you accept a lot of things that most people have not shown a willingness to accept for a century+
@StableTrace
There is no disagreement about this in this thread.
This is about whether or not potential green card holders being harmed by Trump’s action is a problem. The statement was made that this was bad only in reference to immigrant ancestors and the harm to the potential immigrants.
I have never said that any citizens should have different rights based on their ancestry. My argument about ancestry was specifically to push back against the identification with immigrants over other Americans, as I said in my comment above.
I think that my questions in the prior comment still stand, by the way. Immigration that makes people already here “feel uncomfortable because they’re living in a culture that doesn’t match their beliefs” is just as evil and destructive.
The USA isn’t just an economy, it’s a home.
The principal principle of immigration should be “first, do no harm”. If immigration is harming Americans fiscally, culturally or any other way, I’m against it.
Just to push back a bit on that, it seems like every immigrant ever will make at least one person less happy. I’m okay with immigration that makes the nation as a whole better off, even when there are some losers as well as some winners.
Where I think we agree (when we get away from my nitpicks) is that immigration policy should primarily be run for the benefit of the nation, aka the current citizens of the country. I think there’s some room for charity here, as when we take in refugees during some crisis. But that should be a relatively small part of immigration policy done for compassionate reasons. The main criterion on which we should judge immigration policy (and all other policy) is making the people of this country better off–helping us and our kids to have better lives.
Now, that still leaves a lot of disagreement. Some people believe something close to open borders (perhaps with some screening for known criminals/terrorists and people with contagious diseases) would be the best policy for the people of the US. Others believe some kind of point-based immigration scheme like Canada has would be best. Still others think we should limit immigration to ensure immigrants with compatible ideas and backgrounds with current US culture.
But in order to have that discussion, I think we have to start out agreeing on what criteria we should use to decide between alternative proposed immigration policies.
A couple points that seem important here:
a. Family reunification is probably not great for the nation as a whole, but often really matters a great deal to the citizen or legal resident who’s trying to bring his mom into the country so he can get her out of Haiti or El Salvador or wherever. I’m not sure quite how you weigh that.
b. Economic migrants benefit some people and hurt others, in ways that are maybe not always so easy to analyze. For example, it’s pretty clearly possible to make it easy enough for foreign engineers to come and work here that wages for engineers are depressed and very few Americans study engineering, and I suspect that would be a pretty bad outcome overall. But it might still be a win in straight economic terms.
c. Cultural impacts can be really hard to quantify, and they often seem like matters of opinion. If a wave of immigrants makes the country go from 10% Catholic to 30% Catholic, is that good, bad, or indifferent, and how do you decide?
How about if it is harming some Americans in one of those ways, and helping others?
Pretty nearly any change in a large society is going to make some people worse off, even if it makes most better off, so if your answer to my question is that any such change should be forbidden you are opting for stasis, probably unobtainable. If it is only for immigration, you are opting for no immigration.
Consider the cultural element. Suppose we allow in the sort of people whose culture you approve of. As you may have noticed, there are a fair number of people in the U.S. whose cultural preferences are different from yours, so letting in the people whose culture you approve of means letting in people whose culture they disapprove of, so harms them culturally, just as letting in the people they approve of harms you.
@DavidFriedman
I am against it in that way too. Immigration should not be used to generate winners and losers in the culture war. The quota system tried to fix that by making it so that immigrants mirrored the existing culture exactly. Imperfect, but a good idea.
I am exaggerating when I say “no American”, but if it’s opposed by a substantial minority (~10%, say?) then that makes sense to me.
Sorry, I’ll try to make these ideals specific. This is a little too much to do perfectly for a non-expert in a blog comment, so please be nice about technicalities.
I think the ideals currently ARE some combination of the speeches and writings of all the people who have monuments in DC with later people winning out whenever there is a contradiction–basically whatever bright, non-cynical stuff you read in an elementary school American history textbook.
For what the ideals SHOULD be, I think it’s most important to focus on people’s destinies being determined by their abilities and choices instead of the circumstances of their births, lavish rewards for people who contribute through high ability, and tolerance for any cultural differences that do not contradict these three ideals. The goal is to have a country that will attract and subsume all the most capable people in the world no matter where they were originally born. Such a country should naturally outcompete all others.
There seems to be disagreement in how close the first is to the second.
I am happy with a world where different groups of people make different societies that follow the cultures they want and where people are free to choose which society’s rules and culture they want to follow. I am reasonably confident that mine will be the most successful.
The United States was substantially founded on a classical liberal (see: John Locke) model of governance. Allowing in people who stray from this pushes the country away from that model, the Constitution, and doing terrible harm to the principle of the Rule of Law.
That there’s a particular political party which seems to benefit most from this is not lost on me.
Sorry again, there’s a lot that I seemed to have missed and not replied to. I’m still trying to figure out how to deal with this kind of chaotic, multiparty forum discussion.
@EchoChaos
I interpreted a lot of your replies as asking that people think of you differently because you have ancestors who fought in the revolution and saying that the membership requirements for the Sons of the Revolution are a good thing. If this is not what you meant, then I agree we have no disagreement here.
I think the three ideals I emphasized leave a lot of room for people with very different beliefs to feel comfortable. If that still doesn’t work for you, then at some point “The USA isn’t just an economy, it’s a home.” needs to be sacrificed a bit for practicality. How else could 300 million compete with 1.4 billion?
Please point out anything else important you feel I didn’t address.
@Garrett
As said further down, I think it would be most productive to focus the discussion on mass high-skilled immigration since this seems to be the first point of disagreement between the sides of this argument (this is what I’m most interested in discussing too–I think it’s vital to the health of the country that the Republican Party gets convinced mass high-skilled immigration is a good thing).
In this case, I’m not sure which party you’re talking about–there’ve been some extremely well-attended Modi-Trump rallies for example.
What does “compete with” mean? Are you assuming that other countries being rich makes us poor? Or are you thinking in terms of power politics, military conflict, and the like?
The second makes sense, the first does not. You might note that the most spectacular economic success of the 20th century, Hong Kong, was a small population on a very small island. The two largest countries by population, on the other hand, did quite poorly for most of the century.
I mean the second and agree completely. I guess I’ll add competing to influence the values the rest of the world lives under.
Just in case that someone liked joke and wanted to find original one: it is not worth it, it is in a text with such ‘gems’ as “A few contemporary equivalents of free helicopter rides”.
Buying and operating a helicopter is sadly a lot more expensive than I would have hoped. At least too expensive to offer free helicopter rides, 50% off…
I really can’t resist replying to the drive-by, undefended “the ban is good.”
It is extremely important that the US has the most qualified and competent people in the world coming here to work for the benefit of the US. For analogy, A soccer team that refuses to sign-on new goalies because the current goalies are concerned about their play time will not stay competitive.
Workers living in the US can’t be “underpriced”. They have to pay the same living expenses living in the same metro areas as citizens. A lot of them even have a significant extra expense of sending remittances back home.
The hypothetical American out of work from competition needs to take one for the team. Honestly, if you are going for a position so in demand that you can get outcompeted, the correct response is to better yourself and make yourself a more appealing candidate. It feels morally gross to ask for arbitrary advantages over more qualified applicants.
Since tech is a relevant example for a lot of people here, it needs mentioning that the education system in the US already gives American-born workers a massive advantage. Just look up some stories of how horrible CS courses are at Indian universities for example. If a tech worker still can’t compete even with this advantage, I’m not sure the problem is with the competition.
An immigration ban is nothing but a huge self-inflicted wound.
I don’t agree at all. Mental imperialism and looting the world of their most qualified and competent isn’t necessary. We’re a country of 300+ million people. We have plenty of best and brightest here. And we are able to collaborate as well. I work with Englishmen regularly. They don’t need to become Americans for that to work.
Of course they can. This is literal supply and demand. As supply of workers increases, demand and thus price decreases. Note that remittances even harm the common objection that foreign workers are part of the economy and hence stimulate it by buying other things. They aren’t. They’re actively taking money out of the American economy and sending it elsewhere.
This is exactly the attitude I am decrying. You are willing to spike the career of other Americans for the bottom line. I am not. I don’t feel like being an American is arbitrary. This lack of a sense of unity of citizenship is common amongst the pro-immigration types.
Money isn’t productivity.
I don’t believe I said it was.
The statement that ‘they are taking money out of the economy’ only works if they are taking productivity out of the economy, otherwise you just have money going to a different person, who then spends it (going to a different person again) etc, etc, etc, and eventually it will be back in the US.
@baconbits9
But sending money to another country does take productivity out of the economy, since instead of spending it locally on mom and pop grocery for production, they’re sending it to Indo-Mexi-Phil-etnam, where the productivity is actually consumed.
And velocity actually does matter a lot for money, as all economists agree. If it takes years to move back to the States, that’s a notable hit to us.
So you are saying that money = productivity then?
How. Guy comes into the country, spends 40 hours a week picking blueberries. The blueberries he picks literally stay within the US borders and are eaten by people living in the US (stipulation for simplicity sake) and that guy is given green bits of paper which he mails back to a different country.
How exactly was that productivity ‘consumed’ in that other country?
@baconbits9
Money is the exchange medium that facilitates the exchange of productivity.
The velocity of money is how aggressively that particular dollar does so.
Let’s use your example. Two dudes are picking berries in the field. Johnny American and Jimmy Foreigner. Both work 40 hours, get paid the exact same. Johnny spends all his money locally, while Jimmy sends 10 hours of wages back home to Foreigner-stan. To respond to the local demand, 70 hours of local work are produced to meet Johnny and Jimmy’s needs. 10 hours of Foreigner-stan work are produced to meet the needs of Jimmy’s family back home. (this is assuming invariant productivity, which is of course wildly not true, which is why Jimmy came here, but we’re simplifying).
If both workers were Johnny, we would need 80 hours of local labor to meet their needs, increasing the local employment by 10 hours.
The current velocity of local dollars in the USA is something like $15 dollars, which means for each dollar in the USA, we circulate it 15 times in this way.
That means that Jimmy has reduced the demand for American productivity by ~150 hours total via velocity follow on effects of removing those 10 hours from circulation. The promise of the free traders was “yeah, but those come back basically immediately by orders from Foreigner-stan, so it’s not a big deal”. This has turned out to be false. We have a large trade deficit, which represents this.
Three examples.
Bill picks 10 quarts of blueberries, and makes $10. He spends that $10 on locally produced rice and beans and eats them all himself.
Chris picks 10 quarts of blueberries and makes $10. He spends $10 on locally produced rice and beans and eats 80% of them, and ships 20% of them to his daughter in Mexico, who eats them.
David picks 10 quarts of blueberries and makes $10. He spends $10 on locally produced rice and beans and eats 80% of them, and gives the other 20% to his daughter whom he brought with her from Mexico, and she eats that 20%.
What are the effects of these on the local economy?
@baconbits9
All are identical to the American economy, except that Chris and David will be hungrier. If this were the situation I would be fine with it, by the way. America as a net exporter is great for America.
You are talking about end products, but the key point I am making is about monetary velocity. The dollars spent on bean producers will then flow downstream through the American economy. Once that monetary velocity leaves the States, it takes time to come back, during which time it’s not part of the US economy and nobody is producing to use it.
That time is currently beyond eternal. We’ve been running a deficit for my lifetime in trade and remittances, which means that lots of American money leaves the economy permanently, permanently lowering demand for American workers.
Then your model says that sending a pair of $1 bills to mexico makes our economy worse, but sending an actual physical good ($2 worth of rice and beans) to mexico has no effect, which clearly means your model is wrong.
@baconbits9
You’ve made an assertion that I don’t follow. Why does that make my model wrong?
In all three cases, $10 of American production were consumed and the exchange for them continues in the American economy.
In the case of sending a $10 bill, that money no longer circulates in the American economy. Are you saying monetary velocity doesn’t matter? That’s a pretty contrarian position. Can I ask where you get it?
Because you claim that literal production (ie goods) getting sent overseas in exchange for nothing doesn’t harm the US economy, but sending over currency would.
@baconbits9
Yes, and we both agreed earlier that money isn’t productivity. Which is why sending money is different than sending productivity. I’m not trying to be obtuse. I’ve explained that monetary velocity is what I’m concerned about. If Americans regularly took their salary and buried it in the backyard or burned it that would have the same damaging effect on the economy.
Monetary velocity* isn’t stable. You have started form the assumption that if you ship the $10 bill overseas that the remaining dollars in the US will have the same velocity. If you take this assumption to its logical conclusion then the federal reserve could literally print a dollar for every dollar being sent overseas, and delete a dollar for every being returned from overseas and your entire complaint is null and void.
*In actuality velocity is complete junk, its an ad hoc fix to a bad theory that claimed prices moved in relation to the quantity of money in supply. When they found out that wasn’t true they introduced ‘velocity’ as a fix, but velocity is not actually measured, it is calculated by measuring M and P.
@baconbits9
They absolutely could, which would be an inflationary wealth transfer from savers to the Federal Reserve in order to offset this loss of money. Some amount of this definitely already happens. Enough to offset the full trade deficit would be inflation of about 6% yearly (10 trillion nominal worldwide money supply v. 600 billion trade deficit). That’s a lot.
That’s interesting. Do you have someplace I can read that more?
You can read about it on any site that defines velocity, like here they won’t add all the colorful language that I did but it is clear.
Note how they don’t actually even have a single definition for M, and V is just the relationship between GDP and whatever definition of M you happen to choose.
How would it be a transfer to the Federal Reserve? They would be printing money and giving it away in this scenario.
BTW the logical outcome of the positions you have put forth here is that the Federal Reserve could buy every single item of food produced in the US and ship it overseas for free without causing an average decline in the standard of living in the US.
@baconbits9
Thanks.
Well, I did mention that not having enough food would make people hungry in earlier posts, if you recall. You are switching terms again. We haven’t talked standard of living yet at all. We talked productivity, money and now standard of living. Note that Chris and David do have lower standards of living than Bill does in the naïve “how much food do I have” standard of living.
Yes, if people believed dollars were the same value (e.g. ignoring the MASSIVE inflation that the Fed printing that money would cause) then productivity would not fall because the demand would remain. We see that when the Federal government buys food with deficit money and sends it abroad as foreign aid for free. This situation already happens to a small degree. It’s fairly popular, especially with farmers. Note that what you’re talking about here is the Feds essentially creating inflation that is “owned” by those foreigners that they would be shipping the food they by to.
I think a better way to explain it is that productivity is supply and money is demand. Removing supply (e.g. by consumption) is different from removing demand.
I am working on the assumption that when you say that money leaving the US economy is bad for the US economy you aren’t using a tautology where you measure the US economy by dollars within US borders. You can reword and substitute what your preferred word is in there, but the point still stands. If the Fed started buying goods and sending them overseas for nothing what do you think would happen to the economy? Do you think the economy as a whole would be fine and it would just be a redistribution of wealth/value/standard of living within the economy?
Demand is not wanting something, it is choosing to buy it over any other good available, or choosing not to buy it. By assuming that demand is constant i such a hypothetical you are implying that the US could in theory ship out 100% of its production as long as people still had ‘faith’ in the currency.
We know that this is wrong at the extremes. In hyperinflation the amount of money goes way up but productivity goes way down and demand goes way down. There was a period in Germany during the 20s where the German authorities believed that the hyperinflation was caused by to little money, their reasoning was that prices were rising much, much faster- more an order or magnitude faster during some periods, than the money supply was* which mean that there must not be enough money to buy all the goods and services in the country, which was what was causing the depression.
*In this case the money supply was literally printing presses churning out bills and slapping higher and higher denominations on those bills to the point where the limiting factor was that they could not afford the ink imports necessary to continue printing money.
@baconbits9
Thanks, I think I see the disagreement now. No, I don’t think GDP is only “money moving”, but money moving is the visible sign that is measurable. Of course, Goodhart’s law may mean it isn’t anymore.
If the Fed did that the obvious answer would be inflation, because they would be creating money out of thin air. We know inflation is bad for the economy because it distorts pricing signals. It doesn’t inherently lower production, although that often results because of bad signals.
There are two states, production and consumption. Everything is in one or both of those states. Everything that is consumed had to be produced first.
Given the definitions you’re using, the consequences are Bill has a standard of living of X, Chris and David have a standard of living of .8X and their daughters (regardless of location) have .2X. In all cases, our local American bean producer has the same standard of living.
So immigrants are only able to compete with Americans at the same wages to the degree that they are willing to accept a lower standard of living, which is no surprise.
To the degree they are sending intermediate demand requests that need to be fulfilled, this does matter. If instead of buying X American beans, they send .2X home to buy Foreigner beans, our American bean producer ALSO now has a lower standard of living. He now only has demand for .8X beans, which means he only has .8X to spend on his standard of living. This chains downstream at the speed of money (I know you don’t like this, but you have to agree this all doesn’t happen instantly, right?).
Sure, if Americans were all monks who had learned to subsist on only oxygen while meditating then they could do exactly that. Or if they relied on imports, of course, there are many countries that ship out very close to 100% of their production (e.g. Saudi Arabia).
This doesn’t jibe with your expectation that money being sent out of the country makes the US economy worse. The quantity of money within US borders isn’t the determining factor of the economy, money only works to measure the economy if you adjust for its purchasing power. The quantity of money is of little value, but the value of money is of significant value for this exercise.
Only if you assume that the value of each unit of money is fixed, but you have already conceded that is not the case and your conclusions no longer flow from your premise.
If that’s the case you have to wonder why the US has relied on brain drain so much. That America was at its greatest scientifically and culturally just before and after world war II, when it was effectively massively syphoning European intelligentia, should raise doubts about the theory that no really, the US could do that all by themselves without immigration.
We had a near-full immigration ban during that era and were at the lowest percentage foreign-born in our entire history.
You are thinking of a few notable exceptions and expanding them too far.
The 1940s and 50s are the most powerful argument against the need for mass immigration, because they didn’t have it.
Perhaps not, but to be on the receiving end of a “brain drain” you don’t need mass immigration, you need brainy immigration. You can get that as a side effect of mass immigration, but you can also get it from very selective immigration. Including actively soliciting the immigration of people you’d be actively deporting if they weren’t grade-AAA braniacs. And we definitely did that.
I don’t think conservatives would object to an immigration policy of “immigration is banned except for brilliant rocket scientists who are also at immediate risk of being killed for their religion” or something like that.
Pretty sure red tribe would take that deal in a second.
@John Schilling
I’d argue for it to be a true “drain” then it does need to be mass. Nobody thinks that Germany was hamstrung by losing ~1.5k people, especially compared to the self-inflicted damage they had recently done.
One person here or there is fine with pretty much everyone. It’s when it scales to hundreds of thousands and millions and the cumulative amount that it starts to really impact both sender and receiver.
@Matt M
It’s somewhat amusing when people argue for the mass importation of field labor by citing specially chosen supergeniuses, yes.
It’s easier to eat someone else’s corn if they are giving it away than to grow your own from scratch. But it doesn’t mean you couldn’t grow your own.
As echo has said, that isn’t an accurate mental model of immigration at that time. And it isn’t really an accurate mental model of what we currently (largely) do. What our “high skill” immigration does is take the cream off of lower income nations and plugs them into the middle or upper middle class of the US, where they don’t overperform their peers. H1B largely serves 2 purposes: Wage depression of Engineers and Comp Sci (particularly replacing older workers in these areas) and skirting the AMA which has imposed such onerous restrictions on Doctor certification that we would have a doctor shortage otherwise (although once again older workers might come back, and women doctors might not drop out as often if wages were higher).
Except that demand for labor also increases, since the immigrants are buying stuff as well as working. The mix of labor in the society changes, with details depending on who is coming, so some workers end up worse off, some better off.
What do you expect the recipients to do with the dollars, eat them? What dollars are good for is buying American goods.
This is addressed in the second point.
No, because dollars are the world reserve currency. If purchasing American goods was the only use of them, then we wouldn’t have a trade deficit. Well, it would fluctuate back and forth as it did prior to the dollarization of the world.
A dollar can absolutely leave the American economy and never return, being used for exclusively world-wide use.
Since 2000, we’ve sent about 12 trillion dollars overseas, and we send about another 600 billion every year. None of that has come back in purchasing American goods, because we haven’t run a 6 trillion surplus any year.
There are advantages to this for Americans who consume, but it does hurt production.
I am aware we have a difference of opinion on whether free trade is good, but regardless of that, clearly dollars can leave and never come back.
That’s true. A dollar can also be used to invest in the U.S., by buying stock or government securities. But then whatever American would otherwise have owned those things has money to spend in the U.S.
That’s logically possible, but I don’t think it is a major part of the trade deficit. Do you have data to the contrary?
Suppose, however, that you are correct, that the reason we import more than we export is that foreigners want to hold dollars. Printing dollars costs almost nothing, so we are then getting foreign goods for free. That sounds like a good deal.
You seem to have some sort of a mercantilist view in which how well off a country is depends on how much money there is in it. That makes even less sense in a fiat money system than it did in a gold based system. If all it took to make Americans better off was more dollars, the government could simply print them.
@DavidFriedman
I’m not purely mercantilist, but I do think that freer trade has tended to be a negative for a lot of Americans to the point where I don’t consider myself a free trader.
I consider being the world’s reserve currency something like Saudi Arabia’s oil. A resource curse that has benefits and serious drawbacks.
In the degenerate case, you get something like Saudi Arabia, where the printers of money/oil control the political power by dispensing their aid or withholding it to control political discourse.
Why should this matter to me? My goal is to raise my kids and enjoy my life and community. The purpose of the US government is to enable that, not to source workers for business interests. Drop immigration to zero and my life doesn’t get any worse. Bring in enough people who don’t share my values and it might.
Your life is improved if your co-countrymen invent amazing things.
You don’t eat any farm products that would be more expensive to produce if there were no foreign workers helping to produce them? Don’t use any software developed in the U.S. by foreign-born tech workers? Don’t use, directly or indirectly, buildings built in part by immigrant construction workers?
Oh geez, there’s a lot to respond to here.
Why should I care whether other countries lose their best and brightest? America should do what’s best for America. America first! More seriously, if a country can’t provide good enough opportunities to its people that they want to stay, it’s that countries problem.
Furthermore, how are the best and brightest out of only 300 million possibly supposed to compete with the best and brightest out of 1.4 billion? There’s a reason high school sports divisions are usually by school size. Do you not think that the technologies and innovations coming from American universities and tech companies are essential for defending American values around the world? Would you rather the next big breakthroughs in machine learning come from Baidu or Tsinghua than Google or MIT? A technological edge is necessary for maintaining American dominance and all the benefits this provides its citizens.
Once you accept this its pretty easy to see how essential mass skilled immigration is to keep this edge–how many American scientists and entrepreneurs are foreign born, the revealed preferences of how important foreign workers are to tech companies, even the culture of technical excellence skilled immigrants give their children.
This isn’t a lack of solidarity with fellow Americans, this is asking a small minority to stop hamstringing the entire country to cover what are arguably their own personal failings.
The questions here are quantity and level. I don’t think anyone has a problem with an occasional Sergei Brin or Elon Musk moving to America.
How does it help Americans in our intellectual breakthrough for illiterates to come pick our fields? In fact, it holds us back because it prevents forcing mechanization through cost.
How does it help Americans in our intellectual breakthroughs for thousands of H1B workers to do mundane grunt work and depress American wages. I am fine with taking a small (non-damaging) number of intellectual elites. That’s not what we’re talking about. This is strip-mining the Indian upper class in order to get a couple of nuggets. It’s bad for India and bad for America.
So what you’re saying is the policy Trump just implemented is the exact opposite of the policy you’d like?
@Machine Interface
Yes, I started this by saying that he had announced a good policy and done a moderate one and that what I disagreed with was allowing temporary workers.
Although I will note that most green cards are not Sergei Brin. Family reunification, diversity lottery, etc. are good things to stop.
Would you like to generalize that argument? Do you think imposing high taxes on any labor intensive form of production in order to force mechanization through cost would make us better off?
If picking tomatoes with immigrant labor costs a dollar a pound and doing it with machinery costs two dollars a pound, how does forcing the latter make us better off?
@DavidFriedman
Yes, advantaging things that are beneficial long term but have short term disadvantages is a known place that governments can solve coordination problems. The traditional American way to do this is by restricting the labor supply relative to the capital supply, which happened naturally because we have a huge amount of capital per person. Most current immigration decreases that.
Because you’ve freed up an entire human worth of labor as well. That’s the advantage of automation.
And what is your reason to believe that substituting more capital for labor than would be substituted on the private market is beneficial long term but has short term advantages? Private firms routinely invest in things that cost money up front but are profitable in the long term. Most American lumber, for instance, comes from trees planted for the purpose.
You might also consider that if you do reduce the amount of labor you have raised the ratio of capital to labor, lowering the return to capital, hence decreasing capital accumulation, which is the precise opposite of what your argument implies you want. Even without that effect, shifting capital into automating tomato picking means shifting it out of some other use which the people who own the capital find to be more profitable.
On the more general point, is it your observation that governments are more willing to sacrifice present benefits for future benefits than private individuals? Does that fit, to take the most striking current example, the present situation with pension obligations to government employees, where politicians have to choose between paying more now and promising that their successors will pay more in the future?
@DavidFriedman
The Southern experience with slavery. As a proud Southerner, it was very clear how cheap labor distorted the marketplace and put us substantially behind the North in development.
Nothing would’ve helped the South more than banning the slave trade and preventing its use as cheap labor. We know that industrialization of the South was possible, because we’re now industrialized and doing great, but we were held back by the siren call of the cheap labor we had access to.
I see illegal/H2B labor as similar in moral peril to the United States.
@DavidFriedman
I can’t edit, but consider what happened to Israel when the Palestinian barrier wall went up. Prior to that, cheap Palestinian labor was commonly used by Israeli businesses. After the wall, Palestinian labor was substantially more expensive due to the cost of work permits and the difficulty of movement.
The result was a substantially increased Israeli salary, but also an increase in Israeli GDP. From negative growth in 2002 when the wall started to startling 5% growth by 2005.
Let’s specifically discuss mass skilled immigration since that’s the closest point of disagreement here. Unskilled immigration brings up a whole extra mess of controversial issues.
The total number of immigrant workers at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc, or that are graduate students, postdocs, or professors in STEM fields at research universities is probably on the order of 100’s of thousands. I don’t know exact number but I do not believe there is controversy that it is massive. These workers aren’t just a “few nuggets” in mass of grunt workers–they are all doing difficult technical work.
The leaders of the organizations above constantly say in political debates that immigrant workers are essential for their functioning. The salaries at top tech companies are absurd so it definitely feels credible to me when they say willingness to pay isn’t the reason they aren’t hiring purely native-born labor.
Furthermore, there are serious cultural agglomeration benefits of having a large population of people that really care about technical excellence and that teach their kids to care. There is a reason that like 1/4 of all USAMO qualifiers are from the SF Bay Area these days.
It seems to me important to distinguish, even within the “skilled” category. A senior software engineer who makes >$250K at Google is not likely taking a job an American would take, just slightly more cheaply. On the other hand, a database administrator making $75k working for Cognizant/Wipro probably is.
Sorry, I was trying to make that distinction. I think all the examples I listed were more like the Google engineer than the Cognizant/Wipro administrator?
Yeah, that parses to me.
True but not complete. There is a lot of maintenance technical work at the ~110 IQ level that is difficult but has plenty of interchangeable Americans able to do it. We’re only not talking irreplaceable people here.
The leaders of the antebellum South also said that slavery was essential for their functioning. Forgive me if I don’t find that compelling.
That’s exactly why it doesn’t feel credible to me. When you’re struggling to control insane salaries, increasing the labor pool is a critical weapon.
Because that’s where the biggest bang for your buck in terms of reducing salary comes from.
Given that these companies have so much spare time/money/resources to reshape the world and engage in the culture war, it’s clear that they are not actually human-capital resource-constrained. Moreover, as worldwide businesses well-connected to the Internet, there’s no requirement that their employment by the company result in them being physically present in the United States.
@EchoChaos
It think slavery was necessary for the way the Southern economy was set up. It was so morally abhorrent that it needed to be destroyed anyways. Conveniently (as you were arguing above?), there was also a much better way to set up the Southern economy. I’m not sure a comparison to slavery is justified unless you want to speak about these second two considerations, specifically as relates to mass skilled immigration.
As Garrett was saying, these workers might be exposed to foreign competition anyways, at least through US companies competing with foreign companies. Wouldn’t you rather the competition be loyal to and contributing to America? I don’t think a Google software engineer should be upset that their capable coworker is working with them instead of for Baidu.
Sorry, I think the USAMO was too insider and obscure of a reference. I was trying to argue that the kids and culture skilled immigrants bring to the US benefits us too. For another example, just look at how massively overrepresented kids of skilled immigrants are in any advanced college math or science class.
From where I sit, I think that most supporters of populist movements see themselves as unable to compete on a level playing field, with whatever groups they wish to invoke government power to exclude.
From that viewpoint, the whole point of banning immigration, outsourcing, etc., erecting tariff barriers, subsidizing domestic business, etc., is to give the locals a chance.
This is often phrased as “making competition fair”. The foreign competitors are often pictured as cheating in various ways. Sometimes it’s because they industrialized earlier, etc. (Such reasons are more popular in what’s now called the ‘global south’.) Sometimes they are “dumping”, unfairly subsidizing their own industry, etc.; China’s the current main target. Sometimes it’s because they don’t have proper safety standards or similar. Sometimes there’s a secret conspiracy among the monied. Sometimes it’s because we have families to support, and they are young, unmarried, or female.
But the basic deal is “we can’t compete; we need help,” in spite of the fig leaf.
Meanwhile, just about any economic right winger, and most centrists, can explain why those that are propped up and protected never get any more competitive, and cite various protectionist industry building attempts that failed (e.g. in Latin America) as evidence of why this never works. (Their opponents might cite successful examples in Asia, with stronger rule of law, and a lot less corruption, as a counter argument.)
I have to conclude that US populists don’t believe that the US is the “greatest nation in the world” or even, really, the super power they like to describe it as – any more than UK populists think they live in “the Empire where the sun never sets,” or even the UK of Winston Churchhill.
They need to be protected from all those scary Indians, Chinese, Britons, Mexicans, Canadians, Finns, etc. etc. Other Americans disagree – in fact, this might be “thrive” vs “survive” yet again. But the thrivers mostly aren’t joining populist movements, or supporting nativist rhetoric. Why should they? They “know” they can compete and win, and/or that there’s plenty available for all. The populists on the other hand, “know” that’s not true.
Note that, in the tariff case, viewing it in the way you describe required one to ignore the past two centuries of trade theory, which implies that the whole competition metaphor is misunderstanding the logic of the situation. American car makers are not competing with Japanese car makers. They are competing with American farmers and American software developers, who produce cars by sending stuff to Japan and getting cars back.
If everyone in Japan became twice as productive at everything, that would not affect comparative advantage, since the relevant ratios are the ratio in Japan of the cost of producing A to the cost of producing B and the ratio in the U.S. of those costs, which don’t change.
None of which implies that your analysis of beliefs is mistaken.
Good thing we can export large quantities of pork for hundreds of millions of quality N95 masks this week.
It’s hard to express in words the revulsion this comment gives me. I had to read it a couple times and I still can’t give a fitting reaction. This is possibly the worst take on the outgroup I’ve ever seen.
I will leave it at “Loving America doesn’t mean I must submit it to Moloch“
@DinoNerd
Now write a similarly uncharitable argument about social-democrats, who reject wages/incomes that are the result of a free market.
It’s extremely common for people to have belief in ‘fairness’ that is not the same as the outcome of a fully free market.
How much immigration and immigration processing was going on anyway? Considering international travel is largely shut down as are many field offices of the immigration services?
‘Vader’ is father in Dutch, so the ‘darth’ plot twist was ruined for the Dutch; anyway, more Dutch expressions:
‘Beter ten halve gekeerd dan ten hele gedwaald’ = Better to turn halfway than to be fully lost
When you are in a hole, stop digging.
‘Bij de neus hebben’ = having them by the nose
Fooling someone. Refers to leading an animal by the nosering.
‘Bij het scheiden van de markt leert men de kooplui’ = When the market ends, you learn about the salespeople.
You only learn someone’s true character when push comes to shove. This refers to salespeople dropping their act when they no longer need to make sales.
‘Bij hoog en laag zweren’ = Swearing by high and low
Being very insistent that you will do something. Refers to swearing by heaven and hell.
‘Aan de neus hangen’ = Hang on the nose
Telling something to someone, that they would be better off not knowing.
‘Bij zijn positieven zijn’ = Being with his positives
Being fully recovered or being able to think. Probably derives from French, where a ‘positif’ is evidence in court. So a person who had his ‘positifs,’ had the claims for his position ready.
‘Het bijltje er bij neerleggen’ = Laying your axe down near it
Stop working while the job is not yet done. Refers to putting down your axe near the partially chopped wood, indicating that you did some work, but more work is to be done.
‘Binnenvetter’ = innerfat-er
Someone who bottles up his feelings. The word was once used for lean animals that have a surprising amount of fat inside. It then became a word for people who appear less impressive than they are. Finally, it changed to the current meaning.
‘Kop-staartbotsing’ = Head-tail collision
Rear-end collision.
‘Ouwehoeren’ = Old-whores
Being a blabbermouth or blabbering. Interestingly, here we run into a peculiarity of Dutch where some plurals have the same ending as a verb. Dutch pluralization is done by ending the word with ‘en’ or with ‘s’ (sometimes both are valid). So here some words are pluralized (with the bits that cause the words to be plural in bold):
– ‘gepensioneerden‘ = pensioners
– ‘menu‘s‘ = menus
– ‘kinderen‘ = children
And here is a verb:
– ‘wachten‘ = waiting
The plural of ‘hoer’ (whore) is ‘hoeren,’ which is not a verb, unlike in English, where the literal translation ‘whoring’ is a verb. Yet in the fixed expression ‘ouwehoeren’ (old-whores), it is a verb. So in Dutch, you can old-whore, but you cannot whore.
Anyway, time to stop old-whoring myself…
English has this one. “Swearing high and low” is how it’s phrased here.
“Swearing up and down” is what I’ve always heard.
I find it amusing when the best translation of a Dutch expression is an English expression.
But wasn’t it the case that Darth Vader wasn’t even conceptualized as Luke’s father until rewriting of The Empire Strikes Back? Which took place well after Star Wars was completed.
That’s my understanding. I think “Darth Vader” is basically “Dark Invader” and the similarity to Dutch is a coincidence.
Side note: I looked up “vader” on Wiktionary. It says a Dutch V sounds like an English V, but when I listen to the clip it sounds like an English F. It sounds almost exactly like “father”.
There’s a third alternative, where Spielburg learned Dutch after the first film and a had a ‘Eureka!’ light bulb moment.
That has to do with dialect. Where I’m from (North-Holland/suburbs of Amsterdam) and Amsterdam itself it’s common to pronounce Z’s as S’s and V’s as F’s. Anecdotally, while my Dutch is considered very neutral-sounding, I do have that trait. It’s quite common in the west of the country.
Perfectly pronounced Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands (General Civilized Dutch, based on the western dialect of the city of Haarlem, felt to be condescending by many who don’t live there for obvious reasons) would have a recognizable V however.
Is it me, or is the commentariat here getting increasingly Dutch?
At least compared to the population of the Netherlands.
Well I hope at least one of the Dutch rationalists becomes Catholic, so they can fight vampires. /Bram Stoker
Meh, Van Helsing was just the technical advisor, and he was (fortunately) wrong about a critical bit of vampire-slaying technique. Team Harker did the heavy lifting on that one. With an assist from Quincey Morris, because when someone needs killing you want a Texan on hand to make sure the job is done right.
I mean, well, yes. You do.
That’s a myth.
@bullseye
The pronunciation difference is nearly entirely in the ‘a.’ The Dutch ‘vader’ has an ‘a’ pronounced like in aaargh.
In general, the English ‘a’ sounds like a Dutch ‘e’.
“ouwehoeren” and not “oudehoeren”?
‘Ouwe’ is Amsterdam dialect for ‘oude.’ It allows for a much more drawn out pronunciation, which is how they like to pronounce words in Amsterdam dialect.
‘Hé ouwe’ (= hi oldie) is how people in Amsterdam might greet each other, in particular their dad. For example, this is a Dutch song called ‘Hé ouwe,’ where the singer sings about his relationship with his father.
The genre of the song is ‘levenslied,’ literally life song, a sentimental form of popular music about daily life, relationships, etc.
Not just Amsterdam. E.g. Rotterdam and The Hague (well… that would be ‘ahwe’) also. As a matter of fact I don’t know if there’s any place in the Netherlands where ‘oude’ is commonly pronounced as it’s written.
Dear @VoiceOfTheVoid
In continuation to
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/#comment-875971
I’ve started writing a very long winded and detailed reply to you, but I found myself not quite being able to finish it. Maybe I can still share pieces or most of it once I feel it more complete.
However, I didn’t want to hold up our discussion much longer so I started writing this shorter message in which I find that there are likely 2 crucial parts on which if I focus my attention we can more likely achieve progress in our conversation.
1) Just like it’s a bit strange to talk about a probability of a probability; it can be done, it can make sense and it can be useful. We have done it even, I think you mentioned this concept a bit ago first. It’s a somewhat known and accepted idea, even if not widely used.
Similarly, it might be strange to talk about the 95% (or however much) confidence interval of a probability, but I still highly think it can be done, it can make sense and it can be useful. And this is maybe even somewhat close to the uncertain probability concept I am trying to talk about, however, when I take to the internet to search for materials about this idea, e.g. with “probability with confidence interval”, most of the results seem irrelevant. Do you have any ideas where if anywhere there might be materials related to this that I could read up on?
And to tie this back to the original topic regarding the X-risk table, would it make sense for you to consider that instead of singular probabilities for each event, we could have their probabilities with 95% confidence intervals?
2) If you insist on defining 50% for a prediction as “the evidence is equally strong either way”, how do you deal with a distinction where you need to make 2 sets of 100 binary predictions in the following way?
In the first set you are indeed unsure about any event happening, they are all independent from each other, but you are sure all events have equal chances of occurring vs not, and so about 50 will happen while 50 won’t. Therefore it’s very unlikely that we’ll see far deviation from this. E.g. with a truly fair coin, you’d be very surprised if all 100 came back tails, and you would find this very hard to believe.
While in the second set you have even less information and knowledge, you cannot say that about 50 will happen and about 50 won’t; it is very well possible that all 100 will happen or all 100 won’t; none of those outcomes would be surprising.
Using an uncertain probability we can easily distinguish between these 2 sets:
{50%, 50%} vs {0%, 100%}
(perhaps can be written also as 50%±0 vs 50%±50 or
50% with 100% certainty vs 50% with 0% certainty)
How do you propose making a distinction here with a single probability number?
Before I get to your points, I want to make sure we’re on about the same page re: statistics knowledge–not trying to one-up you or anything, just want to make sure I’m using terms we’re both familiar with. Personally, I took a poorly-taught AP stats course in high school, and am currently taking a probability/stats course focused on biomed applications. Is the phrase “integral over the probability density function” meaningful to you?
It’s somewhat meaningful. This video has a not too bad description, if this is what you are referring to.
Ah, that’s a great channel! I was actually midway through the first video in that series, it seems; I’ll watch through the rest of it and then
start on my reply to your actual pointsdo my real homework and then reply to you. 🙂Alright, looking forward to it! 🙂
Making progress with that homework? 🙂 I’m still curious to hear your response.
@Aotho
Ah, my apologies, I halfway forgot about our discussion in the midst of pre-finals YOU HAVE AN ASSIGNMENT DUE EVERY DAY FOR THE NEXT WEEK wonderland. Expect a reply from me….Thursday or so!
Ah, okay!
Some (more) cool space facts.
Titan has lakes of methane and methane rainstorms. Radar imagery of Titan from Cassini shows vast lakes that are most likely methane and ethane. These are the first known surface bodies of liquid in the solar system outside of earth.
Imagery taken by Huygens as it descended through Titan’s atmosphere reveals (dry) channels cut by recent rainfall. When Huygens landed on Titan’s surface, it detected that the ground was damp with methane.
What would a methane rainstorm be like on Titan? Titan has a very thick atmosphere but low surface gravity, allowing its atmosphere to hold much more moisture than Earth’s. However, methane evaporation from Titan’s lakes is much slower than the evaporation of water into Earth’s atmosphere. As a result, it can take 100-1000 years for enough methane to built up to create rain. When it does rain, however, so much methane has built up that Titan’s surface floods. The methane raindrops are expected to be several times larger than Earth’s raindrops, and to fall slowly in Titan’s thicker atmosphere and lower gravity. If you were standing on Titan at the start of a once-a-century rainstorm, you would see the sky fill with slow falling, grape-sized raindrops.
The greenhouse effect as an artifact of blackbody spectra. Objects at different temperatures emit radiation at different characteristic frequencies (termed the temperature’s blackbody spectrum). The sun’s surface, at ~5000 C, radiates (primarily) visible light. The Earth’s surface, at ~20 C, radiates (primarily) infrared light. The Earth’s atmosphere is transparent to visible light but opaque to infrared light. Thus while sunlight can pass through the atmosphere easily and be absorbed by the Earth, the IR energy radiated from the Earth has a much harder time escaping.
Source: Universe (10th Edition). Roger A Freedman, Robert M Geller, and William J Kaufmann III.
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vid_Flumina
ice = rock goes further! There are eruptions of liquid water, making water analogue of molten rock.
So on Titan ice is a rock and water is a molten rock!
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryovolcano
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakes_of_Titan for images and more info and how lakes, islands etc were named
I am confused by 1 in century rain and flowing rivers existing together. Maybe one of this rains was recently? Or rains are happening more often?
IIRC, Titan has a thick enough atmosphere and low enough gravity that, with just a little bit of lift, you could fly using a wingsuit.
As a source for that statement, see “https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/” Interplanetary Cessna in xkcd what if.
Can you answer a planetary mechanics question? When a moon or planet becomes tidal locked with its parent what does it do with the spin rotational kinetic energy it lost? (It’s also possible that it had to gain rotational kinetic energy to become tidally locked. In that case, where does the energy come from?)
My first thought is that it is lost to heat through tidal forces on the planets, but it’s also possible that it trades the rotational kinetic energy with its orbital energy. Does one effect dominate?
It must lose energy as heat, or else why would it be tidally evolving? But it must not lose angular momentum, or else we’d have to know where it was going.
The equations balance out such that, to take the Earth as an example, it is giving off heat as a result of tidal forces from the moon, heat that is lost to the system, but angular momentum is not lost: what the Earth loses in spin, the Moon gains in distance from Earth, so conservation of momentum is satisfied while energy is not conserved, but radiates away and is gone.
So it’s not energy it’s trading, or not much, but angular momentum.
The use of “artifact” is very odd. It’s like saying my not flying off into space is an “artifact” of gravity, rather than what gravity normally does. Similarly, yes, the greenhouse effect is the simple consequence of blackbody radiation — the earth radiates mostly in the infrared, like all ~300K objects, and gases like CO2 absorb infrared.
I’ve been meaning to post this but keep forgetting. Just a neat charity related app that some folks here might like. I stumbled across it a month ago when I was looking for an app to track my runs.
https://charitymiles.org/
Turn the app on when you go for a run/walk/bike ride and they donate $0.25 per mile to a charity of your choice (they have a ton of options, I won’t list them all here). I think the per mile amount is less for bikes but I can’t remember for sure. Since a lot of people are getting into fitness during the lockdowns, figured it might be a good time to earn a little charity money while we are at it.
I will warn, though, that it isn’t very good as an actual workout tracker (it isn’t as accurate as it should be for that) but you can still run it alongside whatever workout tracker you normally use to rack up miles for your charity (that is what I do).
Apologies for being a bit of a buzzkill, but I do want to point out that while pledge drives like that can be good for raising awareness, the most efficient way to help a charity is usually to donate money directly. But if (like me) you’re in the “pre-significant-money-making” phase of your life, by all means go ahead and run for them! (Even if the $X/mile figures are probably misleading.)
If we assume you’re already going for walks or runs anyway, this is a 0 cost way to put a few extra bucks per week in the pockets of whichever charity you choose (I’m doing a ton of walking/running right now and have picked up a little over $75 in the past month doing something I was doing anyway). I’m not saying this is the most efficient way to get money to a charity you like, just that it is a free way to do it in addition to any money that you happen to give directly. If you’re already active it doesn’t even require any changes in behavior or habits other than starting the app to track your walk/run before you head out.
Why do you think the $X/mile figure is misleading?
Fair point!
I think the $X/mile might be misleading since it looks like at least some of the funding sources for Charity Miles aren’t donating based on miles run. So some portion of your “dollars earned” are just redistributed from an existing pot of fixed size. But it looks like at least some of the donations are per-mile, so more miles ==> more total money to some degree, albeit in a somewhat roundabout way.
Ah, yeah I see what you’re saying. In some ways you are more just influencing where the funds get allocated moreso than raising funds, which still has some value. There’s also a potential feedback loop where more users results in larger future donations, but that isn’t a given and would be hard to nail down.
Maybe I’m more pessimistic than is called for, but your location history can be used to identify you.
https://charitymiles.org/privacy-policy/ Their privacy policy says they won’t sell PII. “We may share non-personally identifiable information, such as Demographic Information, Usage Information and aggregated user statistics, with third parties.”
Here is “Usage Information”: “This Usage Information may include the type of phone that you are using, the areas within the Application that you visit, the time of day you use the Application, the number of miles you complete using the Application, the charities for which you participate using the Application, and the types of activities you record using the Application.”
I’m not an expert in this, but it sounds like they think your location data isn’t PII since they don’t associate it with your identity and so they can sell it. Even though it essentially is PII.
If you need to be scared about what “anonymous” location data can be used for: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html
So in short, they probably plan to sell personal information and donate some part of profits to a charity (possibly in addition to other fundraising).
Depends on what this means (it isn’t clear to me, but maybe it should be). I’m assuming that is the bit that you are taking as sharing location information.
Now that you’ve brought it up I can see how it could be interpreted that way, but my first reading of it I parsed it as meaning “which parts of the app you are navigating to” not “what your location is when you use the app”. Or did I miss something and it mentions location data specifically somewhere else?
In any case, most people who aren’t super careful about that kind of thing likely have multiple apps already sharing their location data with 3rd parties.
Given that NYT story, yeah, lots of people don’t know what they’re already giving away.
This isn’t a horse that is permanently out of the barn, though. We can fix it going forward.
Agreed, but it still looks to me (at least per their policy) that this app doesn’t share location data.
Has anyone seen any insightful commentary about manufacturing technology issues related to current shortages? For example, what kind of machines are used to manufacture surgical masks etc? Are they generic machines configured for this particular task, or are they more specialised? Who makes the machines? Are there shortages of raw materials, or is it all about the machinery? Is the whole process automated, or is there a significant amount of human labour? One could ask a similar set of questions about PCR testing kits, or about ventilators. I’d be interested in more general surveys about manufacturing technology as well.
The manufacturing sector for something like masks will be incredibly specialised and inflexible, in order to leverage economies of scale to minimise costs.
The EU has decided that instead of creating a new fund to help the European countries with EU funds, which would require an agreement between all nations, they would remove all restrictions on the European Development Fund, releasing the reserves.
However, there are official ratios, of what percentage of this funding has to be spend in what country. Furthermore, how much money is left in the reserves for each country depends how competent and non-corrupt they have been in the past (or competent at hiding the corruption), resulting in the EU approving their spending plans. Basically, the less competent and more corrupt a country, the more of their reserved funds remain unspent.
Essentially, the more corrupt and incompetent a country is, the more money is being released & the more likely it thus is that the money will be spent incompetently and in a corrupt way. After all, this money remained unspent because the plans to spend it were turned down for being incompetent or corrupt, so what is stopping these countries from spending all this money on those bad plans, now that approval is no longer required?
Heavily hit and large countries like Italy and Spain, get less money than Poland and Hungary. Poland gets 7.4 billion euro, Hungary 5.6, while Spain gets 4.1 billion and Italy only 2.3. My own, fairly heavily hit country of The Netherlands, gets an insulting 25 million. However, we are already used to ‘EU solidarity’ only ever going one way.
Relative to its GDP, Hungary gets 7 times as much as Italy, while having 100 times fewer reported COVID deaths.
Is it proposal or is it actually released money?
Anyway, it is irritating to get yet another reminder that government of my country is not able to even spend money (it apparently failed even at defrauding/wasting it).
It was passed on March 30th, but reported on much later, because apparently, almost everyone stopped caring about what the EU does.
To be fair to your country, I think that there is only so much money that you can effectively spend in a top-down way, especially when a major goal is to develop ‘loser’ regions, where young people are leaving because of EU open borders. This conflict between globalist ‘winner take all’ policies and a desire to care for the losers of these policies is never acknowledged by the EU, resulting in the EU uncompromisingly chasing policy goals that severely harm certain regions in a way that can’t be made up for, yet still trying (and being very confused when their destructive policies work better than their constructive ones and the locals then vote for anti-globalist parties).
Very interesting reading for those who haven’t seen it:
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2020/04/21/japan-coronavirus/
(TL;DR: Patrick McKenzie, a rationalist-adjacent tech worker and commentator living in Japan, concluded on 3/21 that widespread community transmission of COVID-19 was occurring and undetected there. He quickly organized a “Working Group” of four non-expert professionals to collect, evaluate, write up, and distribute evidence of this. They anonymously published their final report on 3/25. The following month validated its conclusions.)
The post steps very carefully. It scrupulously avoids personal criticism, commenting on political matters, mentioning the Summer Games by name, revealing the identity of anyone else involved, or making claims about the impact of the Working Group’s report. The stated reasons for the Working Group’s discretion are 1) they don’t want controversy and confusion over their claims to distract from Japan’s official pandemic response, and 2) they’re wary of being personally associated with contentious political decisions in Japan. Fair enough.
Reading between the lines, though, I concluded that—
1. The Working Group sent their report to the New York Times before it published its influential, correctly alarmist 3/26 article
2. The New York Times told them that their work contributed to its reporting, but that it preferred not to rely on an anonymous non-expert source for the article
3. The Working Group also sent their report to major institutions in Japan that had direct responsibilities w.r.t. its pandemic response
4. Patrick believes that, via 1) and/or 3), the Working Group’s report played a substantial role in pushing the Japanese government to increasingly decisive action starting on 4/6
5. (Somewhat more speculative) As a result of 4), Patrick expects that the Working Group’s efforts accelerated an effective pandemic response in Japan by a large amount— i.e. days
Am I right to take the subtext as making these claims? If so, are the claims credible?
It seems he was clearly right about uncontrolled spread, but I’m not clear his projected impact was right: where are the bodies?
God only knows how many Japanese residents have been infected; the lack of testing and knowledge is execrable. But as of today, they have 281 deaths. If even 50bp are dying–and elsewhere it’s been consistently higher, *before* the breakdown of medical care, in populations less elderly than the Japanese–that says, adjusted for time lag, we have at most ~50K Japanese cases.
Maybe in the next two weeks a huge wave of people will die, or a huge wave of deaths that have already happened will be noticed and reported. (It says something there’s a word for dying secretly at home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi). But if there isn’t, Patrick, who I like and respect a great deal for the record, was wrong on some particular.
Cases are hard to measure, testing numbers aren’t reliable, but bodies don’t go away and can’t be missed for long.
The post speculates that most serious cases are assumed to be pneumonia and not tested, and that the numbers therefore won’t be obvious until total mortality figures are reported (which apparently isn’t the case yet even for March). Ctrl-F for “open questions”.
I read it on the initial drop, thanks; while that’s a possible contributor, I think that if things were as bad as they thought on that day and nothing meaningful changed, we’d still have bodies.
Reading between the lines, I get (1) that they sent their report to the NYT, but (not 2) there isn’t enough in the article to tell if the NYT listened or responded to them. I think sending the report to major institutions (3) is a safe bet without even needing to read between the lines, that’s just the obvious thing to do with such a report. Patrick seems interested in implying the report played a significant role (~4), which is nearly impossible to separate from sincerely believing it. “Played a substantial role” naturally implies accelerating an effective pandemic response (~5), what would it even mean for the role to be substantial if it didn’t do so?
As for whether the claims are credible, that seems unknowable without, at minimum, looking at the email responses Patrick received to his attempts to distribute the report. The claims are not implausible, but I don’t think the information is public enough for their credibility to be verified.
The popular narrative (accepted here) that Japan was doing fine until recently and then suddenly things got out of control is incorrect. Ever since February, Japan has had a growth in cases that varied between 6-12% per day. That hasn’t changed in the last month (until the last few days when it declined to 3% due to the lockdown).
The ever-enterprising Santa Clara County health authorities, continuing to show a flair for well-motivated science unmatched in most of the rest of the Western world (is my bitterness about this rarity showing yet?), have found that at least one death in the county on *February 6th* was a community-spread COVID positive case. The obvious caveat is that, as many others have observed, “died from COVID” and “died with COVID” are not the same. But at the very least this demonstrates that community spread was happening in California as far back as mid January or so, given typical lag between infection and death.
If this holds up, we should probably revise some priors. The obvious ones that occur to me, though these both accord with my confirmation bias, are:
1. this makes it more plausible that the conclusions from the recent California seroprevalence studies are correct, and really do reflect broad population-wide spread and not just false positives and selection bias
2. this should revise downward any estimates of the effectiveness of travel restrictions (the ones that were actually imposed, not the ones that 20/20 hindsight would have imposed).
What else?
We need to get some idea why two months of community spread before lockdown in California and Washington didn’t lead to anything like the kind of meltdown that happened in NYC or Northern Italy. Some possibilities:
a. Differences in the environment (crowding, public transit, density, culture, etc.) making the spread slower or the disease less nasty on the West Coast than on the East Coast.
b. Most of the spread is driven by rare super-spreader events, and those are either easier in the NYC area thanks to density, or they just got extra-unlucky relative to other regions. (But we know of at least one superspreader event in Washington, and a bunch of people got very sick from it.).
c. Different strains of the virus, with the Washington and California strains being much less dangerous or maybe much slower to spread than the strains in Northern Italy and the NYC area. (You could imagine having a strain on the West Coast that’s mostly just a slightly worse version of the flu, and one on the East Coast that’s much deadlier.).
What else?
Possibly weather, although CA has been rainy and chilly until this month.
There’s some evidence from Germany that density is probably not the driver:
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/04/09/coronavirus-and-cities/
Strains are a possibility, but you’d think/hope that someone would have done a lab study pointing to that by now. My money is on some combination of fewer super-spreader events, less cohabitation of elderly people and young extroverts, and a greater Asian cultural and informational connection on the West Coast leading to better and earlier voluntary precaution-taking.
Strains are a possibility, but you’d think/hope that someone would have done a lab study pointing to that by now
I don’t think you can look at strains under a microscope, or at their genomes, and figure out which is more communicable. I think you have to just observe how they work in the real world.
But IANAEpidemiologist.
That doesn’t seem right to me, because we differentiate between strains of the flu (in advance, even).
But IAANAEpidemiologist.
The way I understand it:
a. For flu, the main way we distinguish strains is by antibody response to them, which is mostly driven by the HA and NA proteins that stick out of the viral envelope[1]. Every now and then, the same person or bird or pig is infected with two different strains, and you can get a big change in the strain of influenza–that happened with the H1N1 flu a few years ago.
b. I think it’s much, much harder to figure out why some flu strains are more virulent than others. My amateur understanding is that untangling that is the sort of thing that you spend several months on and get a nice paper out of.
c. There has been some claim that the different strains of COVID-19 might be very different in terms of viral load in patients, but I don’t know how seriously to take it. (The paper was based on a pretty small number of patients.). I’ve also heard the claim on TWIV that COVID-19 doesn’t seem to vary all that much from place to place, and that the small number of nucleotide changes seems unlikely to be driving huge changes in how infections work out. But who knows?
[1] Influenza, like coronaviruses, is enveloped–it has its genetic material in the form of RNA packaged with some enzymes it needs to replicate, then a protein shell around them, and finally a bilipid layer that’s basically like a cell membrane. Some proteins stick out of the membrane, and those are the things that bind to the right receptors to get them into susceptible cells.
@albatross11:
> There has been some claim that the different strains of COVID-19 might be very different in terms of viral load in patients, but I don’t know how seriously to take it.
Are you referring to the paper that Edward Scizorhands (indirectly) linked to in the previous open thread? If not, you might want to check it out:
Summary: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3080771/coronavirus-mutations-affect-deadliness-strains-chinese-study
Study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20060160v1
I haven’t seen it getting much attention, but at least superficially it seems like solid evidence of different strains with very different effects. Or if you are referring to it, I’d be interested to know more why you think it’s not persuasive.
It suggests that different strains might be driving differences in infectivity, but:
a. It’s based on virus samples taken from only 11 people early in the outbreak.
b. The results they have are in cell culture, so it’s not clear how much that will have to do with the course of disease in humans. (Though they did note that the fastest-replicating strain was in one of their eleven patients who took more than 40 days to test negative for the virus.)
I’d really like to see someone do a similar study with viral isolates from different parts of the US or different countries now.
One possibility is that some regions just got nastier strains than others. I’ve read the claim that the initial cases in NYC came from the strain that hit Iran and Italy, and that’s consistent with the idea that the West Coast got the laid-back, mellow surfer-dude strain of the virus, whereas the East Coast got the overcaffeinated type-A hard-driving strain of the virus.
On January 11 there were only 41 detected cases in China, and only about 100 infected people who would later be detected. Hendrik Streeck’s study suggested that the number of real cases is 10 times the number of detected cases (some have criticized this number for being too high); if true there would would be 1500 real infected people at the time. Given the number of people in Wuhan, it is unlikely that one of these 1500 people then flew to the US and infected someone else in time to die on February 6. Particularly as most infected people don’t die. Therefore I assume this is a false positive.
Quite possible. But:
— If the seroprevalence studies are right about real cases being 40-50x the number of detected cases in California, a similar ratio might have applied to Wuhan.
— If any of these folks flew to the US in the relevant time frame, the West Coast is the most likely place for them to have flown to.
I agree with eric23. Absent finding additional very early cases of community spread in the U.S. (not just retesting the same sample which may be contaminated), I think it’s most likely a false positive.
You just covered why it doesn’t demonstrate that. At the very least this demonstrates that community spread was happening in California as far back as February 6th, when this person dropped dead of what could have been unrelated causes. For all I can tell from coverage, they could’ve been hit by a bus. I assume the authorities know, but haven’t been able to find the information published anywhere.
Yes, you’re right, sorry, they might conceivably have been infected right before they died and not have even been hospitalized before then. My guess is, though, that they wouldn’t have been suspicious enough to test this person posthumously unless they at least had some symptoms at some point in the runup to their death.
Saw something online a couple of weeks ago, and went back to read it today.
Clayton Cramer (a historian, who has written a book that our host reviewed) has been looking through old American newspapers as part of an overview of the history of mass-murder in the U.S.
More than once, he’s found a newspaper article about a lynching of a Black person, by a crowd of Black people.
His blog-post a few weeks ago was titled “The Way Lynching in the South is Usually Portrayed Needs Revision“.
Sometime last month, he posted another one. Sometime last year, he had an instance of a bi-racial lynch mob. He also found a news story about a person accused of mass murder, and the local Sheriff-plus-local-militia had to go to great effort to prevent a lynch mob from hanging the suspect.
Lynching, the practice of a mob forming to hang a person suspected of a foul crime, is usually portrayed as cases like the Emmet Till case. (A black boy was accused of offending a white woman in a grocery store. Not suspected of any form assault, and not imprisoned for any crime, but was hung by an angry mob.) These cases look more like mob justice trying to break a suspect out of prison and hang the suspect before the Sheriff and Judge can hold a trial to decide whether to imprison or execute the suspect. Further, these cases show that not all lynch mobs were white.
I’m curious what a careful study of lynch-mobs would show. Was the Emmett Till case an exception, or was it typical? Did the pattern change between the late 1800s and the mid-1900s?
My understanding is that lynching arose because the South didn’t trust its government in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War for rather obvious reasons. The South, especially the more rural regions, had always been more willing to dispense violent personal justice than the North for cultural reasons. Having military government just made it worse.
It was purely “mob justice” and tying it to race is probably due to something related to modern “Color of Crime” reasons more than any specific racism.
I do know that more whites were lynched than blacks and that lynch mobs were also generally formed from the community that felt wronged.
This doesn’t make them just, of course. And poor blacks were probably slightly more likely than poor whites to be unjustly accused, but the main goal was, as I understand it, justice and not racism.
Do you have sources for the ratio of white vs black victims of lynching? Wikipedia cites several sources that claim about three times the number of blacks were lynched, compared to whites. E.g.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100629081241/http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html
Yeah, it looks like I had misremembered the pre-war years with the post.
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/opinion/2017/09/25/many-whites-were-lynched-fighting-racism-opinion/700690001/
Before the war, whites were the majority of those lynched. Afterwards, blacks.
My understand was actually that lynching *predates* the civil war, going all the way back to borderers practices, at which point it was effectively racially neutral. After the civil war, it became racialized and primarily aimed at black people, as part of the enforcement of the social shaming of blacks in the context of segregation.
I linked an article about it above, but yes, it increased post-war due to the South not trusting its government.
As I said, it arises from the rural regions of the South dispatching violent personal justice culturally and the additional belief that the government wouldn’t give it to them post-war.
That time line doesn’t make any sense. Lynchings of black people peaked between 1880 and 1940, after the end of military government.
Rose and peaked are different words, and I used the latter fairly intentionally.
Lynching was a mob justice thing prior to the war in Southern culture, but it dramatically increased because of the military government.
And there were still only a few thousand in the entire 80 year period cited in the article I gave above. This isn’t an everyday thing at all.
But it definitely swapped from a tool of mob justice to a tool of mob justice PLUS repression.
Similar to what EchoChaos says above: from my reading of “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” by Thomas Sowell, I was given to understand that lynching was originally a method of mob justice that Borderer-descended whites practiced on themselves, and that only later did “white mob does it to a black person” become the common prototype.
Given that Emmet Till is mentioned very frequently and I have literally never heard the name or location of a lynching that was not for someone where there was at least probable cause(usually seem like beyond a resonable doubt) of a serious crime, I suspect the latter where probably far more common. Some of us hearing weekly-monthly about Emmet Till and never about other specific cases is likely due to a combination of sloth, recentness, and his case being the best documented of the first type as well as there just not being that many of the first type. But I would also be interested in a random sampling of lynching to get a sense of how frequently they were racialized, what the implicit standard of evidence was, and how frequent ones like Emmet Till were. The problem is that this involves a huge bunch of judgment calls and I do not trust anyone who would do this.
This reminds me of a family story a friend of mine from Oklahoma old me. Apparently one of his ancestors lived in Mississipi sometime after the Civil War. He owned a country store, selling various goods and supplies as such stores do, and being of an entrepreneurial spirit decided that he could profit off all the freedmen in the area. So he put a sign in front of his establishment: “No Chinamen. No Negroes before Noon.” Apparently the custom at the time was for upper class folks to do their shopping in the morning, while lower class folks would do it in the afternoon. So by conspicuously banning blacks before noon, he ensured that the people with real money would still patronize his store. It was also a custom at the time for country stores to charge higher prices to blacks, but my friend’s ancestor did not do this. He figured that by charging the same he charged white folks, he would undercut the competition.
It worked, and soon the store became very popular with the local black populace. Eventually though, the working class whites realised that the afternoon prices were the same as he morning prices at the store, and started shopping there too. So now there were substantial numbers of poor blacks and poor whites shopping together in he same place. This caused problems, because if there’s one thing upper class southerners hate more than black people, it’s black people mingling with the white working class. So one day the local notables got together to burn down the country store and run the owner out of town. Which is how my friend’s family wound up in Oklahoma.
FWIW, I grew up in a Deep South town, and when I asked my older relatives about it, they could not remember any lynchings actually happening, but things got pretty close to it once, in the case of a (white) Catholic priest caught behaving inappropriately with a young boy. Priest left town in a very big hurry.
I do not know if their recollections are accurate.
A piece from Harvard Magazine has been making the rounds: “What rights do children have in homeschooling?”
As best as I can tell, it is purely a puff piece for Harvard Law School’s Elizabeth Bartholet. Despite presumably being written by a journalist, she is the only person quoted, and no opposing views or arguments are discussed. Bartholet only makes passing reference to a mythical group of parental absolutists who control an “overwhelmingly powerful” lobby known as the Home Schooling Legal Defense Association. (It’s actually known as the Home School Legal Defense Association, but maybe they don’t teach proofreading at Harvard.)
And Harvard is now organizing a “Homeschooling Summit” whose “focus will be on problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling, in a legal environment of minimal or no oversight.” Bartholet is speaking, and her paper is required reading. I’m sure the article was timed to coincide with the announcement of the conference, where the same healthy exchange of views will no doubt occur.
More constructively—Bartholet’s remarks themselves are begging for a rebuttal. I’ll just point out two things to start: first, she assumes that compulsory public schooling is necessary to reduce abuse, but does nothing to prove abuse would be so reduced, and from what I know of the evidence, it wouldn’t be. Second, she assumes compulsory public schooling is necessary to improve education, but does nothing to prove either that education would be so improved, or that this improvement is actually necessary; in other words, homeschooling can be good enough even if it’s inferior.
Haven’t read the article, but Harvard Magazine is a promotional organ, so it’s not surprising that Bartholet would be the only expert quoted. Those sorts of pieces are written by communications professionals, not actual journalists.
I see this as a pre-emptive strike against a potential wave of homeschooling resulting from a bunch of people being forced to try it because of the schools being shutdown, and realizing maybe it’s not as weird/crazy/bad/ineffective as they had previously been led to believe.
Also the public schools won’t be re-opening come September. Even Texas is basically saying they’ll be shutdown until a vaccine exists.
I think this is perceptive of you. This article, or at least the promoting of it, is the frontlash against an anticipated sentiment of “My kid learned about as well at home, what exactly are schools offering?”
You can tell because, based on the summit name, they are ignoring benefits and ignoring the base rate.
But, here’s a PSA that what’s happening now is not really homeschooling. Compare a working from home/coping with unemployment parent supervising a kid stuck to a public school curricula taught via hastily assembled web assignments in near isolation and likely anxiety with a parent who has the freedom to meet with groups, attend periodic classes, move through lessons at the child’s pace and provide in person instruction.
That’s not saying it is always perfect or better for everyone, just that this isn’t necessarily the best natural experiment.
edit: related
What’s going on right now is more like remote education, and hastily-assembled remote education at that. I have no trouble believing that most kids would be getting better education in classrooms with their teachers than what they are getting now.
So here’s my prediction: By a couple years after the lockdown, when we look at test scores for kids who went through this period of lockdown, we will not see any significant loss in knowledge, at least as measured by standardized tests. We’ll probably see effects the year after it ends, but not much after that.
albatross11: Can you please specify the age group of kids for this prediction?
I agree with albatross’ prediction, for kids in all age groups.
Okay, let’s make it more concrete. Find kids who are still in the 6th grade by the time the lockdowns end. Test them at the end of the 8th grade, assuming no more lockdowns, and my guess is that they won’t look much different from any other 8th graders. I suspect the same is true at every age–if you find people who did their freshman[1] year of high school during the lockdown, and then track how they do on the ACT or SAT in their junior year, I think there will be very little effect. If you look at people in 3rd grade during the lockdown and test them at the end of 5th grade, the same.
The group who may show some effects are people in their last couple years of high school this year, because the nonstandard educational arrangements and difficulty of taking big exams is going to mess with the way college admissions are handled.
[1] Key for non-Americans: High school is attended roughly from ages 14-18, your first year you’re a freshman, your third year you’re a junior. The SAT and ACT are tests taken to get into college.
From what I’ve heard, in most cases, the online offerings from public schools are not providing anything even close to a full day’s work/education/supervision/whatever for kids that are stuck at home.
Parents have several hours of gap they need to fill themselves. Now the lazier ones are probably just plopping the kids in front of the TV to watch cartoons or in front of an ipad to watch Youtube or whatever.
But some are definitely dabbling in trying to find educational activities themselves for their kids to complete. Which is basically homeschooling. And I believe many will find that their own hastily assembled, non-professional, half-assed efforts will do just as well as whatever the kid is officially getting from their schools.
And this is what the public school edifice is terrified of. That the average parent will find out that if they spend 30 minutes googling “teach my kid math” and attempt to do it for an hour, they’ll be no worse (and might even be better) than the public school was.
The actual learning in a school day is pretty small. A lot of it is just stopping the kids from breaking out in a riot, which can happen at a moment’s notice.
I’m less pessimistic about the re-opening in September, at least for primary schools, for two reasons:
(1) the parental outcry will be much greater if they don’t reopen in the fall and kids’ new-grade experience is screwed up (vs the end of their current grade, much less bad because they already know the teachers and kids they Zoom with)
(2) Sweden has kept its primary schools open through all this, and Denmark is starting to reopen theirs, and some other EU countries are likely to follow suit in the next month; and the longer that fails to result in a disaster, the stronger the case will become that maybe that was all right all along.
Oh my God, that’s so incredibly mean-spirited.
“Schools will be closed this coming school year. It’s urgent that we move against homeschooling!”
I definitely fear Harvard and the ruling class more after this. Not only are we not allowed to go to church or re-open the economy, but any silver lining to total shutdowns for social distancing must be cruelly taken away from us by the elites at Harvard and its like.
Jesus Christ, what do they intend to do to kids who were kicked out of school in spring 2020? Say they missed two years of primary or secondary education and have to finish high school at age 20 instead of 18? What’s their endgame?
Probably throw a GED at them and move them out when they would have graduated.
Schools don’t have the physical infrastructure to house, say, 25% more students in a high school due to 1 extra year cohort, let alone 50% from two.
Although that might be an angle to angle for state educational bailouts from.
From what I’ve seen on Twitter, the plan is “everyone gets As, graduates, moves on, etc.”
Anything else is considered to be “punishment” for students who “did nothing wrong.”
ooh ooh… maybe this will finally lead to scaling back our too long summer vacations to make up the time?
I dunno, if the public school system is as ambiguously useful as the consensus here seems to be, do we really want kids to have more exposure to it than they do now? The sane thing to do would be to keep the current number of vacation days but spread them out evenly through the year, but I’m very skeptical that this would be done sanely.
There is lots of evidence and studies that our summer vacation is too long, but I don’t have anything to add to that here.
@Statismagician, there is such a thing as year-round schools which give several shorter breaks instead of one long summer. AFAIK, results are mixed. Also, not all year-round schools have the same breaks, which complicates such things as summer camps and family vacations.
Yeah, breaking up the multi-month summer vacation is obviously a good idea and I know it’s widely done in the rest of the world. What I’m concerned about is the National Emergency Pandemic School Schedule getting baked into Federal law, so that now kids are in school from August through to July with just a few days off for Christmas and Easter. I think we should be really, really careful about trying to use this to get our unrelated policy aims achieved, because doing things quickly generally means not doing them right.
EDIT: or into Federal regulations controlling disbursement of highway repair funding, or whatever.
When I was an English schoolboy, sixty some years ago, the summer vacation was much shorter than in the U.S., I think six weeks or so, and the Christmas vacation substantially longer. I don’t remember whether there were any other long vacations.
You went to school in England?
Well the normal holidays here are 6 weeks in the summer, 2 around Christmas, 2 around Easter and a week’s ‘half term holidays’ in November, February and May.
38 weeks of term in total, IIRC.
Private schools are at liberty to do their own thing, often having longer days of school and longer holidays, to make time for their affluent families to go skiing etc.
Opening K-12 schools falls under “Phase 2” of the White House’s plan to re-open the economy. If we’re not even at Phase 2 by September….
Public school closures seem to be among the things least likely to be controlled by the federal government.
If I had to bet, I would say public schools in both New York and California will absolutely not be open again in 2020.
Trump can tell them to open their schools, but he can’t force them.
Very different over here in Europe – my kids already know they’re going back to school on 11 May. Fairly happy about it, too.
@Anteros and that’s why I would expect NY and CA to reopen at least elementary schools and preschools/daycares in the fall: those are the states whose leaders are most likely to listen to European authorities and put weight on evidence from Europe.
I think it’s unreasonable to assume that the timing is machiavellian.
The paper which Nick criticizes was written about a year ago.
If you assume that it takes 3 months to organize a conference with speakers from multiple different colleges, then the start was in January or earlier.
According to Douglas below, the earliest references he could find are in late February, so the conference is probably not a response to the quarantine.
One obvious rebuttal is to point out that there’s quite a bit of bullying in public and private schools, and that there are abusive teachers and principals. Are they more of a problem than abusive parents, or less? How would we measure that to know? It’s certainly not obvious to me.
The classic Michael Malice copy-paste on public schools is: “public schools are literal prisons for children and the only time many people will ever encounter physical violence in their lives.”
My prior is that almost all people with siblings encounter at least some physical violence from them at some point. Sisters probably commit far less than brothers, but I suspect that even so the overwhelming majority of girls are violent towards their siblings at least occasionally.
For only children, this may well be true.
I think that if violence includes play fighting or even play fighting that get gets slightly out of hand then clearly yes. But the correct level of play fighting intensity does include some error. I have not observed any level of sibling violence from siblings older than 2 that did not seem part of an overall basically healthy patterns of play fighting. My relevant knowledge base is drawn only from basically functional families and there are bound to be exceptions.
While I’m sure violence is just as common at home between siblings, actual malicious bullying must be far higher in schools.
In general, we would expect public school teachers to be better vetted; there’s a higher bar for teaching than for not having your children taken, because we expect most people to reproduce and foster care, sadly, usually sucks while conversely we only need about 1% of the population to be teachers and the alternative isn’t as terrible as foster care.
But, we would expect parents, on average, to have a stronger connection to their children and concern for their interest. Not so much as to make child abuse unheard of, again sadly, but perhaps enough to weight the scales in the opposite direction as the prior point.
Public school teachers are, perhaps, vetted for not committing what the state considers abuse. But so what? Don’t let the state tell you what is abuse.
I think they’re mostly vetted for having their union dues paid up, and once that’s taken care of the union makes sure they can’t be vetted for anything else. But maybe the unions have standards beyond dues-paying and seniority?
I’m trying to be fair here, ya’ll know where my bias is.
But teachers, even substitutes, are finger-printed and interviewed, whereas becoming a parent is frightfully easy.
Yeah, this reminds me of the problems with interpreting adoption studies–being allowed to adopt a child is a much higher bar than managing to have a child, and that matters for interpreting those studies’ results.
Yes, it’s important to be fair to teachers and acknowledge that they’re just following orders. But it is also important, indeed, more important, to be fair to kids and stop abuse.
> they’re just following orders
That’s a sure-fire winner of a defense if I’ve ever heard one!
(Biological)Parents also have massive biological programing to be concerned for their (biological) children for obvious evolutionary reasons. I have seen this programing kick in people when they have a child. Unfortunately people can and do overcome this programing. Still step parents are about two orders of magnitude abuse rates as biological ones.
This is really important. Despite not having an equivalent scandal, public school teachers have way more pedophilia incidents than the Catholic church ever did.
I wonder why journalists haven’t cover the public school pedophilia scandal, if pederasty has catastrophic mental health effects and public school teachers are per-capita worse predators than Catholic clergy.
You’d have to do some math for per capita. But the media can’t even do that for C19, so why wouldn’t they champ at the bit for the gross numbers, which are both higher, and gross.
It’s probably because there’s not one huge organization to pin it to, which makes for a more compelling tale. AFAIK, Protestant churches have abuse rates not wildly out of line from the Catholic church, but that’s spread amongst a bunch of smaller organizations, so you can’t point at one big nation-spanning organization and tot up all the abuses that happened under their watch–you’re going to be discussing smaller numbers, happening under smaller organizations, with wildly-varying responses. It’s just harder to write about for mass consumption and tell a story that gets clicks (or eyeballs, in the pre-Internet time).
Also due to the law limiting liability, there were not the same big legal cases. This is also bound to affect the numbers of cases that go forward as well.
That reminds me of how Dan Savage likes to say, “If children were raped by clowns as often as priests, it would be illegal to take your kids to the circus.” Which I always found amusingly naive, given how children are much more likely to be molested by their teachers, and yet schooling is mandatory. Reality is, if children were raped by clowns as often as priests, it would be because clowns were respected members of society, and circuses venerable and influential institutions that people felt comfortable leaving their children in the care of. Or alternatively because it was mandatory to take your kids to the circus.
Indeed, the disgusting truth is that people let those who are ‘respectable,’ powerful or useful get away with evil things that others are not allowed to.
The reason why atheist Westerners are so upset about rapist priests is because they already see priests as useless or worse, while people/places who do respect priests cover up their crimes.
Of course, the people who dislike priests have their own groups of people who are allowed to do bad things without being collectively attacked for it or excuse/pretend it didn’t happen/etc.
@Aapje
What groups are you referring to?
The root of evil is not that unvirtuous men take hold of power, but that power exists to be taken hold of. Unfortunately power cannot be abolished, for anarchy is naught but self-defeating nonsense that inevitably summons its antithesis back into being.
Could you be a little more explicit? What are you claiming is the maximum length of time a stateless society can last?
@DavidFriedman: 332 years if it’s a geographically isolated society with a settlement pattern of individual farmsteads and the only faction trying to annex it to a state is external.
@ Le Maistre Chat
I don’t think we know how long the Commanche or the inhabitants of Somaliland maintained their systems.
And Iceland was as stateless before 930 when the legal system was worked out as after, indeed arguably more stateless. That adds about another sixty years.
Potentially indefinitely given favourable conditions, which unfortunately do not really exist in the modern world. I do not believe it’s possible to make a modern society become a stable anarchy any more than we can revert to hunter-gathering. They may be functional enough arrangements in isolation, but isolation is not something that we actually have available.
I can’t offer you a counterexample, and the fact that there are not at present any stateless societies is some evidence. But you might consider that, as of 1800, there were no societies with all, perhaps none with any, of a list of characteristics shared at present by most developed societies:
Government expenditure above a third of national income.
Essentially all adults could vote.
Men and women had the same rights.
Easy divorce.
Homosexual and non-marital sex legal.
Universal compulsory free public schooling (Prussia might have had that by then)
Clearly such a society is impossible.
Do you think you have a convincing theoretical argument? It’s an issue I have discussed at some length in print. If you are not familiar with that literature I will be happy to point you at it.
The theoretical argument against stables anarchies is that states and state-like entities have always been and remain the most effective ways of marshalling organised violence, and the only counter to organized violence is yet more organized violence. This is also why the collapse of central state authority nearly always results in state-like entities arising in its place and then struggling for control. The required conditions for anarchy to exist and endure is that nobody is in a position to start state forming for their own ambition, and there are no exterior threats that would push people to spontaneously form a state for protection. The modern world seems to preclude both.
@DavidFriedman:
I thought Iceland was settled by chiefs fleeing the Kingdom of Norway with kin and slaves. Without the Commonwealth’s distinctive feature of being able to choose one’s godi, that’s just an old super-low-density tribal society. As density increases, the normal pattern is for a state to appear to organize more and more people’s labor in a snowball effect, even if their low-density ancestors were fleeing state power (think Genesis 11!).
There’s also the intermediate organizational system of chiefdoms we learn about in cultural anthropology, which combines the hereditary social classes of pre-modern states with all the fun of instability (chiefs rarely rule a network of villages for more than three generations).
We actually know that the Comanche social system only arose when they acquired horses, with written mentions as late as 1725 saying they only had dogs to carry their tents.
Somalia was really absolutely unique in written history in having any cities without a state. By everything we know about the last 5,000 years of urbanism, there should be constant fighting between two kings, purported democratic bodies, or theocrats over which state’s authority it’s under. And well, I don’t know what the biggest cities in Somaliland or Puntland are, but Mogadishu got conquered twice 15 years after becoming stateless, the second time because Ethiopia and the UN weren’t comfortable with the expansion of sharia as the stateless law code (perhaps primarily since that meant no one to negotiate handing over Islamic terrorists with: the March 2009 announcement that sharia was all of Somalia’s judicial system was of course completely OK internationally).
And Somaliland et al are now under state control centralized in Mogadishu anyway.
The other organizer of the conference says:
Added: he was visiting Harvard Fall 2019, so I conclude that the conference was planned ahead of time and is not a response to the shutdown. The earliest reference I found was 2/27
Now that’s a take so hot you wouldn’t want to leave it lying around near anything flammable.
How to know when an academic has never met someone under the age of 20, and also doesn’t stop for seven seconds to think their ideas through.
Do they not have an anthropology department at Harvard where students learn that parent-child relationships existed in forager bands, tribes, and chiefdoms prior to the holy State?
These are our cognitive elites at our most prestigious universities, people. What should we do about them?
I saw that clip on Twitter earlier! Beyond parody.
Apparently he missed Scott’s post on “How not to sound like an Ayn Rand villain”
And all this time I thought the reason parent-child relationships exist is because Chuck Norris decided not to break them up.
Crap like that, plus the screaming hysteria of the lady linked further down about religious homeschooling organisations, is what leads me to the cynical/conspiracy theory view that it’s all about “How dare anyone try to make sure children do not learn Correct Thinking On Cultural And Social Issues According To Us? How dare they try and teach their kids that there are not 6 dozen genders? The State must step in and protect their vulnerable little minds from being indoctrinated with/by child abuse!”
But of course, I would think that, wouldn’t I? Traditional Catholic social teaching is that the family is the natural and foundational unit of society; from the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004):
That’s not conspiracist, and I’m not even sure it’s cynical. Bartholet says outright, “[I]t’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints.” It goes without saying that “community values” here means “Harvard values.”
And by “tolerance of other people’s viewpoints” Bartholet means “full acceptance of my viewpoint and rejection of any other”.
As clearly shown by approach to homeschooling.
Just as an aside, it’s pretty easy to see why someone in a position to influence top-down policies in education, and who is a member of the social class and ideological faction most in a position to determine those top-down policies, feels pretty comfortable with those top-down policies. From her perspective, most of those policies seem pretty sensible (they are constructed by people who mostly share her values) and the making of those policies seems less like an opaque process driven by people who hate her than like something done by people she knows or knows of, and from whom she could get a hearing if she had concerns.
By contrast, some random mom living in St Louis is likely to see the whole thing very differently. Top-down policies are made mostly by people whose values, life situation, experiences, and resources are very different from hers–often they’re made by people who are openly and explicitly dismissive or hostile to her most cherished beliefs. She has very little chance of getting anyone to listen to her if she disagrees with those top-down policies–the people making them are all far away and very outgroup and are only inclined to listen to people with credentials of a kind she doesn’t have.
This is a little like the way a middle-aged white professional and a 23-year old black auto mechanic can have completely different perspectives on local police behavior.
I’m no longer Catholic, and generally think that kids ought to learn about the 6 dozen genders and be encouraged to accept them, but I’m with you on this. Parents have a right to teach their children what they think is right and wrong, and will do so whether or not you let them homeschool. Kids will get exposed to the Official Harvard Ethical Values sooner or later, and by the time they reach adulthood they’ll hopefully be able to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions about which values are right.
And coming from a healthy, loving family, I have a great deal of respect for the family as a foundational unit of society. I’d only add the caveat that unfortunately not all families are healthy and loving, but don’t try to fix the ones that ain’t broke!
It’s interesting to note how many people can stumble upon the situation of “the public schools are teaching values that are wildly divergent from what many families believe” and just immediately assume that this is indicative of a problem with many American families, and not with, you know, the public schools.
Bartholet’s remarks themselves are begging for a rebuttal.
Right. FEE has one.
Also Babylon Bee nailed it before the fact.
She focuses a lot about the teachers reporting abuse to CPS, but doesn’t mention the abuse inflicted by schools. And it’s not like being taken away from your parents into foster care is good for children.
I know a lot more people who were abused by schools than by their parents. Maybe because of my privileged upbringing, but in general, parents tend to treat their kids better than strangers do (shocking, right?).
https://cap.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Preliminary-Homeschooling-Conference-Agenda-For-Website-01.10.20.pdf
Yep. Looks like a very calm, nuanced academic take. Topics include “Child Maltreatment,” “The Current Politics: HSLDA Dominance and Tactics,” and “State Constitutions as a Basis for Requiring Homeschooling Reform.”
hslda.org doesn’t seem to have a reply up yet. This will doubtless serve as a great fundraiser for them.
Looks like our good friend Rob Reich is doing a talk on “Civic and Democratic Values.” I wonder if homeschooling will get the same bizarre treatment that philanthropy got.
I mean,
Aristophanesone could make a cogent argument that “democratic values” are the principles of controlling the people in your polity by honing rhetoric to get >50% agreement. It’s a principled disavowal of internal violence that has nothing to do with individual rights: 49.9% can disagree with you and get crushed.HSLDA’s take on the conference is here:
https://hslda.org/content/hs/state/ma/20200324-harvard-summit-to-discuss-regulating-homeschooling.aspx
Something in their response that I’m really impressed by:
It’s hard to explain if you aren’t a homeschooler/grown up one/been in that community a lot, but this short paragraph somehow communicates “This is a person who would flat out kill puppies to stop homeschooling if they could” in an ultra-efficient, convincing way to the audience it’s intended for.
I’m not even sure if it’s true and I was unaware of this homeschool lobbyist group before today, and I wouldn’t trust that lady to babysit an un-liked cousin’s nickle. That’s how efficient/effective this is.
Wow.
You managed to demonstrate the thesis of the original paragraph by rebutting it.
I find it hilarious that what HSLDA “has fomented a culture of suspicion and wild conspiracy theories” about* is that a significant chunk of the American political/bureaucratic class believes that parents should have less influence over their children’s upbringing, and the state more.
*I’ve been a member for a decade-plus; my wife’s family has been involved since before it was a formal organization.
HeelBearCub:
Kinda, but also not. If the whole “these guys are spouting lies about us! We are reasonable, and they are alarmists!” message is true, then yeah. So I went to her blog to see what she was beyond that.
Her very first homeschool-relevant blog post is about how homeschoolers have better reading scores than the conventionally schooled, but that we should ignore this because they aren’t being taught to interpret the books correctly. They are interpreting them incorrectly, she says, because a traditional Christian worldview is being taught. She exaggerates what a Christian worldview is as much as she can to make it seem especially bad.
This is her description of why homeschoolers can sometimes read better:
So she views most/all homeschoolers as socially isolated prisoners, too.
So yeah, she is fine with homeschooling, so long as it’s done the way she wants with appropriate “cultural shifts”. For context, she’s an ultra-woke Christian who is pro-abortion, sex-positive, hyper-anti-trump, etc.
So my general read on her is about the same as theirs – she’s fine with homeschool, so long as you can’t homeschool for the reasons you want to and she can somehow roughly make homeschool teach an ideology basically equal to what she perceives public school as pushing.
Again, this is really audience dependent. Most homeschools-because-christianity types would read her blog and independently get the exact same message they give about her – She hates you, hates what you do, and would take it away if she could so she could raise your kids in a way she and the state approve of. The inter-audience message of “just so you guys know, she’s one of those ones” is mega-efficient.
This seems a severe lack of charity.
@GearRatio:
But do you think still think she is evil personified?
@HeelBearCub:
By my standards, yeah. But my standards place a very, very high evil value on “I know better than the rubes” assumptions, “disagreements should be solved with me legislating away their ability to disagree” stances, and people who place a low value on other people being able to do what they want.
If the topic was framed “From the perspective of someone who thinks homeschooling is a good thing as it is and wants to protect it, is she pure evil as regards homeschooling?” I’d be much more harsh; she seems to be eager to go in a direction that looks a lot like “Yes, you can teach your own children – so long as you let us decide what you teach them, what worldview you impart, that you let us judge how good of a job you are doing, that you let us decide whether or not we let you continue, and in general you let us force you to make your children more like us rather than more like you”.
If that seems harsh, understand that I’ve had dozens of conversations with people of this general type in real life, and usually I’ve found that they are fine with homeschooling only so long as it doesn’t produce any outcome in viewpoint substantially different from public school. Since that’s substantially what a probable super-majority of homeschoolers are trying to avoid in the first place, I view her as poison to that.
If you can read (which, granted, not all homeschooled students can– I’ve known lots of homeschooled teenagers who couldn’t read), your parents take you to a library somewhat regularly, and you don’t have friends or music or TV or movies … guess what you’re going to spend a lot of your free time doing?
Here’s where I go “Oh fuck you, bitch” (sorry, I’m touchy about reading because I was one of those kids with their heads constantly stuck in a book, and reading is/was nerdy, and this is sounding all too like the criticism of “reading so much? at an advanced level? not good or healthy for your development!” that I encountered) because I grew up in a small country town (early years in the country actually) with the kind of “and we brought water home from the pump in buckets ‘cos we didn’t have no indoor plumbing” background that she would plainly imagine all homeschooled grew up in.
Wasn’t homeschooled. Could read before ever I went to school, can’t even remember learning to read, didn’t have “TV, friends, music, movies” (well, we did have TV back in black-and-white single channel days, movies were an occasional treat) and no, I didn’t get taken to the library until I was much older (because reasons) and yes, I read every scrap I could get my hands on and no, it wasn’t because my fundamentalist Christian parents refused to let me have any intellectual stimulation in between regular thrashings with the leather strap and hard physical labour.
“A lot of homeschoolers can’t read” – yeah, and I worked as clerical support for adult literacy services and there’s a lot of teenagers and adults who come out of school unable to read as well.
So, everybody else on this hellsite who read more than your own bodyweight in books by the time you were ten – plainly it was because your abusive parents isolated you and refused you to have friends, music, TV and movies, right?
I’m all for strengthening links, but normal families should not need to ever encounter a social worker. Either this lassie thinks the religious homeschoolers are all abusive/neglectful, or worse still – she thinks all families should be in the casebook of a social worker to make sure Correct Attitudes Are Implanted.
I would say that her attitude makes sense from her perspective in a conflict-thesis-y way. She is broadly correct that homeschooling is a threat to her way of life over the long term, since her ideological enemies have way more children than her ideological allies while her ideological allies dominate America’s educational system. Her version of right-think is sustained in large part by conversion, and increased homeschooling will decrease the flow.
As somebody who’s only sorta-kinda her ideological enemy and doesn’t want his kids being bullied in the crummy public schools around every neighborhood he can afford to live in, I think she can go to hell.
Part of my reaction is to wonder if she has ever met someone from her own class, not agreeing with her ideology, who homeschools. A conversation with her would be interesting, but probably not productive, unless she is a more reasonable person than the quotes suggest.
Perhaps I should see if her blog takes comments.
@davidfriedman
Only comment there if you want to make my entire week and fill me with joy, Dave.
I would say that her attitude makes sense from her perspective in a conflict-thesis-y way.
That is what it’s about: what version of ‘the arc of history’ is going to win. Which is a damn stupid argument and fight to have, over “how do we teach children a basic education and try to permit everyone to flourish?”
I reacted poorly because the quoted part, even taking it at its mildest, boils down to “Oh sure, you can read better than your age-mates – if you don’t have a life, loser!”
As someone who read way above the grade level for their age and who didn’t have what this person considers a life, I resemble that remark!
@Deiseach
You’re not wrong. There is a depressing amount of anti-homeschool literature that boils down to “heavy reading is for socially crippled losers.”
Answer: Probably no fewer rights than children have in public schools.
I don’t think she feels the need to prove either of those things. The general thrust of her paper seems to be that people are doing things outside the purview of the state, and moreover, it even has negative effects sometimes. Any freedom from the state must prove itself to have exclusively improved outcomes for everyone in order to be justifiable. Of course, the only way to prove those better outcomes is for the state to measure them.
In other words, if public schooling has downsides sometimes, that’s unfortunate, but there’s nothing we can do to make it perfect. Homeschooling has downsides sometimes, that’s why it should be effectively banned.
Bartholet is just afraid that wrongthinking parents will teach their kids politically incorrect ideas.
Maybe not “kind” to say so, but I’m quite sure it’s true. And the funny thing is that I was homeschooled myself, and I pretty much agreed with all the Approved Ideas until I went to college and saw them in action.
So the educational establishment is moving quickly to guard its near-monopoly?
Well, looking by the only thing that resembles objective measure – standardized tests’ results, the actual evidence-based policy would be a ban on anything except homeschooling.
Setting aside the mother of all selection biases.
I think it’s reasonable to expect well-done homeschooling to perform really well, and badly-done homeschooling (by, say, an abusive single parent with only an eighth-grade education themselves, as an extreme case) to perform really unimaginably badly. Public education is merely somewhat bad-to-mediocre for everyone. I’m not sure what my position on this is.
This is related to the Omelas and dust specs vs torture questions.
Do we let some hypothetical but likely* -10 childhoods exist (or rather, make them somewhat harder to notice and prevent) in order to allow the easier transition of a lot of, say, -5 childhoods up to the 5 range.
Where you stand may depend on your estimation of the relative frequencies of the abusive cases, or your views on limiting the intrusive power of the state, or on action versus inaction.
*(Likely to exist somewhere in a country of 300 million, that is, not more likely that the alternative for any individual!!)
I think that abusive single parents with only an eighth-grade education are far less likely to homeschool.
ETA: And I would suspect as a general trend that more-educated parents are more likely to homeschool.
Public education is awful for nearly everyone, it is only counterbalanced by the fact that kids are unbelievably capable which makes it appear as if schools are merely bad.
@VoiceOfTheVoid
Yes, that’s almost certainly true in aggregate. I don’t know about the flip side you mention – more-educated parents being more likely, not just less-educated parents being less-likely to homeschool. I think it probably depends on specifics, since in neither case is it the level of education that’s doing the etiological work, but rather some combination of the things that education correlates with/is a reliable proxy for.
@baconbits9
I don’t think this matches my experience, but I’m not sure how much I should trust my own recollections here. Could you say more?
IMO public education is largely a disaster for specific groups of people who would otherwise have had out-sized positive contributions to society while doing little on net for those who end up making out-sized contributions. In the long run we are all poorer and marching slowly towards a lesser future with more conformity or a violent revolt. Both are long term large net negatives.
I am pretty sure I have seen statistical data on home schooling parents, although from a while back, and their average education was a little higher than the national average.
But Google is your friend. It looks as though my memory was correct for the 1999 data, but in the 2016 data parents who homeschool are slightly less well educated than parents in general.
Also, from another page, of the reasons parents give for home schooling, the desire to provide religious instruction is only the fourth most common.
My own sample of home schooling parents — three families — is tiny, nonrandom, well educated and not especially religious.
It’s a bad argument for compulsory homeschooling, but the irony is that it’s still better than Bartholet’s faith-based argument for compulsory public schooling.
An addendum: some wrote in to say that the presence of people such as Bartholet and Dwyer just steps from the levers of power concerned them. I think it’s worth arguing that while we’re used to progressive elites steamrolling conservatives on cultural issues, it’s unlikely to happen here. There are two well known exceptions to the long defeat: gun rights and abortion. In both cases conservatives have staved off losses at the federal level, and even advanced at the state level, by building successful grassroots movements. The homeschooling movement is not the NRA, to be sure, but neither does the issue have remotely as much salience to progressives as gun control does. Further, most Americans, even most progressives, are not in favor of presumptive bans on homeschooling, or anything near it. This isn’t an argument for sitting back and relaxing; it’s only to say we are operating under relatively favorable conditions.
And if you don’t believe me—reread this thread, on the knowledge that political views of all stripes are well represented on SSC, and find me a single person who agrees with Bartholet or Dwyer.
In California, home schooling is easy, I believe as an accidental result of the way the rules were originally written. Some years back, someone in the educational bureaucracy pointed out that fact and tried to do something about it. The attempt failed.
And that was in one of the furthest left states in the country.
Do you have any details on that? Back around 2000 when I was homeschooled and occasionally read the newsletters my parents got from various homeschool groups, it was common wisdom that California homeschool laws were insanely restrictive in that they made you however-nominally register with a private school. Perhaps we were wrong, but I’d be surprised?
And more to the point, the gun rights and pro-life communities overlap pretty substantially with the homeschooling community in a way that makes it likely for them to stick up for homeschooling rights(in very different ways) with the reasonable expectation that the favor will get returned.
But also–there’s a significant very left-leaning homeschool movement as well (the unschooling crowd), so it leans right, but has some very vocal and involved defenders on the left as well.
Why do you think of unschooling as left leaning?
Maybe because I live in Massachusetts, and all the unschoolers I know in the area are left-leaning even in the local context. That perspective may not generalize entirely, but I’d still expect that unschoolers are on average more left-leaning than homeschoolers on average.
Waldorf is the only unschooling-ish thing I know of that is available to people who don’t have a stay at home parent. Formal unschooling, if you will. It’s pretty hippy-dippy granola, back to nature, afaik.
One step more formal is Friends (Quaker). Also very granola.
Well I would imagine so.
Sudbury Valley School is the model for unschooling in a school that I am familiar with, and that others sometimes imitate. Its system is democratic, with staff and students getting one vote each. I’m not sure if that counts as left or not.
Sure, there are leftish homeschoolers. But do they protect their political interests as aggressively as rightish homeschoolers?
The leftish homeschoolers tend to let the rightish homeschoolers be their shield. And rationally so.
I’ve been out of the water for a few years, but last I remember Home School Legal Defense Association (called HSLDA elsewhere on this page) was the main legal group and had a notable rightwing tilt. They’ll defend you only if you are a member, which I never was, but I doubt they’d do a litmus test on my politics unless I was doing something really wacky liberal, like, I dunno, burning flags all day as a class project? Or maybe Piss Christ The Musical?
If you live in or near a major city, go look up homeschool groups in your area. You will find at least one explicitly religious and you will also find at least one explicitly secular.
Mostly their legal rights are the same. There’s always suspicion between the two different camps of homeschoolers, but they recognize wedge issues a mile off and won’t take the bait.
> There are two well known exceptions to the long defeat: gun rights and abortion.
Ha! Ha! Ha!
At-best you can claim that abortion hasn’t been completely ceded to the left as an issue, even if it’s almost-completely lost in-practice.
Gun rights are a shadow of what they should be under the Constitution, though there has finally been some very small amount of success which I have no doubt SCOTUS will overturn just as soon as it gets the chance.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-04-20/u-s-citizens-coronavirus-stimulus-checks-spouses-immigrants
You don’t get your coronabucks payment if you jointly filed a tax return with a person without an SSN.
I could understand making the cut-off for not getting funds be that you have to be a citizen, or legal resident, or tax paying alien, or whatever. Fine. But apparently if a fully natural-born US citizen files taxes with someone without an SSN (not an illegal immigrant), that citizen gets $0 instead of $1200.
What’s the explanation for this?
Badly-written legislation?
They have a specific carve-out for people in the military, so it doesn’t seem like just oversight.
Wait…let’s clear this up. This is much more specific. Not defending it per se but let’s accurately describe it at least. Please jump in where I make an error:
Stimulus checks are not sent to households in which an illegal immigrant is working and paying taxes via TIN.
So if one spouse is a citizen but files jointly with their illegal immigrant spouse under a TIN, then no Trumpbux.
AFAIK the EITC works the same way? TIN by definition would make one ineligible since you’re working illegally (and under a false or stolen SSN)
Yes, this appears to be a standard for giving money to citizens. The article mentions that the 2008 bill had the same provision.
Given that most of the article is bemoaning the fact that “Tax paying immigrants without a legal status” (my new favorite euphemism for illegal aliens) aren’t getting it, my suspicion is that they are using a small percentage of people in a weird case to beg for cash for illegals.
Oh, you mean the explanation for the law? American money isn’t meant to go to non-Americans. Their own governments should take care of them if they need help. It appears to be mildly overbroad, but not too bad. Probably very few Americans are hurt by it, and fixing that a bit would be a good idea, but it could be tough to calibrate.
But… they are americans?
Who? The Americans married to non-SSN people? Yes, they should be covered more accurately, as I said. But this article is mostly shilling for illegals, not them. It’s using them as an avatar for illegals.
But, the article is specifically about the americans? Also, not all of immigrants without a SSN are here illegally.
Isn’t marrying a citizen a
prettycomparatively swift road to citizenship?At what point in that process do you get a SS#?
Can you file jointly with someone you are not married to?
No, it dances back and forth between Americans and non-Americans pretty rapidly.
I never said they were. But they’re also not the responsibility of the American government to provide for in distress, nor should they be.
The title is literally “These US citizens…” No where does it argue for giving money to undocumented immigrants. Or any non-citizens, for that matter. But I think your response is the best explanation for they the law was written the way it was.
@zzzzort
From the article:
It puts the illegal aliens as the first part of that sentence and the actual Americans affected as a secondary concern. It later lauds Gavin Newsom.
It’s advocating for illegals getting the cash by mentioning Americans.
And note that this appears to be a fairly standard thing, not malicious in this case.
2008 was a Democrat House and Senate, so this isn’t a rascally Republican thing, this appears to just be a standard rule.
It’s fine for the US to have whatever cutoff it wants to decide who is a citizen worthy of coronabucks. Full citizen, green card holder, permanent resident, taxpaying foreigner, whatever, fine, okay, all right, I get it.
But natural-born US citizens are not getting their $1200 if they are married to someone without an SSN. The spouse is using a TIN, Taxpayer Identification Number, which you explicitly ask the government for and call attention to yourself when you do it, so it’s not something I’d imagine an illegal immigrant would do.
EDIT: I just looked it up and apparently illegal immigrants regularly file for and get TINs. You learn something every day. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/26/perspectives/stimulus-checks-undocumented-taxpayers/index.html “Since 1996, ITINs have been issued by the IRS to individuals ineligible for a Social Security Number — mostly (though not exclusively) because they are immigrants who are undocumented”
Can’t say that any more, though.
A law can have precedent and still be bad.
Why is an American married to an illegal alien less deserving of stimulus than an American who is single?
@alawisgreen
Is that meant seriously? Because he or she is actively aiding someone in living in violation of Federal law, obviously.
We aren’t in the habit of paying people to violate Federal law.
Trumpian vindictiveness toward anyone seen as a foreigner?
Trump didn’t write the bill. CARES is a House Resolution, so written by the Democratic Majority House.
H1Bs, green card holders, etc are all eligible for social security numbers
If you’re living in the US and working and don’t have a SSN you’re either working illegally or…I don’t know.
What’s the other explanation ?
The Amish have a statutory exemption from the Social Security system, but I think they still get numbers assigned to them.
And it looks like there are some visa categories where you get an ITIN (Individual Tax Identification Number) from the IRS instead of getting an SSN from the SSA. I’m having a hard time finding which ones, though.
I have one with an L category visa.
Individual Amish can refuse an SSN if they insist they have a moral objection to having one. The IRS (or SSA?) will still assign their file an internal number, though.
Is “without an SSN” just a euphemism for “illegal immigrant?” If your partner isn’t working, why would you file taxes jointly? And if they are, well, all workers in America whether citizens or not (except for the Amish) are required to have SSNs.
A whole lot of marriages have one working spouse and one stay-at-home spouse. They’re still required to file taxes as married. Technically, they have a choice between filing one married-filing-jointly return and two married-filing-separately returns, but married-filing-separately gives you less-favorable treatment in almost all circumstances.
(Source: I’m a VITA volunteer tax preparer.)
More interestingly, why wouldn’t the citizen spouse sponsor a marriage visa/whatever for their illegal spouse? Shouldn’t that be straight-forward to do if not a sham marriage?
Wait, what’s the point of a sham marriage if you aren’t going to apply for citizenship?
In the United States, at least, it can be to benefit from the spouse’s employer-provided health insurance. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s now more common than the citizenship version, though I don’t have numbers for that.
I have been reliably told that every country on earth except the United States has wonderful free healthcare for all its citizens. So there should be no need for a sham marriage to get access to healthcare when the unauthorized immigrant can simply return to their country of origin.
You are well aware that nobody claims that. You are also well aware that efficiency (not quality!) of healthcare is hardly sole reason for emmigration.
Having been the sponsor for someone who was an undocumented DACA recipient and is married to a very lovely young woman (in something that is very much NOT a sham marriage), the process from undocumented to green card to citizen isn’t at all simple and easy.
The fact that his entry to the US was a legal entry mattered.
He still needed a citizen of documented income to sponsor him.
His DACA status meant that he didn’t have to wait for his green card, meaning, absent DACA status he would have had to wait, I believe, 2 years for the green card.
And he still isn’t yet a citizen, that waits another year from the green card.
So, with trump talking about banning immigration, and the details presumably still being worked out by miller and some beleaguered lawyers, I might need a new place to live. So, what are the best cities outside the US, emphasis on english speaking academics?
Well, Cambridge and Oxford, obviously, plus most other UK and Irish cities. Canada, especially Vancouver and Toronto. Montreal is bilingual with French taking precedence over English, but McGill instructs in both languages and has an excellent reputation. I hear good things about several Australian institutions. There are ‘American Universities of $PLACENAME’ all over the world, too.
I personally find cambridge and oxford to be too small, but London is near the top of our list. I’ve weirdly spent almost no time in Canada, but it’s the other obvious choice. Australia also has points based immigration, which should make things easier, but I just don’t know anyone who’s live there to get a sense of it.
Both Vancouver and Toronto are really quite expensive. Nice, sure, and very international. But we’re not very well paid relative to how expensive the cities are, here.
https://torontostoreys.com/toronto-least-affordable-cities-world-2020/
If you’re looking for an academic job, there are some quite good universities outside of the big cities. In Canada, the universities of Alberta, Calgary, Waterloo, Queen’s, McMaster, and Western Ontario have good reputations and aren’t in expensive centers. If you don’t need a hometown opera or major league baseball they’re good places to live.
I like cities, is the thing. Is there a canadian equivalent of chicago or pittsburgh with relatively low cost of living, possibly at the cost of some coolness or sense of safety?
Montreal is quite cheap compared to other cities of its size. It used to be Canada’s major business center, but the separatists made quite a fuss, and a lot of companies moved their headquarters to Toronto. Since then, Toronto has been expensive and Montreal has been cheap.
Here are some relative prices that look reasonable:
https://careers.workopolis.com/advice/comparing-the-cost-of-living-between-canadian-cities/
Much of the difference in cost of living is in the home prices.
Here’s a list of Canadian cities by metropolitan size:
https://careers.workopolis.com/advice/comparing-the-cost-of-living-between-canadian-cities/
How big a center are you looking for?
There are only three centres in Canada big enough to have metros or subways: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
Let’s try it this way. If Chicago is approximately what you are looking for, start with Toronto. Toronto, like Chicago, is a big sophisticated regional center. If it’s too expensive, consider Montreal. If you can’t stand the weather, consider Vancouver. If all of those are out for some reason, anything else is going to be quite a step down in, because you’ll be stepping down from kinda-Chicago to kinda-Milwaukee.
Is it easy to live in Montreal without knowing French? I was under the impression that while almost everyone can speak English, most casual conversations are in French and most local companies conduct their internal business in French.
My impression is that some companies in Montreal are run in French day to day, while others run in English. It would definitely make sense to find out what language a job is done in, before interviewing. Montreal is bilingual; there is a substantial English-speaking community, with deep roots. But the city is French-speaking enough that most English-speakers speak French too.
In my experience, whenever I meet a Canadian who is truly English/French bilingual, it inevitably turns out they were either raised in French, or they were raised in English and grew up in Montreal.
Quebec (the government more than the people) HATES the fact that people speak English. If you enjoy a lot of cultural hostility, be Anglophone in Quebec. Otherwise…I wouldn’t bother.
I personally live in Oxford in part because I like its smallness, but if you want to look at larger non-London UK cities with respectable academic institutions that are nice places to live, I would recommend Edinburgh (metro area pop. c.800,000) or Manchester (metro area pop. c.3,300,000). Both have a wide range of good (and bad) restaurants, bars, theatres, museums, galleries, parks, nice architecture and other such attractions, both are more expensive than less sophisticated parts of the UK but significantly less so than London, and both get a lot of rain. Edinburgh is also pretty cold in winter, and gets the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and vast accompanying increase in visitors in August, which you may view as a good or a bad thing (I personally love the Fringe; many locals simply choose to let their home out for the month at an exorbitant rate and go on holiday).
I also hear good things about Bristol, but I’ve spent very little time there myself so I’m less confident in that.
I lived in oxford for a bit less than a year, and definitely felt constrained by the end. I love the fringe, and could see living in edinburgh (insert joke about english speaking here). Everyone I know who went to uni in bristol raves about it, but in suspiciously cultish way.
I second these recommendations, and would add Leeds and Glasgow (although unlike in Edinburgh, you may well actually struggle to understand Glaswegians).
Canada in general is a good choice, and if you were able to immigrate to work/study in the US it should give you no trouble on that front, but which city depends on your field of study and tolerance for cold weather (if you can’t stand it at all your only option will be Vancouver and the nearby areas).
Judging by the most recent stories I have seen he is temporarily banning immigration, entry by people planning to stay, not by people with visas valid for some limited length of time.
I’m not sure from your comment which category you are in.
The crux would be where visa renewals fit in. I wouldn’t assign a very high probability to this affecting me (actually my partner directly), but I don’t think anyone is 100% sure at this point, and it seems like a good a time as any to consider our options.
So what is currently going on in China? They officially have no or very few new COVID-19 cases. My understanding is that they’re out of quarantine. They can’t possibly have gotten herd immunity yet, so how are they doing it? Have they eradicated it within China and are restricting travel so that it isn’t brought back in? Are they still doing social distancing and it’s just not considered noteworthy if nobody is getting welded into their apartment? Are they due for a second wave any day now? Basically, does this give hope for the West to be coming back out before there’s a vaccine, or should we plan for the quarantine to go on for another year?
The central government intervened, so the problem is solved…or else.
The usual responses about it being somewhat hard to hide mass graves in the park probably still apply, but we can also replace China with South Korea if you prefer.
Chinese social media is full of stories (some confirmed hoaxes) of exactly this kind of thing. There was a week or two ago a theory that the crematoriums were working over capacity and the government was misreporting numbers. Of course, we shouldn’t take it too credulously. But if we find out it was happening later on, people were saying so.
As for South Korea, police state like measures that work mainly because South Korea is always on a quasi-wartime footing anyway. (Or Asian culture being conformist, if that’s your thing. Personally I think anything that groups Koreans with Israelis and Russians is a little… broad.)
Why? They’re both the Chosen people.
Ha
Police-state-like measures meaning what? That they’re still in quarantine despite not getting new cases? That they’re not in quarantine but doing everything else right and that’s enough? That half the country is in quarantine at any given time because they might have come into contact with someone who might have come into contact with someone with the virus, and the remaining half is trying to make companies run despite that?
Wikipedia says there are about a hundred Korean Jews. Are they the Chosen Chosen people or the Chosen Squared people?
Checkpoints, random car stops and in some cases inspections in home, mandatory quarantines (detentions) of people suspected of having it, conscription of people to aid manpower in risky situations, arrests of people who are noncompliant, military style production.
Don’t get me wrong, SK is a democracy and I think they’re executing these measures in basically good faith. They’re also limiting them to be as small as they can manage. But any time the government gets the right to send someone into your home and detain you if you have coronavirus we’re moving close to police state.
South Korea (and Israel) are permanently on quasi-wartime footing. The idea of a regional conflict flaring up ends up requiring a lot of things that look like this quarantine. So they have apparatus and cultural expectations that the government could be at war tomorrow because that really does happen every couple of years. This has costs but it does strengthen the ability to deal with a crisis like this.
I’m less interested in whether SK or Israel can be described as police states than in what they’re doing that helps manage coronavirus while also having an economy. Part of the answer might be that their normal economy is on permanent partial lockdown, so they’re getting less of a change. But in general, sending people into your house is an enforcement mechanism: what are the things they’re enforcing?
(I think you’re making an implicit point that, whatever it is, it won’t translate to my suburban US experience because I won’t have a police state to enforce those things, and I agree, but I would still like to know what they’re actually doing that makes them not die of the virus. Then we can think if there’s some variant that works with the levels of enforcement I’m likely to get.)
@Erusian:
They must be the Chosen Squared people, so we can make a joke about square peope.
My point isn’t to create horror. I specifically said police-state-like because I don’t think this is a transition to dictatorship or anything like that. And yes, I’m partly making the point that the institutions were already there and that’s helped immensely. When you have to deal with things like North Korean infiltrators or terrorist attacks, you get good at tracking populations, for example. That means you have that skill set for better contact tracing. After all, that’s a counterterrorism tool.
Epistemic status: personal observations(in China for the duration of the epidemic)
COVID hasn’t been eliminated, but certainly isn’t circulating. Social distancing is not in practice anymore, but masks are ubiquitous and are likely staying that way long-term. Buildings/neighborhoods are still only allowed one entrance/exit.
I don’t expect a serious second wave here- nobody wants to be the one who let COVID start circulating again. Appropriate steps will be taken as necessary.
The city where I am was relatively normal after 2 weeks of no new infections, so I don’t think it’ll be necessary to wait for the vaccine to open up again. Fortunately.
If robots can be much stronger, faster, and more agile than humans, why don’t robots in factories work so fast that they’re blurs of motion?
For example, these robots are only working at human speeds: https://youtu.be/P7fi4hP_y80
I don’t want to influence any response, but I think one reason might have to do with inertia wearing out the robots’ parts sooner and making accidents worse when they happen if everything is moving around at high speeds.
For example, if there is a big robot arm that moves heavy ingots of metal from one side of a warehouse to another, it could theoretically swing around at 100 mph, but it would put a lot of strain on the robot arm to do rapid acceleration and deceleration while gripping heavy loads, and if the arm’s gripper accidentally let go, the ingot would go flying around the warehouse like a missile. Instead, somehow it is calculated that the optimal speed for the robot arm to swing around is 10 mph, which is coincidentally the same speed that a human would move an ingot with a forklift.
You make reasonable points. In some cases, “robot” work is limited by their recognition software. For example, some circuit board assembly equipment I’m familiar with needs to identify the correct location based on markers on the board, requiring precise placement, no smudging, etc.
You might also have limits based upon the materials being used, for example some glue needing 3.5 seconds of pressure at 200 degrees to begin to bond.
Precision probably plays a large role too. Tesla factory tours state that cars are placed on stands with millimeter precision by robots.
Engineering costs probably go up more than linearly with the acceleration that must be applied, and with the precision needed.
There are a whole bunch of problems that could arise from increased robot speeds. If things were operating one hundred times faster, things would get much, much hotter, both the robots themselves, and the ambient temperature of the facility. The robot arms (or even the product) may not hold up as well or last as long at significantly higher temperatures, or cooling would need to be introduced, adding engineering, material, and probably other expenses. Other safeguards allowing humans to enter the same area as the robots safely would need to be implemented. Getting hit by something traveling at 10 miles an hour is likely to be less lethal than getting hit by something travelling at 100 miles an hour, and also much more difficult to see coming before it hits you.
expensive
You rapidly approach the point where you’re no longer moving a part (of the machine, or being produced, the same factors apply), but rather applying a machining operation to the part.
Another possibility is that the gating factor is how slow the slowest process goes. There’s no point in one robot arm swinging at Mach 2 if it delivers product that can only be moved along at 10 miles an hour. Sort of like the Henry Ford idea of not building a part to last 10 years when the rest of the car falls apart at 6.
Don’t forget that all these forces cause deflection in the products. This needs to settle before appropriate fastening can occur or else it will still be vibrating and run into problems being aligned or secured properly.
Consider this pick and place machine. If you look closely, you can see the PCB flexing every time a part is put down. You can imagine that at a certain point you’d run into harmonics, enough deflection or other complications where the existing parts would start to shake off the board. Instead you look for the other areas where time can be saved, such as by picking up and scanning multiple parts concurrently.
I’ve seen robot arms in action, picking up sheets of glass and loading them onto racks. The workers there told me that one day they were calibrating the arm movements and a misplaced decimal point caused the arm to swing 10x faster. Which sent a sheet of glass flying ~100 yards across the factory. Fortunately no one happened to be standing where that missile impacted.
There are a lot “Study finds no benefit to hydroxychloroquine” stories making the rounds in the media, based on this study. Obviously the media is predisposed to seize on anything that can conceivably be used to dunk on Trump, but this study seems…questionable. I suppose there is the issue of to what extent they were able to adjust for the fact that clearly the “No HC” group had the most favorable clinical measurements in several categories, but that aside they outright admit that they cannot rule out selection bias, and indeed in the fine print we find:
That reads to me as saying that the clinical course subsequent to admission and its influence on the decision to administer treatment was not able to be taken into account in this analysis. I’m highly skeptical of hydroxychloroquine, but that seems like a huge problem that invalidates the whole thing. What am I missing here?
AFAICT you’re not missing anything. By itself, this is not a very meaningful study. But it’s one additional piece in a larger mosaic of evidence pointing toward disappointing results from hydroxychloroquine so far – I think we can say pretty confidently that hydroxychloroquine will not help you much if you start on it when you’re very sick (though we can’t rule out some small effect, positive or negative).
Hydroxychloroquine fans argue that all the current evidence is on people who are already in bad shape, and that it should be used before people deteriorate. There are biological arguments for that, which I cannot evaluate. But obviously that sort of study takes longer to set up and run.
This parody of basically every commercial on TV right now is one of the most spot-on pop-culture send-ups I think I’ve seen in recent memory…
Reminds me a bit of the Veridian Dynamics commercials from Better Off Ted.
Fantastic show. Fantastic fake adds. Reminded me most distinctly of BASF in tone and incomprehensibility.
I really enjoyed those BASF adds.
Ok, now I absolutely NEED to see this. Any idea where? It’s not on netflix (here), nor Prime, nor HBO. I might actually have to dig up thepiratebay again.
This is what convinced me, btw.
Better Off Ted? It’s on Hulu at the moment. Cannot recommend enough.
I actually wish I was getting more of the “We want to tell you how deeply we care about our customers” ads, if only for the sake of variety.
It feels like the overwhelming majority of ads I’ve been getting on Hulu (I’ve decided to binge re-watch Veronica Mars from the very beginning) are The New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot telling me to stay inside for the umpteenth time (I think I’ve been outside twice in the last month, and I now hate Dr. Barbot with all my soul) and GoodRx.
So. Much. GoodRx.
I have a mental ranking of the various spots for GoodRx and the actors in them, now.
Youtube is full of ads of people telling me to stay home. People I might recognize if I was twenty years younger and twice as hip as I ever was, but now, not a clue.
I just got a spam email from some company called “Tiny Rebel” that was nothing more than an insistence that all of its customers “listen to health authorities and stay home.”
They’re a microbrewery on the South coast of Wales.
I drank some of their ‘Cwtch’ red ale a while back. It’s a decent beer.
Well whatever they paid for my email address, it was too much. I drink mass produced American swill and live in Texas.
And also now see them as a tribal enemy.
Well then I believe the appropriate response would be for you to begin a Zulu war chant.
The “Don’t mess with the IRS” commercials decided to update with theming about the tragedy, and, honestly, they should have just pretended it was something they couldn’t change and let the old one roll.
ROTFL. Until the last part of the tagline, I thought they were just MST3King a real montage.
I’ve kind of enjoyed seeing every website I’ve ever registered with sending contrived tearful emails about how they care deeply about mumble mumble. I’m so relieved that the watch parts supplier I bought from a year ago is taking the pandemic seriously!
Stumbled upon this article at The Atlantic, by a (now ex-) grocery store clerk. TL,DR of it:
There’s some understandable anxiety here, but it comes off as a bit Scroogey. The appreciation for people who suddenly find themselves in risky situations and persevere, enabling a more pleasant life for others is genuine, and, by other workers, appreciated:
It is understandable to choose, based on your own history, not to be any longer in such a situation, and to quit as this person has. But while the situation of the poor clerk who chooses to remain in a risky job is worse than the professional working from home, it isn’t as bad as the waitress now unemployed who doesn’t have a choice in the matter.
I can definitely see the take that gratitude is a poor substitute for cash as the old saw goes, and wouldn’t lose respect for workers who threatened to quite collectively without a pay increase, though that isn’t far from price gouging in a way, which is also understandable from an economic point of view but hard sell in public. On the other hand, it’s going to be a tough economy, or at least may well be, so expectations should probably be adjusted and having stable income prized.
The vibe I get is that the author hadn’t encountered much internal corporate messaging before.
I don’t read it as Scroogy. I read it as his being exasperated at expressions of gratitude without any action to really help him – whether raises or transparency or checking customers’ temperatures or physical distancing or masks.
On the one hand, most of the people calling grocery store workers heroes don’t have any clear route to effect those changes. On the other hand, that exasperation’s still understandable.
The cashiers in my local (large chain) grocery store have all morphed into teenagers, but at Trader Joe’s they appear to be roughly the same demographic as they were prior.
Stupid question:
If it’s going to take more than a year to develop a COVID vaccine, how is it possible to develop a new flu vaccine every year?
One big issue is testing. We have a lot of data on the flu vaccine because we’ve been doing it so long. We are substituting different strains but most of it remains the same.
Also, it does take time to develop the flu vaccine. The people in charge of it make predictions about which strains are going to be prevalent months in the future when the vaccine is ready, and they don’t always get it right.
Specifically, they look at what’s happening during the other hemisphere’s flu season.
Not a stupid question at all – the short answer is that we’re reformulating existing vaccines to target the strains WHO and national agencies predict will be most prevalent during the next year, not coming up with an entirely new one for a novel disease. A lot of the legwork is already done, and this still requires a gigantic amount of work each year.
Almost certainly a combination of lower regulatory burden and having the production pipeline already in place.
They just tweak the sequence/structure of the antigens which make up the flu shot, but in terms of the big picture – the chemical composition of the vaccine, how the body reacts to it – they’re not really making any significant changes.
Another stupid question: if herd immunity is impossible because overcoming the disease doesn’t give you immunity, is a vaccine possible?
Prompted from this article, which seems biased: Herd Immunity is a Myth
I think there are diseases where having had it in the past makes the next infection less bad, and possibly asymptomatic, but doesn’t keep you from passing it along. If I understand correctly, I think the inactivated polio vaccine works this way–you can get the infection in your GI tract, but you have antibodies against it so it can’t infect your nervous system and cause paralysis. I think the live attenuated vaccine prevents you getting it even in your gut.
So we could end up in a situation where there’s no herd immunity available, and we just get the vaccine to avoid getting very sick if we get infected. This is how tetanus and rabies vaccines work for people, so that wouldn’t be unworkable.
Are there vaccines for viruses you can get more than once? What I mean is, if herd immunity is impossible because of reinfection, is there any point in locking down to wait for a vaccine?
Worst case scenario you’d have to get the vaccine a few times a year. It’s not possible to recover if you’re not getting immunity and we would see real reinfections in places like New York if they could happen.
China has also isolated a few people who have been declared cured and then turned up wtih positive viral tests later. I think nobody’s sure quite what’s going on there–maybe some people never clear the virus entirely but still remain asymptomatic, maybe some people lose immunity really fast and get reinfected. Who knows?
The way I understand it, vaccine makers have vaccine strains of influenza they use as a starting point, and production lines to grow the virus in eggs. When they know what strains to target (based on the circulating strains in the other hemisphere), they make a new version of their vaccine strain with the right HA and NA molecules (the things sticking out of the envelope, so also the main thing that antibodies can stick to). Then they can immediately start growing it in eggs, ramp up production, and make basically the same vaccine as they make every other year, with only that change.
The basic process to get a flu vaccine from a flu virus is well established. So you just have to put a new flu virus through the process every year, and it’s expected to work the same way. Apparently this is not 100% true, and the vaccines’ effectiveness varies a bit, but it won’t suddenly develop horrible side effects or completely stop working.
By contrast, there has never been a vaccine for any coronavirus. The SARS vaccine trial and even the FCoV vaccine for cats have some problems and might not work as a model. So we’re starting from zero and have to check the vaccine thoroughly for safety and effectiveness.
It occurs to me that conservative and progressive are both literary worldviews. The conservative genre is tragedy; the progressive genre is Utopian novels.
Libertarianism is, what, adventure novels? Golden age Sci-fi?
Most interesting place to take this topic: what would be the ideology of other genres? Romance? High-brow literature? Mystery?
Mystery is conspiracy theorists. Capital ‘L’ Literature is for the reactionaries, maybe? I feel like Romance could be environmentalism, but I’m not wedded to it.
If you put the Earth in the female role, it’s a bit of a stretch–I’m under the impression a lot of romance is the damsel being pursed by dominant bad-boys she only just manages to tame.
However, if “mother” Nature is instead seen in the dominant role, and environmentalism wants us to submit to it’s ravages rather than fight back….
Alternatively, it’s a rather modern, feminist/egalitarian take on the genre where both parties cooperate in mutual, but boring, respect and admiration?
From my experience with reactionaries, it’s literature with a capital Л.
Hey, you leave my Dostoevsky collection out of this!
Probably Golden Age sci-fi.
Romance = Romanticism, silly. Chateaubriand if you like the Church, Byron if you hate it, Friedrich Schlegel if you find it hard to decide between atheism, Hinduism and the Catholic Church.
Others have already mentioned the obvious Mystery = conspiracy theorist and the less obvious Literature = reaction engines.
Golden age sci fi is the ethos of Peter Thiel.
There’s a worldview that’s much less common in SF now than in the past, that I’d call something like expansionism or endless horizons or something. It’s the notion that the future is some kind of wonderful adventure waiting for us to find, that there are great things ahead for us and our descendants–maybe great dangers, but also great opportunity. It seems like we don’t have so much of that in modern SF–hope and a bright vision for a plausibly attainable future seems pretty uncommon.
Military SF sometimes still has some of this (and is pretty conservative by nature), but often it’s very focused on war and internal politics rather than on great prospects for the future.
@albatross11:
Sounds like the @DavidFriedman worldview that the future can be a wonderful adventure of things getting better through human ingenuity if government gets out of the way (though he seems studiedly agnostic about his preferred anarcho-capitalism ever existing in industrialized societies or how long it would last if yes).
Arguably the new breed of Social Justice compliant SF still has this, but the endless horizons are measured in terms of the number of genders that mundanes will acknowledge rather than the number of planets people will live on. But I think the target audience is still finding a sense of optimism and adventure in their SF, even if it isn’t to my taste.
The classic version is still around in print SF, if not quite so common or critically acclaimed. We’ve discussed the Torchship Trilogy here before, and I just finished Ian McDonald’s “Luna” trilogy for more of the same. As you note, it’s also central to the backstory and worldbuilding of most military science fiction.
Where it has all but vanished, is from Hollywood science fiction. “The Expanse” is the only current example I can think of, and the former flagship of the genre (“Star Trek”) has gone pretty much full grimdark along with everything else. Maybe “The Martian” counts. “The Orville” if it hadn’t been too dumb to take seriously, but McFarlane was at least trying. What am I missing?
The conservative genre is horror.
+1
Not sure quite how to explain Stephen King, China Miéville, etc. then, unless they’re in deep denial about their conservative impulses.
The writers are constrained by the genre, not the other way around.
I’d say the genre that’s most inherently conservative (and specifically, communitarian conservative) is fiction about some terrible disaster and then people recovering from it. Think of the Nantucket or Change series, or Lucifer’s Hammer.
I was impressed by the logical reconstruction of the “kill everyone who isn’t in your tribe” state of nature in the first few seasons of TWD.
Interesting point, you guys. Dracula and The Walking Dead are certainly conservative.
Communists are first comedy, then farce, I guess.
I’m not sure the conservative genre is tragedy; if I had to try to point at something from the inside, I’d say it’s probably more Little Women.
If conservatism more or less instantiates Little Women, that seems like an endorsement. 😛
I like Little Women a lot; I didn’t necessarily mean it to be an endorsement, but yeah, to the extent conservatism is like it is what’s good about conservatism.
Progressivism might have had some utopian novels in its headspace back in the Twenties, when it was still possible for a guided tour of a utopian society to sell a few copies. But who reads those anymore?
No, I think the genre for modern progressives is misery lit and its adjacent corners of litfic. Think The Good Earth, Angela’s Ashes, Beloved, or anything else with some really juicy poverty and oppression.
I suppose you could make a case for the Culture novels, which are quite popular among nerdy progressives (and some nerdy non-progressives) and about as close as modern lit gets — in places — to utopian. But they’re still written by an author who made his name writing deliberately disgusting horror, and tend not to spend a lot of pagecount on the eponymous utopia, and while they’re not horror genre-wise they do go out of their way to dwell on violence, madness, and exploitation whenever they get the chance. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
I haven’t read any of those, but I’ve read The Grapes of Wrath, where the juicy poverty and oppression gets solved by a guided tour of housing built by the FDR Administration. I think that to be progressive, the lit has to point to a solution to the misery that’s the main feature. “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is still only war, poverty and oppression” wouldn’t cut it.
A guided tour of a Utopia is boring, but you could still have a protagonist from Utopia who fights the forces of mental darkness (Counter-Enlightenment?). When Siegel and Shuster introduced Superman, the dead planet Krypton had been a Utopia and he went around beating up wife-beaters and immoral capitalists.
I’m a little worried what military sci-fi might be as a worldview.
Generalizing from Starship Troopers, fascist.
Possibly true of the movie, certainly not of the book.
The portrayal of Heinlein in general and Starship Troopers in particular as fascist is primarily reflective of the desire in some fan/critic circles to force a move away from the “golden age” authors.
Starship Troopers is, like most military sci-fi, openly pro-military. It is also explicitly anti-fascist (arguably to the point of being a flaw in the book). Perhaps something could be said for military sci-fi belonging to the tribe/culture that doesn’t see a contradiction (or even a tension) between those aspects, but I worry that this would be mistaking a few loud voices within a group for a representative sample of that group.
Good point!
If I had to pick genres for the tribes, I’d go with fairly narrow sub-genres for both:
Conservative: Steampunk – World inherits aesthetics, technology, and many social structures from the imperial past. Action/adventure/romance/intrigue occurs. Result is awesome.
Progressive: Solarpunk – World reinvents itself into green energy utopia and uses the new abundance to explore new ways of living. Action/adventure/romance/intrigue occurs. Result is awesome.
Unfortunately, I find myself enjoying both, thus expelling me from both camps and marking me as either a centrist or (more likely) a sci-fi geek.
I have just put up another Mozilla Hubs scene, designed for meetups, slightly improved over the previous one. Anyone interested is welcome to come and check it out. I’m there at the moment, don’t know for how long.
The link is dead.
This should work: hub.link/Utcxv3v
I peeked in, and it looks more house-like this time.
We ended up with five of us there chatting for a fair while.
Guitar (learning) question from a non-musician:
I was watching the old Animusic videos, including Pogo Sticks, which features anthropomorphized Chapman Sticks. That in turn got me interested in the Sticks themselves. In a video wherein Emmett Chapman describes their development, he mentions that the bass tuning is all-fifths and the melody tuning is all-fourths; this in turn got to wondering whether learning to play on a Chapman Stick is easier than learning to play a conventional guitar.
Any thoughts from the knowledgeable crowd?
In an irrelevant aside, Emmett Chapman led to Tony Levin, which in turn led to King Crimson, thence to Primus and Les Claypool. Weirdness quota for the day: satisfied. I do love Primus, though.
I find the ease of tunings on various string instruments has a lot to do with what you’re playing. The kinds of music you’re likely to play on, say, a cello are easiest to play in standard cello tuning; same goes for guitar, bass guitar, ukelele, etc. Drop D on guitar sure makes heavy rock music easier!
One of the easiest instruments I’ve ever played was a mandocello, which is basically a giant mandolin tuned like a cello. (Looks like an 8-string acoustic guitar.)
I’ve listened to some but not a ton of Chapman stick music; I like the idea that conventional tunings for that instrument have maybe driven the kinds of music people have written for it.
BTW, Stanley Jordan plays guitars in the way you’d play a Chapman stick. I wonder how he tunes his guitars…then again he’s a pretty weird guy.
ETA: In my opinion the sticks in that video resemble the Whamola more than the Chapman stick.
I doubt it’s easy to find evidence on the question just because the odds of someone learning to play a stick while having no prior experience with the guitar seem close to zero. Compare piano, where you play different parts with both hands, but the mechanism is as simple as possible and you basically can’t flub notes because you just push down buttons, and the buttons are in a really simple clear order; now on the stick you play two parts but there’s much more complexity in technique and layout. There are some big differences in the mechanics of playing, but I’d say nothing that makes it easier than guitar (at an advanced level there are many specific things that are easier/harder/impossible on one or the other mutually). So yeah, I’d say harder. Also: learning guitar left handed is harder, because finding left handed guitars is harder, and Chapman Sticks are even rarer, so that won’t help.
Ha, I wish!
No really! I defy you to make a piano sound nearly as bad as a violin can. You can play the wrong note, but you can’t play the note wrong (not that there isn’t nuance in how you play, but still, it can only go so badly). Even on a guitar with the frets, there are so many things that can go wrong, to a point where you can pluck and no notes even come out.
And comic deliberately bad piano playing is its own sub-genre and difficult to pull off – ‘you have to be good to play that badly’ 🙂
Having tried, at various times in my life, to play piano, guitar, and cello, I agree. Piano is just easier. Getting a decent sound out of a piano is trivial. Getting a decent sound out of a cello is a real fight. You get to the point of playing simple music that sounds like music way earlier with piano.
@johan_larson:
I agree about cello being the hardest out of piano, guitar, and cello. But I want to say, maybe just as a PSA, that getting a decent sound out of a cello is way easier and usually happens way sooner than on violin.
I believe the only reason so many little kids get started on violin is because parents mistakenly think the size of the instrument is linearly related to the ease of playing or even transporting it. Traditional cellos are surprisingly light and easy to carry around, and the ergonomics are miles above those of violin. The bruises violinists get under their chins should be an obvious sign of this.
True facts! I will readily admit that I can make a much more hideous sound on my viola than I can on a piano, and that furthermore it’s quite easy to do so. But you can still flub on a piano–either by hitting the wrong note, or pressing the key too softly to sound the note, or accidentally hitting the adjacent key as well. (The latter two, I’ll admit, being fairly rare.)
Is, uh….. is prostitution really legal in some form or another, in most developed countries? Somehow (as an American), I had no idea that this was a thing, at all. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_law however, it does appear to be legal in some way in what I’d say are a majority of 1st world countries- just with various limits like no advertising it, no street walking, no brothels, not in a hotel, etc. Or, at least for a number of countries (say Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Portugal, Spain- also the UK?) there doesn’t appear to be a specific law against exchanging sex for money. I have no clue how that works in practice- maybe the police actively discourage prostitution and just find a different charge for both clients & workers- but it was a bit shocking to me. The most prohibitionist countries seemed to have the most sensible model- the ‘Nordic model’ (also practiced by France & Ireland) that just criminalizes the client but not the worker.
Just was surprised, is all. I always thought some degree of prostitution would be a good business model for an Uber-like tech company willing to push the envelope. Uber and AirBnB changed their industries by introducing a vast number of amateurs to what was mostly professional before (driving, hotels)- I’m sure some % of women or gay men would be willing to accept a paid relationship (so more like a ‘sugar daddy’ than a take-all-customers actual prostitute). Just let the women sign up for free, charge the men for memberships & messaging, and leave payment between the parties and off the app. (And ban explicit payment talk in messaging, that would probably be the toughest part though). Like an Ashley Madison that…. actually worked. Call it a dating app, with some wink-wink marketing. Seems like there’d be a regulatory basis to at least get it started, especially outside the US
Yes, this page appears to be accurate and is not some wild hoax.
I can confirm that in Poland it is legal and as far as I know “just find a different charge for both clients & workers” is not happening.
Pimping is illegal but AFAIK typically not really prosecuted due to lack of cooperation from anyone involved. But Uber doing this would be probably pushing things too much.
There were cases of media attacking specific brothels, in some cases leading to closure. But it was affecting places that were extremely aggressively soliciting every male around AND were located in direct city center AND were clearly marked as brothel in a direct city center AND scamming clients (suddenly billing 50 000$ for a single beer).
Sounds to me like a massive minefield that even Uber type companies that happily ignore regulation would prefer to avoid.
Not being illegal is not the same thing as being legal.
Yes, in Spain, prostitution is not illegal. But facilitating it is, so pimps get prosecuted for human trafficking.
Homeschooling is also not illegal in Spain, which doesn’t mean it’s easy to practice it without getting in trouble with the law.
The app’s producers would be RICO’ed pretty quickly. There’s a lot of places where the cops look the other way to prostitution so long as perfunctory efforts are made to keep it hidden. So prostitutes can walk certain streets and pimps can lurk in the background, but if the middle-class entrepreneur wants to open up a storefront business openly selling it, he gets RICO’ed and dragged off to jail. This may be what ends up happening with drugs: many of the same people opposed to “mass incarceration” would be opposed to seeing crack sold, particularly by *sinister voice* corporations.
And anyway, if I wanted to do that, I’d much prefer a website to an app.
The app’s arguments would be that they’re a dating app, and whatever adults who meet on the platform do after they’ve met is out of their hands. That’s why I included the ‘any money exchange would be off the app’ part. Like, the app looks & functions like Bumble, Hinge, Tinder, etc.- only the marketing ‘implies’ that it’s for something else. I don’t see how you support any charges off of that.
As for RICO in general- https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-dammit/
Then value provided by app would be extremely low.
Maybe this is my lockdown-induced return to libertarianism or something, but when two adults have sex voluntarily, ISTM that having the police involved is utterly nuts, whether money changes hands or not.
That’s awfully consequentialist of you! Don’t you realize that prostitution is Bad and Evil and Sinful and A Vice? How much danger that prostitutes are economically forced to voluntarily put themselves in? For shame!
If the lockdown goes on long enough you might be able to trade food for sex.
Or at least toilet paper.
Trading sex for toilet paper is just porn.
I seem to recall reading some articles about online ads for escort services being hammered by various local and federal prosecutors. And as I recall, the claimed result was that prostitutes became quite a bit less safe.
Craigslist shut down its entire personals section after the passing of SESTA-FOSTA in 2018. They had already shut down their adult classified section due to pressure from prosecutors in 2009, leading to the rise of backpage, which became the bête noir of an ongoing moral panic. backpage itself was eventually seized by federal law enforcement in 2018, and its CEO pleaded guilty to charges of facilitating prostitution and money laundering.
According to techdirt, homicides markedly decreased in locations where craigslist adult personals were introduced:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20171024/14485938474/study-craigslist-shutting-erotic-services-shows-sesta-may-hurt-those-it-purports-to-help.shtml
The original post talked about prostitution outside the US, and setting up an Uber type operation outside the US. I think it is pretty clear that prostitution is illegal in the US, and it is definitely very politically incorrect here, although everyone uses the euphemism of trafficking.
But I’d like to hear more responses from those outside the US. I suppose even where it isn’t illegal, it is still has a bad enough taint that I suppose an Uber type company, at least one above ground, wouldn’t work. But I would like to understand how prostitution is viewed and dealt with legally in Europe. Ana says it is not illegal but not necessarily legal in Spain. I’d like to better understand that.
‘not illegal but not necessarily legal in Spain. I’d like to better understand that’
Yeah, same. After I posted this, the concept of escort services (which advertise legally here in the US, including in the phonebook in the pre-Internet era when I was a kid) and shady ‘massage’ parlors occurred to me. Their argument is that you’re just paying the person for their time or a massage, if sex happened to occur who can say it’s for money necessarily, etc. I’d put them in the ‘gray area’ category here in the US- so maybe the same in Europe? I really have no idea.
As far as the sugar daddy app- I think it’s pretty clear that the aggressive, rules-bending tech startups all come from America, so the odds that this would spring up in Europe seems basically nonexistent
In Poland prostitution is legal, pimping is not.
It would not be just taint and going into area where things sooner or later will go horribly wrong, it would be clearly illegal.
Basically, nobody in a position of authority outside some of the more conservative American jurisdictions actually wants to arrest prostitutes. But just about everybody thinks pimps and the like are the Scum of the Earth for abusing these poor women, and the Johns are pretty sketchy and cross the line as soon as any of their money winds up in a pimp’s hands. The difference of opinion, or of legal policy at least, is mostly in whether we’re “just” going to make pimping illegal, or make prostitution illegal and use that as one more weapon against the pimps.
So, there’s usually a good level level of either official or unofficial tolerance for purely private arrangements between a man, a woman, and a stack of $20 bills. Some places will extend that to formal businesses that submit to very strict regulation. But if it looks, swims, and quacks even vaguely like a pimp (and hasn’t bribed the right people), or like a john paying money to a pimp, that tolerance goes away very quickly. “Like Uber but for prostitutes, and with the same contempt for regulation”, is going to look a lot like pimping and is not going to fly. Really, “Like Uber but for X and with the same contempt for regulation” isn’t going to fly for any future value of X, but definitely not for prostitution. The law is not actually required to believe your transparent lie that you are shocked, shocked to find prostitution going on here.
Also, the magic word is now “Trafficking”. It doesn’t matter if the prostitute is practicing her trade on the block she grew up on, she’s being “trafficked” and is synonymous with Liam Neeson’s Daughter From That Movie, and it’s OK to brutalize anyone who had anything to do with her not being a virginal schoolgirl. If you’re in one of the jurisdictions where it is still technically legal to take a share of her earnings in exchange for providing her with a safe work environment, and you’re grandfathered in as a recognized player in the industry, make sure to be very diligent with the paperwork and keep a good lawyer on speed dial. Otherwise, think about a different line of business to go into for the next decade or two at least.
Yeah, I remember a year or so ago when they arrested some 80-year old billionaire for getting a blowjob from a middle-aged prostitute, and everyone in the media dutifully nattered on about how it was human trafficking. I assume the media types knew they were spreading nonsense but it made good copy/clickbait, but it’s always possible they really are that dumb. And the great thing about a moral panic is that it gets everyone to turn off their brains before they do any of that unpleasant thinking stuff that causes so many problems in the world.
As a counterpoint, I gather there are some above-ground sugar daddy websites. This looks like a kind of informal version of long-term prostitution to me. OTOH, if we made it illegal for older men to give money and gifts to their beautiful young mistresses, I imagine a lot of important people would be seriously inconvenienced, so maybe they’ll get to stick around.
I read about an incident in New York from one such website. A man in his 80s got a date with 17-year-old twins. He took them to a fancy dinner and then took them home for drinks, and asked them to do what one girl called “gross things”. It made the news only because they tied him up and robbed him.
Agreed, but I think one of the things the Ashley Madison hack revealed was that the vast majority of the female accounts were fake. I think dating apps, not necessarily about prostitution but actual legit ones, are simple in theory but tough to do in practice- you have to get x number of females to sign up & feel comfortable with the app experience, block harassers, etc. Once you have a critical mass of women, the men follow. I’ve heard it’s the same for the nightclub scene- just cater to women & make them like the place, male patrons will show up automatically wherever the females are
“Where da white/brown/black women at? Asian women? Green women? I’m not picky.”
A little bit of social camouflage always makes prostitution go down easier. That’s why e.g. diamonds are a girl’s best friend – they aren’t cash, and there is a whole lot of very expensive
propagandaadvertising to the extent that giving women diamonds is something a proper gentleman will do out of passionate twue wuv. Ditto other extravagant gifts, fancy dinners and entertainment, etc. Even when people recognize what’s really going on, part of the reason prostitution is so disreputable is that “proper” women don’t want the competition, and the proper women like getting fancy gifts etc. For too many of them, that’s how they sort Mr. Right from the pathetic losers. And the men who can afford it don’t want to ruin that game either, so the double standard holds up.Paying a young woman’s college tuition is I think at the border of what is socially acceptable camouflage for this purpose – it’s well outside the normal bounds of courtship, but it seems so charitable that it’s hard for people to get up in arms about it.
And, yes, a fair number of the sugar daddies are paying in straight cash, but if getting a conviction means convincing a jury that there was economically motivated nookie going on and that the compensation wasn’t in one of the socially accepted grey areas, the camouflage still works.
This doesn’t square with the facts on the ground, where the majority of those arrested for prostitution and related crimes are the prostitutes themselves. This is true even in places where prostitution itself is not illegal. Ireland has asymmetrical criminalization (Nordic Model), so selling sex is not illegal but buying sex and pimping are. I can’t find the bloody source for it, but from what I recall the majority of brothel-keeping, trafficking, and pimping arrests over there are also of women who are themselves prostitutes. As far as I know the pattern tends to generally repeat, people in power may say they don’t want to arrest prostitutes, but that’s not how it ever bears out once the rubber hits the road.
I think the major problem here is that most people have a very poor understanding of how this market actually works, who the major players are, what services they provide, etc.
The simple fact is that “pimps” (and I’m using the term incredibly loosely to basically mean “anyone who facilitates business arrangements for sex workers”) do in fact provide a very valuable service to sex workers themselves. Most sex workers don’t actually want to be solely and individually for all aspects of running the business (including things like finding customers, making appointments, and providing physical security).
Are some pimps exploitative? Yes. Some normal employers are exploitative. Are some sex work environments unsafe? Yes. Some normal work environments are unsafe. Can we expect either of these conditions to improve so long as demand for sex work exists, and providing it is declared illegal? No.
Another example of an unsafe working environment is a meth lab. But they don’t have to be. In a world where meth is legal, meth labs probably look much more like the fancy setup Walter White eventually had and much less like a mobile home that blows up every six months. Similarly, in a world where “pimping” is actually legal, that profession probably starts to look a lot more professional as well…
Matt M, I think in the world of UberHooker, it will still turn out that the most profitable part of sex work is not to be the sex worker, it’s to be the ancillary part of the trade (be that pimp, procuress or madam). If the UberHooker model ever does get off the ground, the website will make more out of the transaction than the provider of the physical services, even if it’s on a “gift-giving not cash” model rather than “$X per hour, kinks and fetishes extra” model”.
Right. And what I’m saying is that so long as “facilitating sex worker arrangements” legally maps to “pimping” and so long as society views “pimping” as “something that evil women-beating gangsters do” there is no chance in hell this sort of thing can become legal/mainstream/accepted in basically any society… even the ones where sex work itself is technically legal under the Nordic Model or whatever else…
Laws against “pimping” are basically laws against being any sort of third-party service provider to a sex worker.
Yes, and the majority of the drug arrests are of users or low-level dealers, not drug lords or even mid-level distributors. That’s not because the police prefer making those arrests, it’s because there are more of them and they are easier to find and how else are you ever going to find the kingpins?
Pimps (broadly speaking) work behind the scenes; they’re not the ones on the streetcorners or in the red-lit windows or coming to your room when you call the service. And as Matt M notes, most prostitutes want to work for a decent pimp, and will tolerate working for a moderately-abusive pimp rather than try to set up as a wholly independent contractor. So they won’t tell you who their pimp is. How, if you think pimps are the scum of the Earth and you want to put them in jail, do you find them?
You arrest the working girls if you can, and offer to let them go if they rat out their pimp. You want them to rat out the pimp so you can let them go, but they won’t so (having made the threat) you can’t. Or you arrest them and wait to see who shows up to bail them out – now you know who the pimp is. And, if you’re thinking clearly, now you know why you’ve given prostitutes one more good reason to want to work for pimps and not rat out even the moderately-abusive ones. If all else fails, you try to lock up enough prostitutes that the pimps are forced out of business, and pretend real hard that when the girls get out of jail some nice social worker will re-virtuize them.
It’s my understanding that the majority of prostitutes are in fact independent contractors. Pimping as is commonly imagined is not actually common, but pimping as a crime is pretty much defined as, “Doing anything whatsoever that helps a prostitute conduct her business.” As you might be unsurprised to learn, prostitutes do in fact frequently work together and help each other out, and consequently any prostitute who interacts with any other prostitute in a professional capacity is effectively guilty of pimping. We’re talking things like sharing advice, sharing rides, sharing in-calls, sharing expenses, working together, giving references, helping with booking / advertising / billing, and so on. All be construed as pimping.
This also means that anti-pimping laws frequently catch prostitute’s friends and family, since after all it’s perfectly normal for people to do things like their friend a ride to work. Hell even landlords may find themselves needing to evict a prostitute the instant they learn of her profession, even if she is not conducting it on premises. In Norway the police ran “Operation Homeless” from 2007 to 2011 (yes, they really called it that). It involved the cops going around informing known prostitute’s landlords of the women’s activities, thus forcing their eviction. Presumably in the expectation that homeless prostitutes would find some other profession.
So it’s not just that pimps offer useful services, but that any part of a prostitute’s social circle that is aware of her profession may legally be a pimp and risks being charged accordingly, which of course very often includes other prostitutes. On top of that, many of the actual pimps – or rather madams – are industry veterans and frequently are still working themselves. Basically there is no clear delineation between pimps and prostitutes, which means that any policy that tries to go after pimps is going to wind up arresting a lot of prostitutes even in legal regimes were prostitution is itself ostensibly legal.
Aren’t there lots of sugar daddy websites? That’s a totally different thing from Ashley Madison isn’t it?
I feel like the hard part of ‘We are selling Ashely Madison, that works” is that that’s what Ashley Madison is selling. Like, your competition is all the other dating apps out there, and they are all free. How are you gonna get dudes to sign up for (and pay for) yours when they’ve already got the constellation of free apps?
Hrrm, maybe explaining this wrong. The internet already exists, and people can use it to talk to one another and arrange to meet up later, strongly hinting at paying for sex at those meetups. That’s…what you want to sell them, right? I dunno, I think maybe the opportunity for Uber for Escorts has already come and gone.
I always thought some degree of prostitution would be a good business model for an Uber-like tech company willing to push the envelope. Uber and AirBnB changed their industries by introducing a vast number of amateurs to what was mostly professional before (driving, hotels)- I’m sure some % of women or gay men would be willing to accept a paid relationship (so more like a ‘sugar daddy’ than a take-all-customers actual prostitute).
It’s still immoral earnings, though. A lot of pimps tried the “I’m not a pimp, she’s my girlfriend, she just happens to be very popular” approach but it didn’t fly.
Uber may have started off as “amateur drivers ride-sharing” but its business model has moved on to “you’re not an employee, you’re an independent contractor, but you still work for us and we set prices, terms and conditions”. UberHooker is going to be the same way – you’re not running a third-party website where working girls and johns can meet up to discuss his etchings, and everybody pretends they’re not working girls and johns, you’re facilitating prostitution and making a cut off it (even if you go the model of “charge the guys a membership fee, the girls get to join for free, we don’t take a slice of whatever money changes hands after they go on a ‘date'”, you’re still offering the prospect of “sign up here, guys, and we’ll offer you a range of ladies of the night”).
There already are sugarbaby/sugar dating sites, and they have to swerve around the legalities by making very sure professional escorts don’t use their services and that the terms of what is on offer are very much couched as “dating site! no promises of sex! absolutely no explicit terms of ‘pay to play’! just letting attractive younger and generous older people have a chance to meet!”. Translating that into UberHooker would mean an implicit “no, definitely sex on offer in exchange for cash/presents” and there you go, that’s prostitution.
And even where prostitution is legal/tolerated, you then will run into the kinds of regulations that apply to such operations. Off the top of my head, the first one I think such a site would run headlong into is the necessity to demonstrate that sex trafficking is not going on – are all the women/men offering their services as escorts free agents, not being coerced by anyone or run by professional pimps, and not trafficked?
I also think people have different expectations vis-à-vis prostitution and online dating, even sugar dating; UberHooker would be trying to run a model of “classier than traditional methods” so they’d be appealing to the high end of the market (which could afford premium prices). You would then have to gauge your market: can you make enough from the higher-end clients to get enough of a return for the investors? (Plainly the sugar dating sites manage that, so it mut be doable). What about ordinary average guys who just want a ‘date’ for the weekend but can’t or won’t pay premium prices? If more down-market sites then follow to cater for them, isn’t that going to taint your brand (which will already be struggling with the image of prostitution) and reduce its appeal? How can you make a meaningful distinction between UberHooker and Slappers’R’Uz?
And maybe you can’t make such a distinction; porn sites don’t base their appeal on ‘discreet good taste and merely alluding to the delights within’, after all. To quote The Screwtape Letters:
UberHooker’s base appeal will be founded on the second type, you’re not likely to be hitting it up to find a potential wife, after all.
I LOLed at UberHooker. Is it too late for me to change my username?
Honestly, I had no idea that there were any sugar daddy still websites out there, so perhaps they’ve already cornered the market. They may have stolen UberHooker’s market share. I just knew about Ashley Madison because the hack was in the news last year
I thought the Ashley Madison thing was stupid, because if you’re married, want an affair, and sign up to an adultery website, that is going to leave all kinds of paper trails (so to speak). If you’re not on the path to divorce already, you certainly are going to be once your wife finds out (and she is going to find out).
Also, it will devolve into a sugar dating site: there may be tons of hot chicks out there who want to have sexy no strings attached fun times with a married man, but if they’re on an adultery website, it’s going to be pay to play, Mr Casanova.
And then the problems with the whole concept that we saw in reality: it’s catnip for scammers, there are not in fact tons of hot chicks who want no-strings sexy fun times with married men, and you’ll pay through the nose and be led on by the fake accounts set up by the website for the promise without the performance of meeting said willing hot chick.
The UberHooker model might work due to the honesty of the concept: “I’m a guy looking for sex tonight, I don’t want to go to the local singles bar and try my luck and going to a brothel is skeevy. If you’re disease-free, reasonably attractive, and your prices are reasonable, let’s meet” but the problem will be (a) this is prostitution (b) if you disguise it as a dating site in order to try and drape the aura of “this is not sleazy, this is high-class”, then you may well fall into the Ashley Madison ‘we can make more dough off these desperate suckers by spamming fake accounts and charging premium membership rates than we can actually letting them hook up with amateur or professional prostitutes’ model.
EDIT: To be fair, I am congenitally disposed to be unsympathetic to the entire concept because I don’t get the urgency of the drive for romance/sex, so my basic instinct (ahem) is “can’t you just stay at home with a nice cup of tea instead?”
Just got a message today from my Tumblr stalker and I’m chortling about oh sweetums, you have no idea how asexuality/aromanticism work, do you?
Now that the Kung Flu is here and dropping old people left and right, have you made your peace with dying a virgin?
Oh, eep, oh noes, oh dear, oh yeah no sex is really the biggest issue on my mind right now, yes indeed! *eyes rolling like slot machine reels*
My guess is that:
a. If an UberHooker type system got going and widely used, sex work would become much less dangerous and there would be much less of a place for pimps, since the app would track things well enough to make the whole transaction relatively safe (much safer than street-level prostitution).
b. Done competently, they’d take some sensible steps to prevent disease spread (say, requiring negative STD test results every month or so), and it would probably be a net positive for mankind.
c. Anyone doing this explicitly would be hammered and hounded out of existence by prosecutors and politicians and media types who are 100% okay in practice with ongoing street prostitution, and many of whom probably hire prostitutes themselves.
This is a very general pattern, making the world a worse place basically everywhere on Earth.
1. Uber is an odd model to use for sex work. The whole point of Uber is that car rides are largely undifferentiated and nobody really cares exactly what car or what kind of driver they get, so long as the person safely delivers them to the destination. Prostitution is uh… very different. Almost nobody is desperate enough to hit a button that says “send me a random prostitute at the cheapest possible price.” People have pretty specific tastes and want to see what they are getting.
2. We don’t have to speculate about this. It wasn’t quite Uber, but backpage used to exist. And its former CEO is now in jail for aiding and abetting human trafficking. The feds went after that hard, and they went to the very top.
The President and Vice-President of Backpage are both in jail for facilitating human trafficking yes (though technically I think the charge is money laundering). The funny thing about it though is that while they did knowingly allow their platform to be used for the advertisement of prostitution, and indeed encourage such use, they were exemplary in their efforts to cooperate with law enforcement in tracking down actual instances of trafficking (that is to say forced prostitution). We know this, because the same FBI that shut down Backpage had a few years earlier given them a certificate of recognition for their assistance.
I also recall that in the immediate aftermath of Backpage being shut down, many law enforcement officers lamented that it had now gotten more difficult to locate trafficking victims. Which makes sense, as it was an attractive and easy place for traffickers to advertise, but one that was being actively monitored by law enforcement with the cooperation of the people running it. Unfortunately Backpage was just too big and too visible to be allowed to continue existing in defiance of the law, even if it was a net positive in the fight against greater crimes, so the Feds shut it down.
Sugar dating exists, but it’s a somewhat different market. At least in my corner of the world, it’s just not working as an UberHooker – there is a courtship process, however brief, messages rarely get answered the same day etc. It’s just that the women are a lot more willing than on match.com and some form of compensation is (usually) expected. There are also plenty of young women that just want the thrills and no cash, and there are of course straight up escorts as well. Numbers are very confusing – I’d estimate maybe 40-40-20 curious-sugarbaby-escort, but since the more you rely on the website for cash, the more visible/online you are, what’s perceived is more like 20-30-50.
UberHooker is definitely not a new concept. Problem is that, like others pointed out, it’s too damn easy to get prosecuted for being a pimp, not matter how stupid it is. In most legislations, AFAIK. So I’m afraid it’s going to have to go the other way – first the legislation, then the app.
There is a way you can try to go around it – build a platform that genuinely makes it easy for everybody to find a service provider of any kind. Once people wise up to it, you’ll end up with a Schelling point category that’s understood to mean paid sex. Probably massage.
I wanted to do it at some point but can’t spread too thin. Might yet try, if I manage to make enough money to afford both the dev, the marketing and the lawyer for the saucy bits. If you’re tempted, the trick is to make the software reasonably generic, but to build each market separately to solve the chicken-and-egg problem (network effects). If you think hair dressers would be interested, pretend for 3 months that the app is all about hair dressers and make sure every one in a given city has your QR code.
Not only is prostitution legal(ish) in most developed countries, it has been legal for pretty much the entire history of Western civilisation. Its complete ban in the United States since the Progressive Era is basically a modern aberration, though one which sadly is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
It’s only sensible if you think paying someone for their services is somehow taking advantage of them. Personally I find it far more exploitative when labour is not compensated. Furthermore, I believe workers should be able to openly receive payment for their services without being subject to police surveillance of their persons and the jailing of their clients.
Congratulations, you just invented Seeking Arrangement. Unfortunately Brandon Wales beat you to the punch by 14 years, which means it also predates Uber and AirBnB by a few years. There’s no app, because neither Google nor Apple will allow it on their app stores, but the website existed before apps and continues to do so. You’d probably be surprised at the fact that it’s both US based, and very unsubtle the wink wink is. Notably however, they do aggressively prune professionals from the site, and even more so after the passing of SESTA-FOSTA increased the legal liability for not doing so.
When I look at the stats for Coronavirus in NYC I can’t help but wonder if we are at (or at least near) “herd immunity.” It’s hard for me to explain the rapid drop in hospitalizations (I think that is a better number than cases) over the last two weeks in any other way. For example, yesterday, there were only 9 new hospitalizations in all of NYC for Coronavirus. The lockdown can’t be that effective, can it?
So far, something like .15% of all of NYC has died from Coronavirus. That’s higher than some of the lower-bounds I’ve seen for IFR. Even if IFR is 1% (which I think is probably at the very high end), that would imply that 15% of NYC has already recovered.
First, someone pour some cold water on my logic. Second, if NYC is that far along, shouldn’t we start re-opening?
FWIW, I both personally believe this (not at a high confidence level) and hope that you’re correct. But to play Devil’s Advocate:
a) We don’t actually know the IFR. If it’s actually 1%, we’re nowhere near immunity levels.
b) We don’t know how complete immunity is. There are reports of reinfection; this is probably a minor concern, but until we can be confident, we can’t take any serious risks.
c) Lots of people go in and out of New York under normal conditions; even if herd immunity protects people currently in the city, these people increase risks by swelling the effective population of the city.
It doesn’t seem like COVID-19 spreads all that well even during normal times. People being extra-paranoid about being coughed or breathed on, washing their hands constantly, wearing masks, avoiding crowds, etc., seems like it might actually have substantially decreased transmission, even before the lockdowns started.
And yet in Italy there was quite a delay in the beginning of the crisis (say arbitrarily >100 deaths per day) and numbers actually going down. I understand that most of this is due to being a sum of exponentials, most of which were barely starting, but still… either corona is pretty infectious or the Italians really really sucked at social distancing.
Don’t have friends I can ask about that. I don know they were pretty fast to put pretty draconian shelter in place rules that required, for example, writing out a plan for the day and respecting it. Not sure how much that was actually respected.
My impression is that in a lot of Northern Italy, the hospitals became centers of infection, and that might change the way the spread works in some pretty big ways.
@albatross11
Yeah, that’s my intuition as well about Romania. Between this and intubating early proving to be a biggish mistake, one has to wonder if hospitals really helped.
Have you ever been to Italy? I mean, albatross and Radu are right about the hospitals being an early issue, but if you have to pick a European country as least likely to do proper social distancing without tanks-in-the-street level enforcement, Italy is on the short list.
Is Italy a real thing or are Lombards just Very South Germans?
Hospitals being an issue in pandemics is not something new. Its quite common for healthcare areas to become major areas of spread.
Speaking about hospitals. I was just looking at this picture. Numbers are per 100k. Upper right corner is a major fuckup by a single hospital manager, with heights of stupidity like “let’s call every doctor for a meeting at 7am, including those that are in isolation at home because they already tested positive, keep them in the same room for 40 minutes then cancel the meeting”. We now have military management there plus the whole area under sever quarantine and things are slowly getting back under control.
Nothing else was remotely as bad. The west side hotspot is a major border crossing, so it’s somewhat justified.
Recent data isn’t complete (I believe the main delay is that they aren’t added to that chart until testing has been finished). There is near-real-time data on influenza-like-illness hospital visits and admits, linked on that page under “NYC Emergency Department Surveillance Data”. It shows that the peak was reached somewhere around April 1.
I expect that NYC was either at or near the point that the epidemic would recede on its own (“herd immunity”) when the lockdown was put in place. If you’re following a strategy of avoiding overloading hospitals, it’s time and past time to open up, but the political incentives run against that.
That’s fair. Ok, so the dropoff the last few days is not so dramatic. Bummer. Gonna keep checking the next few days to see what happens.
It’s important to recognize that, like everything from R(t) to testing protocols, IFRs are not constant across locales. Beyond the obvious things (e.g., local demographics, incidence of co-morbidities, air pollution), you also need to factor in level of care and availability of that care. It’s unlikely that NYC’s IFR is close to the best-cases scenarios if only because NYC has had a ton of stress put on its medical providers.
This article is very CW, but I’m hoping for a good-faith discussion. It is about what the author calls “avocado politics” in analogy to “watermelon politics” (i.e. green on the outside, red on the inside:
The short-comings of this article are obvious. Aside from the gratuitous Godwinning, there’s serious out-group homogeneity bias: the political right does have environmental ideas aside from restricting immigration (from grass-roots wildlife conservation efforts of hunting and angling groups, to the market-based ideas of e.g. PERC); and not everyone who wants some restrictions on immigration can fairly be described as far-right. Despite these weaknesses, I found it a worthwhile read for a couple of reasons: it covers some interesting history of how ecology and eugenics had common ground in the past, and it makes some predictions that I find plausible (if you take away the sneering) about environmental-based arguments being increasingly deployed in support of the positions of the political right. In the aftermath of coronavirus, I expect this to be even more pronounced–not just with respect to immigration, but also on topics like nudging development away from crowded cities, re-shoring industry from places in Asia with low pollution control, etc.
Eco-fascists exist, but I don’t see them getting traction at all in the US, nor likely in Europe (which has center-right parties willing to hand victories over to the left to keep the far-right at bay)
Yo. Environmental damage done by human expansion is an ancient tragedy, and as such I don’t have fixed Utopian ideas for how to stop it (see “literary worldviews” below). The Epic of Gilgamesh has verses mourning that cedar trees got chopped down in Syria, destroying habitat of animals such as monkeys. Any tragedy that has been noted and not fixed for 4,000+ years must involve trade-offs, which I cannot dogmatically fix. But I care about the issue.
Also from Sumeria:
“By 2000 BC crop yields were down by half. Clay tablets tell of the earth turning white in places as the rising layer of salt reached the surface.”
Yep, we have a 4000-year history of overworking the soil to feed more people.
Egypt may be the only 4th millennium BC Cradle of Civilization where humans didn’t cause desertification. I’m not familiar enough with Yellow River agriculture.
A big part of the reason the center of demographic and economic gravity in China shifted South over the course of the Tang and Song periods was because of increasing erosion/desertification and the decline of agriculture in the Ordos region (the former country of origin for Imperial power, where the Qin originally ruled and both the Former Han and Tang dynasties located their capitols) and the increasing reliance in that region on river/canal delivered foodstuffs for the cities. The battle between soil deposition in the canals and the need to keep them open for food delivery eventually made locating very large urban populations there untenable.
The North China Plain itself has different climactic problems. Erosion in that area doesn’t tend to necessarily lead to desertification (it’s too well watered), instead it leads to flooding. Eroded soil finds its way into rivers, which become shallower and shallower and, eventually, break their banks. Floods kill a few hundred thousand people, the river jumps to a new course, and the whole cycle starts over. Some desertification did happen (Northeast China in the Beijing area used to be more fertile), but it hasn’t spread too deeply into the plain itself.
A similar thing happened far later in South China. In the late Ming and Qing dynasties you had itinerant farmers start cutting down forests in the uplands, the hills surrounding the myriad river valleys of the area, farming the clearing for a few years until the soil that was no longer held in place by foilage drained into the valley and their terraces started to collapse, then they’d move on to another hilltop. The soil erosion found its way into rivers similar to the process in the North China Plain, the silting up of rivers would cause periodic flooding, but the south is far, far too well watered to become desert. Instead, formerly heavily flora and fauna inhabited highlands have simply become barren rock over the centuries and the river valleys have become somewhat more flood prone (although they don’t usually jump course, for obvious reasons).
The Chinese environment has definitely been comprehensively ruined by several millennia of intensive agriculture, but just in different ways from what happened in the Near East and in places like Greece and Italy.
The most telling part, in my opinion, is at the end – where he calls for ‘counter-arguments’, but seems at a loss as to where they might be found.
I have never heard the term watermelon politics before, but I love it. I remember when I first heard of the Green Party in Germany. It was the ’70’s, and I thought it was pretty cool that a whole party was focused on fixing the environment. It was not until decades later, when the Greens became a power in the US (in urban areas at least), that I was disappointed to realize that they were just a party of the far left, with a little stronger environmental focus than other leftists.
I don’t think environmentalist inherently has to be a synonym for big government fan, and in fact in the ’50’s I don’t think that was the case. It meant someone who cared about maintaining nature on a personal level, not clamoring for the government to fix stuff. And in fact many of the right have always been environmentalists in that sense. There are large groups of people that are hunters and fishermen, which is a group that is both highly conservative and very much into nature. It is also strongest in middle America, so little media coverage.
But skimming the article, I saw little evidence of avocado politics. Sure the right will take great advantage of the contradictions of the left between the Green movement and anti-poverty movement. The article pointed out how some of these contradictions, such as how bringing the third world out of poverty inevitably greatly increases their carbon footprint. The writer seems to want to combat the right taking advantage of these contradictions, whereas maybe he should be more concerned about the left figuring out how to resolve these contradictions themselves? In any case, he gave little evidence that the right has a serious interest in the environment, at least in politics.
This is a common pattern that drives me crazy: ‘our opponents have noticed that our platform has conflicting desires, how can we prevent them succeeding against us by pointing at these contradictions, while we don’t actually resolve them?’
I’m also concerned about the trend, though from the opposite direction.
It makes a certain amount of strategic sense for the Right to embrace the “eco” narratives. If there is one idea I’d like to beat into the heads of the American Right’s leaders, it is the importance of appealing to intelligent, competent people. The man the Right needs, quoting the bible isn’t going to appeal to him. Claiming you love the planet and are concerned it’s overpopulated and overheating might. He grew up reading these sci-fi novels where “overpopulation” was just assumed, where only rank stupidity or religious fanaticism would lead any to dispute the “obvious” truth. This narrative was a good story, one which let the smart young man feel superior to the hoi polloi, for he understood exponential growth. The story was so elegant he didn’t think to ask himself why decade after decade none of the predictions panned out; people kept getting richer and richer. More recently he embraces the climate alarmist narrative and considers it inconsequential that the predicted catastrophes have been ten years away for at least twenty years now.
Still, overpopulation and climate alarmism are not supported by facts. The smart man may eventually recognize this and you wouldn’t want to be tied to that sinking ship if he does. And fundamentally, what happens when you take power and are expected to put these ideas into practice? This reminds me of an Arab proverb:
The version of that story I know is about a Texas oil man who dies and goes to Heaven. Unfortunately, Heaven isn’t that great, because there are too many other oil men there. Harps and wings are out of stock, there’s a long line at the heavenly golf course.
He thinks about the problem and solves it by starting a rumor that they have struck oil down in Hell. It works. No line at the golf course. Wings and harp show up.
But he starts worrying about that oil strike down in Hell that he’s missing out on. So …
I picture Daniel Day-Lewis as the oilman.
Climate alarmism is not supported by facts? I would be interested to see your reasoning.
Some very sound facts seem to support it, in my view:
– C02 levels have risen [1]
– Mean global temperature has risen [2]
– Sea levels have risen [3]
– Anthropogenic related extreme weather events have increased [4]
Do you dispute these facts? Or perhaps you dispute that they are cause for alarm?
===
1: Keeling, C. D. 1986. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii 1958–1986.
2: Folland et al., 2001. Global temperature change and its uncertainties
3: Cazenave et al., 2004. Present‐day sea level change: Observations and causes
4: Fischer & Knutti, 2015. Anthropogenic contribution to global occurrence of heavy-precipitation and high-temperature extremes
Notice that the claim is about “extreme weather events” but the data is for particular forms of extreme weather events expected to increase with climate change.
A low-temperature extreme is just as much an extreme weather event as a high-temperature extreme, but isn’t being counted. Similarly for low precipitation events.
That wasn’t directed to me, but I’m happy to respond.
Climate change has both positive and negative effects. Climate alarmism ignores the positive effects, exaggerates the negative, concludes that the net is large and negative.
Start with those climate extremes. Greenhouse warming tends to be greater in cold times and places, because of the interaction with water vapor, also a greenhouse gas. On average, increased warmth is a good thing when it is cold, a bad thing when it is hot, so the pattern is biased in our favor.
As it happens, there is an old Lancet article that estimated global mortality from heat and from cold. Mortality from cold was much higher.
Combine those and think again about the implication of looking at the increase in unusually high temperature events and ignoring the decrease in unusually low temperature events.
One more example. There is a lot of alarmist talk about decreased crop production, despite the fact that warming so far has been associated with increasing yields. That all depends on uncertain predictions of the effect of climate change on precipitation and the ways in which farmers adjust to that and increased temperatures/longer growing seasons.
There is, however, one unambiguous effect — CO2 fertilization. Doubling CO2 concentration, roughly what the IPCC projects for the end of the century, increases the yield of C3 plants (most crops other than maize and sugar cane) by about 30%, of C4 crops by less, while reducing the need for water. That effect is well established experimentally and depends on only the first step in the causal chain, the increase in CO2 that drives the rest.
My point being that there are large positive effects, and they may well be larger than the negative effects. Climate alarmism mostly ignores them.
Now a simple question: Were you aware of either of the positive effects I mentioned? If you were, perhaps you can explain why they are not major pluses.
If you were not, you might think about whether your present beliefs on the subject are based on scientific knowledge or one-sided propaganda. If the latter, it doesn’t follow that you should shift to my conclusion, only that you should abandon yours, since you have no adequate reason to believe it.
Yes, I’m well aware of the potential positive effects. It’s the same argument you make whenever it comes up. In fact, I recall you being rather pleased about your education of some poor Facebook users about how CO2 isn’t an insulator, and that this somehow demonstrated something important about people who are concerned about climate change.
I remain unconvinced. Increased crop yields in Canada (a place where there is very little agricultural infrastructure) are substantially less important to me than massive geopolitical destabilization that will occur if a hundred million people in Bangladesh are turned into refugees due to rising sea levels.
Where does this idea come from? I’ve read a well-cited UN report on projected climate migration. They sensibly used a gravity model, which is common in current migration models. This reflects things like, “Economic changes,” and, “I moved over here to get a better job.” Hardly disastrous things. And in their end result, IIRC, basically every case study they showed had “climate migration” being relatively small compared to the baseline (like 20% or so; I’d have to do a bit of digging to find the actual numbers). I don’t see how “something like a 20% increase, happening slowly, of a regular process that already happens slowly” implies “massive geopolitical destabilization”. Certainly I don’t see any way to justify that claim in comparison to the baseline (whatever magic you’re using to project the geopolitical baseline on those timescales).
Wonderful. Nice to know that I’m doing some good.
What I said was that I stopped arguing climate issues on FB after concluding that almost nobody on either side of the argument understood the greenhouse effect.
As I may have pointed out before, there is a nice web page that lets you see the effect of any level of sea level rise. I suggest that you take a look at it and try to find out what level you have to assume to displace a hundred million people from Bangladesh. Start with a meter, which is about the high end of the IPCC estimate for the end of this century as of the 5th report.
If you conclude that that floods out fewer than ten million, will that in any way change your view of the basis for your climate beliefs?
The time before the last time you linked it, I went on a dive to try and determine where all the errors in that map are coming from. Punchline is that the 90% confidence interval of the source data is apparently 16m even before accounting for tidal effects (and it isn’t hard to find areas exceeding that if you check). It’s a neat tool for convincing people that we won’t flood an appreciable fraction of Earth’s total land area, but I wish you wouldn’t link it as though it had something useful to say about AGW over any meaningful time frame.
Could you provide a link to the source of that claim?
The source data, as best I can tell, is a topographic map of the world. Is your point that heights could be off by as much as 16 meters? What matters is the difference between the altitude of the current coastline and of points inland. Are you suggesting that, for some reason, the map gets the terrain inland much higher than it really is, but not the adjacent coastal terrain?
On their own about page http://blog.firetree.net/2006/05/18/more-about-flood-maps/ linked in the map footer.
See for example https://www.usgs.gov/land-resources/eros/topochange/science/accuracy-assessment-elevation-data?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects
In case of city/forest along sea SRTM will often record top of building/tree as a ground level. For obvious reasons it will underestimate sea level rise effects as trees and buildings are usually on land and rarely in the sea. So there is a systematic error overestimating differences between sea level and terrain level.
See https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/effects-a-vegetation-canopy-srtm-data “The large difference in the middle of the profile, ranging up to 15 meters, is due solely to the presence of trees.”
This simulation is useless for demonstrating “see, sea level rise is not a problem”.
There are a few other error sources given the specific implementation, but matkoniecz covered the large ones. Building a topographic map of the planet accurate to within a meter is fairly difficult, to say the least.
There is good reason to believe the dataset being used systematically but not uniformly overestimates elevation changes at coastlines (and therefore underestimates sea level change effects). Separately, there is a noticeable amount of noise in the underlying measurements. These effects render the map filters 9m and below extremely unreliable, which includes all but the crudest uses in the AGW debate.
I’m not sure I understand the difference. Eco-socialism and eco-fascism would both use environmentalism as a Trojan horse to make the state more authoritarian and put the collective before the individual. A right wing take on climate change would for me mean a carbon tax – i.e. use economic incentives.
Perhaps more fascist than socialist are the calls for accepting mass surveillance because of COVID (“lives are at stake, so the usual restrictions don’t apply”), but for the environment, the main drive seems to be for five year plans and reducing the (profitability of the) private sector.
I think he has in mind mostly foreign policy and immigration policy: use the threat of military force to prevent rises in emissions from developing countries, and clamp down in immigration from those countries.
I just finished reading Garett Jones’ book “10% Less Democracy”. I would really like to see Scott’s review. It’s short, punchy, clear, and entertaining and I’d highly recommend it. I’m biased in its favor, being an anti-populist epistocratic elitist already, but I think his arguments are really strong and well presented.
One highlight is the discussion of the EU, which will be especially useful to non-EU folks who have no idea how EU governance works. The “qualified majority” concept, where one common route to passing legislation needs 55% of all states voting yes, but also states representing 65% of total EU population voting yes, is super interesting. You could imagine introducing something like it in the US Senate in place of the filibuster: if to pass a Senate vote you had to simultaneously get both 51 Senators and a set of Senators representing 51% of Americans voting yes, you’d retain the small-state/rural-state check on large-state power, but also remove one of the main democratic (and usually Democratic) complaints about the Senate, namely that majorities of Senators representing a minority of the population can do things that the majority of Americans oppose.
Two things I thought could have been improved:
1. There is no discussion of parliamentary vs presidential systems, which seems odd since in a key respect parliamentary systems seem to be “less democratic” in the sense Jones says is good. Namely, the executive is not elected directly by the voters separately from the legislature, but instead chosen by the legislators. Moreover, a lot of parliamentary systems also use party-list proportional representation, which replaces voter choice of individual candidates with voter choice of parties and party insider choice of individual candidates– something Jonathan Rauch et al ought to love. Do we see good effects from parliamentarianism and/or party-list voting on governance quality? Are these gains, if they exist, offset by the lack of a check-and-balance dynamic between executive and legislature? I’d love to hear what Jones thinks about these questions.
2. The discussion of positive effects of earmarks is very US centric. Sure, earmarks are one way to build consensus through transactional negotiation. But are they really the best path? Do countries that are often thought of as having relatively effective governance (say, the Nordics, Taiwan, Canada, Australia, NZ) have earmarks? If not, how do they do their transactional negotiation– or do they not need it? Jones doesn’t say.
Yes, but that’s the whole point of the Senate / House combination. You can’t get a law to the President’s desk without it going through both, so we already have to get most states and most population to agree. Maybe the EU stole this idea from the US.
salvor — you need to write a review on this one yourself. I’d like to hear what you think. That’s the whole point of these open-ended comments in my opinion; we don’t need to wait on Scott to bring up a topic. Many of us here, me included, are very interested in electoral systems, so if he has interesting things to say, please tell us.
Agreed, this is a good enough book that I’ll try and find time to read it again and write a review as I go; thanks for the prompt.
Re: Senate, that’s indeed the idea of balancing it with the House, but it falls short because:
— in practice the House is also somewhat unrepresentative due to gerrymandering
— there are a bunch of very consequential things the Senate and President can do together without the House, notably appointments (judicial, Cabinet) and treaties, and the systems for electing both are biased toward the same minority bloc.
It is true that the Senate can do some stuff without the House, such as blessing treaties and confirmations. I normally think of passing laws as a lot more consequential, but there certainly has been a lot of publicity for the last couple of decades on treaties and confirmations. So I agree with you partially.
Earmarks are effective when there are competing influential coalitions with distinct material interests. I think size and diversity (geographic and otherwise) influence the importance of earmarks to the system’s stability, and would explain why they’d play more of a role in the U.S. than the other countries mentioned. Also, democracies that developed their government structure more recently could take a more top-down approach because of things like mass broadcasting, an “expert class,” and administrative systems that didn’t exist when the U.S.’s system was being formed.
I’m from New Zealand. We don’t have as much transactional negotiation because of the parliamentary system — the government by definition needs to have the confidence of a majority of sitting MPs, so important bills are passed in toto by the MPs in the governing party or coalition. The US can have a divided House, divided Senate, and a president without a majority in either house, so you need the horse-trading to get things passed. That’s less common in a parliamentary system (though not impossible — witness Brexit, where you had Tory MPs not willing to support the Government’s business in Parliament but also, in most cases, not willing to say they did not have confidence in the Government).
On your other point, I agree that in some senses you could say a parliamentary system is “less democratic” than a presidential system. My old law professor said that NZ has a “thin” constitution; get 50% + 1 MPs and you can do what you want without limits. The US has a comparatively “thick” constitution, in that the way it is established means that a clean sweep of all directly elected positions by one party doesn’t give you unfettered power — you still have SCOTUS and the Constitution to limit actions of the legislature and the executive. Of course, from another point of view, in some ways that is “less democratic” than the NZ system; in the US a majority of the population can clearly demand something which is unconstitutional and it will be unlawful.
@salvorhardin
But this is exactly what is missing in the EU. In most of the EU states, the globalists have more power than their share of the population would justify, also because the deep state tends to back them, as well as the media.
Then at the EU level, you get another layer of the same disenfranchisement of the localists, with the EU deep state being even more biased.
This is why the EU is so hated by populists and those who favor democratic justice, as it’s two layers of disenfranchisement stacked on top of each other.
Downthread you are complaining about needing universal EU state approval for something new.
You’re allowed to have complicated opinions on the EU.
@HeelBearCub
I didn’t complain about that. I complained about the dumb thing they did because they didn’t want to get consensus for a COVID-specific help plan, but decided to abuse an already dysfunctional subsidy system, because doing so didn’t require going to the proper political process.
Ultimately, the EU is a hydra with many bad elements and some good elements, including good parts of the bad elements and bad parts of the good elements.
The requirement for state consensus on many major topics seems crucial for the EU to not become even more controlled by the globalists, although the layered system is also very bad from a democratic point of view.
Yet what is the alternative? The plan was to neuter the states and empower the EU parliament, but the EU parliament doesn’t function well as a democratic institution and the voting system is absurd. You don’t actually get to vote for the political parties that exist in parliament, but for national parties that then become part of the EU political parties. It seems designed to make it impossible for a casual person to understand EU parliament politics, who voted for what, etc.
PS. I don’t particularly believe that it is the EU’s job to create huge subsidy programs for nations hit hard by COVID, but if they are going to have such a program and demand credit for it, I want it to actually help those who are hit hardest, rather than what I expect will happen: that a lot of corrupt people will get to buy a new Ferrari.
It just seems a little blinkered to complain in one argument that there is no check that small states can have on the globalists, and in another complain that the unanimity requirement prevents any reasonable way of providing extra funding.
The EU requirement for unanimity means that the “most rural/small states” have full veto power.
You are being very stubborn by continuously misreading me.
Again, I was not complaining about the need for unanimity. I was complaining about the choice by the European Commission to evade the proper political process, choosing a very flawed solution that probably will result in tax payer money being wasted on corruption and waste, and that certainly doesn’t result in the money going to the places that were hardest hit.
I would much prefer a delay to do it right or for nothing to have been done. This is tax payer money. I prefer it not getting spent over it being wasted. I also prefer that politicians don’t claim credit for solving issues, when they didn’t.
My argument/belief is also not that the small states have no ability to single-handedly prevent certain policies from being enacted, but that the globalists in the member states have a disproportionate amount of power, because of mechanisms which amplify the votes of certain citizens and dampen the votes of others. Mechanisms that do this also exist on the EU level.
So for example, imagine that a EU country’s population on average favor doing globalist policy X at 50% of the maximum possible (where a higher percentage is closer to the preferred policy of the most extremist globalist). However, these mechanisms then result in the national parliament being in favor of setting it at 60%.
Then lets say that there is only one other country at the EU level, whose population prefers 55%, while their parliament favors 65%.
Then when it gets to the EU, the EU commission is going to coerce both these countries to accept 70%, rather than let the countries meet in the middle, because the EU has their own agenda.
Yet in an actually democratic system, parliament would represent their people and they might compromise at the EU level, resulting in getting (50+55)/2 = 50.25% of the policy, which is a lot lower than 70%. The gap is undemocratic oppression of the people who prefer a less globalist policy.
Note that I don’t favor conformity at the EU level for certain topics, as I believe that no strong de facto European polity exists, which makes it impossible to make extensive policy at the European level.
* Although there is a fairly strong lobby to get rid of these veto powers, by the most ardent globalists.
Why aren’t the parliaments of these EU countries doing this already? You claim the globalists are amplified by “mechanisms”, but I assume that mechanism is basically “don’t vote for non-globalist parties in sufficient number”.
And the inefficient kludge you are complaining about seems to be, by your own report, the result of needing to do something about lack of funds in various health services, but being constrained by existing rules on how that can be done. Doing nothing isn’t really an option. You seem to have agreed with the idea that money is actually needed.
So, how would you envision a more equitable distribution of funds being made possible?
@HeelBearCub
No, my claim is that a single vote for a non-globalist party has less impact on policy than a single vote on a globalist party & also that parties use their ‘fuck my voters allowance*’ on globalism. The latter means that the voting options are restricted in the first place.
For example, imagine that a party has an ideology that either fits just as well with globalism as with anti-globalism; or actually fits better with the latter, while the party is actively globalist. I would argue that this is the case for Green parties, who tend to oppose long-distance travel, long-distance trade, etc. This fits way better with localism than with globalism. Yet if you are an anti-globalist Dutch ‘green’ voter, you have to choose between voting ‘green’ or voting anti-globalist. A globalist ‘green’ voter can vote his conscience much better.
A major mechanism by which some votes count for more is that both Dutch parties and Dutch coalitions are dominated by the better educated and better connected. There is a reason why populist rhetoric invokes class consciousness, to use a Marxist term.
Another mechanism is that the media far more aggressively goes after the anti-globalists than the globalists and shills more for the latter than the former. Propaganda works and the globalist side has more of it.
* Parties/politicians don’t actually maximally cater to their voters. This is similar to how normal people can get away with a certain amount of weirdness (weirdness points), rather than making themselves maximally agreeable. Of course, if the politicians misjudge this or are ideologically wedded to policies that too many people reject, you get Trump, Brexit, etc.
You keep telling me that I wrote things that I can’t remember writing. Am I becoming forgetful?
Its pretty obvious that this pandemic is very costly, but less for the costs of healthcare than for the disruption to the economy. I do think that government funds have to be spent to combat this, but I’m not convinced that the states can’t finance this at the moment. Do any countries have imminent liquidity problems?
If there are no issues with liquidity/loans, then no international interventions are necessary in the short term.
Aside from preventing catastrophic problems, there is also the simple possibility of solidarity by the least hit with those most affected. Such a temporary wealth transfer obviously should then be customized to help those hardest hit. Alter all, if you want wealth transfers for any other reason, then it has nothing to do with this pandemic and there is no reason in particular to do it now. Here it is even more doubtful whether short term interventions are useful, since those who are doing fairly well now may be hit much harder later.
Neither of these necessarily require, or are best done by the EU, especially since it is such a hopeless institution.
The one thing that the EU could uniquely do, coordinate the distribution of materials and such, they have dropped the ball on massively. Some countries have enough masks for regular citizens, while others (*cough*The Netherlands*cough*) don’t even have enough for secondary (health) care workers (nursing homes, care at home, etc).
The Trump administration seems to do that much, much better, which is like having a paraplegic beat you at the 100 meter sprint.
An article about the lockdown protests from Vox.
Well, he must be pretty knowledgeable about the Tea Party, right?
Guess I dreamed going to that Tea Party rally in the fall of 2008.
Is it possible that a Harvard professor would be this ignorant of something he’s written two books on?
Yes.
Either that was a leading question or you’re in the wrong OT!
Oh, it was definitely leading. I know they say never ascribe malice when stupidity will fit the facts, but I think he’s just straight-out lying.
Yes.
Fuzzy logic rooted in statism isn’t quite the same as just bold-faced lying about an easily verifiable fact. JustToSay has it right about that downthread.
This matches my recollection (though I would probably have placed that monologue in 2008 as well, as I recall it being a response to Bush proposed bank bailouts), though I recall hearing that Ron Paul had some prior claim to the term.
The tea party was in response to the bank bailouts. Bingo. They were pretty much solidly libertarian affairs for months. Then after Obama was elected, the press decided it was because they were racist against a black president. Any events before the election just weren’t spoken of anymore. Of course, some of those people joined after the media told them it was for them repeatedly. It started to change. Gotta be some principle that’s been defined for that occurance.
It looked to me, from outside, like a lot of the change in the nature of the Tea Party came because conservative media were their internal communications, and big conservative media outlets were much more comfortable with some ideas (opposition to Obamacare, say) than with others (opposition to bailouts for big well-connected companies, opposition to more dumbass wars in the middle east).
@albatross11
That was definitely in play as well.
Yeah, I’m sure that there were protests at plenty of times in history referencing, you know, one of the most famous American protests of all time, but there was a distinct genesis of a movement in early 2009, to the best of my recollection.
It was a rally for fiscal conservatism called Tea Party. It was in several cities. Don’t know what else to tell you. I attended in Houston. They were pissed at Bush.
I have photos. And apparently it wasn’t fall, just almost. They’re dated from September 2008.
Yes, I also received info about Tea Party protests before the 2008 election, though I didn’t attend. September sounds right. This would have been in Virginia or DC or something.
While it’s not something I pay a whole lot of attention to, I’ve also occasionally seen references to people saying that the Tea Party stuff started in 2009 with Obama and mostly have assumed they’re deliberately lying to push the “Tea Party = racism” narrative. This thread is interesting because this is about as high-trust a forum as I can get on the Internet and I don’t assume any of you are deliberately lying.
So that said: rumham is right. The Tea Party “movement” started in 2008 after the bank bailouts, before the election.
Same here. I was starting to think I somehow jumped timelines.
@rumham
Jif or Jiffy? Berenstein or Berenstain? When did Mandela die?
Just trying to get your multiversal bearings.
Whose gonna break it to him who the president is in this timeline?
There’s a great and underserved appetite for lying about simple stuff to smart people in a way that flatters their hunger for complications and secret knowledge. You found someone profiting off it. Call it the Hillbilly Elegy pattern, if you like. There are plenty more just like your professor.
The basic gist is that for obvious reasons each side of things drips with utter and total contempt for its opposite number. (political parties that don’t dehumanize their enemies are outcompeted by those which do, etc etc). If you ever read the old LW article about one sided tradeoffs you get the gist. It isn’t just that the side you find yourself on is better on the balance of issues, dear reader, we are in fact the better side on each and every issue that exists, and also our opposite numbers drool when they talk and smell terribly.
The problem arises when the other team wins an election, which happens about (tell no one) half the time. It’s really hard to reconcile the lurching monstrosities we’ve been trained to view the other team as with 51% of the population.
This is where your professor and their ilk steps in. The masquerade can go on if they can pull a “What’s the matter with Kansas” and come up with a flattering explanation for how the opponents can be literal Skeletor and also win a popularity contest with us.
If that’s how you make your bread, if that’s what your deal is…then you don’t really have to get your facts exactly right. You are aiming to reassure, not to actually explain. What you need to sell books about the Tea Party to liberals you want to flatter isn’t domain knowledge of the subject matter of your books, it’s domain knowledge of the liberals you want to flatter.
People be like ‘how can Trump be too dumb to tie his shoes and also beat us’. You don’t need to know stuff about Trump, you need to know who the audience will buy as a plausible mastermind. You whip up “He’s in the KGB” based off your read on the audience, not actually trying to figure how that would work. If they leaned a different way you could just as easily say he’s in the pay of Israel.
So you get the year of the Tea Party wrong? Big deal. Who’s gonna tell that to anyone? Vox? NY Times? It doesn’t seem likely that it outcompetes the other stories, right? And if Fox or the right-wing-o-sphere gets ahold of your error and comes to dunk on you…great? They’d be advertising your lies to another audience you can’t reach alone! You should be so lucky.
Your prof isn’t immune to the same pressures that made the political parties what they are. Anyone who’d be like “Wow, I lied to people on the subject they trust me for, I’m a sham!’, has already been outcompeted and replaced by someone without that weakness.
Whenever the news reports on something you know anything about you’ll be appalled by how little they grok, how shallow the version that gets repeated is. The trick of it is that for some reason, even after that’s happened, when you see them reporting on something else they’ll seem credible and sensible again. Cling to this moment, and let it guide you the next time your hear a website assert its authority.
@walter
Sounds about right. I am familiar with Gell-Mann Amnesia. I have taken to scouring politifact and snopes for reinforcement against it. For example, I found this one the other day: Hospitals get paid more to list patients as COVID-19.. It was rated half true.
What do you think it should have been rated? The claim that hospitals get paid more for COVID-19 patients is true. The insinuation that they’re committing Medicare fraud by lying about which patients have COVID-19 is almost certainly false. I’d call it…half true.
Eh, I might even go for “mostly false” since the thrust of the claim has no evidence and is highly unlikely. The only reason they put out the true fact that hospitals get more for COVID-19 patients is to support the claim they’re faking COVID-19 patients to get the extra payments. But there’s no evidence they’re doing that, and it sounds pretty unlikely. Yes, Medicare fraud happens, but it’s usually a scam run by small physician-owned clinics, not major hospital systems.
I disagree. The base claim that hospitals get paid more to say COVID is 100% true. That’s the only thing that a fact checker can really establish objectively.
Yes, the reason for stating that base fact is to imply that some deaths are being improperly encoded (which is technically fraud). And given a basic understanding of economic incentives, that is a reasonable thing to assume. Of course it can’t be easily proven. But that doesn’t make it “false” either.
What a fair fact checker should state in this situation is:
1. The base claim is true
2. The base claim quite reasonably implies that some sort of fraud is probably happening, given everything we understand about economics and human behavior
3. There is not, as of yet, any direct evidence either way as to whether this fraud is or is not happening
@Conrad Honcho
I think it should be rated true. What would you rate the statement “the atmosphere is composed of oxygen and other gasses”?
Someone might think that that implies that there is mostly oxygen in the atmosphere. So is it half true? Or mostly false?
Like the previous example. I would rate it true.
“True.” Now what you would you rate, “the atmosphere is composed of oxygen and other gasses that rumham could use to kill puppies?”
I don’t think it’s all that reasonable, because of both the nature of healthcare fraud and everything we understand about human behavior in structured organizations like hospitals.
Healthcare fraud is mostly done by small operations, either unscrupulous physicians or people posing as them. The doctor himself, or his office manager wife, submits knowingly false claims to Medicare for procedures they didn’t do, or inflated versions of procedures they did. They do the crime, and keep the money.
Not so much hospitals. How does this work exactly? In a big hospital, you’ve got the CEO, and then the head of Billing and Accounts Receivable, and then probably some manager specifically for Medicare, and then all the coders who work submitting Medicare claims. So, the CEO tells the BAR manager “lie about COVID-19 patients,” and he goes to the Medicare manager and says “let’s lie about COVID-19 patients,” and she goes to the $50k/year coder and says “lie about COVID-19 patients for us” and everybody says “okay!” Nobody bothers to call the Medicare fraud tip line? These are federal crimes, with jail time. That would be lots of people caught up in a criminal conspiracy.
This does not seem likely to me. Or, it certainly doesn’t seem likely for some place that wasn’t already committing some kind of widespread Medicare fraud. But the vast, vast majority of hospitals are not defrauding Medicare and begging for massive fines and jail sentences. Just saying, there isn’t anything special about COVID-19 payments that are going to make non-fraudulent hospitals become fraudulent ones. How much Medicare fraud do you think hospital systems are committing in general? What’s the base rate here?
If my job is to check facts? True. That is a true statement.
Going beyond checking the fact and commenting on whether or not I believe rumham is a likely puppy-killer crosses the line into regular journalistic commentary.
Note that this is precisely why huge swaths of the American public no longer trust fact-checkers at all. Because even if you assume that their constant veering into normal journalistic commentary is a noble effort deigned to provide “greater context” to facts that might otherwise mislead, it still represents an abandonment of their core mission in such a way as to remove the distinction between them, and a larger group of people (regular journalists) that we already know to be heavily biased and unworthy of trust.
@Matt M
+1 puppy
I could not agree more.
Partly false, I think most people would incorrectly read this as saying that you can kill puppies with the other gasses in the atmosphere but not with oxygen, but not the correct ‘runhum can use any gas in the atmosphere to kill puppies’.
@Conrad Honcho
Is that really the only way you think that could happen? I mean, I don’t know if it’s happening or not, but I can envision a much more plausible scenario. How about a directive from up top “all respiratory illinesses will be coded COVID-19 even if we don’t have enough tests to go around.”
Yeah, I think the directive from the top would read something like “If in doubt, mark it COVID.”
This would not be asking anyone to lie or to commit fraud, but would definitely result in more COVID cases than you would otherwise see, and would result in an overstatement of COVID cases nationally.
This is a longish look at some of the claims about cause of death records and Corona virus from a blogger I like.
You don’t even need that directive, people’s biases will at some point cause them to mark things Covid that aren’t absent a higher up enforcing rigor.
In settlements reached in 2000 and 2002, Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to a $600+ million fine in what was at the time the largest health care fraud settlement in American history. Columbia/HCA admitted systematically overcharging the government by claiming marketing costs as reimbursable, by striking illegal deals with home care agencies, and by filing false data about use of hospital space. They also admitted fraudulently billing Medicare and other health programs by inflating the seriousness of diagnoses and to giving doctors partnerships in company hospitals as a kickback for the doctors referring patients to HCA. They filed false cost reports, fraudulently billing Medicare for home health care workers, and paid kickbacks in the sale of home health agencies and to doctors to refer patients. In addition, they gave doctors “loans” never intending to be repaid, free rent, free office furniture, and free drugs from hospital pharmacies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott#Career
Medical billing requires documentation. You can’t just make stuff up. You need to look at the specific Medicare guidelines for getting the 20% boost and meet those. If they’re not doing that, it’s fraud.
But the things you are saying about fraud for COVID-19 are the same as for any other type of healthcare fraud. There’s no reason for a hospital that’s been scrupulous about Medicare billing to suddenly start lying about COVID-19.
@TheContinentalOp
Thank you for proving my point. If you need to go all the way back to 2002 to find a hospital fraud case, it’s probably pretty damn rare, and not something we need to be concerned about at any large number of hospitals spread throughout the country right now.
@Randy M
That was highly informative. Thank you.
> There’s no reason for a hospital that’s been scrupulous about Medicare billing to suddenly start lying about COVID-19.
Didn’t the Federal government agree to cover all of the costs associated with Covid-19 care? If so, there might be an incentive to over-ascribe cases which are more ambiguous.
Walter:
The strategy you’re describing is pretty much the fundamental theorem of Trump.
I don’t think britannica is to be trusted on CW issues. I just read their article on the the female worker ant controversy (blocked term) and it is largely nonsense. I can’t post the link here cause the word is banned, but you can google it.
Today I learned a new thing about ants, so thanks for choosing the circumlocution you did.
Right? That’s a GREAT one. Consider this my addition to the thanks as well, @runham.
Really? “Reproductively viable worker ants” has been SSC circumlocution for at least six years.
I got it from this forum.
Speaking from the elite liberal bubble, there was no real awareness of the Tea Party movement here until Santelli started ranting about it on CNBC. For all I know, there really was a groundswell of fiscal conservatism in 2008, but to the solipsists in the mainstream media it doesn’t exist until they report on it.
Like most on the left I see fiscal conservatism as a mile wide and an inch deep. Maybe I’m wrong and there really are a lot of Justin Amash supporters out there, but I doubt it.
I think this is…. fair but incomplete.
I would say the tea party was representative of a brief but fleeting moment, taking place in the run-up to, debate over, and immediate aftermath of the 2008-09 bailouts, when many conservatives decided to start taking fiscal conservatism seriously.
Which cost a few long-standing incumbent GOP congresspersons their jobs. Not by angry conservatives staying home, but by getting primaried out in what looked like “safe” solidly red districts.
But it didn’t last. The 2010 elections saw quite a few “tea party” reps get pushed into office because they were supposedly fiscally conservative. But then the voters stopped caring, so they did as well. Ted Cruz and Jeff Flake are notable names among this group.
“Conservatives claim to care about fiscal responsibility but they don’t really” is correct most of the time, but incumbent GOP leadership who assumed it was still true in 2010 learned the hard way that it wasn’t correct at that exact moment in time…
I think the shallowness of the movement is fair too. I was legitimately convinced by Tea Party type arguments that government spending, pensions, and entitlements were going to be a major problem, worth whatever shutdowns and debt ceilings etc. it took to change course.
Maybe, as discussed upthread, they are still a sword of Damocles.
But it seemed that both the predictions failed and the predictors were hypocritical, so now, while my instincts run frugal, it doesn’t really keep me up at night, so to speak.
This is my recollection of the pre-Obama “Tea Party”, which was definitely a thing and which I viewed as a positive thing at the time. I was very disappointed to see the evolution of the movement (and the reaction of the movement) devolve into stupid tribalism in the Obama era, and particularly the enthusiastic adoption of Birtherism by the tea-partiers. Which was also definitely a thing. Maybe the Tea
Party turned into an enduring, positive thing in the universe where Mitt Romney won that election.
If the people who didn’t notice the Tea Party until it started attacking their beloved president, are trying to retcon the history of this universe into something where the Tea Party was only ever created to conduct stupid racist attacks on their beloved president, they’re wrong and need to be corrected.
Can you find evidence of something branded as the “Tea Party” prior to Obama’s inauguration? I don’t remember anything earlier, and I remember people specifically criticizing them for not protesting Bush for TARP in 2008. I’ve spent about half an hour searching online without finding any reference to a pre-Obama tea party. All of the groups were founded in 2009 and the big protest events appear to be the 4/15/09 rallies and the 9/12/09 march on Washington (although Glenn Beck’s 9/12 project wasn’t identical).
The only Tea Party-themed thing around the same time a Ron Paul fundraiser on the Boston Tea Party anniversary (12/17/07). It’s certainly the case that conservatives opposed the bank bailout as House Republicans 2008 votes showed, and plenty of those conservatives joined the Tea Party. For example, Michelle Bachmann founded the Tea Party Caucus in 2010 and also voted against TARP in 2008. But the Tea Party as an identity, which had a huge impact on the 2010 midterms, simply didn’t exist before Obama took office. Every source I can find, whether published recently or around 2009 says the Tea Party movement started in 2009.
@BBA
I just find it hard to presume that she has remained ignorant of this fact while supposedly interviewing so many Tea Partiers. Although, now that I see the dearth of coverage online, I believe it is more possible than I did when I first posted. You just never really look online about something you already know. These were large rallies centered around Ron Paul supporters, held all over the country. They have been memory-holed to an astonishing degree. It’s enough to make one slightly paranoid.
Yes, I always through the Tea Party was an outgrowth of Ron Paul’s campaign, so first rumblings in late 2007 and a cohesive thing in 2008.
I’d wager the vast majority of Tea Partiers in 2009 were not Ron Paul supporters in 2008, because libertarians punch well above their weight on the internet but are a rounding error in real life.
So then we’re back to ignorance of one of the most basic facts in her stated area of expertise.
Ron Paul received over 2 million votes in the 2008 primaries, that is a reasonable base to build a different movement off.
Tea partiers were very sympathetic to Ron Paul’s economic policies, but most couldn’t accept his foreign policy.
There wasn’t any candidate out there saying “End the Fed but also let’s keep having a lot of war” which is why the tea party never really coalesced around a single person.
This thread has prompted me to try and untangle the timeline.
My initial belief is that the Tea Party primarily refers to the loose affiliation of groups formed in response Rick Santelli’s widely televised monologue attacking foreclosure relief. That was on February 19, 2009, two days after the stimulus passed and a day after a homeowner relief program was announced. It led to massive protests on April 15, 2009. Numerous contemporary media reports point to the Santelli rant as the inciting moment. There are no FEC filings for groups with Tea Party in the name for the 2007-2008 election cycle (the two that show up in a search were renamed later). 22 groups with Tea Party registered with the FEC for the 2009-10 election cycle.
Here’s Daily Show’s coverage of the 4/15/09 protest and the coverage from Fox News. Both treat the 4/15/09 protest as a new phenomenon. Sean Hannity was at the Atlanta protest.
I believe you that there was anti-bailout out protests in 2008, though it’s strange to me that they occurred in September when TARP wasn’t passed until October (was it caused by the September 29th house vote, I wonder?). I would surprised if they resembled the 2009 protests with the use of the backronym “Taxed Enough Already” and the wearing of teabags as jewelry. Regardless, there doesn’t appear to be any continuity with the Tea Party movement as commonly understood. For example, the Houston Tea Party Society was founded February 2009. High profile national groups like the Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Express and Tea Party Patriots were all founded after February 2009.
I believe that the point was to voice displeasure with the legislation that was coming up for the vote. It was an honest attempt to affect the vote. I grew disillusioned when it failed.
I have two vivid memories of it. One was a guy just reading the constitution on a bullhorn when it was dying down (we had wandered over thinking it was another speech) and the other was a man in a tricorner hat with teabags stapled to it. There was a woman with him that had a straw hat with the teabags also.
That being said, I can understand why you don’t believe me. As I said earlier, it seems to have been memory-holed to an astonishing degree. I am pretty sure they organized through the Ron Paul Mailing list that I was a member of at the time. I am trying to figure out if there is a way I can use these photos as proof, but I don’t know. Photo editing would be necessary to prevent my doxing, and xif data is too easy to manipulate.
At this point, I’m just kind of fascinated by the mismatch between your account, my memories, and what I can find online. There have been a number tea party-themed tax protests in American History. For example, there was an anti-tax group called the US Tea Party back in 2002 and a group opposed to property tax calling itself Norfolk Tea Party II in 2006.) I’ve spent longer than is reasonable on this, and the most comprehensive two sources I kind find are a 2012 piece from CATO on the origins of the Tea Party and Lee Fang’s 2013 book “The Machine”.
The CATO piece matches the consensus narrative of a massive expansion following Santelli’s rant but characterizes it as a focal point for pre-existing anger about government overreach. Although it identifies earlier anti-bailout and anti-stimulus protests, starting with a anti-stimulus protest by Mary Rakovich, it does not identify any “Tea Party” themed movement prior to February 2009.
On the other hand, leftist journalist Lee Fang’s 2013 book “The Machine” claims that the modern Tea Party was the result of a deliberate branding effort launched by Americans for Limited Government at a 2006 conference in Chicago. This is sourced to a 2006 Portland Oregonian article by Laura Oppenheimer titled “Anti-Spending Crusaders Gain Steam for Fall Votes” that is referenced in a number of left-leaning blogs from the the time, but is not itself online. Apparently according to Oppenheimer, at that conference, Mary Adams from Maine was given the Sam Adams award. In her speech, she dedicated it to the Boston Tea party. According to Fang, some of the organizers from that group founded the “Sam Adams Alliance.”
Still according to Fang, sourced to its now deleted website, the Sam Adams alliance put out a tea party themed video and gave awards to a number of tea party themed events, including property tax protests in Indiana by Melyssa Donaghy such as a July 2007 “Indiana Tea Party” and March 2008 “Tea Party Tax Revolt”. Notably although these were events put on by a group “Hoosiers for Fair Taxation” and calling the group “Indiana Tea Party” only came after February 2009. Donaghy (now Melyssa Hubbard) has her own book on the subject, Spanking City Hall in which she claims to have founded the Indiana Tea Party.
Fang also claims that Citizens for a Sound Economy (later Americans for Prosperity) promoted Tea Party themed protests in Michigan, including an April 2007 tax protest, sourced again to a no longer available website. Fang’s next reference is the to the well-known Ron Paul event on the anniversary in December 2007. That event was discussed at the March 2008 Sam Adams Bloggers convention, and some of Ron Paul’s digital team was hired by Freedom Works after Paul suspended his campaign in June.
Fang them jumps to a January 2009 Libertarian Party of Illinois listserve discussion, which was reported on in the Huffington Post where a Chicago Tea Party was discussed. According to the Huffington Post report, the Libertarian Party coordinated with the Sam Adams alliance. Fang suggests that Santelli’s rant was a direct result of this effort, but the evidence is essentially just that Santelli was in Chicago and that another Chicago CNBC employee, Jonathan Hoenig, attended Sam Adams Alliance events.
So, there was certainly anti-bailout sentiment prior to Obama’s election from people who would later identify with the Tea Party, and there were certainly Tea Party themed events under Bush. It also would make perfect since for Ron Paul or his PAC, Campaign for Liberty, to hold anti-bailout rallies in 2008 (although it is surprising to me that there doesn’t appear to be anything online about those rallies). And some Ron Paul supporters wore colonial costumes to events.
But, there was a huge incentive for people and groups to claim to have been the first tea party. Anti-stimulus protests without any apparent tea party theming later claimed to have started the movement. Melyssa Donaghy/Hubbard has used her earlier Tea Party themed property tax protests to promote herself. And we’re all familiar with the Democrats attacking the Tea Party as only caring about the stimulus because it was under Obama, so Tea Party groups had every incentive to locate their origin before Obama’s election especially because prominent Tea Party politicians actually did oppose the bailout.
In short, if there were large Tea Party themed rallies across the country in September 2008, there would be more evidence online. Here’s the flier for Donaghy’s 2007 event. . I’m surprised that multiple people wore tea bags to the event you remember, but I still don’t believe that it was called a “Tea Party.”
ETA: Wow, I spent way too much time on this. I actually would be really interested to see the photos, especially any materials promoting the rallies and any “Tea Party” signs.
@qwints:
Not to create more time-sucking work, but have you tried The Wayback Machine for those broken links?
The footnotes are “15. Internet archives of http://www.cse.org” and “20. Archived websites within samadamsalliance.org and terraeclipse.com”. A quick glance didn’t find the Michigan tea party event sourced to the former or the tea party themed video sourced to the latter.
I very much appreciate the time you’ve put into this. I honestly gave up. Maybe working another direction: The mass bailout protests match that timeframe exactly. But I could find no record of one in Houston. And that’s the one place I know for a fact there was a protest against the bailout in 2008. It is entirely possible that the the fact that Ron Paul was centered in Texas is what cause the protest there to be named that. Maybe it wasn’t named that anywhere else. Could be that the mailing lists were promoting the protest without coordination with the others, and using the standard Ron Paul Tea Party branding. I have now called one of my friends that attended for confirmation, (reminded him of the guy with the tricorner hat with tea bags, but asked him what the wife was wearing. His recollection matched mine) and left a voice mail on my friend’s phone who we think first told us about it. I want to know if he still has that email. The copy I had is gone in an account I used for work at the time. I’m asking around for any pictures of signs among that group as well, as the photos I have are just us standing in a large group, but the signs are largely out of frame.
No worries, it’s interesting. As you’d expect, it’s easy to confirm that anti-bailout rallies took place (though there’s nothing about them being tea party themed. Seeing photos of a 2008 tea party anti-bailout rally would cause me to significantly update my beliefs about the completeness of the online record.
Here’s a CNN article about mass protests on September 25th, 2008 , (by groups on the left) and an October 17, 2008 Ron Paul interview condemning the bailout where he doesn’t mention any protests or rallies. Looking at the Houston Chronicle archives, there’s are articles about environmental and anti-abortion protests as well as an article about the House rejecting the bailout, but nothing about an anti-bailout rally.
@qwints
I know this thread is dead now, but just to give you an update, the second person I talked to that was there in the photo has zero recollection of the event. I am still trying to get ahold of the 4th person in the photo who we think was the one who sent us the emails.
I won’t argue with you wether you were on an Tea Party rally in 2008 or not.
But if you look at google trends you see a very low interest in the term Tea Party until Feb 2009.
So she might be wrong about when the first rallies where held, but it obviously turned into a mass movement in the first quater of 2009.
It didn’t exactly feel small at the time, but yes, it definitely blew up in 2009. Changed considerably shortly after that. I understand if you don’t believe me.
On a secondary note, this has prodded me to question the historical record even more than my previous high level.
Can anyone explain why Trump spent several days encouraging protesters against the lockdowns, and then today holds a press conference and says he strongly disagrees with the governor of Georgia reopening the state and thinks it’s more important to protect peoples’ lives?
I don’t even mean in terms of actual good policy, I am having trouble finding a rationale from this from either a bloodless political strategy psychopath angle, or even a Donny from Queens yelling at the radio talkshow host angle.
I have given up trying to figure out what the hell that man is thinking. He really is a classic agent of chaos.
+1
My best guess is that his “liberate” tweets were more like an expression of identification with protestors’ concerns than an effort to help their protests succeed. And also a manufactured distraction/disruption for the media/opponents. And that he isn’t going to take the risk of condoning the the first decisions to lift lockdown, whatever he may think of the decision personally.
Also possible that he doesn’t like the particular decisions made by Georgia’s governor, but thinks it might be a good idea to lift certain restrictions in, say, Michigan, especially if there is more resistance there. I mean, I doubt there’s a sophisticated tradeoff analysis driving his actions here, but a lot of politicians are willing to hint that they think some lockdowns have gone too far without be willing to indicate approval for a specific and widespread reopening. Typical playing both sides politics, which Trump just does more bluntly as usual.
ETA: More on Trump’s actual remarks:
I believe Georgia opened bowling alleys and barbershops, which many perceive as an unnecessary risk, so he was probably acknowledging that.
Consider this worldview:
1. If everyone is locked down, and suffering from it, and he shouts that we should open up, people will think “he is trying to stop the suffering!”
2. If people actually open up, there will be blood on the streets. Not literally, of course, but then people will blame him.
3. If groups are agitating to open up, and he thinks they won’t do it, he can support them for the same reason as #1.
4. But if governors are actually opening up, he doesn’t want responsibility for that. See #2.
I don’t know if those are true. I’m not even sure if this is the worldview he has. But you could see someone having that worldview and it explains the behavior.
There’s a lot of places in politics where someone will publicly support a policy as long as it can’t happen.
I think this is definitely part of the reason. Incidentally, the phenomenon you describe is not restricted to politics or politicians.
See Brexit.
I think this is substantially correct. Trump sees everything through the lens of what looks good going into the election in November. And he wants to distance himself from any negative news. And all roads in this lead to negative outcomes, so whatever path governors choose, expect Trump to pretend he was always on the opposing side.
One datum that makes this seem more likely is the lack of specifics in the White House’s plan. There are no firm numbers, so he’s free to say whatever he wants about any particular situation.
He does it so when anyone says he was against lockdowns, they can be accused of TDS, and shown the press conference.
My best guess for this weird about-face is that he didn’t actually expect a governor to go through with a lift of restrictions this early. If enough people behind the scenes say a lift now is bad, then Trump suddenly owns the deaths (as opposed to simply raging over a ruined economic boom that would have likely delivered him reelection). Also, polling still strongly favors lockdown measures, maybe someone finally told him?
I’m not sure the kinds of polls which I’ve seen — not quite “Ending lockdowns will kill every one of your older relatives horribly, while continuing them will be all sunshine and roses. Do you support or oppose ending lockdowns?”, but leaning in that direction — are all that reliable.
Trump constantly says things and their opposite. In a month’s time, he will be quoting whichever one of the statements came true and pretending he never said the other one.
+1 — I have heard (I don’t actually pay enough attention to the man’s Great and Unmatched Wisdom to verify this firsthand) that he essentially “focus-groups” his statements, keeping the ones his supporters like and discarding the ones they don’t.
Most politicians do focus-grouping of two statements, but they do it before saying both of them out loud.
Maybe Trump gets better feedback with larger sample sizes.
Trump is an authoritarian, he wants to be in charge. States that would resist his urges to reopen are a threat to him, and states that reopen to quickly are a threat, it is pretty simple.
It doesn’t inspire confusion in me. Its perfectly reasonable to think 2 related, but not the same things are both bad and good. For example:
During Vietnam plenty of people opposed the draft, but when drafted did not draft dodge, or opposed the draft and did not support draft dodgers.
Its possible to think lots of governors and mayors are going overboard and totalitarian with their restrictions, thus supporting protesters, but also thinking now is not quite the time to open up beauty salons (one of the last things we need to open up realistically).
I actually think these two examples are meaningfully different.
In case 1, you’re asking someone to pay a significant cost for their beliefs. Dodging the draft makes you a criminal and requires you to live underground or flee the country. It’s possible to support a philosophical position but be unwilling to pay the cost of it yourself. This is where I’m personally at right now with lockdowns – I overwhelmingly support people engaging in civil disobedience and getting arrested, if necessary, for the cause. But no, I won’t be doing it. Too risky for me!
In case 2, you’re just asking for “support.” I think someone who says “the draft is morally wrong but nevertheless, drafted people must show up” is in fact confused, or at least inconsistent. If you want to criticize draft dodgers, you waive any and all rights to object to the draft, IMO.
This is a bad take, IMO because I value the rule of law. Draft dodging is illegal, but if it has lax enforcement you get the worst of both worlds, you still have a draft, but one that is easy for people to get around if they know what to do or are connected. Its the problem with many current regulatory laws. Because they are not enforced at 100%, bad laws remain on the books. If FARA laws were applied against Universities that take money from abroad, FARA wouldn’t still be on the books, because all the Deans in the Ivy league would have been sent to prison. I think FARA is a bad law, but I think having FARA on the books with such lax enforcement is worse, it just allows selective prosecution.
I think his comments earlier may be driven by opposition to the suppression of protests. I am deeply unsympathetic to them apart from the fact that these were protests that were shutdown and some people were jailed for peacefully protesting in a resonable place and time. The restrictions on protesting were not narrowly tailored to be the least restrictive possible, so they clearly fail strict scrutiny. Instead of realizing that the law was unconstitutional in this somewhat unexpected setting and so backing off or trying to find a compromise narrowly tailored norms for protesting with social distancing, they decided to jail them. I am instinctively moderately pro police and I dislike the protestors, but I want the government officials responsible to at least have some chance of being imprisoned.
To trigger the libs, of course.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t the “Liberate” tweets directly connected to states that have been highly criticized for being too authoritarian? Like, fining people for going to drive in church services and banning wide swaths of industry that aren’t particularly risky? It makes sense to criticize some states for being to harsh if they’re unusually draconian in their lockdown implementation, and it makes sense to criticize a state for opening up too fast if it’s unusually lax.
If you actually have a perfectly rational and not very complicated position (there is a correct level of reopened-ness, neither of these are it), why not just say that, instead of taking two wildly contradictory extreme ones? He asked, naively.
If he did say it, would anyone report on it?
Mostly joking. Trump and nuance are practically antonyms at this point.
I think it’s pretty simple, the former approach was a political mistake, and he changed course.
The “Liberate” tweets were precipitated by a fox news segment he watched, its pure id. He tried to stick with that messaging for a bit but realized it wasn’t going to work. The protests are very unpopular.
He’s used to being able to say and tweet as much dumb stuff and falsehoods as he wants and the resulting outrage doesn’t matter at all because a) its not about stuff most people care that much about b) the news cycle just moves on c) it’s already priced into his reputation as a thing he does.
It seems to me like this approach is hurting him a little more than it has in the past because a) and b) no longer hold. Thus “new hoax” and “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero” have stuck to him in a way previous things haven’t. I think if there’s any cases of opening too quickly, or the ‘liberate’ protests remain a salient, unpopular threat, it will prove similar with those tweets.
The latest version of my meetup site is currently up. Anyone who wants to is welcome to come play with Mozilla Hubs.
@DavidFriedman, your link is bad; I think you just meant to use the last part starting with “hub”.
Anyway, technical issue for anyone who can help: I’ve consistently found I am unable to connect to Mozilla Hubs. It takes a long while to load and then gives me a black screen saying it couldn’t connect. It offers to try again forcing a TCP connection, which I do, and that always fails too.
I’ve tried this both with and without my VPN running.
I’ve only tried this on Firefox, for whatever that’s worth…I figure if Mozilla Hubs doesn’t work on Firefox it won’t work on other browsers either.
I first tried to connect with Google Chrome (not the open source Chromium) from Ubuntu, but I only got a black page – it didn’t render the scene, but I could hear audio and interact with menus. I then tried Firefox (Version: 75.0+build3-0ubuntu0.19.10.1) which worked for me.
Another participant was using Chrome on Windows, I don’t remember off-hand what the others were using.
Perhaps not much help, except that it shows Hubs is a bit sensitive to software.
The problem that’s worrying me is the stability of a site. If I create a site using a particular scene, mine or one of the canned ones, at what point does it vanish? If I try clicking on the link I gave, after fixing the problem already pointed out, I end up in my scene — but is it the same instance? If two people click on that link, will they end up in the same place?
I need to experiment more. But my plan for this Saturday is to set up a room a couple of hours before the meetup starts, post the link for it on the latest open thread, email it to people on my meetup list, and then stay in that room until the meetup begins. Whether it will be the same link to the Parthenon that I posted earlier I don’t know.
You say that, but I can’t make Google Docs work at all in Chrome, whereas it’s absolutely fine in Firefox.
Fixed link
This paper finds that you can get much better performance from a lot of makeshift masks (basically up to the level of surgical masks, but not N95 masks) by making an extra layer of pantyhose to put around the mask. The idea is that the pantyhose apply constant pressure to keep the mask tight against your face, so you get a much better seal.
I wish she would also do the study the other direction–does the pantyhose-over-the-makeshift-mask help prevent droplets coming out? It seems like it would almost have to.
Huh. You might get surgical masks close to n95 this way. Not in the size of particles filtered (which I don’t think we care much about in this case) but in real life results. Surgical masks don’t even try to make a perfect seal, and many people also have some amount of facial hair.
If we end up trying test-and-trace in the US, we need more testing; everyone agrees on that. But estimates of the actual numbers of tests required seem to range from 300,000/day to over 5 million/day. (We’ve been stuck at 150,000/day for a while now).
Is anyone aware of a summary of where these estimates are coming from and what different assumptions they’re making? I tracked the 5 million down to here but the report doesn’t show its work and I don’t have the stamina to go through the references. Scott Gottlieb is being quoted in various outlets giving numbers in the 3 million/week range (example) but no one ever asks where he’s getting that. He’s also author of a March 29 report for the American Enterprise Institute giving 750,000 per week as the target. I suppose he’s updated from that. (The reasoning for the 750k/week number is really simplistic, see footnote 9).
I assume one of the biggest variables is how low you can get the number of cases through suppression before switching to test and trace.
I suspect test and trace will only be effective in places where transmission is already rare. Aka, mostly places that are already not all that hard hit. How do you trace in NYC? I suspect that city alone would need a few hundred thousand tests a day for it to even be minimally effective. Plus, once you are getting to that high of a number (because your testing people who were merely on the same subway as another person) testing artifacts start to become prominent (kind of like giving pregnancy tests to every girl who took a class with a boy who got another girl pregnant).
It depends what you want to do.
If you want preemptive testing (that is, “I get tested once a week at my place of business, regardless of whether I’m showing symptoms”) vs. just tracing existing cases, you get different numbers.
Where you start also matters. If you drive new cases down to ~100 per day, you can do test-and-trace with many fewer tests than if you drive it down to ~1000 per day.
I imagine the differences you see come down to assumptions and details of execution.
Right, but I would like to know which of the numbers in this incredibly wide range I should believe.
If the 300K/day estimate is reasonable, then that’s something we might conceivably be able to achieve. If the 300K/day estimates are making lots of unrealistically optimistic assumptions and the 5 million estimate is more realistic, we can just forget about test and trace in any reasonable time frame and shift our focus to other approaches.
As others have noted, it depends on what your infection rate is – the “trace” part of “test-and-trace” implies that you’re only testing the people who have had contact with known or reasonably suspected carriers. Otherwise it’s just “test”.
For each carrier, you probably need to trace approximately Dunbar’s number of contacts on average(*), and maybe two of those will test positive so you’ll want to test their contacts to get ahead of the spread. So, maybe 500 tests per base case. And maybe we test each of them twice at intervals for greater reliability, so 1000 tests per case.
If we were to do test-and-trace now, with ~20K new cases a day in the United States, you’re going to need 10-20 million tests peer day. Also far more contact-tracing caseworkers than all of America’s public health departments combined have on the payroll, and I haven’t seen them advertising for new recruits or setting up intensive training pipelines. If another month of lockdown reduces the base rate by an order of magnitude, then 1-2 million tests per day. Lockdown until two orders of magnitude reduction, 100-200K tests per day, and so forth.
* Not the actual “people I know” Dunbar’s number, because many of those won’t have been in contact with the carrier recently – but there will also be a (probably roughly equivalent) number of people they don’t know who attended a business meeting or shared an Uber or whatnot with them.
> Also far more contact-tracing caseworkers than all of America’s public health departments combined have on the payroll
I’m not sure it will be that difficult. The testing aspect can be farmed out to existing EMS services, or a bunch of the nurses currently unemployed due to the drastic drop in hospital work at the moment. The question then is based on the training required to do the interviewing with specific people. If we’re talking about working through standardized checklist forms, those can be done by the same. If you need specialized interviewing techniques, I can see a people shortage. Do you know of any resources on the process specifically involved?
Not on the medical side, but part of the skillset would seem to overlap that of census enumerators, and that training seems to be a three-day thing. Plus two months for the interviews, background checks, and other on-boarding, which can probably be shortened in a crisis if you can convince the bureaucrats to get out of the way (big if).
Add in the specifically medical aspects, and maybe a week to a month total? I agree, this shouldn’t be a problem. But it can’t be ignored or taken for granted either, and I haven’t really seen anyone try to tackle it. Part of the recurring, worrisome theme of obvious little things that need to be done, not being done.
If war is politics by other means, and sport is a proxy for war, I’m not entirely sure what to call this except “playing silly buggers”.
I suppose it is better that two Middle Eastern nations who are in a state of enmity indulge in slap-fights over English Premier League clubs rather than shooting one another.
It would be amusing (in a way) if what actually scuppers the attempted Saudi takeover of Newcastle was them turning a blind eye to TV broadcast piracy, rather than them dismembering a journalist who writes for a prominent US newspaper, or mass beheadings or any of their other insanely tyrannical policies. It also seems a lot more likely.
They probably turn a blind eye to it in order to annoy Qatar.
In 2001 we had 9/11, which was a big deal.
In 2008 we had the mortgage crisis, which was a big deal.
In 2020 we have COVID-19, also a big deal.
Let’s look ahead. What long-simmering problem will boil over in roughly 2030?
Pension funds, maybe? Any teetering towers of underfunded pension obligations likely to come tumbling down ten years from now?
These things are black swans, you can’t predict them in advance, If you could they wouldn’t happen.
I seem to remember Taleb saying Covid is not a black swan. Even if I remember wrong, many people predicted it. Gates has a Ted talk that’s just freaking uncanny – for once I understand conspiracy theories as being properly justified (even if untrue) – before you look at the date you think he’s describing the current situation. Bush Junior was obsessed with this and built from scratch the US pandemic response program – which obviously got defunded and rusted in the meantime, but it’s still what they’re using now.
I’m hesitant on the other two, mostly because hindsight predictions are worthless and while there were some before the event, they weren’t that many. But 9/11 was predicted by Oklahoma and 2008 was a situation in progress for quite a long time. So even if you call them proper black swans, this still makes a discussion trying to guess the next ones possible.
Ontopic? We’re long due for a big war. I never expect one if things are going as usual, but given a pandemic (even a shitty one like this), then a crisis created by the isolation measures, then maybe another pandemic, a serious one this time, with 1-10% fatality all over the the age groups, _then_ another economic crisis… and you’re left wondering what exactly is Putin to do?
People predict all sort of things all the time, including and especially catastrophic events, so everytime something happens you can always cherry pick someone who had got it right or almost right.
But these predictions are not actionable if they aren’t any more credible than the countless predictions that didn’t happen.
How so? The Oklahoma attack was carried out with explosives by far-right Americans against a government building. 9/11 was carried out with hijacked planes (who would have thought that planes could be used this way? Seems obvious in retrospect, and yet) by foreign Islamic terrorist against both government and private buildings. Seem quite different.
And yet all the major economists, including Nobel laureates, got it completely wrong.
Well, I did say I’m perfectly ok with not counting Oklahoma and 9/11 as predictable – but that discussion trying to predict future similar events is not worthless. After all, people can progress.
As for Covid – my examples included a US president, the most famous billionaire before Musk and the guy who wrote “The Black Swan”. It’s a bit more than some guy on youtube, and more like there were plenty of warnings, but contemporary civilisation didn’t do enough. More than nothing, clearly, but hesitated to invest proper resources for something that hadn’t happened in living memory.
“Major pandemic causing national lockdowns in many countries will happen between 2000 and 2500” was predictable and nearly certain.
“Major pandemic causing national lockdowns in many countries will happen between 2020 and 2030” was not predictable at all before late 2019.
@matkoniecz
I misread the question. But I do think the spirit of the question is “what has a fair chance of happening next few decades”, as opposed to “what is more likely to happen around 2030 as opposed to some other timeframe”.
If you use the first reading, just divide the probability with 3 or 4 (chance per decade). That’s how we’re going to end up in this thread anyways – a list of likely things to happen, of which at most 1-2 actually will happen.
Tom Clancy, _Debt of Honor_ 1994. Not the same buildings and definitely not the same attacker, but same tactic.
That’s a good way of looking at it. I wish I had phrased the question along these lines.
Combined with the same target and the same attacker but with a different weapon in 1993, it seems like a plausible future situation.
Yeah, it seems that I got a bit overly exact over not ideally phrased question.
[Michael Scheuer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Scheuer) was predicting something like 9/11 back in the 90s. He was on the money about al-Quaeda and Bin Laden, but apparently these days he is writing about how the American right needs to rise up and kill the enemies of Donald Trump, including the Obamas and “all of the mainstream media.” So who tf knows…
The Crash of 2008 was very predictable, and was predicted by many; the only thing people got wrong was the specific timing. Which is what makes or loses you money in a financial panic. (I got stuck renting out a house at a loss for 12 years because I missed the timing of the top, though part of that was not getting off my ass to sell it even though I *did* see the crash coming fairly close to when it did.) By 2005 it was a safe bet that there would be a crash by 2012, and probably earlier, but that’s not a great timescale for doing something about it.
The WTC bombing that got Bin Ladin on the FBI Most Wanted list was warning of 9/11, but again, there’s a timing issue. There’s also the issue of not wanting to take steps that could have solved the problem because the followup problem those steps would cause seemed worse.
I’d have to read up on Taleb to figure out if Covid-19 counts as a black swan – it’s entirely predictable, except in time. And something like it doesn’t happen often – there have only been three major pandemics in the past 100 years, and they each had their own special characteristics.
It is obvious that pandemic will sooner or later happen. Similarly it is obvious that major war will sooner or later happen. And that supersized solar flare will sooner or later happen.
But does not mean that 10 years ago you could predict that 2020 will have pandemic.
Bush Junior started serious pandemic preparation after reading a book about 1918 flu and realizing that sooner or later it will repeat. Not because he predicted that 2020 will have COVID.
What’s your point? I don’t think we should have given any points to any wacko who predicted a pandemia in 2020 back in the 2000s. The precision here is innecessary and even suspicious.
That Bush Jr wanted to prevent a pandemic is loable, even if he never bothered to pinpoint the year or decade it would happen.
I would say 9/11 was predicted by the 1993 WTC bombing.
Target and actors predicted by WTC/1993, method predicted by Clancy/1994.
And Clancy’s following book seems rather relevant at the moment as well. Actually rather disappointed I personally haven’t heard anyone else mentioning Executive Orders or generally proclaiming Clancy’s greatness of late. It needs to be done more.
Executive Orders Is one of my favorite books of his. Fast-paced dealing with the complexities of multiple issues concurrently.
Taleb said a pandemic was a white swan—something that would eventually take place with great certainty. I’m not sure why this assertion is meeting so much resistance. Disease outbreaks are common in history, and viruses mutate all the time. It’s a regular natural process. For years I have said I expected to see a major pandemic in my lifetime. This was no great prediction: I was thinking more along the lines of a deadly flu virus mutation, not a comparably hard-to-contain coronavirus, so I would not have predicted such quick and widespread disruption.
I wouldn’t expect anyone to predict the year or nature of the disease or particular impact in advance. I wouldn’t expect anyone to predict such a thing accurately enough to prevent it in all cases. But I don’t see how one could think a pandemic was unlikely, especially in a globalized world and after things like AIDs and SARs, not to mention the modern risk of human manipulation of all kinds of viruses in labs. When Taleb says “eventually,” he’s talking about things like a 100-year-flood zone. In any one year, the risk is low, so people build houses in such areas, and if you plan on selling in a few years, that may be worthwhile. But within 100 years, it’s extremely likely to happen, so if you were counting on living in that house for your whole life and leaving it to your kids, it can’t be seen as a small risk.
A pandemic is just one of the most reliable things that you would expect in a 100-year-period, because it’s even less controlled by humans than a major war or an economic crash, both of which I’d consider practically inevitable in any 100-year-period, or even 50-year-period. These basic recurring issues are so predictable that fixating on efficiency to the exclusion of resiliency violated common sense. Predicting specifics is an entirely different matter. My best guess is that in 2030 we’ll still be defined mostly by dealing with what went on in 2020, economically and with the pandemic itself. I think the 2020s would have been a time of crash and rebuilding even absent COVID-19.
ETA: This article is interesting.
While the pandemic was a white swan, second order effects or collapses that result from COVID-19 may be black swans. We could have gotten a virus that was much easier to control. Or, in a world set up differently, COVID-19 could have been easier to contain. Since we can’t predict everything in detail, we can’t go overboard with complexity and interdependence, because it makes the environment susceptible to black swan events. This makes white swans appear as black swans because we didn’t anticipate the unprecedented second order effects of a known problem.
This is one of his important points that people don’t seem to understand. This is not likely to be a once in a lifetime event, so we shouldn’t act like it. We should not be willing to sacrifice all this normalcy because inevitably we will be asked to do so again and again. Instead we should insist on forward looking solutions, mainly robustness.
Yeah, well put. One pandemic, meh. Two pandemics, eeeh. But Pandemic –> lots of borrowing –> (superficially) working financial system but with lots of hidden debt –> crisis or any kind –> BIG problems –> war.
That’s pretty much the only scenario I see that could lead to major war in a _very_ connected and increasingly non religious and non nationalistic world. Pretty much all that’s left now is the language barrier.
Right. It’s the financial system that is making this terrifying for me, and that’s the part we could have avoided by acting with basic prudence. This is not because I care more about money than lives, but because I care about overall wellbeing, and a collapse does a lot more than wipe out stock market gains, and also weakens the ability to save lives in the pandemic. (The only thing worse than death is dying without palliative medication because the supply chains broke down is one). We will not always be able to prevent or contain pandemics, even with great preparation. But we should be able to sustain regular shocks without the whole system crashing.
Exactly. The next one may not be as bad, but we should definitely have been open to the idea that closing borders or grounding planes due to a pandemic might become necessary every couple of decades, at least for a short time. Everything depending on lack of “friction” is not a tenable set up.
Although, Taleb himself right now is urging us to give up all our normalcy, in a way that is somewhat confusing to me. I understand he’s going by the precautionary principle–this disease could have really bad effects we don’t yet know about, so we should avoid getting it at all costs. Makes total sense–what if it turns out to cause a reaction in survivors, ten years later, that wipes everyone out? But he seems to be ignoring the fact that this is also true when we court societal collapse with extreme and long-term lockdowns. The virus may have a greater worst-case existential risk, but in a social collapse, we’ll lose the ability to control it at all. In the past, he’s used an example of traveling to a country with bad water quality, and how it doesn’t make sense to try and figure out if the water at any particular place there is low risk—you should just bring a lot of bottled water and stick to it. The risks are too high and the information isn’t good enough. But it seems like that is the case here—we’re don’t have an endless supply of “bottled water.” It made sense to pause and learn more about the disease, for sure, and it’s certainly true that absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but that doesn’t mean we can freeze in place for every pandemic.
These things are not black swans as black swans are not simply ‘unlikely things to happen’. Black Swans (as defined by the guy who coined the term) are things that we think are unlikely to happen due to our current sample, but are in fact very likely to happen perhaps even certain to happen.
FYI this is a misunderstanding too. from the actual book:
You can predict this things (very generally), but it is extremely hard to predict what will happen exactly.
For example some things that happened repeatedly: economic crisis / pandemic / terrorism attack against superpower / new emerging technology / new religion / collapse of major country / succesful uprising / reign of terror in some country / famine causing massive death / climate change / solar flare / war etc.
All this things will happen again. But it is impossible to actually predict whatever 2030 will have something specific like “Russia invading Europe”, “uprising in China”, “chicken illness jumping to humans and killing millions”.
You can blindly guess from pool of semi-plausible things and hit by accident.
But if I am forced to select something than I will go with supersized solar flare causing significant damage to satellites and power grid.
That’s the one that scares me too.
Citation for that?
I can’t. Edited because I just realized what I accidentally did.
No problem. I agree with the general prediction of enormous social and economic disruption, but the bar for prompt mass starvation is pretty high. The food exists, the trucks exist, and both farmers and truck drivers are pretty good at improvising.
I don’t believe that the trucks would work. Unless like, pre-1970. Nothing with any chips in it is going to work that wasn’t insanely shielded.
I think you’re confusing this with the electromagnetic pulse produced by e.g. nuclear weapons. And you’re probably wrong even there, understandable given the amount of disinformation on that subject, but there is test data on the subject and I believe we’ve discussed this here before. Even the most modern automobiles, subject to a military EMP simulator, suffered only minor disruption – at most, it was necessary to disconnect and reconnect a battery terminal, or live with the fact that some dashboard indicators were doing the equivalent of annoyingly blinking “12:00”. Automotive electronics are tougher than most people give them credit for, and nuclear EMP is less reliably destructive.
But we aren’t talking about nuclear weapons in the first place. Solar particle events are energetic but large and diffuse things, and their interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field produces very low frequency, long wavelength electromagnetic fields. They don’t generate damaging voltages unless they couple into a very long antenna, like a hundred miles of power line. Hence the focus on disruption of the national power grid – it’s the only thing big enough for a Carrington effect to not simply wash harmlessly over and around. Cars and trucks aren’t going to notice this one.
I was actually thinking of drastically increased bitflipping, but just now realizing that that issue shouldn’t be sustained past the flare. And shielding wouldn’t really help with that though, would it? Fuel generation would probably be an issue, though.
It hopefully would not be some mass starvation but problems with fuel delivery, panic, shops running poorly or not at all, economic system shutdown (electronic payments may be effectively down for long), processing food etc may be significant.
Note toilet paper stupidity, happening without any real problem. What would happen in “there is real risk that some people will starve due to collapse of logistics” case?
The government declares a state of emergency and starts rationing or something.
All of Europe’s had to deal with the threat of starvation twice already.
And is transporting food to the cities the right thing to do? In America, at least, you might want to ship people from the coasts to places like the Midwest.
There were government estimates that firebombing enough of Germany would cause their society to collapse but it never happened.
I am not optimistic about state of society after week or month without electricity.
The US government finally runs out of credit. Rocks fall, everyone dies.
The current US federal debt is something like $23 trillion. How much more could the government borrow before its credit rating dropped out of the A’s?
Double? Triple?
The credit ratings largely depend on assumptions about the ability to pay, which means that downgrades to the long term growth prospects for the US would be a major contributor.
Is that true? Does our current rating reflect that people actually expect it to be repaid one day, or just that if we really, really wanted to, our GDP could technically support it? I assumed everyone assumed our debt would be perpetually until the country dissolves…
It reflects all of the people loaning money to the US government today, expecting that the individual notes issued today will be repaid on schedule and the gross debt will be rolled over to new creditors until well after the person loaning money today has exited his position. The bigger idiot theory remains rational much longer than the theory that the investment is fundamentally sound, because there really are a lot of idiots.
But a finite supply of idiots, each with a finite supply of money. When people start losing their faith in the future supply of cash-rich idiots, willingness to loan money to the US (or any other) government will decline. Probably in a panicky herd-driven way, and a fundamentally unpredictable way because crowd psychology is a hard problem.
Even if the total debt remains high the debt can still be rolled by issuing new debt to pay off the maturing debt. If you are steadily increasing debt eventually you will hit a point where there is literally not enough savings in existence to buy up the new issuance for the roll.
Let’s be clear, absent some extreme stupidity, wherein people in Congress just decide we really, really, want to default on our debt, Federal debts will be paid.
They will be paid in US dollars, the supply of which is completely in control of the Federal government. The only question is how much those Federal dollars in the future are expected to be worth vs. a) today’s dollars, b) other currencies in the future.
Our “debt” isn’t one massive IOU to one person/entity payable on one day.
It’s a giant aggregation of all types of different debt instruments with a wide variety of maturity dates.
And everyone who holds a piece of US debt does, in fact, expect that their individual piece will be repaid.
Because it always has been.
Typically the way we repay it is by issuing new debt, and so long as you believe that can keep happening, then you do believe that “US debt will be repaid.”
Ninja’d by John Schilling above.
Nobody knows. I suspect that if it happens (i.e. nothing else kills us first), it won’t happen through a drop in the credit rating but through some unseen limit being passed all at once. Kinda like when that last facility in Cushing, Oklahoma filled up and suddenly crude futures went negative.
There will almost certainly be downgrades in the US credit rating; there’s been one already. But the first few will be just like the last one, disregarded as irrelevant because that’s just some judgemental wonks being judgemental and “everybody knows” US government debt is the safest investment ever. The one after that will be “holy crap, nobody will buy T-bills unless we offer 20%?”, and the one after that “now they’re only willing to loan us Swiss Francs?”. Nobody will know in advance when that happens.
Cushing, Oklahoma has 80 million barrel storage, when prices went negative there it was reported that 20 million barrel storage was still available.
The treasury rates are already < 1%, and Trump has mentioned them getting negative, and he is not wrong.
If people didn't want to borrow from the USA the treasury would be raising rates. I think the USA will be fine in this front, in the medium term. Not the long term (100 years) cause a lot of things can happen there.
Top worldwide contenders (assuming they don’t happen during this crisis)
1. EU breaking up for reals.
2. Currency crisis in Japan.
3. Effective bankruptcy of SS/Medicare.
If Brexit turns out to work reasonably well for the UK, who might bolt for the door next?
Germany.
J/K. I don’t have a firm opinion here, the political situation is way beyond my understanding, but currently it appears as if the struggling countries (Greece, Italy etc) are using their situation to extract benefits from the EU by threatening (implicitly or explicitly) to leave which they have no real capability to do smoothly. That leaves the large countries that want to hold the whole thing together in a bind, they don’t want disorder with their currency, and they don’t want to pay for the bad behavior of badly behaved members. This makes it seem to me that the most likely countries to leave are those that kept their own currencies like the UK did, who are also reasonably well off. That is Denmark and Sweden so that is where I would put my money (but I really just wouldn’t put money on it with my very low confidence).
Isn’t Germany benefitting from the other countries being less productive but still using the Euro? They are basically devaluing the Euro at no cost to Germany (well, I guess keeping the Eurozone running is a cost, and if Greece defaults that’s also a cost).
I mean, it’s completely possible the Eurozone will breakup, but honestly Germany is the one country that will try to keep it alive.
Germany is both benefiting and paying a price, with different people reaping the benefits and paying the price.
German entrepreneurs benefit from the euro being undervalued relative to the German economy.
German consumers pay a price since foreign products are overpriced for them.
Etc.
Do the consumers really pay this price, tho?
Germany has one of the most complex economies in the world, meaning they can purchase local a lot of the time; their trade balance is positive after all.
If you compare their consumers to other consumers in the Eurozone, Germany will most of the time come on top; they all pay overpriced foreign products, but the Germans they will be probably be the better off in this comparison. You need to compare them to other countries, and the germans consumers will come out on top most of the time too.
Or you could compare them to the hypothetical out-of-Eurozone-Germany, which uses the N eoMark. The NeoMark would rise in price because it no longer has Greece and other countries to sink it down, and suddenly German products are more expensive to other countries; german consumers enjoy a limited window of cheaper imports then they start losing jobs and are overall worse.
Major war is a good guess by Radu, it’s been awhile. Pension funds likewise, I’ve been hearing dire warnings about them since 2008-ish.
I’m going to go for something technological related. Like a recession caused by a solar flare or computer virus or cyber war. We are getting increasing reliant on, or at least integrated with, computers and internet technology, and the experts are probably not perfectly aware of all the vulnerabilities.
On the topic of prediction, I think all of the events johan listed could have been predicted, to the decade if not the date, if someone had had the relevant information, which no one really had access to. If someone did have all the relevant information, presumably they’d also be in a position to do something, and so there’s probably a fair number of these that just don’t come to pass in a meaningful way. Perhaps Y2K was one such.
We need a lot more discussions like this one, in places where people consulting decision making can read the conclusions. It’s pretty clear that potential for big problems is rising sharply, but our capacity to prevent and deal with them rapidly … less sharply. We did “ok” this time, but I still think this was more like an exercise than a real crisis, and we spent a lot for what we got.
Organizational problems are all solvable and not even difficult to solve, but they’re subtle. Sometimes to subtle to even explain. I’m more than pissed at all the discussion on Scott’s article – even though the title literally was “[…]not of prediction”, 90% of feedback was… about how easy/difficult it was to predict.
We need threads like this, in the open, to generate lots of idea. We need people to take the conclusions to decision makers. We need the equivalent of war games for every kind of conceivable disaster. We need people taking the results of those exercises and actually doing something with it. We need realistic budgets set in advance, because otherwise you go on a black hole of trying to solve everything, and it’s not a matter of money anyways, it’s a matter of having a blue plastic folder containing 50 pages of prepared advice and decision trees and contact info for the people to call.
A lot of modernity seems to be gaining productivity and prosperity but fragility along with it.
It’s one of the reasons I’m not fond of scenarios where we radically alter reproduction (not that any are on the table for the immediate future). It’s a place where we would be adding in an existential failure mode.
> It’s one of the reasons I’m not fond of scenarios where we radically alter reproduction
We already have via reliable contraception and abortion on-demand. Suddenly the birthrate for those with long time preferences has dropped significantly.
True enough, and some theories about excess hormones in the water supply are kind of scary. But at least if birth control production fails, the species doesn’t die out, whereas some kind of sterile by default “improvement” like you might see in Sci-fi is setting us up for extinction.
I don’t agree that the probability of disasters is getting higher. I think some disasters are becoming more likely/worse, and others are becoming less likely/better. As an example, global supply-chains have bitten us in the ass several times during this crisis, but they make recovering from a localized disaster a hell of a lot easier–we can get that stuff we used to buy from the factory that wasshut down by hurricane damage from some supplier in Malaysia. Improved biology and medicine probably makes us much more resilient to naturally-arising plagues like COVID-19, but at the cost of also making us more susceptible to an engineered plague.
A fiscal apocalypse of some sort is a pretty good bet for ~2030, and pension funds are as likely a place as any for that to start. But it could just as well be (as Nybbler notes below) the US government reaching its credit limit, or it could start outside the US. Wherever it starts, it will spread broadly but perhaps not universally.
The world finally overcoming its long-term aversion to nuclear war is also something I’d peg for about 2030, again with many plausible candidates for who goes first.
The internet in its current form becoming unusable due to malware, ditto. I’m not optimistic about the result being “Internet II: Electric Boogaloo, just like the original but mumble something security”.
Democracy in its current form becoming unworkable due to deliberate subversion of the electoral process. And this ties in to the one above, because 2030 is about when I expect shouts of “I wanna vote by smartphone!” to overcome sanity.
“There is a hole in everything” – Leonard Cohen
It’s a technological arms race and always will be. It has gotten better and worse many times. It will almost certainly continue to do so. Since I’ve been in the game I’ve seen ebb and flows of malware, phishing, database cracks etc. Microsoft almost eliminated phishing from outlook for awhile last year (proper settings needed to be configured,of course) but scammers are adapting again already. Ransomware is currently taking a huge toll, but it will lessen as more entities realize the necessity of a good backup program. The reason it’s hitting hospitals, schools and government offices so hard right now is that they were primarily concerned with protecting PII, which can be complicated by a backup program. They are slowly getting into line.
Due to poor coding in IIOT devices, they are a major source of botnets right now. That too is being worked on.
We cannot go back. If we have to abandon the TCP/IP stack, there will be alternate technology available. There are already some which have been developed.
But large-scale cyberwar is still an unknown quantity. Possibly in much the same way that the machine gun was an unknown quantity in 1912.
Maersk has already been caught in the Russo-Ukranian crossfire.
I doubt we’d see the death of global internetworking, but it’d really mess up the economy in the short term.
Large-scale cyberwar is not going to be limited to the Internet.
Known attacks involved attacks on critical military hardware (Stuxnet), power networks (Rusian attack in Ukraine[0]) and other cases, reaching beyond software.
It is likely to be fairly easy, as more things gets connected and security is low. Like case of a teenager using slightly modified TV remote to derail trams.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/inside-cunning-unprecedented-hack-ukraines-power-grid/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2015_Ukraine_power_grid_cyberattack
Not too unknown. Brazil is a good example.
It can cause about the same damage as a bad hurricane. Awful, but not world changing. If someone hacks a nuclear powerplant, is that worse than what mother nature did to Japan?
Nuclear anything is behind air-gaps. Sure, there are internet connected devices at the plants, but none of them are wired into anything that matters. Hacking a nuclear plant basically means you get to fuck with payroll or the like at most.
@Thomas Jorgensen
If there is one thing you should learn from Stuxnet, it’s that there is no such thing as an air gap that can’t be bridged.
@rumham
Note
in article you linked.
I’m not worried about one nuclear plant.
I’m worried about dozens of banks, factories, stock exchanges, logistics companies, pension funds, refineries, backbone routers etc. being DOSed at once as a form of economic warfare.
@matkoniecz
Good to know. There are a ton of online materials using Brazil as an example. I wasn’t aware of the denial. Note that Iran denied Stuxnet harm as well. And Germany never released any details (including casulties) about a steel factory that got hacked and resulted in an explosion. Countries typically don’t like to announce their vulnerabilities. And Operations Technology is incredibly vulnerable. Nevertheless, I will definitely upgrade my priors regarding the Brazil incident.
@Lambert
Huge DDOS attacks are already happening.
There are ways to deal with them.
@rumham
Note than in case of Stuxnet there was a clear motive (note what happened with previous nuclear research facility) and there was a thorough public analysis of a captured malware.
There were also multiple leaks (including likely to be deliberate ones) and semi-official confirmations from multiple sides, including competing ones.
It is probably the best documented case of a cyberwarfare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
——-
In case of Brasil there was no evidence only some anonymous sources. And everyone involved denied that anything happened. Also, presented explanation was plausible and unlike in case of Ukraine there is nobody with a clear motive.
@matkoniecz
Noted. Good point.
I don’t mean packet flooding, but advanced, persistent attacks getting in and breaking whatever they can find. Like the malware that hit Maersk which masqueraded as ransomware but actually just deleted all the data.
@Lambert
From a security and recovery standpoint, there is no difference between ransomware and just deleting the data. At that point, it’s gone. Even if you pay, you are almost certainly not getting that decryption key. And this is combated by a secure backup plan. That gets you out of a bunch of different troubles.
@rumham
The ransomware seems to give back your data if you pay. That is their business model. People would stop paying them if they wouldn’t get their data back.
@Aapje
Much of it is running on it’s own now, no one at the wheel. Then there’s the fact that often the malware crashes the system when it tries to decrypt. And there have been several high-profile incidents where payment was sent and keys not delivered. Probably quite a few more where it wasn’t publicized.
Bottom line, unless guys who wrote it are in direct contact with you, and the amount is low enough that if you lose it with no return, it won’t significantly impact all the other stuff you have to pay for to resolve this, and you don’t mind taking the reputational hit from complying, and your backups were insufficient, don’t pay.
Note that you’re still gonna have to get clean systems after this even if you pay and everything works perfectly. That had better be some seriously mission critical data.
As best I can tell, large-scale cyberwar between major industrial powers is like a flamethrower duel at three paces. Both our economy and China’s melt down, and we get to have the traditional shooting war next with a lot less wealth and in the middle of a global depression.
Have we considered that we are already in a state of cyberwar?
Some former SSRs have been at limited cyberwar with Russia.
Everything else seems to be ‘war on terror’-esque dilution of the term.
We had a Dutch university get ransomed. They paid and did get their data back.
@ Aapje
I’m glad that it worked out for them, but I would not recommend paying unless all of those criteria I mentioned upthread were met. The risk is high.
Eh.. There are pretty obvious ways to make the network infrastructure trying together local networks much less of a vector for malware, the problem is that the most effective ones are going to be goddamn hard to get everyone to sign up for.
Because the most obvious one is the solve the technological problem via social and legal paths. No anonymity on the net, track every case of mal-ware or spam back to its ultimate origin, lock the people responsible up. Repeat until people stop trying.
Are you sure that you’re not just moving the vulnerabilities around? I think that this would be an arms race almost the same as we have now. There is no type of identification scheme which we’ve not figured out how to spoof. You never had a fake ID as a kid? We’d just lose one of the best qualities of the net in the process.
Or prevent typical user from full access to a computer.
Typical smartphone user has no admin rights on his own device already (root access).
It has negative effects, but also makes harder to install malware – running malicious exe attachments/downloads on PC can do far more than malicious executable file on a smartphone.
It’s a literal arms race, and those rarely fall into the “always will be” category. Either the runners agree to stop racing, or they decide to use the arms.
Right now, all the Advanced Persistent Threats are carefully using their cybernetic arms only in deniable ways, but that’s basically because they all expect to win and they want the internet to be available for them to use in all its glory after their victory. So none of the exploits are being used in internet-breaking ways, even though many of them clearly could be. Eventually, that restraint will fail somewhere. Either by one of the winners getting cocky with “this is deniable enough for me to get away with it” or “I have such an edge that I can secure my networks against their retaliation”, or one of the not-wholly-defeated losers saying “If I can’t have it, no one can – and I think I have a relative advantage in the non-networked world”.
When has the arms race stopped? Last I saw it’s been kicking for all of recorded history. Different people come out on top, but the race continues.
As for the rest, I largely agree, just not with the conclusion. I am probably most concerned right now about the docker exploits.
There is also an effect that breaking Internet permanently would be without benefit to almost anyone and with noticeable costs everywhere (extreme Bootleggers and Baptists situation).
Similarly to situation where USA is sole power with nuclear weapons. Would they nuke China/Russia/Europe? Almost certainly not.
The world’s most dangerous Arms Race paused in 1987 and effectively stopped in 1991, mostly by the actors deciding what they were doing was insane and also super-expensive. The world would look a lot different if that arms race was still going on, not just for the big 2 nations, but for regional powers like India.
I am concerned that someone is stockpiling an inventory of zero-day exploits, which isn’t so much a concern as a genuine fact. I am also concerned that there are collections of other weaponized exploits that are not necessarily zero-day but which companies haven’t effectively patched. And I am also concerned that the computer staff at my company cannot really keep up with teams of state-sponsored hackers anyways, because we’re not designed to fight Russia in cyber-space, we’re designed to return profit to shareholders, which precludes us from dropping massive amounts of cash to play “WOLVERINES!” on the interwebz. I don’t know exactly how this plays out, but I do know that this is a hell of a risk.
What is the half-life of 0-day? Can you even stockpile them long-term?
I am thinking that you can have experienced team finding new ones quickly, but old ones will be found sooner or later. For example Heartbleed existed for 2 years.
I would expect any decent spy agency to gave pool of active exploits, but you have no equivalent of rolling out nuclear arsenal prepared for decades and deciding to turn opponent into a pile of burned ashes.
@A Definite Beta Guy
We are testing new delivery systems which can be used for nuclear warheads right now
And as for the APTs, yes they are a problem. Many in the industry feel it has to come to head eventually. It is a very real risk.
Think of the APTs as predators. If a bear comes to your camp, you don’t have to outrun the bear. Just other campers. The best advice in cybersecurity right now, is that if you are a high-profile target, run faster.
It is very concerning and a completely legitimate fear, but it won’t be the end of the Internet or lead to societal collapse. It may possibly be the end of many current modes of thought in the cybersecurity industry, though.
There is a long tail of software that remains unpatched and vulnerable for many years after most instances of that software have gone away or been patched. Tons of cheap Android phones never get software updates, for example.
I don’t think that model works for APTs. That’s the model for non-A and particularly non-P threats; if the script kiddie who wants to hold your data for ransom can’t get through your firewall or whatever, he’ll move on to the next target. Assuming he had a target in the first place and wasn’t phishing for whatever nibbled at the bait.
But, e.g., when the APT that is the USA rolled out Stuxnet, Iran couldn’t say “well, all we have to do is make our centrifuges a harder target than the Pakistani ones and the Yanks will move on”. The threat very specifically wanted to get the Iranian centrifuges, and focused persistently on that end. That’s the ‘P’ in APT. The Iranians had to be absolutely faster than the bear if they wanted to escape.
What John said, if Russia comes looking for us, they are going to come looking for us to fuck up our shit. They may move on to an easier target, but they will not stop until they do damage to the US.
@John Schilling
From the standpoint of sovereign governments, you are doubtlessly correct. From the standpoint of A Definite Beta Guy’s company, however, the analogy holds outside of any threat other than a very disgruntled employee (or ex-employee), or a really amazing hacktivist (and there may be some overlap there).
Also, I know this wasn’t stated, but the implication from your example is that APTs are hostile governments. There most assuredly groups labeled APTs out there that are solely criminal organizations.
@A Definite Beta Guy
Yes, exactly. There are limited areas where for a company it doesn’t hold true, but they are exceedingly rare. Note that this advice works even for the vast majority of government weapons manufacturers. Top secret operations like refining uranium in a single hidden location are the types of areas where the analogy fails.
In the worst (best?) case we may get back to slightly older version of internet, with static pages and less complicated protocols.
But I would expect current situation with the worst gaps getting closed and new ones discovered.
Even “quantum computers/ novel algorithm break RSA completely” would be survivable.
Practical quantum computers require that we swap out existing public key algorithms for new ones that are slower and bigger (perhaps a factor of 10 each), but not unmanageably so. It will be an engineering pain in the ass over the next decade or so, but we can do it.
I second the nuclear war prediction.
I don’t know what problems we will face around 2029, but after that we will face Y2038 bug (and year 2036 bugs for NTP).
2030 sounds like a plausible date for the first major proxy conflict of a putative second Cold War.
China vs US backing opposing factions somewhere in Africa, maybe?
Or maybe classically Middle East? Saudi Arabia is an interesting bet. It is strangely a strategic partner for both superpowers, and looking on their royal house, that country has a potential for instability and internal conflict. Long term demand for oil is key here.
I think the world is really unprepared for a major armed conflict, such that it would quickly become The Most Important Thing Ever To Happen even if it involved pretty limited stakes. Obviously even SAYING the previous sentence prompts a lot of Fukuyama-ish responses and speculations about nuclear MAD.
…but anyway: Russia and China (perhaps also India, Pakistan, or Israel) still seem like world powers that could find themselves forced to commit to all-out military action, and pretty rapidly and unpredictably too. You could find yourself watching a news broadcast about “increased tensions” in the Taiwan strait or whatever and then the next week every news outlet is talking about nothing else because folks are actually launching missiles at each other, or some aircraft carrier got sunk.
Like COVID, the economic effects of mitigating the problem would probably be what “changes everything”, not really the problem itself. “China Invades Taiwan” would affect every one in the entire world, simply because it would disrupt global trade in a pretty dramatic way. Similarly, even a single nuclear weapon getting dropped on a city, anywhere on earth, would restructure geopolitical negotiation forever: everyone would know it was an option again.
I don’t know when the system will actually collapse (or if it can be averted in the meantime), but underfunded public pensions are absolutely a crisis in the making.
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/pensions-101-understanding-illinois-massive-government-worker-pension-crisis/
Fiscal calamity, IMO, is practically guaranteed. We speculated that modern economies would hit ZLB in the early 00s with any major recessions, and promptly hit that point in 5 years. We responded with public sector and QE, and we are leaning into that even harder with the current calamity. This will continue to be standard until it breaks, and when it breaks, I expect massive devastation. And I highly doubt the limit on QE and fiscal debt is “infinity.”
2030 wouldn’t surprise me. Hell I’m not even sure how the states are going to weather THIS crisis.
I guess another thing is that it’s hard to tell what events are going to be Generation-Defining and which ones are just going to be Big, and which are going to be forgotten. Like, JFK’s assassination is a generation-defining event, but it’s not really on the same scale as COVID. Columbine seemed like a big deal, but it is not Generation Defining and modern shootings now just mark First Down in Political Football. The Elian Gonzalez situation seemed like a HUGE deal at the time, along with the Monica Lewinsky affair, but Elian Gonzalez was memory-holed entirely and Monica seems like a minor deal. Katrina and 2000 both seemed like big deals at the time but couldn’t compare to 9/11 and 2008: would 2000 have been generation-defining had 9/11 not happened? Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane whatever hit Houston just aren’t burned into our cultural memory at all.
A lot of people seem to think the Iranian Hostage crisis was huge, but I didn’t live through it, so I don’t get it.
What I would call the biggies:
-Another major storm that’s going to render a major American city basically uninhabitable for weeks and start a major recovery operation.
-A huge internet security breach that’s going to affect everyone…but then again, nobody seems all worked about Equifax anymore.
-The internet being rendered unusable because a super-virus is killing everything connected to it.
-Contested election, especially in the US. Totally conceivable, totally conceivable that this will result in major armed resistance
-Waco 2.0, and just imagine if Waco 2.0 happens and President Biden’s FBI kills a Tea Party Congressman that was making an ass of himself.
-Small scale nuclear war with some minor power that decides it’s going to nuke a US city (or really any city) to demonstrate how big and powerful it is.
-Terrorist biological or chemical weapon attack, though I would think it would require state actor assistance at the present time to make the really nasty strains.
I think the information security issues are probably the least appreciated and the most life-altering at this point.
So this is a CW friendly topic, right?
You guys aware of the Parasite Stress Theory? I don’t buy it wholesale, but I think there is a correlation between this kind of times and rallying around more conservative ideas. Even moral foundation theory supports it, with Sanctity being an offshoot of Cleanliness.
Separate from this, I think the current situation has pun in perspective a lot of the left’s talking points. Partly because that’s the world they’re lobbying for (less driving/flying, dead corporations, centralized power and so on) but mostly because it make is obvious that its goals are first world problems. You can only care about social justice if you have a full belly. Similarly about the environment 50 years from now. And you’re not even allowed to care about present day pollution – everybody is supposed to care about carbon, and less-to-none about P2.5. And ironically, the true benefits of socialism (protecting the working classes) is completely foreign to modern left. They’re horribly alienated from blue collars.
Long story short, I don’t see the left doing well the next few election rounds. I’m not saying this with particular glee because I’m not particularly happy about the (lack of) right. For example I find Republicans mostly laughable – they had one subgroup I could ever support ideologically, and chose Sarah Palin as a face for it. But for good or bad, I’m predicting the left doing very badly medium term.
I wasn’t familiar with this, but it’s an interesting idea. One thing I noticed is that it claims research suggests higher disease burden is associated with collectivism. The left can easily pivot to dropping all their fringe intersectional ideas, while keeping a core philosophy of big government collective action. In contrast, conservatism in the USA is perceived as more of an individualist philosophy, and the response to the pandemic so far has looked pretty uncoordinated and will serve to reinforce that perception. If the theory holds water, to me that suggests a benefit to the left. I also think you are underestimating the extent to which voters are willing to punish Republicans for a perception of incompetence in the face of the crisis, regardless of all other political considerations. My expectation is that if Biden doesn’t appear outright senile in debates, and if the recovery isn’t swift and strong – and maybe even if it is – voters will punish Trump for appearing to lack any basic competence, and Trump loses in decisive fashion.
Social Justice is way more important the less developed your country is; would you rather be gay in the USA or in some country where it can actually get you imprisoned? So it’s crazy to call it first world problems.
Besides, the “left” in America is mostly comprised of the Democrat party, which is insanely right wing compared to everywhere else. If anything, other developed countries can afford to go more right wing because they have good social security nets.
Keep in mind that America is barely a democracy; the current President received the minority of votes. In any sane system, Hillary would have won that election, so that’s a strong reality distortion right there.
Disagree. Social justice in the US is primarily practiced by non-gay people shouting for and demanding gay rights. The point is that in the developing world, non-gays have much bigger problems relating to their own survival, such that they aren’t bothered as much by what happens to a small 2% or so minority of the population.
Caring for the survival of others is a luxury that you can only afford once your own survival is pretty well guaranteed.
That kinda makes me want to call it “first world problem” more, and I totally agree with your point. Just the discrepancy between 1st world SJ news (they refused to bake a cake) and 3rd world SJ news (death penalty for being gay)… see what I mean? Imagine how it looks from 3rd world perspective. And that’s the kind of lens that’s going down now on everybody’s nose.
Justice is a universal, fundamental problem. Social Justice is a “First world problem.”
Quick reminder that at the times when first world was on third-wordly level of developmnet, the left there was as supportive of penalization of homosexual behaviour as the right. The only difference was terminology: bourgeoisie decadence instead of sin.
So yes, it is a first world problem, which can become an issue only if workers and peasants don’t starve.
You don’t even need to be third world. In the second world (i.e. Soviet satellite states), homosexuality wasn’t exactly encouraged either.
So all systems where the top level politician can get that position with support from a minority of the voters are insane?
I think that would apply to all parliamentary systems.
Why do you assume there is something especially sane about a straight popular vote majority election, as opposed to any of a multitude of alternative systems?
This is a valid but superfluous objection.
The USA is not a parlamentary system; people voted for the top office, their majority preference should be respected; if the system that exists stopped that outcome, it is not sane (IMHO), and it is certainly not democratic. Let me qualify; in any sane presidential democratic system, Hillary would have won; given that clearly the USA is a presidential system, it follows that it is either not a sane or democratic system. In a parliamentary system, people vote for their candidates to get into the parliament. The equivalent here is that somehow parliament member Donald Trump got the seat despite getting less votes that candidate Hillary; whether or not Trump can form an alliance to become the leader of the country is a different question.
Valid question, but the relevant alternative here is a system where the top government office is normally assigned to the person with the majority of votes , except for a random chance that it will be assigned to the person with the minority votes. What is particularly sane about a system where Donald Trump got the office with less votes?
At the risk of exposing my ignorance about someone else’s political system, it was my impression that people did not vote for the top office: the states did, their electors numbering according to a formula agreed in the constitution, which leaves the method of appointing those electors up to each state. If I missed a crucial detail, serves me right for butting in and I will have learned something. But it sounds as though in theory a state could have had every elector appointed by the governor, or drawn by lot, or whatever.
It happens that all states converged on a method amounting to plebiscite, but they didn’t have to, and the situation as it stands doesn’t oblige David to agree with your frame. After all, the situation as it stands also allocates the total number of electors among the states in a way you deplore, but you don’t sound as though you feel obliged to bow to that.
I think the other limb of David’s objection is that Hillary didn’t have a majority, she had a plurality. The third parties were very small but still large enough that neither Trump nor Clinton made it over the 50% bar, which in some systems would have caused a head-to-head runoff to validate that the winner did, in fact, capture an actual majority.
Correct. Nor is it a system where the to executive is elected by majority vote.
You seem to assume that “democratic” has a single unambiguous meaning.
Consider legislation. In Athens, it was decided by majority vote of the citizens who chose to attend. In no modern society I know of is it done that way. Does that mean that no modern society is democratic? Does the fact that the executives in Athens were not elected by majority vote mean Athens was not a democracy?
Given that the American presidential election is, and has been from the beginning, done via the electoral college, what made it insane not to switch to popular plurality voting in the most recent election?
You’re presuming there even is a majority preference, which there was not in 2016.
And last time I checked, I couldn’t find any nation which selected its chief executive on the basis of plurality preference, when there was no majority. There are reasons, I would hope obvious ones, why that’s a really bad idea and so nobody does it that way. If there’s no clear majority on the first ballot, there is something to try and rank the various conflicting preferences before declaring victory.
In the United States, that’s done by A: the Electoral College and if that fails B: the House of Representatives. Both of which preferred Trump in 2016. We can hypothesize about how a runoff election or a ranked-preference election or any other such thing might have turned out, but “We totally would have won if the rules were different, trust me” is just being a poor loser.
The claim that “Hillary would have won under any sane system” is both being a poor loser, and being arrogantly presumptuous regarding the unstated preferences of Johnson, Stein, and McMullen voters.
Hmmm. So look on the polls, for example here. For me it is clear that there is no such effect, at least for now. The only thing seen consistently is “rally behind the flag effect”: if government is competent or at least looks like it was, the ruling party results rise exponential, as number of corona cases (just look on CDU!), while the ratings of ruling parties supporting incompetent governments, like Italian or Spanish, stay the same.
Survey:
If you could somehow exist pre-conception as some consciousness (soul?), and you had a choice as to whether or not you would be born, what would your choice be? Two part question:
1) If your option was to have your current life or none would you take a spin at life or pass?
2) If your option was to have the life of a random person out of the 8 billion current, would you take a spin at life or pass?
My answers:
1) Pass
2) Pass
1) so easy I don’t even have to think about it: spin
2) that’s a slightly tougher one, but still spin
I can understand why people might pass on (2) since there are lots of people out there in destitution or disease or other terrible situations beyond their control, but I’m curious why you’d pass on (1), given that you’re posting here and haven’t killed yourself. Is there some logical argument there that just isn’t obvious to me?
Not HowardHolmes, but since I’m giving the same answers: have you considered that killing yourself isn’t as simple as it sounds?
Yes. (I’ve been suicidal at times in my past.) But saying “Given the choice, I would choose to never be born” and really meaning it is, I think, a strong enough statement that it must carry the same or greater level of dissatisfaction with one’s life that would be necessary to overcome the complexities of killing yourself. Even when I was suicidal I still acknowledged that my life had been mostly worthwhile up to that point.
ETA: I suppose it’s possible that you’re staying alive for the sake of friends and relatives who, since you’ve been born, have gotten to know you and care about you or even depend on you, but that makes it sound like you’re still deeply miserable and would kill yourself as soon as you’re “off the hook” in those relationships.
Sunk cost fallacy?
Bingo!
ETA:
However, there’s also the practical issue of only having – potentially – one chance to get it right. Get it wrong and you might find you’re stuck living a life of much lower quality, with little chance of ending it (e.g. your failed attempt left you permanently paralysed).
This is more personal than I usually go here, but if I had to distill it out I’d say my suicidalism had to do with a dissatisfaction with my present and the feeling that my future was going to be much worse than either my present or my past, rather than with disappointment in the quality of my past (even though I had my complaints in that department as well, at the time).
This is why I tend to discourage suicidal thoughts in others.
However, if I am to speak frankly, my life sucked, sucks and will suck. This is not due to any objective feature, but rather my subjective perception that can be boiled down to “no life is worth living”.
I try to play the hand I was dealt to the best of my ability. There’s no requirement that I actually be happy about it.
This doesn’t accord with your previous statements, in which you said you don’t kill yourself both because it would pain others and because there’s a chance you might fail and end up with a lower quality of life.
If you really believe no life is worth living, then that should apply both to lives that provide happiness to others but not oneself, and to lives whose quality is higher than the potential quality of some post-botched-suicide paralyzed-from-the-neck-down life.
I’m not saying that is a life worth living. It is one I am choosing to live because I was born dumb. IOW: Smeagol promised to help nice hobbit. Verbum nobile debet esse stabile.
This is purely a practical matter of “why not kill yourself right now?” I don’t think there is any debate as to the fact that a post-botched-suicide life would have a lower quality than the pre-botched-suicide life, yes?
This being the case, if the pre-botched-suicide life was bad enough to attempt suicide, then the post-botched-suicide one will be the same but more so.
However, in the post-botched-suicide life you no longer have the means to end it.
The prudent approach, therefore, is to not attempt suicide until you are reasonably certain that you’ll be able to get it done right and with the minimum amount of fuss.
Disclaimer: I am only exploring this matter intellectually. I don’t endorse suicide (as should be obvious) and I don’t want to encourage you to kill yourself. That said…
This implies you’re “working on it” or something. What are you waiting for? How long will it take for you to figure out how to get it done right? Many people have already killed themselves successfully with minimum fuss. It’s easy to sort out which methods are the most reliable. You can copy these, and even combine several.
When at several points in my life I tried but ultimately failed to kill myself, I eventually realized it was because I lacked some combination of the necessary will and courage. I didn’t pretend it was because of some rational trade-off about sparing others’ feelings or winding up crippled. And this led to the conclusion that maybe I do in fact value living, for its own sake.
I already have.
And yet I don’t because of all the other reasons. Funny thing, life.
That is neither kind nor charitable.
Sorry if it came off that way, I honestly wasn’t trying to be unkind or uncharitable. But I’ll concede “pretend” is unfair. I’m trying to say I sense there is something unresolved in your reasoning.
Yes, indeed…
There’s that possibility.
There’s also the possibility that your experience doesn’t map to mine.
On the most basic level, however, we started from a choice between existence and non-existence, but you’re trying to turn it into a choice between existence and termination of existence. There is a difference.
Just a simple example that I’m sure you will understand: to kill myself now will do obvious harm to my wife in many ways that are easy to foresee. To never have existed will do no harm to my wife-that-never-was, because she will have experienced neither my existence nor its ending.
To do premeditated harm to others is to be an asshole. I don’t want to be an asshole – even if I believe, as I do, that I won’t experience being seen as an asshole after I’m dead, because there will be nobody to do the experiencing. I can only choose to be an asshole whilst I’m still alive and I choose not to.
Does this make it any clearer?
I was thinking about it, and although what I meant was something like “I don’t think you’re done thinking it through” even if I’d said something like “Hey you liar, just admit you enjoy being alive” it would be a strange breed of unkindness: directly encouraging you to find inherent meaning and pleasure in life, at the cost of an accusation of one instance of dishonesty. 😀
Anyway, I get what you’re saying, but I have trouble seeing how “don’t be an asshole” is worth more than “persist in a life that has sucked, sucks, and will suck because no life is worth living”.
There are two different relevant concepts here:
1. Present value at birth of lifetime utility
2. Estimate at any instant of the present value of future utility.
One could have a person who was sufficiently miserable early in life to make the present value at birth of lifetime utility negative, but who did not realize that the present value of future utility was negative until a point at which it no longer was.
I will try to explain.
I believe we can agree that life consists of good things and bad things. For the purposes of this discussion I will take “good” to mean “things that we like” and “bad” – “things we don’t like”. We can substitute “pleasure” and “pain” if you prefer, though I think it doesn’t really matter what we call it, so long as we are aware that we are dealing with subjective perceptions rather than objective facts.
“A life worth living” would therefore be a life with a positive sum: more “good” than “bad”, more “pleasure” than “pain”, overall.
Howard’s Hypothetical gives us a view-from-nowhere perspective. I take it, from what you said, that you consider your life a net positive. How bad would a life have to be, under Howard’s Hypothetical, for you to choose non-existence over existence? We’re having a philosophical discussion here, so please assume that the amounts of physical, mental and emotional anguish we can inflict upon you are limitless. We can assure that none of the joys of life dear to you ever come your way and that all your greatest fears come true. Is there a point beyond which the sole fact that you exist – assuming that this has any value to you in and of itself – is insufficient to outweigh all the suffering we are about to heap upon you?
If so, we can agree that some lives are worth living and others are not.
Now, if – like me – you find little, if any, joy in what life has to offer, whilst the suffering is felt as real, then under Howard’s Hypothetical the set of possible lives worth living is going to be much smaller than that of someone who feels many joys. For example, I gather from your post elsewhere that your children bring you plenty of joy. Me, I cannot stand children (and don’t like people very much to begin with, though they are the most interesting thing available), so having children would be a net negative, so I don’t. I am better off not having children than I would be if I had any, but – other things being equal – your life with children is more worth living than my life without, because children are worth a positive amount in your life whilst my lack of children is worth zero (and having children would be worth a negative amount).
With me so far?
I’m not exactly young any more and I’ve had a surprisingly eventful and diverse life, compared to people I know (and likely most people). This resulted in my having the opportunity to sample the thick and the thin. The thick turns out to be… not particularly satisfying. I can take it or leave it. I don’t feel the need or desire for more good things in my life, because I find them to not add that much positive value (again, this is solely a subjective judgement). The pains of life, on the other hand, are mostly unavoidable. I could pursue the stoic ideal of not letting it get to me (which I mostly do in any case), but I am self-aware enough to understand that this is putting on a brave face at best.
From this comes the realisation that the question of “how much would I have to pay you to start enjoying your life?” doesn’t make much sense. If the currency you offer is worth near zero, the amounts would have to be so great as to exceed all credible scenarios.
And yet, here we are.
Since I was not offered a choice as to whether I shall exist or not, I am stuck with existence and must choose within the context of said existence. There were numerous situations in my life so far where I was faced with circumstances I would have gladly avoided (the current COVID situation is, overall, not the worst I’ve seen), but I had to carry on regardless, just like all of us have to deal with the present pandemic one way or another.
I didn’t choose to exist, but I can choose how to exist. I can choose to do or not do certain things based on the self-image I wish to cultivate. To purposefully end my existence is a choice of the living-me and it is the living-me that needs to pay the price for it. This price may be greater than the price of living a life I don’t consider worth living.
There is no inconsistency here. If I value my life at -1 util (making it a “life not worth living”), I would choose to not exist under Howard’s Hypothetical.
If, having already been brought into existence, I value the self-image hit of killing myself here and now at -10 utils, I will continue to exist even though I value my life as a net negative.
The very fact that I need to consider this is a disutility in and of itself, so it might bring my valuation of life even lower, say -8 utils, but I would still continue living due to loss minimising (much as you might choose to lose a leg rather than die of gangrene).
Does this clear the matter up?
ETA:
David has the right of it.
Well…,
Killing yourself goes against every lizard-brain instinct you have. That’s why its hard.
Yet lots and lots of people do it successfully; they don’t necessarily all have especially strong powers to override their lizard brains.
Why don’t I kill myself? Because I am indifferent.
So why pass?
Inaction is cheaper than action.
That doesn’t track, life is action. You don’t accidentally stay alive, even if you just gave in to your baser desires and kept eating and drinking you still have to manage your life to not die.
The question was “why pass?”
Passing is an acceptance of the current state (non-existence) and an indifference to changing the current state. I would have to choose to “take a spin” but make no change in passing. If I am living I will continue to live because I am indifferent to change.
True indifference to life would mean you have no opinion on the pass/no pass question, the actions of life are a cost to life, claiming indifference and then citing the costs to life for a ‘pass’ implies the benefits of life are outweighed.
@baconbits9
To pose the question I had to invent a “non-existing” thing that exists. There can be no such thing. I was merely trying to make a point. If I am existing, I accept that. If not, I accept that. I am indifference as to which is the case but could only be so in a state of neither existence nor non existence. You are trying to make too much of an impossible choice
@HowardHolmes and Faza:
You guys seem to share a similar outlook in terms of your lives being undesirable, of hanging on only to reduce pain on others or because it’s easier/lower risk than the alternative or because you just can’t bring yourself to care enough to take the drastic action required to actually kill yourself. In any case I’m curious, how many years have you (each) lived with that outlook?
Twenty, give or take.
I am not unhappy with life. There is no one’s life better than mine. My life is neither desirable nor undesirable (as is everything else). Desire is purely in the mind and does not have to exist. I simply have no valuation of life. I have been this way for eight years.
@HowardHolmes:
Given that you’re considerably older than me, I must say I’m a bit surprised. I was sure you’d have me beat by a mile.
@Faza
Lack of natural ability.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been involved in a conversation with two or more participants with stated worldviews like yours, @Faza (fearful enduring wretchedness) and @HowardHolmes (radical stoic
buddhist?indifference). And so it also isn’t the first time I’ve noticed a certain competitiveness among people with those kinds of worldviews. Just pointing that out because it’s amusing.How so?
It was rather a bit of amicable banter on my part, given that – IIRC – Howard is old enough to be my father.
ETA:
Isn’t that being a bit melodramatic?
My brief parenthetical summaries of your worldviews were meant to be accurate (given what you’ve said) but also a bit tongue-in-cheek.
@Well:
I tried to take it in the same spirit, but suddenly I’m no longer feeling quite so firendly.
You keep changing an awful lot of pixels on your computer screen for someone who’s indifferent to change 😛
@VoiceOfTheVoid
Good point (sort of). The nature of reality is change (as opposed to being). To exist is to change. This does not nullify the fact that one can be indifferent to life, existence, or change –whatever you choose to call it. I am indifferent to existence. If you were to shoot me, I do not care. But I also do not care enough to pull the trigger myself.
I would spin on 1, but mostly because I’m selfish and because (at least these days) life is pretty enjoyable.
I know quite a few people who are not suicidal but would still choose to pass on 1 for altruistic reasons. Most of them are reasonably hardcore environmentalists or animal rights / welfare supporters who think that humans as a whole are a net harm to the planet.
If I was making my decision out of altruism instead of selfishness… Well, these days I would probably still spin, because I think I’m doing as much good as harm to society. But if you’d asked me five years ago, when I was in a rough spot and was actively burdening my friends and family and society as a whole, I would have passed.
What’s the alternative? Being extinguished? Floating around as a disembodied soul? Being born somewhere else?
Also, considering that I’m a disembodied soul, will I also get an afterlife if I choose the human incarnation?
Presuming that my pre-conception existence… exists only insofar as to allow me to make that choice:
1) Pass
2) Pass
This is actually from Kabalistic theology, the Chamber of Guf.
So it’s quite possible you were already given this choice and took a spin. Have you considered that your current perspective might in fact be the wrong and shortsighted one?
It is at least equally possible that the Kabalistic theology is a load of Guf, so that doesn’t seem to be a helpful perspective.
Why do you find it unhelpful?
Even if I don’t believe it (I’m agnostic on the possibility), it allows one to think about why one would’ve chosen this life and what the other possibilies are.
I thought Howard’s hypothetical was supposed to do that, given that we are very much alive if we are having this conversation.
I agree that the possibility does raise questions, but mostly of the “what the hell was I thinking?” variety. I can only conclude I was drunk at the time.
@Faza (TCM)
I think @HowardHolmes hypothetical implies a lot more current knowledge than the theology of the Chamber of Guf does, but also a lot less eternal and spiritual knowledge.
Thinking about the disconnect might be useful to you. It is to me.
Given that I consider “eternal knowledge” or “spiritual knowledge” to be empty terms, no.
It’s also a joke, I think in The Joys of Yiddish.
“Better never to have been born, but who can be that lucky? Not one in a thousand.”
Well, this question is giving me flashbacks to the Leaving Certificate:
Prayer Before Birth (Louis MacNeice)
I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.
I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.
I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.
I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak to me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.
I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.
I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.
I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.
I can’t imagine what my decision making process would be as a pre-me, bereft of my brain and experiences. I’m not a materialist, but if these things haven’t had an impact on me then what’s the point of it all?
But, in regards to whether or not I prefer being, absolutely, and I also think the average person probably does too, although I’ll admit the distribution is has a longer tail on the wretched end; I think there’s greater breadth and depth of misery available than joy.
I suspect you will find more people who agree with “I would prefer to have never been born” among the relatively well off. Many people whose lives we would consider miserable (due to factors like poverty and disease) are reasonably cheerful, or at least have a stoic attitude towards life.
Depressive philosophising about whether existence is preferable to nonexistence is generally a hobby of the wealthy and educated who don’t see the sun enough.
That’s possibly true and a good point. I think the best way to compare would be rates of suicide and heavy drug use, which are not confined to either end, though I’d bet higher on the low with low confidence.
But, at the extreme end, there have been people imprisoned by tyrants and tortured repeatedly. It’s pretty hard to image the inverse of that scenario, where someone has pure joy repeatedly thrust upon them.
Fortunately, due to hedonic adjustment, selective memory, focus, etc., I don’t think it’s necessary for the total or average of a life to be more pleasurable than painful for it still to have been worthwhile.
At the risk of sounding trite or cliche, and although it’s decidedly not “pure”, my experience of having kids has been one of joy being repeatedly thrust on me.
I thought about that when I wrote my reply. But ultimately I’m convinced that most suicides are not philosophical statements where people decide that not-living is preferable, but result from some sort of misdirected aggression, or inability to deal with some specific problem. I think Scott has written about this, and most people who are prevented from committing suicide end up happy to go on living.
Drug users aren’t necessarily unhappy, some just like drugs.
I completely agree with the rest of your post.
Are the units for pain and pleasure commensurable? Are there even units?
But I agree with you here, I have discovered as I get older that avoiding suffering has more utility than experiencing joy, and yet, mere existence has utility beyond either.
This part I don’t fully agree with; I think a little joy can excuse a lot of suffering (for example, child birth, or the pain of an early death of a spouse).
But there does exist in the world, at least historically, people who had great suffering without much or any joy, like forced conscription into an army that lost and resulted in your death by impaling or something, and when speaking of the “average” person it bears acknowledging such people may weight the calculation differently for others in an understandable way.
@Randy M
I know someone who spent a ot of time studying the lives of soldiers in the 30 years war. That’s probably among the worst situations you could live in, but they’re not miserable. They have camaraderie, culture, religious belief. Presumably people in similar situations in other contexts are also not constantly miserable. And who is to say whether death by impaling is objectively worse than the way most people die nowadays — elderly, sick, slowly.
Of course, for any set of circumstances that you find unacceptable, you can probably find some lives that have those circumstances and not much else. But I think the number of such lives is not so great, and the people experiencing them might not feel the same way about it.
@Kaitian
Perhaps that’s all true. I hope so. I haven’t experienced great suffering, so I don’t want to speak authoritatively on it and am granting that extreme reactions to it may be warranted.
Is it possible that the propensity towards depressive philosophizing tends to match with a propensity to try to do something about one’s situation, leaving the person better off materially, but not actually much happier?
Or maybe those who fail to improve their situation are outnumbered among the cheerful or stoic among those who are in materially lousy situations, and so we only see the depressive philosophizing of the well-off?
I won’t deny that depressive people exist among the downtrodden, but nihilistic wallowing about whether it’s all worth it seems more common among comfortable people.
I don’t think the causation could be that nihilism leads to success. The stereotypical image here is the overly coddled child of privilege, who starts sulking when he realizes life is not always super easy.
Of course, rich, healthy, educated people have more of a platform to spread any views they may have, but it does match what I’ve seen in people I’m acquainted with.
Depends a ton on what pre-conception conscious experience is like but presuming I’m not sitting on a Lotus Throne contemplating my own Perfection:
1) Definitely
2) Yeah
Especially since it’s the 8 billion current lives I think I’d take that chance at being. Now if it was random chance to be anyone who’s ever lived up til now that’s a lot less appealing. By my nature though I’d probably still take it, since at least if I’m born a miserable peasant I’ll be raised one and not thrust into that position at my present level of effete modern comfort.
If it’s anyone who has ever lived or ever will then I guess there’s a chance that there’s some 3 billion years of resplendent post-singularity hyperbliss that’s coming down the tracks. Or 3 billion years of enslavement and torture by AIs or something. Or else more of what we have now. Basically bigger error bars on how miserable/pleasurable the whole thing might be, but again probably still take the chance.
Either way, it’s a different experience to the Guf, which even if I don’t return to is presumably functionally without change so what else do I have going on. To my disembodied soul, scanning over my life from beyond the veil I say hop in the waters fine, and even if it all goes wrong I think it’ll at least be a cautionary tale to the others.
I’ve been pretty negative about the “pass” choice up to this point, even for the second part of the proposal, but “pass” starts to look more appealing to me if we’re talking about all people who have ever lived. It’s possible that there was some substantial fraction of human history in which the way people lived was so consistently miserable, they way they died was so consistently horrific and painful, and the age at which they died was so consistently young, that the living regularly envied the dead and the pleasures of sex, which is all that perpetuated the species, were our only escape and were still a brief and temporary one at that. Heck, it’s even possible this was true up until a few generations ago, although I think it increasingly unlikely to be true from the invention and global spread of agriculture onward.
“…who ever will live” is way too speculative for me to be able to form a coherent thought around.
“How was your meal?”
“Terrible! It was burned, too spicy… and the portions were too small.”
😉
Note as a counterpoint that is was a somewhat regular occurrence for early American colonists to flee colonial life and join a native tribe. Either via kidnapping or voluntarily.
It was VERY hard to get them to return to colonial life. Nomadic life has some substantial charms to it, apparently.
I’m aware of that. I’ve felt the charms myself. But it seems most people don’t flee the “civilized” life for the nomadic one. Most people don’t even become Amish, despite the well-documented advantages.
@Well…
Sure, obviously status quo bias is powerful, but if we’re talking about the “risks” of ending up as a nomad out of the Chamber of Guf, being a pre-ag human doesn’t seem risky in terms of “will I be satisfied with my life”. In fact, the risk seems to be the reverse.
I dunno, man…maybe if I was a pre-AG human I wouldn’t have the particular aversion to stuff like guinea worm that I have now. And while there are some people who have to deal with guinea worm today, I’m pretty sure such parasites are pretty much universal among hunter-gatherer tribes.
Are you an anti-natalist by any chance?
No, I am not an anti-natalist. My life is not bad. There is no suffering, ever. At every moment I do exactly what I most want to do, and I have the resources to anything I want to do. If I won the lottery, I would not go pick up the money because it would have zero effect on my life.
So I’m not saying life it bad. I am merely saying it is also not good. It has zero value. Placing value on life leads to suffering…always
Is anyone an anti-natalist? I had a professor who was but he was also a geographic determinist and spoke in a made-up ideolect so I’m not sure he wasn’t some sort of Brechtian street performer. I’d enjoy a steelman of anti-natalism because it seems like a parody of repugnant conclusions in philosophy where you’d need to wipe out all life if you had the chance.
My basic understanding of the anti-natalist position is that:
Having pleasure* is ~GOOD~
NOT having pleasure is ~NEUTRAL~
suffering is ~BAD~
NOT suffering is ~GOOD~
And since not suffering is an active good, you count the non-existents’ not-suffering-ness in hedonistic calculus but because not experiencing pleasure is merely neutral it counts for nothing. And I guess the only thing keeping someone from hitting the everything-stops-existing button is whether or not it causes suffering?
I also can’t wrap my head around why, from within existence we can declare a value to not-suffering which we can apply to the non-existent but we can’t declare a value to not-pleasure. I suppose because that way lies utility monsters? Whole thing seems whack.
* defined in that weird philosophical way that doesn’t expressly mean orgasming but rather something abstract and beautiful but make no mistake does include orgasming
I’ve never understood people who would prefer never to have existed to existing. Existing seems to me to be a good in and of itself, regardless of particulars, and non-existence the ultimate deprivation. But I think there may be something deeper and more inherent to a person’s personal makeup when it comes to this question. Personally I agree with Chesterton, who wrote it best:
Chesterton also (famously?) wrote a novel on the subject, Manalive, where a stuffy pessimistic academic who claims it would have been better not to have been born changes his mind rapidly when the protagonist pulls out a revolver and offers to mercy kill him. I agreed with Chesterton’s sentiment there, but I have since learned it is not an affective argument against those of a pessimistic disposition. C. S. Lewis for a long time agreed with HowardHolmes and Faza, and he didn’t think much of Chesterton’s argument, writing the following in his autobiography:
So I think it has less to do with how much pain you are actually in and more to do with some deeper matter of temperament. Some people smell the roses and others count the thorns.
While I generally agree with you (opinion on the top level question is hard spin on 1 and spin-with-fingers-crossed on 2), I think you go a bit too far here. As a reductio ad absurdum, I think nonexistence is pretty clearly preferable to eternal torture.
Here’s the thing: I can’t argue with you, in the sense that I don’t have any argument to make. But I also disagree with you. I believe, deep in my bones, that pain is preferable to non-existence. I don’t know how to articulate that understanding, but it’s that understanding I have. So if asked whether I would prefer to be in hell or to be annihilated, I would choose hell. I can’t say with confidence that I would be correct in choosing hell, but its what I would choose without a doubt.
Sometimes I think that when people talk about non-existence they equate it with unconsciousness. Like, would you rather be tortured or be asleep? But even when you’re asleep you exist. It’s not at all like non-existence. I’d certainly rather be unaware than in hell, but to not exist at all? That’s….yeah, that’s the worst thing I can imagine.
Although I agree with you, note that this is somewhat antithetical to modern liberal thought. Witness the shift of the Anglican church from a belief in hell to a belief in annihilationism.
Why is that?
Me, I understand on an intellectual level that people can and do feel this way, but intuition completely fails me as to where such a feeling may come from.
Isn’t perpetual unawareness the same thing as nonexistence?
I share FLWAB’s and EchoChaos’ terror of nonexistence, and I think that, given the choice, I’d pick eternal hell over annihilation, but I’d probably come to regret it pretty quickly once the flames got hot.
@Faza (TCM)
I don’t really know how to put it into words other than “Existing is literally all I have.”
@FLWAB
What’s good about it?
Hoo boy, how to explain.
So there’s some trees outside my window, right? I’m looking at them. They’re beautiful. Each one started as a tiny packet of dna and carbohydrates and now they’re these amazing forty foot high fractal sculptures, no two exactly alike. I look at those trees and I think “It’s good that they exist.” Even if I were blind, and couldn’t see them, it would be good that they exist. Even if there was nothing else in the universe except those trees, it would be good that they exist: better than non-existence, for sure.
And I think about my daughter, and I know that it’s good she exists. The world is better because she is in it. I knew the world (at least, my tiny corner of it) before she existed and after and I can tell you that if I know anything at all I know that it is good that she exists. Better than it was before.
I’m just shuffling the ball around here. None of this is an answer. It’s just that, it’s good to exist. I couldn’t explain it to you any better than I could explain that its good the trees exist, or my daughter, or anyone. I couldn’t explain it any more than I can explain why life is better than death, love is better than hate, or right is better than wrong.
You are right. You cannot explain one more than the other. There is no explanation because there is no good or bad. It is all just something in our head. Your daughter exists outside of your head, but her goodness exists only in your head. One can’t make an opinion into a fact just by repeating it. Can you attempt to define good in any way that denotes something real?
I doubt I could to your satisfaction. What we have here is a fundamental philosophical difference. I mean could you define good in a way that denotes something unreal? I’m sure you could, but you’d be wrong.
My working definition of good is anything that fulfills an entity’s telos. Or possibly anything that is more like God than less like God. Existence is an obvious good in either case: a tree can’t be a good tree if it doesn’t exist, and God exists and thus existing is more like God than non-existence.
To be honest, I’m a bit unsure that either of those definitions is correct. What I’m not at all unsure of is that good exists, even if I haven’t been able to define it properly.
But in any case our difference is so foundational that we have little to discuss. You wrote “Your daughter exists outside of your head, but her goodness exists only in your head.” Now that’s clearly wrong. Convince me otherwise.
I’d take a spin at life with either option.
I’d also take option 1 over option 2, because currently I’m a middle-class high-IQ 21st-century American, and I probably wouldn’t get that lucky with a random dice roll.
Of course, without knowing what pre-conception existence is like, these answers are pretty uninformed.
I don’t think there is a “pre-conception existence” under this hypothetical. As I understand it, the extent of this existence is a yes or no answer to the question. Answer “yes” and you go on to be conceived and live your life. Answer “no” and you return to non-existence.
Am I right, Howard?
Yes
In that case… same answer. I’m a pro-natalist.
1) spin, duh.
2) if we’re assuming there is something beyond materialism – ie ‘I’ would be born in some significant way, spin. Otherwise flip a metaphorical coin, heads spin tsils pass
Online streaming video content available for $0-$10/month with ads tends to still have a pretty low percentage of ads. The biggest percentage I’m personally familiar with is probably on Hulu, where I sometimes have to sit through three or four 90 second ad breaks on a 22-minute TV show like South Park. In other words the ads:content ratio there is at most about 3:11, or about 27% ads. Of course Hulu mostly offers stuff that’s already been proven to be very popular, so the ad space is probably quite valuable even if there’s lots of it because they know the audience will put up with it.
Most online streaming video has way fewer ads than that. A typical video from some popular-but-not-household-name Youtuber, for example, might force me to sit through maybe 10-15 cumulative seconds of ads (assuming I press the “Skip Ad” button reasonably soon after it becomes available) on, say, a 15-minute video — that’s about 1.6% ads.
Meanwhile it seems like paper magazines, even not-particularly-notable ones like Allure (which I guess the previous owner of my house never cancelled or updated her subscription to and which my wife likes to keep in our bathroom so she can glance through it before it goes in the trash), are at least 50% ads. Is this because…
1) Paper magazines are so much more expensive to produce that they need to be stuffed full of ads just to cover their costs?
2) Paper ads are harder than video ads for their audiences to “skip”, or at least more likely to be looked at long enough to deliver their messages?
3) The people who read paper magazines are way more ad-tolerant than video watchers (or they’re in an ad-tolerant mindset while reading magazines anyway)?
4) Maybe a more specific version of #3: Paper magazines, much moreso than video content, really are just ad-delivery systems — even their “content” is basically just advertising — and everyone including the audience kind of understands this on some level?
5) It’s some whacky irrational thing, like being a cultural relic of the advertising/print publishing corridor left over from older times before streaming video or even television?
6) I know it can’t be this, but…the content in paper magazines is just so amazing that audiences will put up with >50% ads to consume it?
One key difference is that – unlike TV, say – you can skip the ad content at will. Even if you have a “story continues on p. X” (which isn’t a requirement), you can still read only that which interests you at your own pace and ignore all the rest.
The other thing I personally find about the magazines I (used to) read is that the advertising tends to be much more narrowly targetted and hence I almost find it to be a value-added item.
Replying to your first point and to @Matt M who also made it, I am not sure paper ads are easier to “skip.” Yes, you can get past them with a brief flick of the page, but you typically have to give some visual attention to the physical object in your hands in order to do that, and so your eyeballs are likely gonna move over the ad, and those ads are usually designed so that their main message will travel through your eyes and into your brain in much less time than is needed to see the page, see it’s not content, and flip past it. Compare with video ads where you can take out your earbuds, look away from the screen, switch tabs (and thus almost fully switch your attention) or use ad blockers. (I love Hulu’s “We’re sorry, we are unable to display this message because of your ad blocker” screen! And, I don’t even know what any ads on Youtube look like. All I’ve ever seen is a little rectangle that eventually says “Skip ad” and then I click on it; my fovea never wavers from that spot.)
I don’t care about filtering advertising. I care about reading my article. I care about watching my show.
Magazine ads let me read my article at my own pace.
TV/video ads force me to wait while the ads are running, even if I don’t actually have to watch them. (What Matt said.)
It’s as simple as that.
Right, so there might be a division between people who care more about their time (being able to get back to their content as quickly as possible) and people who care about the purity of their content (being able to consume content without the cognitive litter of ads). “Skip” will mean a different thing to you depending on which side of the division you fall on.
A similar division might also exist on the supply side, with advertisers or platform providers caring more about time-on-message vs. slipping the message successfully into the experience.
I think these people exist, but are an extreme minority. Like yeah, there are some people out there who reflexively hate advertising, in and of itself, and will be just as annoyed at having to glance at a Pepsi logo for one second as they would be at having to watch a 30 second pepsi commercial.
But I think the overwhelming majority of people don’t object to advertising on a philosophical basis like that. They are annoyed by it to the extent that it disrupts them from consuming content. At which point a 30 second video ad is, in fact, 30x more disruptive than having to turn an extra page which takes 1 second.
The fact that Pepsi might benefit equally between the two is almost irrelevant. The average consumer doesn’t hate Pepsi and doesn’t begrudge them the right to advertise. They just want it to be as non-disruptive as possible.
I’m the weirdo, then. But since we’re on the topic I’ll explore it a bit…
I don’t begrudge Pepsi the right to advertise. (I do strongly prefer Coke, though Pepsi products are better, but anyway…) I just personally really dislike being exposed to ads. They feel like litter in my brain, like negative learning, negative growth. This isn’t to say I’ve never seen an ad I thought was entertaining, but those are by far the exception and even then I’m not one of those people who tunes in for the Superbowl to see the ads. I’ll take no ads over entertaining ads, and a lot of the time I’ll take no ads AND no content over ads and content.
Like I said, I don’t begrudge Pepsi the right to advertise. In fact I appreciate that most people care more about the quantitative than the qualitative intrusion, because I can free-ride off it to some extent. I think 15 minutes of quality Youtube at the cost of having to click a button a few times is a pretty good deal.
It’s the SSC comments section, man. We’re all weirdos in our own way.
With the possible exception of Plumber, who I assume is here to fulfill our state mandated diversity quota of normies…
Plumber is either on the normal side of weird, or, by dint of being both weird and “normie”, one of the exceedingly weird ones.
What Plumber is, unfortunately, is not normal.
It’s hard to call Plumber normal when he talks at length with us about D&D, his favorite scifi and fantasy authors, and obscure leftie/third way political affiliations like guild socialism.
And, they are much more intrusive. Loud (notice the compressed audio at full volume?) and generally annoying. A magazine ad is just a pretty picture, not very disturbing at all. Web ads tend to go the way of TV ads, with animations and sometimes (shudder) even sound. I find myself close to unable to read an article with stuff bouncing around in front of my eyes (and obviously, I run an ad blocker).
Magazine ads don’t work like that. They’re typically either two columns – 1/4 page and 1/2 page, with the text in between, or full-page. It’s not that hard for most people to focus on the column of text between the columns of ads, but it’s also not hard to skim the ads to see if anything is interesting. The full-page ads are the reason every article skips to the back of the magazine eventually – your flow *is* interrupted, because you can’t automatically turn to page 85, and you’ll see some of the ads on your way there.
Fashion magazines are somewhat different – the ads really are as valuable as the editorial content to most readers. Most other magazines aren’t like that. But the ads are pretty well targeted, and it’s plausible some people will specifically look at the ads between reading articles.
I don’t think it’s necessarily any of your 6. I’d wager paper ads are less effective and hence cheaper. So newspapers need more to make ends meet.
I suspect #2 is completely false, which partially justifies #3. Paper ads are much easier to skip (you just flip the page right by them, whereas video ads force you to wait until the ad is over before you can continue consuming content).
Since they are easier to skip, the audience is more tolerant of them, thus they can get away with having more of them.
I might also suggest that having a lot of ads inside a magazine makes it look bigger/thicker which most people probably mentally map to “has more content/better value” and actually increases purchases. If you took all the ads out of magazines, what’s left would look rather unimpressive and people wouldn’t be able to justify paying $5 (or whatever magazines cost) for it.
This seems plausible.
This seems supported by fact that newspapers and various paper magazines are dying, died or are in some way very unusual.
Well, if you use consistent metrics on both you get similar results. How much eyeball time does a paper commercial get? You probably want to round up a bit, because just recognizing the brand has a lot of effect, and further reading the commercial has sharply decreasing marginal benefits. But still, you’re likely to end up with something between 1 and 10%.
Exactly. I don’t think “eyeball time” is the right metric.
Are you sure?
Didn’t express myself very well. Probably benefit second by second would be: 10 5 5 5 5 5 3 2 1 1 1 0
Apply this kind of function to create a “weighted eyeball time”, and then just straight up compare to total eyeball time.
Produce? No. Distribute? Yes. Almost all of Netflix’s costs (as a percentage) are cost of content and platform costs. They don’t need to create supply chains, coordinate delivery, etc. If a million people watch Netflix’s new drama Fluffer Nutter: Look At Them There Rednecks, it has almost no marginal cost to Netflix. If a million people order the New York Times special issue: “Republicans! Evil or Just Stupid?”, they have to print, transport, and distribute a million issues. This is in addition to all the same costs of content creation etc.
Yes.
Yes. Older, in particular.
No.
Not sure how to evaluate this one.
No, despite what the New York Times tells you.
You’re also missing that online ads are better targeted (you get an almost one to one ratio with who sees them) which means they’re more effective and cost more on a per ad basis.
Seems like it should be this way but Netflix just beat new subscribers by a huge margin and missed on EPS by a small margin, something is eating their ability to profit from a massive add in new subscribers.
Counterpoint: the *licensing* costs for Netflix might be zero. But the hosting/distribution/whatever costs are non-trivial. This is one of the reasons why there hasn’t been any practical competitor to YouTube set up – it was basically subsidized in various ways by Google’s main Advertising business. IIRC, a number of analysts were wondering if YouTube would ever manage to start making money.
Did Youtube ever start being profitable for Google?
Also I want to know this.
Thinking about masks and their benefit to you versus to others:
Recently I realized while it intuitively makes sense to me that they help stop spread more than keep you safe, I didn’t really understand the mechanism. Can someone explain it, or link somewhere that explains it, in a precise way?
Concerns with that theory: If the mask doesn’t have an airtight seal, it seems like breathing in (where you bring the fabric closer to your mouth) would have more air pass through the filter than breathing out (where you blow the fabric away from your mouth. And if the material only filters 50% of the particles either way, it seems it wouldn’t make a difference on whose face the mask was (even if the seals were perfect, but not great material).
Reasons it still makes sense: 1) the mask diverts your breath up or down, making it less likely to hit others quickly. 2) it strongly reduces the velocity of particles emitted by a cough or talking, reducing the radius of transmission. 3) If a mask on a receiver catches some viral load, you’re then pulling that viral load towards your face every time you breathe, and eventually it’ll make it through.
Something that I’ve heard though I have no idea how much sense it makes is that the eyes are a potential way to be infected but not really to spread the infection. So a mask that leaves your eyes uncovered will stop you from spreading but won’t stop infections from entering that way.
And if it doesn’t make it through, it’s still all going to be right there on the outer surface of the mask when you take it off. Which, realistically, most people are going to do by touching the outer surface of the mask and then e.g. promptly scratching the itchy parts of their face that were until now covered by the mask.
On the transmission side, COVID-19 seems to be mostly transmitted by relatively large droplets, which can infect by either A: spraying directly on the face of someone in front of the guy doing the sneezing, shouting, singing, etc, or B: spraying onto a surface where someone will later touch them and then touch a vulnerable part of their face. If it’s the spreader wearing the mask, that whole chain is interrupted. If it’s the recipient, the mask provides only partial protection against the first part (see above and also the eyes are still vulnerable) and even less against the second.
Woah. John doing a 180 on homemade masks, unless I’m misunderstanding something.
Not really, and note that I didn’t use the word “homemade” anywhere in the above post. In responding to the OP’s question, I perhaps too generously assumed we were talking about the subset of masks that at least did something.
And to clarify: My best guess is that homemade cloth masks worn by amateurs,
A: Would have a significant effect at reducing transmission by actively symptomatic infectees who are coughing up the neighborhood, if we weren’t already insisting that these people should stay under lockdown, and
B: Have a very small effect at reducing transmission by asymptomatic carriers, who are shedding only small aerosolized particles that will be entrained by the airflow as it is ejected out the gaps, and
C: Be somewhere between almost useless and worse than useless at protecting uninfected individuals.
The proposals currently under debate all involve forcing / strongly encouraging the asymptomatic and mostly uninfected population to wear improvised cloth masks, and that I think is solidly in the “don’t do that except as a private measure if it makes you feel better” category.
There isn’t an exception for the symptomatic, so it captures them, too. Precisely because we can’t depend on whoever it is that is spreading to take appropriate action.
So, I don’t see how you can poo-poo the notion that everyone wearing masks gets the symptomatic who don’t self quarantine to wear masks (i.e. the people you consider to be the spread risk).
The asymptomatic sometimes sneeze and cough from something besides having coronavirus. Not sure how much, but I was reminded when I had to sneeze today in public, and was wearing my mask.
It seems that the virus doesn’t really spread by floating through the air, but is basically sprayed from your mouth and nose. Those droplets either fall on someone else, or are directly breathed in by him, or they fall harmlessly to the floor.
So it seems straightforward that any maneuvers around or through the mask would make droplets lose enough momentum that most of them will be caught in the mask or fall to the floor instead of spraying towards other people.
If you’re wearing a mask and someone else sprays virus droplets on your face, there’s a number of ways they can still get into your mucous membranes, even if the mask can stop them, which is disputed for all surgical and cloth masks.
For sealed filter masks, they stop all droplets as well as the virus itself and thus protect you pretty well (modulo your eyes and any contamination while donning or doffing it).
3) If a mask on a receiver catches some viral load, you’re then pulling that viral load towards your face every time you breathe, and eventually it’ll make it through.
But you’re also pushing it away every time you breathe out.
How potentially infective are dried-out droplets?
Food for thought.
The NYC MTA workers have had 83 deaths out of a work force of 55,000.
NYC has had ~11,000 deaths out of a population of ~8.5M
That works out to death rates so far of ~0.15% and ~0.12%. Roughly a 25% increase in total morbidity risk, but I don’t know how strong a signal that is, given all the other things that are coincident with “MTA worker”. Without controlling for those, we don’t know whether MTA worker is an increased risk at all.
But, I don’t think this supports the idea that mass transit in general is a huge risk factor that explains too much of the increased NYC crisis.
I’d expect that working for the public transport company is less risky than riding public transport. I guess employees would get discounts and use public transport more than the general population, but the job itself might not be that risky.
Some of the 55000 employees are probably office workers or machine technicians who don’t go near public transport while working. And even tram and metro drivers tend to have a wall between them and the passengers. On the other hand, some jobs like bus drivers and security will have a lot of contact with passengers.
So I’d expect that there’s a large group of MTA employees whose risk is no higher than average, and a smaller group where it’s much higher. Considering that none of the workers are 80 year old cancer patients, even a 25% increased risk of death compared to the general population shouldn’t be scoffed at.
Age demo is a good point. I think we can assume all of the MTA workers are under 65.
Although, Roughly speaking, the death rates of the 45-64 crowd match the overall morbidity rates. Under 45 is negligible.
Not sure how the MTA age distribution skews. My sense is that they skew older than the working age population in general, but I’m not at all confident in that.
It looks like 60% of the MTA workers are over 45, and 90% are over 35. So they do skew quite a bit older.
Source
They probably don’t include many high risk elderly people. But on the other end they definitely don’t include any children, who are very low risk. So I’m not confident that the demographics themselves have a big effect.
Various cities have tried to reduce bus drivers’ contact with passengers, where the design of their buses allows, by roping off the front of the bus and having passengers board via a back door. In London, this involved making some of the buses free to ride as the only payment machine was next to the driver (London buses are a fixed fare regardless of distance- normally you pay as you get on at the front door, then get off at the back).
I saw a recent scare-porn article about how 30 grocery workers in Texas had been diagnosed with COVID or something like that, but if you actually did the math (note that you had to do this yourself, the article didn’t give you any of the necessary information to do it), their base infection rate seemed to be lower than the statewide average.
It seems that we still have a very poor and incomplete knowledge of exactly how this virus spreads and what the primary risk factors are.
You could tell a story in which MTA workers are demographically at less risk than the general population, being of working age, but are getting much more exposed to the virus, and the two effects mostly cancel out. This would predict that MTA workers will get much higher results on antibody tests than the general population.
Something I’m still not clear on…
Are younger people at less risk of acquiring COVID in the first place than older people (controlling for all environmental risk factors)? Or is it just that COVID is less dangerous to the young, and part of being less dangerous means that some young people will never even bother to get tested, and thus won’t show up in the COVID case statistics, which will then make it look like they are less likely to acquire in the first place (even though this isn’t technically true)?
Porque no los dos?
Could be!
But that was a real question and I’m hoping someone has a real answer!
We don’t know how many cases there are that never get tested. Among those who do get tested, young people are safer at every level:
– less likely to test positive
– given positive tests, less likely to have symptoms
– given symptoms, less likely severe ones
– given severe symptoms, less likely to die
Whether the test and symptom disparity is due to testing protocols or natural resistance is unknown.
There’s not a whole lot of data on that, but the Diamond Princess data suggests that younger people are at lower risk of acquiring it also.
Younger people have better hearing and don’t need to stand so close to talk?
The data from that aircraft carrier that had an outbreak is probably useful here. As well as the data from the women who came to that NYC hospital to give birth–something like 1/6 of them were positive for the virus, and most never showed any symptoms.
The most plausible thing, to me, is that young people catch the virus pretty often, but are typically asymptomatic or very mildly symptomatic and so, in a world where you can’t get tested unless you’re deathly ill or a millionaire with political connections, nobody will ever know you’re sick.
Eh. Pregnant women are in a special category because they are intrinsically immunosuppressed in a very specific way. You can’t generalize from them to … anyone else.
As someone who takes public transit, I don’t really see why the workers would be at increased risk, they usually are separated from the people.
They are in bus/tram/subway for the entire working day and (depending on vehicle construction) may be near many different people.
I am very concerned with the longer term economic impacts of both the virus and the shutdowns and spending that have occurred, I am working my way through some thoughts on inflation and this is a piece of that.
Markets have a great correcting mechanism for price increases. If pork increases in price at the store then meat packing plants have an incentive to produce more pork, and will bid up the price of pigs which increases the incentive for farmers to raise more pigs. Even with ‘cost-push’ inflation where an increasing cost of raising pigs is the cause of store price increases you still have the same incentive structure to address the causes of the increased cost of raising pigs.
Note: I am not claiming that this prevents all price increases, I am claiming that this mutes long term price increases. One off price increases can still exist, but spiraling price increases are rare due to this fundamental mechanism in markets and specifically capital markets.
This mechanism is not perfect and the current shutdowns highlight a weakness. Prices have to be passed through the chain for this mechanism to work well. Currently several large pork processing plants have shutdown due to infections, this is (or is going to) create a shortage* of pork products, and stores will be bidding for this reduced supply. The expectation here is higher in store prices, however prices for pigs are dropping because the processing capacity isn’t there for as many pigs as have been raised**, so while we are getting higher prices at the store the pig farmers are getting the opposite signal, lower prices for their pigs.
This break in the signalling chain can have long term consequences, if farmers expect lower prices they will raise fewer pigs, even if they expect higher prices in the future many will go bankrupt due to selling at current prices and their productivity won’t be 100% replaced immediately. What is scary for me are the number of areas in which extreme breaks in pricing are appearing. Oil collapsing into negative territory on Monday was the largest event I have noticed and indicative of prices failing to move fast enough to shift supply and demand to find a new equilibrium. Some have argued that prices bouncing back*** after the delivery date of that particular futures contract shows that it was a one off and not as big a deal. I disagree, the large swings add uncertainty and prevent accurate predictions about the future. A sustained decrease towards zero, with producers cutting back supply/going bankrupt is the orderly solution, but a swinging price does not do this efficiently and in the long term will destroy more supply leading to higher prices.
*In the sense that less pork will be produced than previous expectations.
** Pigs also have high carrying costs
*** only part way
This isn’t crazy, your two divergent prices are effectively pulling in three directions:
– Eat less pork (there’s less of it to go around, higher prices).
– Raise fewer pigs (they’re not the bottleneck for eating more pork right now, lower prices).
– (Re)open more pork processing plants (turning cheap pigs into expensive bacon).
There’s money to be made in figuring out how to turn more pigs into pork products, which is exactly where the problem is (and until it’s fixed, raising more pigs isn’t useful).
I am not arguing that it is crazy, I am highlighting a situation where the dampening mechanism of markets isn’t going to work as well as you want.
Has anyone done a detailed comparison of the staffing / budget of comparably sized hospitals over the last ~100 years? I’d be curious to see how different they looked, and where the various chunks of money went. One obvious difference would be a large increase in technological capital and the people to run it. Administrative (insurance and legal included) increases were discussed about in the Amish thread. Another would be labor costs for comparable positions – for example nurses’ unions are consistently pushing for fewer patients per nurse, higher pay, and more education… to the extent they’ve been successful that might be another source of cost growth (of course “nurse” is also a legitimately more technical job than it was a century ago). Doctors and surgeons are probably paid better too, and that’s cost disease in the classic sense since I doubt a doctor can effectively treat many more patients than their 1920 counterpart.
Is there anywhere that costs might be relatively lower than in 1920?
These are usually incredibly cheap, to the point there’s a slight nocebo effect when you get a prescription and have it filled for the equivalent of 50c.
Yes, treatments for some diseases have become dramatically cheaper. Probably it wasn’t worth doing the expensive version in the first place. I always recommend Lewis Thomas, in particular his Technology of Medicine.
For those who are looking for something to do, Aurora just updated. This is a free space-based 4X game, with no graphics and incredible depth. You do everything from setting grand strategic direction to the finer details of technology path and ship design. The learning curve is steep, but for a certain type of person, the level of depth is very compelling. The only game I’ve found like it is Dwarf Fortress, but Aurora lacks the constant teetering on the edge of failure.
The C# version came out about 10 days ago, bringing vastly improved performance. The flurry of patches seems to be slowing somewhat, so if you want to get into it, now might be a good time.
Download/install info is at http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=Download_%26_Install (linking s I needed a bit of time to track it down).
Has anyone tried running it on Linux?
Not sure whatever
should be interpreted as “easy, requires ability to read” or “will require recompiling kernel”.
I’m reminded of the old xkcd comic, where the dreaded words were “requires only minimal configuration and tweaking.”
The Aurora forums are generally good, and I’d recommend looking there for info. I’m a windows user, so I can’t help you on this one.
Runs fine for me using wine.
I think I just opened the .exe from Nautilus then pressed some ‘ok’ buttons in the wine prompt that appeared.
And kernel recomplilation isn’t terribly hard.
Also, the link you posted is not a good one. It’s for the VB6 Aurora, and I’d recommend the C# version instead.
Ops, after the edit window. Sorry.
What a blast from the past! Aurora is an AMAZING game that I spent most of my 20s playing. Maybe I’ll get into it again after law school.
Speaking of it, how do you find Rule the Waves? Should be exactly your kind of game…
It very much is, yes. I’m currently in 1928 of an RTW2 game with my blog readership. But Aurora, when everything is working right, is better.
I remember trying out Aurora a long time ago, but I couldn’t get into it because while I just wasn’t interested in running my space nation’s entire space economy and was distressed by the lack of space capitalists to hand it off to. Like I enjoy designing missile spaceships, and space missiles, and space missile supply spaceships to carry the space missiles to my missile spaceships. However, I do not very much enjoy setting up space factories to build those space missiles and don’t understand why I can’t just give the blueprints to Space Raytheon so that they can give me a per unit price estimate for me to work into the budget. I certainly don’t enjoy having to set up the raw material supply chain for said factories either. It would be nice if the free market could handle all that.
You can do that to a limited extent, although buying from civilian mining colonies won’t provide enough minerals to live off of. If you really want to ignore all the civilian details, spacemaster mode should let you solve the mineral issues.
Ah, well then if I get the hankering to play Aurora again I will try it in Spacemaster mode. Thank you.
More specifically, go into the system window and add a zero or two behind the values on the homeworld. That will buy you a fair bit of time. If/when that starts to run out, you can use the HW minerals generation button and repeat the process.
Interesting article: Why are there no shortages in Canada compared to the US?
Kudos to Canada for sensible economic regulations! Or rather, for the lack of insensible economic regulations.
Eh. They haven’t had any high outbreak areas.
Show me the data that Canadian prices actually rose, coincident with an increase in demand, and that those price rises were sufficient to prevent people buying two double packs of TP instead of only 1.
@HeelBearCub
Neither did the US when the store runs began.
“No National Laws” != “No Laws”. Ontario (about 1/3 of the total population) has apparently been prosecuting pretty aggressively on that front. They even have a denounce-a-kulak form linked right from their main covid-19 page:
Even in the states, most of the action is at the state level, so looking at Canadian Federal laws is not a good way to compare across countries.
Good to know. I should’ve dug deeper. Thanks.
edit: there is this:
Our store runs were before that.
Some other factors that might be relevant are:
1) toilet paper was one of the most noticeable shortages, and a lot is made in Canada, resulting in shorter supply lines
2) there are like two national grocery chains, and their response has been really competent. Inventory has been carefully managed, with purchase limits on high-demand items; they were also really quick to deploy measures like plexiglass shields for cashiers and sanitizing carts between customers.
I can see purchase limits being responsible for pretty much all of the difference.
Toilet paper is mostly made domestically
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/17/business/toilet-paper-supply-chain-coronavirus/index.html
Potentially very interesting result re: COVID-19 transmission, but needs critical review and even more so replication.
TL, DR: Looking at 58 known “superspreader” incidents, most involved religious services or “parties or liquor-fueled mass attendance festivals of one kind or another”. More generally, places where lots of people were enthusiastically interacting face-to-face at close quarters in a high-noise environment. Conspicuously rare or absent are superspreading incidents in airliners, mass transit systems, theaters, auditoriums, classrooms, or open-plan offices. High density plus quiet conversation doesn’t do it, even with the highest plausible social anti-distancing. High density plus noisy social interaction does.
If this holds up, it has important and somewhat counterintuitive implications on how to go about lifting the lockdowns.
Too lazy to look for it now, but there was a report of a restaurant where an infected person ate; about 10 more people were infected, but only those in the path of the air conditioning draft. The 80-some people elsewhere in the restaurant were not infected.
Actually linked in the above study.
He did say he was too lazy.
If true then countries/cultures that celebrate the end of lock downs should see mass spreading when they are lifted, right?
Yeah, if your plan is to say “crisis over!” and hold a ticker-tape parade, that probably won’t end well.
I thought that link would go to a story about a city in 1918 or so that did the same, with results that validate your prediction, such as this one about San Francisco.
Those who don’t learn history…
If that had been someone other than DeBlasio I would have assumed it was a joke, but BDB can never surprise me with his outlandishness.
The article refers to the superspreader event in the German town of Heinsberg. What they leave out is, that two initially infected people who went there were themself infected on a ski holiday in Tirol the week before. So no mass transit wasn’t the place were it happened, but if mass transit would have been restricted earlier, we might not had have two infected people at the event.
I wonder if there is a bias in which sort of superspreader event is simply easier to find after the fact. If a bunch of people at a party get coronavirus they all talk to each other about it afterwards and it quickly becomes obvious what happened. If it happens on a subway, none of the people infected know each other and so they can’t compare notes, and so the superspreader event is hard to see.
I’ve seen the government put notices for people who “took the bus A-51 between 19:12 and 20:00 on monday on such and such city” to please report for testing. It’s hard, but it is not impossible.
The subway may be harder, tho.
The MBTA (Boston) is decent at translating descriptions of transit activities into car and bus numbers. They’re also not one of the better run transit agencies compared to, e.g. Tokyo or Seoul. I would be shocked if there were public transit superspreader events, and we didn’t know about them for lack of looking. If only because it’s such a scary prospect.
Thinking about it, it just seems way harder to trace spread in a subway car or bus or commuter train, relative to a funeral or church event or big party or sporting event or something. Imagine asking someone who’s very ill and in the hospital to recount where they’ve been in the last week or two. They or their family will remember a funeral or a big party or a ski trip or something. And the investigator will then be able to chase down many of the other people at the funeral/party/ski trip and ask them how they’re feeling, ask them to get tested, etc. On the other hand, it’s going to be *way* harder to get in contact with everyone who takes a particular subway line at 7:45 AM and in the other direction at 5:30 PM every weekday. You can get a list of those people for planes, and maybe you can for some trains as well, but it’s going to be very hard to get it for subways, cabs, buses, etc.
If you are trying to do contact tracing, yes.
If you are looking for clusters, it’s much less hard, relatively speaking. You just need to be asking lots of people who are known to be infected about their activities. If there are SSEs in transit, you eventually will run into a cluster of people who all have in common that they take the A train to Sugar Hill every day at 5:15.
Selection bias is definitely a possibility, and I agree that subway-mediated superspreading would be easy to miss in this study. Transmission during airline travel, OTOH, would be much easier to catch. School classrooms and the like ditto, though probably not to the same extent.
We had a guy who was diagnosed with COVID but -he says- received no order to quarantine.
Then he took a plane to another city.
A handful of passengers in the plane got sick. One is dead.
V anecdotic but I am still not taking my chances.
Well, it would jibe pretty well with the other article Arnold Kling linked recently, the Banholzer paper:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20062141v1.full.pdf
which says venue closures have a big effect (presumably by taking away the gathering places for these kinds of SSEs) and gathering bans and event bans do too (also obviously related), while travel restrictions have a moderate but significant effect (by preventing people from traveling to them). By contrast, school closures and lockdowns (“no leaving your house for nonessential reasons” orders) have little to no effect. The one inconsistency is that work bans have a bigger effect than this survey of SSEs would predict; maybe workplaces put enough people close together enough to get the kind of moderate spread that matters even distinct from SSEs.
What’s counterintuitive about this? It’s fully consistent with the Swedish model not having produced disaster there, and with advocating that stricter lockdowns be backed off to the Swedish level. In particular, it would say that reopening one-teacher-per-student-group primary schools with measures to limit cross-student-group interaction is probably safe, but universities should stay closed, not because of classroom spread but to stop college kids from throwing big parties as is their wont.
One counterintuitive thing is that we can afford to open the movie theaters, etc, early in the process. Maybe parks and beaches as well, but there are some more unknowns there. Since a big part of the end-the-lockdown push is going to be people who want to get out of the house for some entertainment, making sure we allow the safer forms of entertainment is going to be critical.
Not having to worry so much about subways and other mass transit is also counterintuitive to normal social-distancing intuition. Lots of people in very close quarters, but it’s maybe OK because they’re not shouting at each other.
Being able to reopen schools is going to be huge, not just for the kids (who see the homeschooling discussion may be better off under the lockdown) but for the parents who need the kids out of the house if they’re to reclaim their own personal and professional lives. That’s not so much counterintuitive as a big “we just don’t know” are at present, where now we have a piece of evidence pointing to their being OK.
And if one outcome of this is a blanket rule that restaurants, bars, etc, can reopen if they meet a strict decibel limit, I for one am going to be very pleased.
+1 to quiet and uncrowded restaurants where you can concentrate on the food and nobody comes over to sing Happy Birthday. 🙂
Many people were already saying (haha) that parks and beaches would be fine if well patrolled to tamp down large gatherings, just because of outdoor air circulation being a big risk reducer. The paucity of known spreading events from trains and planes is counterintuitive, yes; maybe the lack of party atmosphere is really working, and maybe a mask requirement will be enough to keep it working, but on the basis of prior theory I’d want more corroboration, especially given the recirculation of air in those spaces.
If we can get to the point where the airlines, subways, etc, are back in business, and you get a disposable surgical mask with every ticket, I’d consider that a solid win.
I’ve read that airplanes don’t really have all that much air recirculation–most of the air’s being pulled in from the outside and compressed to a high enough pressure to keep all the passengers from passing out, and then venting out the back. On the other hand, we should still be able to get large droplet contagion.
I wonder how the thinner and dryer air on an airplane affects droplet range. But in general, I’d expect you to be able to infect people only within a couple rows of you, and the people sitting to either side of you. Maybe that isn’t enough to get a superspreader event, but it’s likely enough to an occasional person.
I’m skeptical that the lack of known SSEs in schools is very informative. At least in Western countries, people seem to start looking when they find a cluster of identified sick people. If almost nobody under 18 shows symptoms, there will never be a visible event at a school. And yet, pep rallies, basketball games, chorus practices, gym classes, and eating in a crowded cafeteria all have many of the same elements as the SSEs the article described. Unless there’s some reason that asymptomatic 16-year-olds somehow can’t spread the virus the way adults can, the smart bet is that this can and will happen when schools are back in session.
Schools aren’t just students, they have a fairly substantial adult staff. And the students are then going home to their parents, who often keep in touch with each other. If any significant number of those people turn up sick, they’re probably going to make the connection.
There will be some underreporting due to marginal school outbreaks not reaching public notice, but their nearly complete absence is at least suspicious (in a good way). And now that we know it’s a question we should be asking, it shouldn’t be too hard to get better data.
OTOH, it’s a question we obviously should have been asking a month or two, and the people with the resources to do the job right have been curiously (in a bad way) uninterested in doing so.
No schools at all and schools back to normal are not the only options, though. I’m betting that by the fall there will be a bunch of evidence one way or another from school/camp/etc openings which maintain consistent groupings of kids and staff and don’t do mass gatherings (so to your point, no pep rallies, chorus practices etc and the kids eat in their classrooms), especially from Europe.
Here is something to compare to the NYT movement map from several weeks ago. Note the rough similarities between that and this map of new high prevalence counties of the last two weeks.
Any fans of the EFM want to explain why Barrick (GOLD) has doubled in value when similar gold miner Newmont (NEM) has only gone up by 30%?
People
gamblinginvesting bought something with GOLD symbol?https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/zoom-ipo-zoom-technologies-zm-mistaken-identity-penny-stock-50000-percent-increase.html
I think he wanted an argument that makes the EMH look better, not worse…
I was going into direction “maybe this temporarily is not an efficient market” (I think that everyone agrees that there at least temporary anomalies).
Yeah, your example is worse because GOLD actually does mine gold. Barrick is a little bit bigger than Newmont too, though probably not by enough to justify the disparity in stock price increases.
As far as I can tell, they both fill the niche of investing in gold without actually buying gold.
My favorite was when Twitter announced its IPO and lots of people tried to buy stock in it before the IPO happened, and ended up with the last company to use the symbol TWTR, a defunct electronics retailer named Tweeter. Funnier, I guess, if you had lived in New England when Tweeter was around and remember shopping there.
Anyone want to go around buying up small companies whose names sound like those of big ones that are about to do an IPO?
Canonical (company behind Ubuntu Linux) is taking steps towards an IPO. What companies should we be buying ahead of time?
I don’t know what the differences actually are but gold miners are not interchangeable. A miner can sell its stream of gold for a fixed payment over a fixed time to a buyer (or it can be a semi floating payment where the miner gets a percentage change in payments as gold prices go up or down but not tracking gold spot 100%), so one of them might have 100% of their production available to sell at a higher gold price as gold moves up and the other might have 70% to sell and 30% committed at a previous price. Plus there is debt, and some mines are closed due to -19 and some are open, and sometimes a mine will flood etc, etc.
However looking at the two on a longer time frame, Barrick has gained ~47% since Feb 12th, and Newmont is up 42% to now. That doesn’t appear to be a difference that needs explaining for two companies in the same space during a highly volatile time.
Killing the last-anti-centrist
Fast-moving, silly, trope-aware political satire.
Two ease-of-movement summits.
These are collections of video clips about making movement easier, I’ve found this sort of thing to be valuable and interesting.
The clips will be posted day by day and available for free for 48 hours. It’s also possible to pay for permanent access.
A lot of the material will be sequences you can follow, not just information.
There will be a lot of stuff, and there’s no need to view all of it– you can just poke around and look at what seems interesting.
https://peacefulbodyschool.com/2020/04/17/a-learning-opportunity-free-online-event-april-27-may-1-2020-the-somatic-summit/ 4/27–5/1
https://feldenkraissummit.com/ 5/1– 5/10
Thank you for this. I have been interested in feldenkrais since I saw it mentioned in another comment thread.
Really interesting article about superspreader events in Quillette. The writer just dug around and tried to find as many known superspreader events as possible, and then draw whatever conclusions he could from them.
His big takeaways were that the big superspreader events seemed most consistent with large-droplet spread–having people doing a lot of close face-to-face interaction, or singing, shouting, etc. in close quarters seemed to present in most of the known events. Most of them took place indoors, which suggests to me that there may be some limited airborne spread, but I think that’s consistent with what he’s thinking of. A simple model is to divide the world into big droplets and tiny airborne droplet nuclei, but really, there are a bunch of intermediate sizes of droplets that probably travel further, and in eating/coughing/sneezing/yelling/laughing/singing, you’re probably making a lot more of all sizes of droplets and propelling them in a cloud for a pretty good distance. His take is that it’s much harder to get spread when you’re just sitting quietly or talking quietly. He pointed out that there weren’t known superspreader events on airplanes, trains, or theaters.
A plausible model here is that you have both occasional community spread from one person to another, and also superspreader events where you get like 20 people infected the same day. The normal spread isn’t all that easy to do–you might infect your wife or your office-mate while you’re asymptomatic, but probably not a lot of passers by. But once you get into the right environment for superspreading–you’re coughing, sneezing, singing, shouting, etc., and you’re in a closed-in space relatively close to everyone else–the virus spreads pretty readily.
Man, if only someone like @John Schilling had posted that for discussion at https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/22/open-thread-152-25/#comment-885632
Said lightheartedly, but you might want to delete and move your response there.
Ninja’d.
Unemployment won’t even cover my rent (and this is the cheapest apartment I could get with my income). I have a good amount of savings because it was going to be down payment for buying a place (ha. ha. hahahahahaha), but it sure still feels like I’m a frog in a bucket, and water temperature just ticked up another couple of degrees. Trumpbux will help, but if lockdown doesn’t lift by end of May, things are gonna get dicey.
This would be a nice time for a classifieds thread.
Was there something other than your former employer handcuffing you to an expensive zip code? Do you expect to get your job back eventually? Do you have space for a room mate to split the rent?
I am only furloughed, not laid off, so I will still have my job when the lockdown ends. I sincerely love my job, and it pays well.
I wrote my post before learning about the extra UE from the stimulus bill (aside from the one-time check). That assuaged a lot of my stress.
Looking for alternative platforms to host online community than Facebook Groups. We have had lots of people leave over Facebook’s privacy failures. And we know they are selling data from our conversations in the group to 3rd parties (from targeted ads minutes after using a catchword in the group). I only see this getting worse and more people leaving. New platform also needs to be a totally SFW site, or the group won’t migrate there (no Reddit). Thoughts?
Public/private group?
How many people?
What is the budget (money)? 0? >0?
What is the budget (time) for a technical maintenance?
How strong privacy concerns?
Depending on level of privacy concerns and other considerations, following may be interesting (used by some communities where I am involved): Telegram / Signal / mailing list / Slack / IRC / hosted forum
Private group. We currently have around 650, though I don’t think that would replicate in new platform, and only around 150 participate day to day. Zero budget, but if cheap ($10 or less / month) I could just pay it. We have no technical skills (coding etc) so it would need to be a pre-built platform. Privacy concerns are very significant to the group — Facebook’s privacy issues are the key factor in the group’s current decline.
The I would probably recommend Signal (if very concerned about privacy) or Telegram / Discord if not extremely concerned about privacy.
Still, all this services may want phone number for verification but AFAIK are 100% free and working decently. All are less stable than FB (may become bankrupt), but far less likely to ban you because FB algorithm disliked you.
Slack/IRC/hosted forum/mailing list/Mastodon(?) are more exotic solutions.
To be more specific I thought about sysops – maintaining server with installed software (that is programming adjacent but not exactly the same).
Though in this situation things starting from “install on your server…” are probably out (I assume that you have no burning desire to start playing with servers).
I love signal. But how does it replace a comment board?
Depends on what you want.
Communication between N people as in “ability to send text and images and files” – works well.
Structured communication (groups, comment trees) – not really.
Depends on whatever group really needs the structure.
But if you combine “extreme privacy requirements” + “0 or nearly 0 budget” + “0 technical time budget” + “reliable solution” then you are not getting exactly what you want, you are getting something close and hopefully sufficient.
You can make a subreddit that is completely SFW. The other subs will still exist, so I don’t know if that fits your need for “totally SFW” or not.
NSFW content will be still one or two clicks away. Sometimes in automatically added subs.
You are asking the question the wrong way.
– What features do you need?
++ What, if any, Facebook specific features do you need?
– What resources do you have?
++ Is it worth money to members of the group
++ Does the site need to be pre-built by an existing company like Facebook or Reddit
For instance, if you had money and tech knowledge as resources, and no need for drawing future members from the general public, you could stand up a linux node running “simple machine’s forum” message board software.
I have no idea what Facebook Groups does because I never joined Facebook in the first place due to its privacy failures. Since I can’t know what you want, I’m shooting from the hip here:
– Friendica if someone can run an instance
– Scuttlebutt if everybody is willing to install it on a desktop or mobile.
The New York antibody study prelim results have dropped.
Interesting results, but oh my God, who wrote the article?
WTF?
What do you think, poor editing, or sensitivity to pet-roommates?
I guess people residents, as opposed to feline or canine residents? (joking) Copy editing seems to have gone out of the window even more than usual now that everbody is kungflu fighting.
Damn. Ninja’d by Randy M by a matter of seconds.
I guess people residents, as opposed to feline or canine residents?
Seeing as how the virus has been found in cats, not such a joke.
I think a combination of “nobody does copyediting any more” and poor ability to use English (I blame the schools 🙂 ). Saying “19.4 million people resident” (meaning “19.4 people residing in the city”) is correct, but someone could look at that, think “doesn’t seem right, should be plural” and stick the “s” on the end so treating it as a noun not an adjective.
Probably a relic of an earlier draft, that had something like “with 19.4 million people residents of the city, the results show that at least 2.7 million…”, ie, it was saying that X people were residents of the city. But the new version still works grammatically, a little, it’s just hard to parse.
So this number puts us back in the 10x range for total cases vice confirmed, which isn’t great but also isn’t horrible. It’s much more in line with common expectations and points in exactly the opposite direction from the California seriological studies.
Also worth bearing in mind that this is could still be an over-report based on sampling issues. (Folks in the grocery store are more likely to get infected than folks who refuse to go to the grocery store.)
So I’d call this disappointing but roughly in in with expectations.
So if you believe these numbers, 21% of NYC specifically has had it. Which would mean the true fatality rate is not much less than 1% (since close to 0.2% of the city has already died from it) and that relaxing the lockdown might plausibly triple the current death count there before herd immunity kicks in. Right? On the one hand, that might be an overestimate if the study has been going for long enough to make a significant fraction of the negatives out of date. On the other, it could be an underestimate if as Cuomo says the tested populace is biased away from people who are rigorously isolated and thus less likely to have gotten it.
I got .6% as an IFR for NYC specifically. That was using 11000 deaths, population of 8.4MM and 21% infected.
But we don’t know when the antibody testing was actually done. And I’m not familiar with the timing of when antibodies are detectable: we really need to know the timeline of infection—death—antibodies can give positive test
Would also be helpful to know false positive and negative rate for the test. A bit frustrating they didn’t link to a paper.
This is also broadly consistent with the study on pregnant women who came to the hospital to give birth.
I try to listen to Cuomo’s address each day. He’s still a politician (and I’ve had many issues with him in the past) but he will not gaslight me by pretending today he never said something (that he really did say) yesterday.
One problem he had with one part of a region opening up but not neighboring regions is that people from those closed-down regions will rush to use the services (hair dressers was the common example) in the now-open reason. This potentially creates more spreader events across longer distances.
As part of a gentle re-opening, have people considered a model of “open for business, but by appointment only”? That way you can keep your traffic limited, and you also know exactly who to contact for test-and-track.
I think any business that would have considered that is probably already doing it.
Folk linguistics question: You know that sound you make by putting your mouth up against a baby’s tummy and blowing? It sounds a lot like a fart, and it makes the baby laugh. What do you call it?
Most people seem to call it a “raspberry,” from the Cockney rhyming slang. When I was growing up, it was called a “britzel” or sometimes a “brutzel.” My mother is from Pittsburgh, of unambiguously German immigrant extraction, and I’m pretty sure it’s her word. I’d like to know where she got it. Does anybody else on here, especially from a German-speaking or related society, call it something like “britzel” or “brutzel”? Anybody know what the word means? It’s such a weird word …
Google Translate says it means “sizzling”?
My father called it a Bronx Cheer but I couldn’t possibly tell you why. Some googling appears to indicate it’s a baseball thing?
In my mind there’s a slight distinction between a “raspberry” (a linguolabial trill) and imitating a horse’s whinny (a bilabial trill), even though doing either against a stomach would undoubtedly produce tickles.
Brutzeln is what something does while it’s being fried (shallow fried?) in oil. Brutzel is sort of the sound effect for that.
I’m familiar with the move you describe, but I’m not sure what it’s called. If you do it without putting your lips against someone’s skin it’s called prusten, and is a kind of laugh or a noise you make when exasperated. Maybe that’s what your mum calls the baby tickling move as well.
The only name I ever heard for that sound is ‘motorboating’.
‘Britzeln’ (as a verb) is continuously making the sound and sight of small sparks in an electric short, ‘brutzeln’ is what steaks and sausages in the pan or on the grill do, also sometimes used jokingly for sunbathing.
Pretty sure motorboating has a different meaning to most people. It would seem extremely weird to me if someone used motorboating in this context.
Yeah, motorboating is something waaaaay different. If your baby does that, he needs a refresher on how to nurse.
That suggested a trip to Urban Dictionary. #learningneverends
That’s not where you go for a motorboat. The learning is more … biblical in nature. If you know what I mean.
I have heard it referred to as a “zerbert”. Not sure how widespread that is.
Yep, we call it a zerbet, too, though I might have written it zerbit, and I don’t know where the word comes from. I have friends who call it raspberries.
I think the “zerbit” thing comes, and I swear I believe this, from the television show “The Cosby Show”.
*Edited to say the right show name instead of the clearly wrong one.
*Edit the second: Success!
I thought it came from the Cosby Show too, but I’ve never looked into whether it originated somewhere else first.
That’s satisfying to know, thanks. We probably did pick it up from The Cosby Show, but I never would have figured that out.
Hmm. Maybe fart -> raspberry tart -> raspberry -> raspberry sherbet -> zerbert?
Could you unpack that? Whats the (non)rhyme here?
(Trying to make sense of Cockeny Rhyming slang is harder than understanding the theory of relativity as far as I’m concerned. In both cases I have had it explained to me multiple times, but in the latter’s case I actually understood it after the tenth time it was explained.)
Raspberry tart—>fart. It doesn’t strike me as an especially clever trick, but I understand the rationale, more or less.
I see. Is that something you can look up somewhere, or is it obvious to someone whose brain works differently than mine?
No, I read the etymology at some point. It’s not anything natural, and I like to think I’m reasonably good at wordplay. It’s a weird game of deliberate obscurity, honestly.
I’m glad I’m not crazy! It’s like the world’s strangest crossword puzzle.
Doesn’t help that it also involves backslang e.g. “yob” is “boy” backwards, as well. Also, I think some of the etymologies put forward are derived after the fact and may not be historically correct – the linked article seems very much straining after meaning, to me.
And of course, people are constantly inventing new slang, even people who are not Cockneys.
“Munprutt”, swedish.
translates to “Mouth fart” (Mun + Prutt)
We always called it a “blow kiss” or “blow kisses”, even though that is already the name of a thing (blowing someone a kiss is also called a “blow kiss” too).
We call it an “elephant’s kiss”, but that might be family folklore.
Zurbert
I read an interesting post in the culture war thread of r/the motte I’m interested in your reactions to.
Basically he posits that rpgs are more social justice aligned because they have gained in popularity to the point where they are on the cusp of respectability. So they are a lot more worried about looking like nerdy weirdos, or incels or creeps or whatever, then a few decades ago when they were seen as hopeless outcasts and thus could basically do whatever they want (within bounds of law and reason, etc.).
This probably generalizes to any subculture, and I suspect there is another threshold wherein you no longer worry about societal approval because you have sufficient prestige that you are setting standards.
Also, of course, local customs may dictate what standards you want to meet but, role playing games is a hobby that’s pretty urban and on-line, places that tend to hew toward “universal” or blue tribe cultural mores.
This might be non-sense and it’s just the fact that it is a hobby for younger people with time on their hands, and youth tend to be more progressive. Thoughts?
Comparisons are going to be drawn to the video game industry eventually, so I’m going to go ahead and mention it now.
I feel there’s similarity to comments I’ve heard on SSC before about communities that go all social justicey. @lvlln, I think, used to write about how it happened to ultimate frisbee just as it was breaking out into the mainstream, which he regarded as tragic because he’s a big fan of the game. This theory suggests it’s no coincidence it happened as ultimate frisbee was breaking out.
I don’t think it explains why it happens to communities like young adult fiction. Though of course there could be many reasons a place ends up awash in social justice; that’s not a mark against it per se. A better question is whether there are communities this theory predicts it would happen to but it hasn’t. I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but maybe others can.
There’s another wrinkle to this: Dungeons & Dragons used to be more mainstream than the RPG industry was when it started going SJW. This is before my time, but I’ve read that the D&D Basic and Expert sets of the 1980s sold like a million copies a year in places like the late Toys R Us (i.e. no dependence on specialty stores), there was a cartoon and a line of action figures.
IIRC, 2nd Edition D&D, after TSR cancelled the boxed sets, was only the second-best-selling line after the World of Darkness, which assumed a grim ‘n’ gritty version of Nineties Environmentalism (Werewolf), the trendy academic belief that reality is a social construct (Mage), and anti-Christianism and general independent coffee shop Blueness (Vampire).
Later, during D&D’s failed 4th Edition experiment, one of Pathfinder’s minor selling points (the major being “It’s D&D 3rd!”) was Wokeness (Pathfinder came into existence shortly post-Racefail and the California Supreme Court legislating gay marriage).
Not to deny that it’s getting slightly more blatant, e.g. gay marriage and transgenderism now exist in D&D’s Forgotten Realms setting with no indication that they ever didn’t. But I don’t think the arrow of causality runs “Critical Role is making D&D mainstream” -> “must get woke before someone calls us creeps!”
We talked about Vampire: The Masquerade a while back and @Lillian had an interesting response on this. The short of it is that yeah, White Wolf has always been very leftie, but it was that old form that was very transgressive. This doesn’t fly nowadays. But WW games were really popular at the time, right? So wouldn’t they have been facing the same respectability incentives twenty years ago? We’re not at some special inflection point, this would suggest, it’s just contemporary SJ’s quirks regarding propriety and sanctity that is driving this.
Not saying this is definitely what’s going on, of course. Just throwing more ideas out.
@Nick: I’m rather flattered a post I made a year and a half ago stuck in your mind well enough that you went looking for it to reference in a later discussion. I wish I could make a post of that quality, but my brain’s not cooperating. I however want to say that I don’t think respectability is the issue here, at least not mainstream respectability.
I have seen game developers go full SJW, and it doesn’t strike me that it’s because they started caring about what the normies think more than they used to. If anything they continue to very loudly not care. The status feedback loop they are actually sensitive to is that of other nerds, and it is that feedback loop that has gone all in on idpol.
As for the reason why it has done so, there’s likely several. I think one mechanism is the thing Scott has described in his infamous Untitled and elsewhere. A lot of nerdy folks are very scrupulous and conscientious and so are sensitive to messages that tell them that they are hurting others, and consequently will put a lot of effort towards avoiding doing so. This makes SJW messaging particularly effective against them, so it’s not really surprising it has been taking root with them. Additionally people participating in nerd hobbies seem disproportionally likely to be queer, weird, mentally ill, or disabled, and these are also all groups which seem particularly receptive to idpol and likely to get on board with it.
We also must not forget that nerd hobbies have always been very lefty and blue tribe for a number of reasons. When the leading edge of the left was transgressive, nerd hobbies tended to be transgressive. Now the leading edge of the left have become anti-transgressive and very concerned with propriety, so nerd hobbies are consequently also anti-transgressive and concerned with propriety.
Thoughts, on a somewhat broader version of the phenomenon. TL,DR: It’s not enough to keep out the SJWs, you pretty much have to keep out the mundanes at the start.
I had a whole section discussing this which I decided not to post. But since you did anyway:
Think of this discussion in conjunction with the discussion about homeschooling and that Harvard conference.
All the people in this comment chain wondering about SJism infiltrating games and is it a sign of wokeness taking over – you’re the Bad Guys in the homeschooling debate. You’re on the same side as the religious fundamentalist organisation. You are exhibiting the retrogressive attitudes the people holding the conference and being quoted in regard to it believe are a form of child abuse, or arise out of not believing children are people and have rights.
These are the Wrong Thinking beliefs that, if any of you have children, social workers should get involved because they are a warning sign. These are why the State should be the ultimate arbiter as to what and who is a family. These are why your kids need to go to school so they can be taught Correct Thinking and the Harvard people can make sure that they are being properly raised.
Do young people still rebel against their parents and professors by being More Left Than Thou? My college experience was that professors were the Vanguard and us youth just tried to get As. It was rare to meet anyone openly conservative or libertarian, but the Anarchists etc. weren’t any more common.
Given the existence of the Inquisition, “youth are more progressive per 1,000” seems like a claim that needs to be proved. It’s possible that all the anonymous heretics are Gen Xers, but how would we know?
My experience (at a moderately prestigious West Coast school known for being very left-wing) suggests there’s a fat-tailed distribution going on. Most students fell somewhere in the vicinity of “unexamined UMC center-left values”, but the people who got serious got very serious. Supporting every faculty strike that came down the road (there were two or three a year). Getting into SlutWalk or Take Back The Night. When none of that was going on, protesting McDonalds (this wasn’t too long after “Supersize Me”).
Despite that, though, I think the “unexamined” is doing most of the work for the youth-are-more-progressive trope. Educators are one of the most consistently Left professions out there, syllabi aren’t much less so, and a student who leans heavily on their schooling to form political opinions is going to end up with a politics heavily informed by The Jungle and Grapes of Wrath and maybe, if you’re lucky, Nineteen Eighty-Four. These days it’s not even all that uncommon to find Lies My Teacher Told Me on a syllabus, which has got to set some kind of record for irony.
The teacher profession probably requires and/or creates a rather peculiar mindset:
– a strong belief that you know better than others
– authoritarianism (the kids will maul the teacher if (s)he tries to treat them like equals)
– a sufficient belief in a big state to accept being paid by the government, getting dictates from the government, etc
– a solid belief in the ability of education to better children
It may not even be rebellion, it’s what is now the New Normal. If you’ve grown up or came of age when Gay Marriage Is Ordinary Now, you are going to expect gay characters in your media consumption, and as “just ordinary people like the rest of them, not blink-and-you’ll-miss-them background characters or the trope of the Tragic Gay”.
And if you don’t see it (having been raised on a diet of YA novels where the rainbow of race, sexuality and ability is carefully included) then you’re going to complain because This Is Not Representative Of My Experience. It’s not perceived as wokeness or SJ, it’s perceived as “you wouldn’t write a Western where the cowboys all rode water buffalo instead of horses, would you?” levels of “this is what is the standard”.
For instance, I am currently wincing my way through an anthology of Sherlock Holmes pastiche stories edited by an American (who is doing this out of love for the character and not as a deconstruction or anything like that) written by Americans and they are painfully American. I don’t even mean language, I mean late 20th/early 21st century attitudes on show to social matters and class distinctions (never mind the dragging in of American characters and locations all the time).
No, a socially-conscious aspirant to being the local squire is not going to send his step-daughters – no matter how much he dislikes them! – to work as barmaids in the village pub. They have been raised as ladies, he is (or wants to be) a gentleman of that specific class, this is not something he’s going to do just to teach them a lesson or exert his control over them because it threatens his status (at the very least). Neither are the villagers going to accept it or treat the girls as “one of us”, and the young officers of the local regiment are not going to treat them as they would a fling with a genuine village barmaid of the lower class, these girls are of the same social status as they are and could be respectably courted even in the face of their families’ disapproval.
It’s that kind of imbibed with the air they breathe attitude that is at play: of course the girls and the villagers are on the same level, of course the young officers are going to behave badly because [class/sexism/blame the patriarchy] and we’re contrasting the good old American ‘no class structure, all are equal before God’ way of things with the stuffy Victorian condescension and oppression of the lower classes. This is not particularly anything to do with SJ or woke, it’s to do with “Jack is as good as his master, Yankee Doodle Dandy”.
And in the same way of course there are going to be gay married couples with adopted kids, trans characters and the rest of it in your games.
I have been reading, and on the whole enjoying, “A Practical Guide to Evil,” a web serial someone here pointed me at. It has a number of virtues, but one of the things that strikes me is to what degree modern assumptions are built into a fantasy world.
Perhaps the oddest example is the repeated reference to “racism” with regard to the attitude of many humans to orcs. Orcs are not a different race, they are a different species, strikingly different physically and mentally. They are not, in the context of the story, inherently evil or inherently inferior, so someone who assumes they are either is making a mistake, but it isn’t the mistake that someone who explains black/white differences on genetic grounds is accused of making when he is called a racist.
It is a society where women being soldiers is taken entirely for granted, ditto rulers — the “high Prince” of one polity is female. Where homosexuality and bisexuality are taken entirely for granted.
Fifty years ago, much of that might have worked to make the society feel different from what we are used to. Now, the alien society in Cherryh’s Foreigner series (much better than the web serial, or most other things), feels different because it is sexually conservative — an eight year old boy sleeping in the same room as a nine year old girl is “not proper” and so avoided — and a well functioning aristocratic society.
The side with the modern virtues (being accepting of orcs and homosexuality, though the former only recently) is “Evil”, though. It’s a Good kingdom which has laws assuming only a man can rule (hence the female High Prince, which is a bit of a fantasy staple). The author is deliberately rubbing our nose in this.
Also, D&D called these different species “races” as well, so the terminology makes sense for a world based on a similar genre. In D&D they could cross-breed and there’s some indication they can (perhaps with magical help) in “A Practical Guide to Evil” (such as the eight-foot-tall Captain)
I don’t think there is anything so far implying that orcs can crossbreed with humans. And I didn’t see anything implying that “First Prince” was legally restricted to men.
Part of what I like about it is the tension between the consequentialist and the deontological view of evil. The kingdom is officially evil and the protagonist is a villain. She is villainous in what means she is willing to use, but virtuous on her objectives.
And the other thing I liked is dealing with the unorigional tropes in most genre fantasy by making them explicitly part of how the world works. I gather that may be part of the current web serial genre, but this is the first of those I have read.
Yes, half-orcs and half-elves have been playable since the original Player’s Handbook (1978?). Human-ogre hybrids apparently go back to optional 1st Edition content from a Gary Gygax magazine article, and a monster entry for “ogrillion” (orc-ogre) goes back pretty far. The weird one is dwarves: they can’t breed with anything else except maybe humans (despite properly being a type of elf) or producing sterile hybrids with humans. But then, the Monstrous Manual (2nd Edition) has an entry for halflings that includes the Stout (part dwarf) and Tallfellow (part elf) in addition to the Basic Bilbo type.
I think this implies the basic halfling is half human and half Ling.
Not orcs, but ogres. There’s an offhand thought of Catherine’s, “She must have ogre blood or something, humans don’t usually get that big.” Of course she may not be thinking literally.
As for the First Prince, from the prologue of the second book: “Rhenia was still backwards in some regards and the laws had never been officially amended to reflect the reality of women ruling”. So Good is a bit behind the times.
Isn’t “the ends justify the means” usually considered villainous?
D&D owes more to Tolkien than to Germanic mythology; it mostly only uses the latter to avoid being sued by the Tolkien estate. And if I recall my Silmarillion, Elves and Men are basically different races of the same species, and definitely interfertile. Orcs are explicitly derived from Elves, by generations of torture and mutilation, and so plausibly interfertile with both Elves and Men. Dwarves are a separate creation, by Aulë rather than Ilúvatar (though ensouled by the latter), and so biologically interfertile with nothing.
Orc-Elf hybrids somehow never come up, presumably because no Elf would ever sleep with an Orc nor suffer itself to live if it did. I speculate that if you somehow arranged such a thing, the offspring would be a perfectly normal Man and an awkward silence from Ilúvatar
Haha. Well met, fellow!
Makes more sense than them not being able to interbreed at all, given the givens.
I’ve just read the majority of the Silmarillion and now I’m curious. The story makes it clear that the vital and most important difference between Elves and Man is that Man has the mysterious gift of death. Elves don’t get old, and if they are slain they go chill in the halls of Mandos, but all Men age and die and where they go after only Iluvatar knows. The distinction is so important that Manwe himself has to rule on what’s going to happen to half-elves and decides that they have to choose for themselves whether they will be immortal elves or mortal men, but they have to pick one! So obviously the distinction is pretty important.
So I have to wonder: logically would that mean that orcs are immortal? Do they ever get old? Is there a seven thousand year old orc chilling out there somewhere like a trailer park Galadriel? And where do orc souls go when they die, do they get Mandos’s mildewed basement?
@FLWAB:
This was such a blatant case of “existence precedes essence” that I can scarcely believe it’s in fiction by a TradCat and not a Beauvoir or Sartre novel.
It definitely seems out of place. I mean, when exactly do they pick? And what if they change their mind? And how pointy are their ears before they choose? When they decide, do they go through a cool magical girl transformation sequence?
Before they choose, they are in a superposition of human and elf. When they choose, the superposition collapses.
If they procrastinate too long, they become a superposition of a dead human and an alive elf.
Exactly; the vast majority of students accept that their professors are Normal. Few seem to be competing by displaying their bigger, more progressive tail feathers.
So maybe if you had to take Holy Orders to be a university professor like in the good old days, most 18-22 year-olds would conform to them instead?
If “same-sex marriage didn’t exist in the Middle Ages” is as alien to Millennials or Zoomers as cowboys not having horses, that’s a frighteningly successful level of propaganda.
Some related thoughts:
There’s a strong tradition in RPGs of framing controversial decisions in plot or setting as a matter of what players want. Every GM advice thread repeats the same refrain: talk these things over with your players, preferably beforehand. There’s no sense in playing something you/your players don’t find fun. That sort of advice. It’s good advice, and in theory it permits a wide range of games. Get five players together who say, “Yes, we’re fine with a grimdark setting, we won’t object to blood and gore and references to sexual assault” and you can run that sort of game.
It’s also good advice because RPGs can be very escapist. And there’s nothing wrong per se with escapism, is there? Problems can crop up, of course. Suppose you’re in a medieval Europe setting and you want to play a female fighter, or a gay character. This can be done, with some finagling. But minimal finagling might mean NPCs have a problem with a gay character or refuse to follow a woman general. So maybe it’s a medieval Europe that mysteriously has no objections to these things. Getting harder to suspend disbelief, but it’s understandable why GMs do it nonetheless.
But a lot of folks have observed that books, and communities, and groups have gotten more and more reticent when it comes to the uncomfortable stuff, more and more careful. Is that because people weren’t comfortable with those things all along, and they’re willing to say so now? Should we regard that as a good thing? On a naive theory of “run what players want,” yes, absolutely. With books and official settings it’s more obvious why this is done: players and GMs probably don’t want to be constrained here.
I’m not sure that’s always for the best. I said there’s nothing wrong with escapism per se, but maybe there’s something wrong when everything is always escapist, and that seems to be where we’re headed in the long run. If people won’t face uncomfortable things in a fictional setting, how will they face them in real life? We can’t make them face them, but maybe we should still want them to. I don’t have a solution to this.
The upshot, though, is that it seems to me like RPGs are a bit of a special case compared to video games or ultimate football, two examples I mentioned above. There’s no particular rationale for those to exude social justice—but the cooperative storytelling games that RPGs are? That’s a little different. I’m not persuaded respectability is what is doing it.
It feels frankly bizarre to complain about social issues in a pen and paper RPG. Not to say that it’s the wrong place for them, as you know Shadowrun has been diving into racism allegories since day one, but because it’s a collaborative medium with a smorgasbord of mechanics and settings to play with. If you want to be woke in an RPG you can just do it, dust off the Changeling book and run a campaign about being a persecuted subculture. It’s fine.
The original writers sure as hell aren’t going to come over to your house and tell you that you’re fantasizing wrong. So as long as you can find a DM/ST/GM/Etc willing the run that kind of story then you’re off to the race no matter what setting you use. If you really just want to turn your brain off and kill orcs for six hours every other weekend you can just do that too without worrying about the ethical implications. Conversely, if you want to dive deep into living in a divided world then heck, you can do that with the D&D core book with just a little extra effort. Both kinds of game can be run from the same source-book so if the source book caters to both extremes what does it matter to the other?
Well, the original D&D rules had lower strength for female characters, and the medieval settings certainly didn’t have gay marriage, and all the elves looked like white people. In later editions these things changed, so clearly that means that SJWs are taking over.
Sure, you can change these things in your own game if you want, but that’s just as true the other way around. The books have clearly made a choice who to cater to and who not.
I think the publishers probably made the right choice, there probably aren’t that many people who both care about the official setting and have a problem with female or gay characters. But it does leave some people feeling like the game isn’t for them any more.
Lower maximum strength, to the best of my knowledge (don’t have OD&D sourcebooks on hand, will check later, but I do know that was the case in AD&D 1E), which is more or less true to life. On average, women would be just as strong as men (given the normal distribution of ability scores). There was no actual Strength penalty for female characters. The Strength cap for female characters was removed in AD&D 2E. I don’t recall any sort of cap in B/X or BECMI.
Pedantic, because this is a persistently repeated misconception, with all appearances of serving a political goal (not accusing you personally of spin).
In real life, both the average and the maximum strength (e.g. lifting ability) is much lower in women than in men. So a flat -2 strength would be realistic enough.
But the game ignores all kinds of unfun real world facts, so why not make female characters just as good as male ones?
Funnily enough, female characters were just as good as male ones in all but one D&D edition (now that I have access to the rulebooks, I checked), that being the aforementioned 1E AD&D, where human females were capped at a mere 18/01-50 (this being exceptional Strength), meaning that a whole
1 in 72(Edited – I can’t count) 1 in 432 men would be stronger than any woman (assuming no magical strength enhancements which weren’t gender-restricted either). That man would also be stronger than any halfling or gnome.The point being that this was a very rare case, so hinging a political point on it seems very much in the mountains-out-of-molehills territory.
Did it have to be in there? Not really, as all prior and subsequent editions show. Did halflings need to be weaker than men? Nope on that score, too, even if it seems realistic.
The designers (in this case, primarily Gary Gygax) are always faced with certain choices as to the amount of realism they will incorporate into their rules. In the latest editions, rules have tended to trump realism (4E being the main offender) which has led me to not like them very much, because they constrain my creativity as player and DM. My guess as to why this choice was made was that once you’ve decided you want to introduce some semblance of realism in strength across races, the commonly known differences between male and female strength seem equally natural. I guess nobody thought it would be a big deal, because it – frankly – isn’t.
Unless you have a political interest in making it a big deal.
Honestly, when it comes to male/female strength I don’t care either way. However, I do care about attempts to inject contemporary American (it’s always American) politics into my entertainment. Don’t like the ability caps? Don’t use ’em. Don’t like the level caps on demi-human characters (a much more common complaint)? Don’t use those either.
Just don’t make your problem my problem.
ETA:
All “you”s should be read as generic, of course.
Except for female characters having lower strength, these were simply correct.* What it comes down to is that “secondary worlds” were a mistake: they’re shadows of the real world that trap the mind for the whims of a demiurge, like Plato’s Cave.
These games could be an opportunity to learn more about our own enchanted world. I deploy much knowledge of ancient history, literature, and archaeology as a GM. Or someone who plays the historical fantasy CRPG Darklands is going to learn about German geography and medieval history.
*A black elf was literally a dwarf, svartalf. Woke Fantasy even deprives its consumers of learning grammar.
I didn’t know that. Does that mean dwarves should all be speaking AAVE instead of Scots?
Maybe the sjw types are just really loud about not being weird, and are generally more worried about signalling, popularity.. etc .
When something gets close to mainstream they jump on.
The campaigns I’m in have been, if not SJ-aligned, then at least SJ-friendly, but I suspect that’s largely because my friend group is SJ-aligned. Don’t really know whether the source books are, since I don’t DM. Although one system in particular, Urban Shadows, seemed to lean into it noticeably, you’re not getting anything you’re not expecting after reading the first page of intro.
You are a wealthy, international businessman, and you’ve decided to start a private military contracting company. However, the markets for land forces and air forces are already cornered by older PMCs, so you’ve decided to make the logical move of creating a private navy. You will rent some or all of it out to governments or powerful individuals when needed.
Scenario details:
-You’ve decided to spend at most $200 million of your personal funds to start up the business.
-Since you’re INTERNATIONAL, you can buy ships and weapons from any country and are not beholden to any one country’s laws.
-Your navy needs to be able to handle a wide variety of missions and campaigns, from doing boring coast guard patrols to fighting a long war against a country with a respectable navy of its own. When a shadowy consortium hires you to take on Iran’s fast attack boat fleet or to bleed the PLA Navy dry at the far edges of the South China Sea, you’ll need to be able to put together a force on short notice to do it.
-Don’t worry about paying for aircraft aside from organic assets (mostly scout planes and utility helicopters) that some of your bigger ships will have. If air combat is expected to be a major factor in a conflict, assume that your customers pay a separate, private air force to handle it.
1) What types of ships do you buy, and where do you get them from?
2) How do you get crews for your ships?
3) Where do you keep your ships when not in use?
Isn’t that just privateering with extra steps?
And naval aviation is the dominant form of sea power, nowadays. Destroyers and frigates exist to protect the carrier.
The other option is hunter-killer subs. But I don’t want to know what sort of target you paint on your back by becoming a nuclear pirate.
That part basically doesn’t work. You can’t buy arms of any sort on the international market without an end user certificate from a recognized government saying basically “It’s OK, these guys work for us(*) and we’ll take responsibility for making sure they don’t use these weapons without proper oversight or pass them on to anyone else who might”. Anybody who doesn’t play by that rule, gets frozen out of the international arms trade, which is a thing basically no national government wants.
And you won’t get an end-user certificate for e.g. a warship, except in the narrow case where you are the middleman who will be promptly handing that warship over to the government that issued you the certificate because of your expertise as a broker or warship-refurbisher. If for some reason you do, it will be limited to your use of that warship while under contract to the government which issued you the certificate, and if you want to provide naval services to a different government next year you’ll need to buy new warships under a new certificate issued by your new employer. Which, if they can afford to pay you to do that, they can afford to just buy the warships for themselves.
When a PMC working in Kreplachistan decides to take an internal security contract in Ruritania, they often abandon their current arsenal in place in Kreplachistan and buy new guns in Ruritania. Which they can afford to do if they are selling expensive expertise in the use of cheap small arms. Or they can walk off with their Ruritanian arsenal in their checked baggage trusting that nobody really cares about a few machine guns. Heavy military ordnance, people care.
More generally, not being subject to any national government doesn’t mean you have unlimited rights and freedom in the world at large, it means you have basically zero rights and freedom in the world at large, and you really need to maintain either a very low or a very sympathetic profile.
* Or, occasionally, “for our citizens who we have chosen to allow to bear arms within our country”, but as far as international law is concerned, that’s a privilege granted by national governments and not a right of people.
So step one is to somehow acquire a letter of marque from the United States. According to Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution Congress still holds the right to distribute them.
Good luck; the US hasn’t issued any since 1815. And, when nations did issue letters of marque, they only issued them during declared wars to privateers who would prey on their specific enemies’ cargo.
Despite Ron Paul’s best efforts.
You could say that about a lot of things. (And I supported him in 2008, around the peak of my libertarian phase.)
The rest of the world has promised not to recognize anyone’s letters of marque, so unless the plan is to have an actual USN warship shadow each of your own “privateers”, they’re going to be treated as pirates. Also, no port will accept them.
Its funny that Congress can still issue them when they’re practically useless. Maybe they could issue some as collectibles: no practical value, but you can hang it on your wall like a diploma.
It would take a Constitutional amendment for Congress to make Congress in general (as opposed to the 116th Congress specifically) unable to issue letters of marque and reprisal. Since they are practically useless and since saying “Hey let’s write a new amendment” would invite mischief, nobody has ever wanted to bother.
Its also funny to imagine a scenario in which we’d be glad we never got rid of that power. Maybe some kind of near future space war? If SpaceX has rockets that could be jury rigged to take out enemy satellites…
There is a Poul Anderson SF novel, Star Fox, where a wealthy industrialist arms a spaceship and takes it to the defense of a planet under attack by aliens, the Earth authorities being unwilling to do anything about it.
The planet was settled mainly from France, and he gets France to give him a letter of Marque.
Also there is a novel where congress overides a de facto presidential veto of a declaration of war by giving letters of marque to some very recently ex us military forces to act as regular forces. This would only work if a small naval force was needed, but I imagine many countries would recognize this if they only went after legitimate targets.
@edmundgennings, I want to read that novel!
Not nearly enough money for anything other than killing pirates. A proper warship is going to eat your entire investment, and probably then some. A USN LCS costs something like $400 million. Any comparable warship will cost probably around as much, even if you bought Russian or Chinese, it’d probably still exceed your budget for the ship alone, let alone training your crew
I don’t know how running a private navy would work out, plainly since there are private contracting companies, it must be a viable business model, but do any of them run navies?
Probably you should also vet your customers so you don’t get tangled up in a mess like this one 🙂
I had a bit of a look around online to see if those “markets for land forces and air forces are already cornered by older PMCs” involved any kind of naval arm, and the Constellis Group (formed out of amalgamations of several of these ‘private contractors’ including what was formerly Blackwater a few iterations back) do provide maritime security:
Sounds like you should be vigilant about having a crack team of accountants, HR lawyers, and compliance department on hand as well as the boats and bang-bang stuff!
Let sail the Crimson Permanent Assurance!
They’re doing something rather different from what the OP is asking. That’s not naval power, it’s a maritime version of a high-end private security firm. Quite useful against pretty much any non-governmental threat, and they’ll take care of the paperwork for you too, but of absolutely no use if a major government decides they’d rather the thing didn’t exist.
how hard would it be to build them yourself?
how hard would it be to build them yourself?
How big of a vessel are you talking about, and how many of them? You’re going to need a shipyard, and while there are private shipyards out there who can handle the job, I do wonder what the governments of those countries might have an opinon about that. I’ll need to defer to the experts on here about “can a private third-party contract a shipyard to build naval ships without the permission of the shipyard’s country’s government?”
On top of that, you’ve got the inevitable “everything takes longer and costs more” when it comes to these kind of projects; building for the army/airforce/navy is the province of governments, and we are all familiar with how these projects over-run on time and zoom up in price over budget. According to this story, $40 billion dollars will get you three Ford-class aircraft carriers, and if you’re going to be building a private navy I think you’d want more than three vessels and a range of them at that, so do you have hundreds of billions spare?
I think by the looks of it, it’s easier if your customer has their own navy/fleet of ships and your private company provides the crew training, security oversight, experts at making things go bang, and of course – the compliance review and remediation programme professionals!
Modern naval weapons/warships? Essentially impossible. These things are incredibly sophisticated, and without the backing of a national government, you’ll quickly end up on everyone’s watchlist for arms trafficking.
Canada purchased 4 “slightly used” submarines from the UK for $750M at that time. One caught fire on the maiden voyage and another was initially so unsafe the crew
threatenedvery strongly implied mutiny if ordered out to sea.So – 1 submarine with limited blue-water capability and limited reliability?
No.
There is no part of this plan that works. First, as John says, you can’t get the ships unless you’re a government. There’s really no way around this, so you’re limited to what you can get as a non-government, which is essentially some machine guns and small boats. Perfectly fine for some very limited uses, but not nearly a general-purpose naval force. Second, even if you could get the ships, $200 million gets you a very light frigate. Basically, it has a helicopter pad (but you probably can’t afford a very good helicopter) and a 76mm gun. Even the Type 31 is expected to run 50% more than that, and it’s about the lowest-end thing I’d consider for something like this. This is absolutely useless against any serious state actor.
Third, a naval mercenary force doesn’t work. Mercenaries are essentially illegal in international conflicts, with minor exceptions for units like the Gurkhas and Foreign Legion that definitely don’t apply here because they’re essentially regular units recruited from outside the country in question. Actual mercenaries are basically limited to targeting people who can’t go to the UN in protest, which are conveniently also the kind of people you can actually take out with a mercenary force you can build under current laws. Need someone trustworthy to operate your tanks against internal threats? Sure. Need someone to build a couple of improvised bombers? Absolutely. Need someone to go up against a first-rate military? Yeah, right. Naval combat is probably the worst domain for this, as it requires big crews, large assets, and a level of sophistication that is only now reaching aircraft. All of this suggests that you can easily get hired to run coastal security against smugglers and pirates, but dreams of bleeding the PLN are going to remain that.
Polling data from Kaiser Family Foundation shows substantial support for continuing the lockdown, and also says that about 1/10 of the population knows someone who has died of Coronavirus. I strongly suspect a guy from my church who died recently died of COVID-19, but don’t know that for sure. OTOH, I know two people who’ve apparently had the disease.
Is there a science specifically of studying network effects? Or branch of mathematics that would answer the question in a population of X, average Y connections, how many instances until Z percent will be touched?
Anyway, my wife knows a person or two suspected of dying from it, through playing water polo at the YMCA with seniors. That’s as close I come right now.
I think what you’re looking for is social network analysis.
Probabilistic Ramsey theory if I had to guess.
I know two people who’ve been confirmed to have had the disease, two more who were never tested but clearly caught it from them, and one more who most likely had it.
None of them died or were hospitalized.
An elderly friend of the family was diagnosed and hospitalized for Covid last week. Last I’ve heard he’s off ventilation but still far from recovered.
I don’t like the phrasing of the poll. “Which of the following comes closer to your view: (1) Strict shelter-in-place measures are worth it to to protect people and limit the spread of coronavirus. (2) Strict shelter-in-place measures are placing unnecessary burdens on people and the economy and causing more harm than good.” You have to choose one of these. I suppose I’d pick #1, though I think the nuance-free implementation of shelter-in-place orders, identical across urban and rural regions, closing spacious parks while leaving nursing homes alone, is stupid and counter-productive.
I wonder how many people have thought it through in much depth. But yeah, what I want is an intelligently implemented lockdown that’s gradually relaxed as we get the pandemic under more control and work out ways to slowly relax the lockdown that still substantially prevent the virus spreading. There’s no option for that, so “keep the lockdowns going for now” is the closest thing to my position.
I was of the view that it would be better to lock down too strictly and loosen things later than to lock down not strictly enough and have lots of people die. After all, the lockdown leaves us weeks to months to figure out what we can plausibly stop restricting or prohibiting, and we’re fortunate to have 50 different laboratories.
One interesting failure mode of this has been some governors going tyrannical, like Michigan, from what I’ve heard. I wasn’t expecting this, but I guess I’m not surprised; we have 50 governors and I know not how many mayors in America. The worse failure mode has been that relatively little discussion seems to be about experimentally loosening things; just a lot of “reopen the economy!” from some people and “keep everything locked down!” from others.
FWIW, I’m pretty active in a lot of “reopen” groups. My read (and this is certainly true for myself) is that a whole lot of people there want an experimental loosening, but are operating under a political reality where the way you get what you want is by loudly demanding 10x more than what you want.
So I go on Twitter posts of government authorities and I say “RE-OPEN EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW!” fully knowing they aren’t going to do that, but hoping that if they think that’s what a lot of people want, they might “compromise” and say “No, you don’t get that, but here’s some experimental phasing in of re-openings.”
Whereas, had I initially said “GIVE ME EXPERIMENTAL PHASING-IN OF RE-OPENINGS” the “compromise” between that and the “permanent lockdowns forever” crowd would be much less…
Yea, I’m in the group that expected bad actors and that rolling things back slowly would be nearly impossible. People have trouble understanding partial measures. That is why “The Wall” is more effective rhetoric than “100 more strategically placed camera traps”.
I stumbled on some facebook comments on a news article here in NZ, in which one woman was arguing that the fatality rate was between 30% and 55%, and a few were trying to correct her by saying that the fatality rate was more like 5% or 15%.
I would like to see a poll about what people think the infection fatality rate of the virus is. Maybe even extra questions about IFRs for different age groups. I think there are a lot of misconceptions out there about how deadly the disease is.
I figure most people’s understanding of percentages is basically: less than 50% means “not that many”, more than 50% means “lots” and more than 90% means “most”. So the lady’s basic assessment may have been “enough to worry about, but not extremely many”. Which is basically correct.
So we probably shouldn’t encourage people to go around stating percentages that “feel right”.
On the other hand, she may also have read some crazy reddit comments extrapolating the death rate from back in December when only those who were actively dying of covid got diagnosed.
She was calculating based on number of recovered vs. number of deaths. Which does have a logic to it. It’s a problem though when there’s 400 comments over several threads on a news article, and she is far more active than anyone else, aggressively spreading misinformation about how many people are going to die, with nobody correcting her with any confidence.
If you look at worldometer you see that the fraction of deaths in the closed cases is 36%. Yes this is different to the fatality rate, but I think a lot of people do not get the differents.
At this point worldometer records the “deaths as fraction of deaths+confirmed recoveries” as 20%. But that’s probably because most recoveries aren’t registered in any accessible place.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
I ran across the interesting term “virtue fantasy:”
uggcf://tnzrfvqrq.pbz/2014/09/10/afnexrrfvna-if-gehgu-cneg-vvv-vzcbffvoyr-nethzrag-zra-xbbcnf/2/
(Link rot13’d for CW content.)
A virtue fantasy (analogous to “power fantasy”) is a story in which the reader derives enjoyment from the characters displaying conspicuous moral goodness. E.g., in Arthurian legend, Galahad is the best knight not because he’s strong (he doesn’t appear to be any stronger than his father Lancelot) but because he’s the most morally perfect (he’s a virgin). Obviously, a story can be both a power and virtue fantasy (Superman, obviously), but they’re not the same thing at all.
Is there a more commonly accepted name for this concept? It’s not quite a morality play, though they’re clearly related. The linked article, which I will warn you again is CW, alludes to virtue fantasies being attractive to young men who seek acknowledgement from society for following its moral code, which seems to me like a fruitful avenue of study. I feel like I’m typing “antihumanial drugs” into a search engine when everyone but me knows they’re called “bacterial toxins.”
Most people would still just call it a power fantasy, as a case where the hero is rewarded (with power or status) for whatever aspect the author wants to promote.
Not necessarily: in a virtue fantasy the virtuous person in question might be rejected by the world because of their great virtue and suffer horribly because of their pure virtuousness.
Yeah, for those of you comics nerds, it’s the archetypal Thing (as in Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four) story. He’s the big strong invulnerable guy on the team, but notably, he’s a bit less strong and invulnerable than your real super-badasses like the Hulk or Thor.
The classic Ben Grimm story isn’t one where he wins because he’s the strongest. It’s the one where he loses to someone more powerful than he is, but does it in a way that shows his absolute dedication and heroism. The “I’m too dumb to quit! Too ugly to die!” moment.
It’s pretty clearly not a power fantasy, because in a power fantasy you don’t get absolutely wrecked by a superior foe and lose the fight. But the way he loses shows he’s the real hero, which seems to be the kind of thing we’re talking about here.
I guess what I’m really saying is that Marvel Two-in-One Annual #7 is the closest thing our culture has produced to Arthurian myth.
I can’t say if that’s what Brendan Richardson means as a virtue fantasy. The offered example is Galahad, who is clearly rewarded for his virtue.
What FLWAB and MisterA describe is a persecution fantasy.
Film-noir often has the protagonist suffer for doing the right thing, but the suffering falls under the noir genre part, not the enjoyment of the protagonist doing the right thing part.
I think a persecution fantasy is a subtype of virtue fantasy. Jesus was persecuted for his goodness and Aragorn wasn’t, but they share a common appeal of seeing a character acting ostentatiously good. (Although I think Jesus is a weird edge case, since he’s supernaturally good, which might hurt the reader’s fantasy a bit.)
Just realized that virtue fantasy as power fantasy is far more common with female protagonists, epitomized by Cinderella. Male power fantasies seem to tend more towards “I get mine despite my flaws/because of them,” hence their virtue fantasies tend towards persecution fantasies instead.
Tvtropes has Purity Sue, though that seems bound up in conceptions of specifically feminine virtue—a Sue who is endearingly naif and virginal instead of one who acts decisively and righteously, as a Purity Stu might.
I’ve actually had “virtue fantasies” in my daydreams. It often happens when reading a book or watching a movie where a main character has a moral failing and makes a mistake. I go over in my own head what the virtuous thing the hero should have done would be, and how he would do it, etc. I considered writing a story where the whole point is that the main character is completely virtuous. That kind of story inevitably ends up with the hero about to be killed by the villain, and going to his death without fear and telling the villain something like “What you are doing is wrong, and you will have no peace until you repent. Killing me will do nothing except make you a murderer.” I had to admit to myself that the story of someone who is perfectly virtuous would get quite boring and twee.
But then again, the perfectly virtuous character does have a place in many stories as the wise old mentor figure, who usually tragically dies. Uncle Ben, Dumbledore, Obi-Wan Kenobi, etc.
This was always jarring to me. To get to that age with that lifestyle requires waay above average survival instincts.
Not necessarily- A Man for All Seasons does something like this pretty well. K.M. Weiland calls this a flat character arc in her book about character arcs and explains how to do them.
Now go write that book! 😀
I’m not sure I agree with many of the examples provided thus far.
Was Obi-Wan Kenobi “perfectly virtuous?” He blatantly defied the Jedi Order in training Anakin due to an emotional reaction to the death of a friend, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to the deaths of millions.
And one of the main tensions of A Man for All Seasons is Thomas More having to choose between sticking to his principles above all else, even at great cost to not just himself, but to his family as well. Whether that counts as perfectly virtuous or not seems unclear to me. His family clearly wanted him to make a different decision. And ultimately, his sacrifice didn’t seem to lead to much…
There is nothing unclear about it. More was vindicated by heaven and even now enjoys the beatific vision. No such vindication can be expected on Earth, which the movie acknowledges in its ending—the scoundrel Rich dying peacefully in his sleep, having enjoyed all the power and wealth the devil can promise.
And yet, God in his providence has seen fit that More inspire generations by his words and deeds. It’s why we put “Saint” in front of his name, and it’s why the play or movie exist at all.
ETA: To put it less cryptically: the ‘tension’ is not in trying to find the right thing to do, but in doing what you know to be the right thing when it is difficult. And people got that, and that’s why we still care about More today.
That’s all well and good and in the case of More specifically (particularly for those who are religious) is probably spot-on.
I’d just say that in today’s modern storytelling, the archetype of “guy who sticks to his principles no matter what even at great cost to himself and his family and achieves no obvious gain for doing so” would not necessarily be seen by the majority of the audience as “perfectly virtuous.”
“Sticks to principles no matter what” is actually probably a trait that in modern times is more often associated with the villain than the hero.
@Matt M
Sure, I’ll grant that. That says more about modern society than More, though. What you’re saying is that people don’t believe in principles any longer. They believe in practicality, in getting one’s hands dirty, in doing certain evil for the sake of potential good. Draw your own conclusions as to whether that is progress or regress.
I’m now fascinated as to whether or not we could produce a modern gritty remake of A Man for All Seasons, except that More is the villain (fundamentalist biblical literalist unwilling to be flexible and adopt modern sensibilities) and the King is seen as the good guy (a common sense pragmatist who is willing to defy stodgy religious authority for the sake of doing what is best for England).
How many changes would be necessary?
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is something like this, only Thomas Cromwell is the hero/protagonist. Henry’s still an arsehole.
That is an interesting question. You’d probably have to remove any of More’s personal charisma, so have the actor to play him like Benedict in The Two Popes, stodgy and unrelatable. Make sure the king is young and conventionally attractive; make him witty and urbane, as well. Make More an asshole in the refusal to bless Roper’s marriage. Make Rich conflicted about betraying More but feeling he has to do it to save England; portray him in a scene or two as privately uninterested in the power he’s been promised. That should get you most of the way there, but would require substantial changes to dialogue.
@Matt M
I would agree that prequel Obi-Wan is not perfectly virtuous: he’s a man trying to do what’s right and making messy mistakes. I was referring to him in his old man hermit mode in Episode 4. There the only thing of questionable virtue he does his bend the truth about Luke’s father. Otherwise he is a wise mentor who takes on a very dangerous mission to help them escape the Death Star and who ultimately sacrifices himself to prevent Vader from killing them. All while sagely lecturing Vader on how he must repent from his path of evil.
I think this is the answer to Radu’s objection,
The perfectly virtuous elder mentor wasn’t always perfectly virtuous.
He helped an innocent, gifted child in a terrible situation, when the hoity-toity Jedi Order was all “throw him back into poverty and slavery; he’s too old for us to care”.
He was a loyal student and companion to the one Jedi of the age who wasn’t a complete navel-gazing ass.
And he put up with whiny-ass Episode IV Luke Skywalker, protecting and training him out of duty and honor, which gets him bignum virtue points in my book. ETA: even after he was dead he kept coming back to bail out idiot Luke.
I still do not understand why after saving the entire planet of Naboo, Anakin couldn’t just ask the queen, “so, buy my mom out of slavery, maybe?”
Oh, wait, wait, I do understand. It’s because George Lucas is a terrible writer.
Because no one writing a movie has any idea how economics work.
“I saved this whole planet and all I got was a slightly improved chance of getting to have sex with the queen 10 years from now.”
Obi-Wan taught him the Jedi Mind Trick. He got a much better chance of getting to have sex with the queen 10 years later.
The Jedi Mind Trick is literally the only possible way Anakin could have gotten laid after all this.
“Then he’d use the prestige to ‘buy’ free dinner for Padme, thus earning a slim chance to perform the reproductive act.” says the narrator in a hygiene film authorized by the Space Pope.
I think this is pretty much what has happened already. All you need to do is introduce Anne Boleyn.
Henry VIII is stuck as the asshole character (since he pretty much was); you’d have to work on “only married Katherine out of duty, forced to do so by his emotionally abusive father, Anne is True Love” to make him sympathetic. Make Katherine the “Spanish Inquisition on legs” older woman, all sinister black clothing and rosary-rattling repression. Might be a bit risky pitting one woman against another, but make Katherine old enough, plain enough, and most importantly RELIGIOUSLY BIGOTED enough, and contrast her with pretty, witty, liberated, modern urban career woman Anne, and you’ll pull it off. Especially if you make it that Katherine doesn’t care for Henry but is only concerned for her position as Queen while Anne Genuinely Loves Him.
Back in 2007 there was a BBC/Showtime/other co-production of “The Tudors” and a couple of years ago there was nothing on my Tumblr dash but excerpts from this starring Anne Boleyn (as played by Natalie Dormer). Now I don’t like either Anne the historical character, or Anne as played by Natalie (she has a particular acting tic of quirking her lips in a kind of sneering pout that makes me want to slap whatever character she’s playing), all that much (too much brattiness and self-conceit) but the young women blogging this show loved her, adored her, took her as the sympathetic character.
Then we’ve got the recent Hillary Mantel novels where she stans Cromwell so hard, and the BBC TV adaptation of those. She contrasts the two Thomases to the detriment of More (because she fangirls Cromwell) and her novels are fairly popular both critically and as best-sellers.
So just remake A Man For All Seasons with a huge part for Anne Boleyn, cast her and Cromwell as allies with More unreasonably prejudiced against them because they want to introduce
21st century liberal valuesProtestantism and allied with EVIL QUEEN KATHERINE on the side of “sexist racist misogynist transphobic homophobic Catholicism”, and there you go!I think one of the most common archetypes of the virtue fantasy is the time traveler (or character who might as well be a time traveler) in the past who acts according to present-day morality. Showing anachronistic concern for women, minorities, etc. It’s a cheap and easy thrill for the reader, who gets vicarious cookies for what is now considered basic decency.
Huh, never really thought about what that’s called.
I learn best not by reading the same thing over and over again but by reading different sources covering the same topic and most people are probably similar. Maybe we should base our textbooks in the same way. Imagine each chapter written by two authors who independently come up with ways to cover the same general topic. It’s inefficient but no one remembers half of what they read anyways.
Gotta be careful about that one!
This can have the opposite effect, where people bother even less with actually reading – it just says the same thing over and over again anyway!
I’m similar. Usually bought 2 textbooks per domain, preferably in different languages. The styles of explaining can be very different between the teaching cultures.
@Purpleherman
Of course, you have to compare before buying to have sources that both explain well and in different ways.
I do this, too. A great thing about the internet is that if one approach to explaining something isn’t working for me, I can usually go find another.
Mathematics is great for this: two completely unrelated proofs of the same theorem drives the theorem home much more strongly than two similar proofs.
The Difference of Two Squares
Pythagorean theorem: 3 Visual Proofs (Think Twice)
I’m going to badly paraphrase someone here, it went something like:
“Medicine has been a net-negative in human history until recently.”
This doesn’t strike me as plausibly true. At long last, no, suddenly, modern medicine works? Right now?
“until recently” here means “until the invention of antibiotics”. Before that, you were usually better off going to a doctor if you broke a bone and not for much else. Nowadays, you are certainly better off going to a doctor for vaccines, antibiotics, and giving birth (and maybe other things). Between those three, it pretty clearly comes out to a net positive.
I wouldn’t say “recently”. The three biggest public health wins of all time were widespread indoor plumbing, antibiotics, and vaccination, more or less in that order. Those were all products of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Before those, there’s a pretty good case that medicine wasn’t worth what was being spent on it, and after those, diminishing returns kicked in pretty quick.
Funny thing: by 2350 BC the Harappan Civilization had universal urban indoor plumbing. By 1700 BC, the Cretan sewer system was sophisticated enough that they were flushing feces through underground pipes to fields outside Knossos with literal flush toilets.
These also happen to be the only two Bronze Age civilizations whose scripts we haven’t deciphered. If they had invented antibiotics or vaccination, how would we know?
They may well have invented vaccines or antibiotics, but without industrial capabilities, they wouldn’t have had the means to mass produce or distribute those things to everyone. So treatments would’ve likely only been available to the wealthy and powerful, or to those living in specific regions or cities.
The first vaccination anyone knows about is variolation–basically giving someone susceptible a very small exposure to smallpox on their skin or up their nose. Wikipedia says that goes back to the 15th century in China, and may have independently arisen in North Africa and the Arab world. Interestingly, the Chinese version involved taking scabs from smallpox patients and exposing them to sunlight, which sounds a hell of a lot like trying to make an inactivated virus vaccine with very crude methods.
Medicine was a net negative in the 18th and 19th centuries. I’m not sure about before that. As it became more popular over the course of those two centuries, the aggregate harm increased. Also, the doctors became more arrogant and probably the harm intensified.
And then, yes, there really was a sudden change, not just antibiotics, but many things. Read the Youngest Science, by Lewis Thomas.
I said this in a past OT. One of the things I noted was that basic nursing care doesn’t count because you don’t need a doctor to tell you to do it. Consider how bad maternal mortality was, thanks to doctors, as found by Semmelweis:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/dalys-per-doctor/
Was that just a really bad case? Maybe, maybe not. It’s not like there were many other studies like that of Semmelweis and I’m picking one: that was one of the first of its kind. And if it was, how many people had to be saved by other areas of medicine to cancel out all those deaths?
So here’s something I stumbled upon while researching some obscure point: the United States Pharmacopeia of 1820. This is the first edition of the official list of medicines and their methods of preparation used in the US, compiled under the authority of a coalition of most of the country’s medical organizations. A later edition of the USP was named in the law that established the FDA as the standard to be used for all existing medicines, though going forward new drugs would have to be approved by the FDA (and look where that got us, but I digress), and it continues to be updated and published to this day.
What strikes me about the 1820 pharmacopeia is how little of its contents are recognizable as medicine. Opium is there, and among the many herbal extracts listed are cinchona and willow bark, from which quinine and salicylic acid would respectively be isolated, the latter of which would lead to the development of aspirin. There’s also aloe, which we still use, I’m not sure how “medicinal” it is but it’s something. But aside from those, there’s not a whole lot you’d see for sale at a modern pharmacy, except maybe in the “alternative medicine” aisle.
And of course the other parts of the medical profession were equally primitive – surgery without anesthesia must have been horrifying. So I don’t know if medicine 200 years ago was a net negative, but it certainly didn’t provide much benefit.
This could just be a folk tale, but I heard back before modern medicine surgeons didn’t clean their tools because having ones that were clearly used was a sign of experience.
Worse, nobody knew what a germ was, so nobody knew you needed to sterilize things between patients. Figuring out you needed to sterilize your instruments between patients and really wash your hands before surgery surely had a huge benefit. But before that, the physician seeing a bunch of sick people was likely spreading disease everywhere he went, just because he didn’t know that he was carrying germs around.
I’m thinking once you got the germ theory of disease, ether, and opium, medicine was probably getting into net positive territory.
To compare apples with apples, we’d probably have to count all kinds of “alternative healing practices” as modern medicine, and the overall benefit will look much smaller than it would for just “western medicine”. Depending on your values, medicine might still be a net negative, although the plus side is pretty enormous these days.
Before the 20th century, I guess it would vary. There were a lot of quacks and a lot of unsanitary practices. But some medical procedures certainly fulfilled their intended purpose. Treating wounds, setting bones, some herbal medicines, even some surgical procedures.
I guess if you define medicine as “things doctors do that non-doctors don’t do” it would be pretty useless before the 19th century, probably a net negative during, and positive since.
Quite a long time ago, I had a conversation with a historian who had studied the question using data on the British upper class, a group whose births and deaths are well recorded quite far back. Her conclusion, as best I remember, was that the medical care available to the elite was better than nothing by the 18th century.
The historian in question was the wife of Paul David, an economist. Unfortunately I don’t remember her name.
What I read was that there were two separate disciplines: medicine, and surgery. Surgery was good, even really far back in the bronze age. By the middle ages, surgeons knew how to perform rhinoplasty.
Medicine, on the other hand, was overwhemingly quackery until the mid 19th century.
An explanation for why it was so is that, following Ancient Greek tradition, medicine was learned as a noble, intellectual practice, mostly as theory and from books. Practicioners expected to never actually have to touch a patient (if they needed to they’d call a surgeon instead), and generally relied on old written knowledge rather than on pratical experience (eg: for a long time nobody performed autopsies because it was deemed superfluous, as Galen had provided ample descriptions of human anatomy — it later turned out Galen had never autopsied a human bodies and his descriptions were constructed by analogy based on his dissections of monkeys).
Surgeon, on the flipside, as a profession that involves working with your hand, was considered low class work for the uneducated. Which meant that surgeons were largely free from academicians scrutiny, and had to learn their job as a craft by apprenticeship, and so in general they had a much better idea of what they were doing and what worked and didn’t.
Fun and interesting fact: Luke, the author of the Gospel of Luke, was a surgeon.
It seems to me that one thing that was missing for medicine to be able to become net-positive for a long time was some combination of the notion of experiments plus basic probability theory. If you do an experimental treatment and 13/20 of the people you give the treatment to get better, while 5/20 of the people you don’t treat get better, is that a real effect or not? You need at least basic probability theory to figure that out. Really getting experimental design and statistics right is a lot harder, but you can’t even start on that until you know how probabilities work.
When Fallopius wrote that Herophilus was better than Galen, it was because he had more access to ancient texts.
I don’t know about what Zephalinda is saying, but I can well believe it. At the least, I can say that Augustine of Hippo, who generally did put some store behind doctors’ advice (he frequently compares Christ to a doctor), speaks of “doctors” (medici) performing surgery on a complicated system of rectal or lower intestinal abscesses from which his friend Innocentius was suffering, in about 389. The most authoritative consultant is one Alexandrinus, “then considered a surgeon (chirurgus) of marvelous skill” (certainly no snobbery here, at the end of the fourth century). The medical men did manage to do some good, Augustine suggests, but not to drain the deepest of the fistulae (surely not fistulas in our sense of the word?), which miraculously resolved itself after agonized prayer from Innocentius. (Augustine speaks of a “river of tears,” “groans,” and “gasps that shook his whole body and just about shut off his breath.” Only, he suggests, by dying on the spot could Innocentius have done anymore. Ancient surgery was not fun.)
The story appears, in gory detail, at City of God 22.8. Really, the whole of that (extremely lengthy) chapter is worth a read. It’s a catalogue of miraculous happenings that Augustine, always an inquisitive man, had compiled from his own experience. There’s the nun, Innocentia (no relation to Innocentius), who has breast cancer. The “learned doctor” (again, a medicus) refuses to treat, citing Hippocrates, who, as Augustine helpfully reports, thought a radical mastectomy not worth it, as the disease would kill sooner or later anyway. Warned in a dream, Innocentia goes to the baptistery, has a random newly baptized woman make the sign of the cross over the tumor, and is healed. She then goes to the doctor, who to her surprise doesn’t make fun of the story but remarks that one who raised the dead could also heal a cancer. Augustine himself is “dreadfully irritated” to find out about it only well after the fact. (Think of all the lost sermon illustrations!) Then you have the siblings from Cappadocia who are striken with some kind of nerve disorder (a continuous trembling) after being cursed by their mother and, after a long pilgrimage, happen to come to North Africa and are cured by the relics of St. Stephen. No doctors there, though.
That moves us far from the medical theme, but I think it reveals a good deal about basic cultural assumptions. Augustine had met at least one well-known gentleman-doctor, a certain Vindicianus; we have a work by the man, in fact, though his influence on Augustine was chiefly through the advice to give up astrology, in which Augustine was indulging out of the same inquisitiveness (both scientific and prognosticatory) as a young man. (Vindicianus was provincial governor at the time, and had given Augustine the first-place crown for a poetry contest.) Augustine certainly does expect doctors to have cures that work for some people and not others, and to have reasons why. That much he says in Epistle 138, again about Vindicianus, whom he calls “the great doctor of our times.” The story is again revealing: Vindicianus gave a cure to a man when he was young that did not work years later, because, he said, “I did not order it.” Some people took that as a claim to an occult healing power, but it was really, Vindicianus explained, because some cures work differently for people at different ages.
So much for the subjective side of things; I’m sure many more examples could be multiplied from the voluminous Galen or from ancient papyrus documents. Whether there was any objective benefit, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t dismiss it all as “quackery.” Diet modification seems–so I surmise from the references I’ve seen in various texts, rather than a study of the specifically medical literature–to have been a staple of ordinary medical practice in antiquity, and it might have done some good, especially for the rich and well-fed who could typically afford a doctor’s attention. It does do some good now, after all! At the least, people seem to have perceived a doctor’s care as desirable. The hope might well have been in vain, and it is clear that many of the cures prescribed were spectacularly bad, but I’m not confident we can write off the whole medical profession before ca. 1800 or 1850 or whenever, huge though the gains from anesthesia, inoculation and vaccination, and better surgical techniques are (witness, e.g., the successful treatment, after long trial and error, of vaginal fistulas–something likely worse than what Innocentius faced–by J. Marion Sims and his slave-women patient-assistants in the 1840s).
We would have, at the least, to know how often doctors actually did deal with patients in an epidemic, e.g., or were called in to help with gynecological matters (on which they wrote, whether or not they delivered babies). If they dealt mostly with routine lifestyle related diseases–again, the rich are likely the most common patients–with incurable chronic illnesses, or with acute infections for which survival depended largely on chance, they might conceivably have come out ahead in aggregate. I imagine the work’s been done, but I don’t know it.
I don’t know about what Zephalinda is saying, but I can well believe it. At the least, I can say that Augustine of Hippo, who generally did put some store behind doctors’ advice (he frequently compares Christ to a doctor), speaks of “doctors” (medici) performing surgery on a complicated system of rectal or lower intestinal abscesses from which his friend Innocentius was suffering, in about 389. The most authoritative consultant is one Alexandrinus, “then considered a surgeon (chirurgus) of marvelous skill” (certainly no snobbery here, at the end of the fourth century). The medical men did manage to do some good, Augustine suggests, but not to drain the deepest of the fistulae (surely not fistulas in our sense of the word?), which miraculously resolved itself after agonized prayer from Innocentius. (Augustine speaks of a “river of tears,” “groans,” and “gasps that shook his whole body and just about shut off his breath.” Only, he suggests, by dying on the spot could Innocentius have done anymore. Ancient surgery was not fun.)
The story appears, in gory detail, in a long chapter of the last book of City of God (22.8). The whole chapter is worth a read. It’s a catalogue of miraculous happenings that Augustine, always an inquisitive man, had compiled from his own experience. There’s the nun, Innocentia (no relation to Innocentius), who has breast cancer. The “learned doctor” (again, a medicus) refuses to treat, citing Hippocrates, who, as Augustine helpfully reports, thought a radical mastectomy not worth it, as the disease would kill sooner or later anyway. Warned in a dream, Innocentia goes to the baptistery, has a random newly baptized woman make the sign of the cross over the tumor, and is healed. She then goes to the doctor, who to her surprise doesn’t make fun of the story but remarks that one who raised the dead could also heal a cancer. Augustine himself is “dreadfully irritated” to find out about it only well after the fact. (Think of all the lost sermon illustrations!) Then you have the siblings from Cappadocia who are striken with some kind of nerve disorder (a continuous trembling) after being cursed by their mother and, after a long pilgrimage, happen to come to North Africa and are cured by the relics of St. Stephen. No doctors there, though.
That moves us far from the medical theme, but I think it reveals a good deal about basic cultural assumptions. Augustine had met at least one well-known gentleman-doctor, a certain Vindicianus; we have a work by the man, in fact, though his influence on Augustine was chiefly through the advice to give up astrology, in which Augustine was indulging out of the same inquisitiveness (both scientific and prognosticatory) as a young man. (Vindicianus was provincial governor at the time, and had given Augustine the first-place crown for a poetry contest.) Augustine certainly does expect doctors to have cures that work for some people and not others, and to have reasons why. That much he says in Epistle 138, again about Vindicianus, whom he calls “the great doctor of our times.” The story is again revealing: Vindicianus gave a cure to a man when he was young that did not work years later, because, he said, “I did not order it.” Some people took that as a claim to an occult healing power, but it was really, Vindicianus explained, because some cures work differently for people at different ages.
So much for the subjective side of things; I’m sure many more examples could be multiplied from the voluminous Galen or from ancient papyrus documents. Whether there was any objective benefit, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t dismiss it all as “quackery.” Diet modification seems–so I surmise from the references I’ve seen in various texts, rather than a study of the specifically medical literature–to have been a staple of ordinary medical practice in antiquity, and it might have done some good, especially for the rich and well-fed who could typically afford a doctor’s attention. It does do some good now, after all! At the least, people seem to have perceived a doctor’s care as desirable. The hope might well have been in vain, and it is clear that many of the cures prescribed were spectacularly bad, but I’m not confident we can write off the whole medical profession before ca. 1800 or 1850 or whenever, huge though the gains from anesthesia, inoculation and vaccination, and better surgical techniques are (witness, e.g., the successful treatment, after long trial and error, of vaginal fistulas–something likely worse than what Innocentius faced–by J. Marion Sims and his slave-women patient-assistants in the 1840s).
We would have, at the least, to know how often doctors actually did deal with patients in an epidemic, e.g., or were called in to help with gynecological matters (on which they wrote, whether or not they delivered babies). If they dealt mostly with routine lifestyle related diseases–again, the rich are likely the most common patients–with incurable chronic illnesses, or with acute infections for which survival depended largely on chance, they might conceivably have come out ahead in aggregate. I imagine the work’s been done, but I don’t know it.
Not a simple one-time crossing over into net positive. There were small patches of approaches that were actually working.
Smearing mold into a wound — penicillin. Peeing on bad skin — urea skin formula. Fly larvae in festering wounds (‘rediscovered’, but rarely used in western medicine) — clean dead material and micro-massage.
ETA Bloodletting — for special diagnoses still used today. There must be more I’m not aware of.
Leeches are back, too.
I think the main question here is just: Suppose you somehow find yourself transported to some year in the past. Using remembered uptime knowledge in some completely non-medical field, you get rich and powerful. Then one day, you fall ill. Should you:
a. Call one of the available physicians to attend you?
b. Call a surgeon, barber, etc..?
c. Just have your servants do basic nursing care for you?
My guess is that in 1850, you want to call the physician or surgeon. (Especially if you’re rich and powerful enough that you can demand he wash his hands carefully before touching you.), and in 1700 you probably just want to have your servants nurse you back to health as best they can.
Smallpox is so deadly it still managed to be the deadliest disease of the 20th century (some sources have influenza edging it out) despite being extinct for a third of it and locally eradicated in many places for longer. Once widespread vaccination began, medicine almost certainly became net positive and has only been going up since.
The thing is, without primitive/historical medicine, there would be no modern medicine.
Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.
I dunno, older medicine is more like a stack of turtles. Or a bucket of crabs.
As I mentioned earlier, I am holding a meetup this Saturday at 2 P.M. Pacific time on Mozilla Hubs. It will be either at the Parthenon [hub.link/Zd85BZs] or in a meetup site [hub.link/q7PLxgT] I have constructed. Try the Parthenon first. Feel free to invite friends — from anywhere in the world.
There seems to be a problem with embedding links to Hubs in a web page or email, which is why I am doing it this way. The information is also on the announcement page on my site.
For those not familiar with it, Hubs is a VR environment, accessible either on computer or with a VR headset. Its great virtue, relative to Zoom et. al., is that as you get farther from someone in the virtual world, his voice gets softer. So with a world of reasonable size, such as either of the two I plan to use, you can have multiple groups of people having separate conversations, rather than just the sort of one to many interaction that Zoom is designed for.
I came across this sentence in the decision approving the class action settlement against Equifax:
I knew that bar for a federal judge wasn’t *that* high, but I thought it was higher than that.
Could you unpack that a bit for those of us who don’t know the context?
Equifax was unbelievably incompetent.
Additional people were affected, even more data leaked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/07/ftc-encourages-consumers-opt-free-credit-monitoring-part-equifax
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/19/court-awards-80-million-to-consumer-attorneys-in-equifax-case.html
So there was laughably low $380 million settlement (penalty should be much larger, yes it would bankrupt Equifax – it would be a good thing). Reminder – personal data of over 100 000 000 people was leaked through a blatant incompetence.
Out of 380 million
78 million paid to lawyers
31 million to victims
Remaining funds are virtual costs of “credit monitoring services” costs that are paid by Equifax to Equifax. What a terrible penalty.
Also there was $175 million to the states and territories in the agreement and $100 million to the CFPB in fines ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach ) so hopefully top bosses got smaller bonuses for that year.
As I understand, nearly entire “fund for victim compensation” went back to Equifax and lawyers, leaving $31 million to as restitution for over 140 million people.
That apparently is
Turns out that suing Equifax in small claims cases was far smarter – some people actually won real compensation actually matching what they should receive. See https://finance.yahoo.com/news/people-successfully-suing-equifax-almost-10000-app-193607932.html
@matkoniecz
That is not “unbelievably incompetent.” Just about every software project I’ve worked on didn’t keep all their libraries up to date. It’s a huge burden to do so, as it often requires code changes and may cause bugs.
The same in my projects, but I am not administering databases with private info of more than 140 million people.
Though on second thought it was sadly believably incompetent. Also, that was not a sole incompetent thing done by this organization.
Maybe “they were not competent enough to be allowed to handle any private data” would be better?
It is believably incompetent. But for the record, there are different kinds of “not up to date.” Being behind a major version is completely understandable, because those contain breaking changes. So is being behind a minor version. But security patches are generally provided to all maintained versions and less commonly have breaking changes.
Wow, that’s a nice scam. They should have been made to pay a competitor who hadn’t recently proven incompetent to protect their information.
Also, was this customer information (bad enough) or information they were collecting on people’s credit who never choose to get involved with equifax for a third party?
They were collecting on people’s credit who never choose to get involved with Equifax for a third party.
Very small part of affected people signed for credit monitoring, but Equifax generally had their data anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax
If everyone prefers A to B, then A is more valuable than B. Even if a bunch of self dealing lawyers insist that credit monitoring is more precious than diamonds.
It goes to the very definition of the word valuable. For an inverse version of the same misunderstanding see the IRS’ conclusion that greedily sought start up stock options are actually worth nothing.
Any thoughts on the term late capitalism?
“… neo-capitalism was most often used by intellectuals in Belgium and France around that time. This term drew attention to new characterististics of capitalism, but at the time ultra-leftist Marxists objected to it, because, according to them, it might suggest that capitalism was no longer capitalism, and it might lead to reformist errors rather than the overthrow of capitalism.”
When capitalism still exists in 2100, will they need to add another stage? “Oh-my-look-at-the-time capitalism”?
Kind of amusing, given that it tends to be used by people who advocate a system whose late-stage happened thirty years ago. /snark
+1
+1
+3
Anyone who uses the term “late stage” anything to refer to the current age is an idiot. It’s a historical term. Marxists think they can wish away capitalism by using certain labels but it surprisingly doesn’t work that way.
Blurring together two different terms is an interesting mistake to make while calling others idiots. “Late capitalism” is the historical term, while by Google n-gram standards “late-stage capitalism” essentially doesn’t exist. Late-stage is, however, very popular on the internet.
They mean the same thing. What you said doesn’t change anything about what I said. “Late capitalism” is either a rhetorical device or wishful thinking.
So, late-stage capitalism, a term used almost exclusively on the modern day internet, means the same thing as a historical term used far less, which makes other people idiots for using words wrong? Cool.
This is why I rarely get in to arguments with the far left. They’re so obsessed with having everyone use their terminology “correctly” as if it changes anything.
Do “late capitalism” and “late-stage capitalism” mean different things? I was under the impression that it was just a slight change in cadence, a la “grilled cheese” vs. “grilled cheese sandwich”.
Late capitalism is clearly already dead.
Late stage capitalism is just acting.
@HeelBearCub
Late term capitalism is what you call it when you’ve really got to get this paper finished for your final.
@Mick:
And “End Stage Capitalism” is when you don’t want capitalists portrayed in fiction for propaganda reasosn …
Nothing more than a cheap and transparent rhetorical trick designed to pre-suppose that capitalism is in the process of failing and will soon be replaced by something obviously better.
It’s a term that appears in some older sociology and philosophy, like the Frankfurt school. Since Capitalism kept on going, those theories are a little bit pointless now. But it helps in understanding that people like Adorno really thought that Capitalism was going to break down any minute now (or a least transform into something else). And in a way, they were right, the extremely rigid society of the 50s and 60s was transformed by the Hippies, the shift to a service economy, etc. What they didn’t expect was that society became more friendly to it’s citizen thanks to Capitalism (which, one can argue, was not the first time, many social problems of classical 1850s style capitalism where solved in the late 1800s).
The term is also a shibboleth in some contemporary leftist circles. The implication that Capitalism is going to break down soon and becoming ever more bizarre is still a strong rhetoric device. But I don’t think it has much theoretical value to it that is not a quote from Adorno etc.
I also have to mention that the term Capitalism is often not really defined. Is it a system where the rich get richer? Is it a system that has a specific notion of property? Is it a system where prices are created by supply and demand? Is it a system that revolves around markets?
“Spätkapitalismus” sounds a lot cooler. You English speakers are missing out.
Let’s say we date the replacement of mercantilism by capitalism with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. I understand “late capitalism” to begin with the end of World War II, conveniently almost exactly 100 years later.
We can therefore conclude that by the mid-2040s, “late capitalism” will actually be the majority of capitalism!
It’s a nonsense term. I don’t think there’s any real agreement on what it even means, beyond vague intuitions and hazy implications. The Wikipedia page on the term goes over the academic usage of it, but even then, it seems like each Marxist scholar who used it had a totally different understanding of what it meant.
Warning, griping, shaming. Corona.
Mark Linsey, who posted here as Mlinsey, collected donations for buying masks from china for healthcare workers.
He claimed that he had contacts who could supply many more masks, he just needed money.
I tried contacting him multiple times about helping get masks to healthcare workers, the provider was willing to pay for masks if he could get them (quickly enough to matter).
He never responded. A few of those workers are dead now.
Would this have changed that? Maybe maybe not. He couldn’t be bothered to answer an email though.
Sorry, but can you be more precise? Your vague accusations sound a bit like “murder or jaywalking”.
What exactly are you accusing this Mark guy of? That he wasted your time by offering help but not actually coming through? Sounds mildly bad, but not “those workers are dead (because of him)” kind of bad.
If you meant to warn us that this person is a fraudster trying to scam money out of naive altruists (which you might be hinting at, not sure), then please say so outright.
Agreed. This seems incredibly uncharitable. Running some sort of donation scam is deplorable and should be called out, but the notion that everyone who might conceivably have donated to provide PPE, but didn’t, is somehow responsible for the deaths of health care workers (which ones? where? how many? does it even matter?) is absurd.
See here and here.
He claimed he could get masks, he just needed money.
He didn’t answer emails asking for help buying masks for health workers.
Now some of them are dead.
He might not have been able to affect that, but maybe he could have. It is and was plausible that he could have saved lives, and he didn’t make any effort to.
I am accusing him of not doing all he could, and not in the trivial sense.
That’s all.
@Purplehermann
It’s possible he’s not doing all he could or worse is scamming. I really don’t know.
But it’s also possible your e-mails went to his spam filter or that he was inundated with thousands of e-mails and accidentally deleted yours while trying to filter for genuine request or who knows what else.
I used his ‘contact me’ button on his donation page. A few times, over multiple days. (Also tried getting his attention here once or twice, but it makes sense for him not to see it here.)
It seems unlikely to me that they went to spam, or that he just happened not to find them. It is possible, but I don’t believe it.
I am not claiming he is a scammer.
Trump had this to say yesterday. I slept on it to see if it sounded any less unhinged. Nope.
This is what he had to say immediately after a presentation on research showing how long covid-19 survives on surfaces and in the air under different conditions.
Video of his remarks starts at 1:42 in, with [some of] that presentation beforehand.
This isn’t spinnable as 4D chess to “wind up the libs”. This guy really is just as impulsive and ill informed as he seems.
The Emperor has no clothes and everyone around him has to pretend they see invisible silk, or it’s into the proverbial pit. I hope at some point everyone will realize that, as otherwise the rebuilding will be that much harder.
He’s clearly thinking out loud. Should a President do that in a press conference? No, he should not, but eh.
Good thing the Dems are running a clear communicator who doesn’t have spells of weird talking against him as a contrast. If they ran someone who communicated even less clearly that would be a huge mistake.
If that’s how he thinks, out loud or in his own head, he should not be the President of a country of 12 people, let alone 350 million. The problem isn’t just that he said it at a press conference but what it reveals about how dumb and uninformed he is.
It is unfortunate that the two candidates for the Presidency are senile, but I’m fairly confident that Biden doesn’t think injecting people with disinfectant or “bringing a light inside the body” is going to cure people of coronavirus.
Great, find me someone who has the correct policies on trade and immigration and also a medical degree and I’ll vote for him. In the meantime I suggest not taking medical advice from Dr. Trump.
Done.
Isn’t Ron Paul an open borders free trader?
Free trader yes. Open borders no. I’d say he’s a “private borders” guy which is right in that sweet spot where red tribe thinks he’s open borders but blue tribe thinks he’s anti-immigration.
The basic thesis of which is looking more and more accurate every day.
As in there is no such thing as Coronavirus, as per the usual meaning of “hoax”?
He’s not thinking out loud. Pay attention to what he is saying. It’s in the past tense.
He’s speaking in the past tense regarding a conversation he had with someone else where he is clearly speculating as to something that might be tested/done in the future. Note the many uses of “supposing” and such language…
… and they said “We’ll test that.” Invisible silk.
I’d vastly prefer a President with a stutter than one without the mental competency to make it through a press conference without recommending laparoscopic UV sterilization.
He didn’t recommend anything. He described a conversation he had with someone about a hypothetical method of treatment, that would need to be tested first, and specifically clarified that it would have to be managed and overseen by medical doctors.
So, what I get from this is that Trump is having conversations with technical advisors, but he doesn’t really have the right basic knowledge to understand what they’re saying, and he’s walking away from those briefings/discussions with some pretty profound misunderstandings. Or alternatively, he’s getting briefed by technical advisors who themselves don’t know what they’re talking about or are quacks, but I’d guess it’s that they know what they’re talking about but Trump doesn’t understand it very well.
Now, I think this is fairly common. My mom and stepdad are smart, college-educated people (actually both with graduate degrees), but with no technical background. Every now and then I’ll have a conversation with them where it becomes clear that they’ve really fundamentally misunderstood how some bit of technology works. I’ve also had technical conversations with management/administrative people before, and then watched them display a deep misunderstanding of what we’d just discussed. Once, I even watched as the CEO of a company I’d done a lot of technical work for got up in front of several hundred people at a conference and “explained” how the technology we’d designed worked. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t actually work anything like what he said, and much of what he claimed it was doing wasn’t even possible.).
The difference between Trump and 95% of other politicians is not intelligence or technical background–as best I can tell, he’s probably about as smart as the median high-level politician and isn’t any less technically savvy. The difference is that most politicians are afraid of looking like fools by saying something that displays their misunderstandings, and so they’re careful to go over exactly what they’re saying with their advisors until they hopefully get it right. Trump isn’t into that kind of care w.r.t. what he says. That has probably helped him in debates, where he managed not to sound like a trained seal reciting his lines.
Now, in this kind of situation, what we’d really like would be a leader who was both reassuring and careful not to overstep what he knew, and to make sure anything he said wasn’t going to cause Tony Faucci to quietly do a facepalm in the background. But that’s not the leader we have.
The quality of decisions we can expect from Trump probably follows the same pattern–he has no internal mental model that would let him reason well about any of this stuff, studying up on it isn’t his style and anyway he probably doesn’t have the time, and so he’s likely unable to tell when he says or hears something silly vs something plausible vs something rock-solid. As best I can tell, though, that’s also true for most of the political class. An overworked 63-year old with a law degree who’s spent most of his adult life in politics (which is more-or-less what the median elected official looks like) is unlikely to have a deep understanding of epidemiological models or virology or whatever. He’s dependent on his advisors for that. The fact that most elected officials don’t want to look like fools in public (and Trump doesn’t care so much about that) doesn’t change the fact that when they’re making decisions, most of them probably don’t have more than a basic cartoon-physics understanding of what they’re doing.
I think you mean he described his incredibly poor, borderline child-like understanding of a conversation he had with someone.
He’s the kind of guy who reads a four page newspaper article, remembers the one-sentence tagline underneath the title, and then starts making detailed decisions about the world based on that memory. People believe a lot of dumb shit because of having a poor understanding of limited amounts of information, but this person is the President of the United States with access to expert advisors in literally any field he would care to try to understand. With this guy they’re stuck with crayola drawings to try to get him to understand anything and even then he seems to fail to grasp anything but the broadest of details.
@albatross11 I agree that Trump has probably just catastrophically misunderstood his advisers on this stuff, but disagree that we can’t do better by substituting more typical politicians. Yes, plenty of smart people fundamentally misunderstand technical issues in ways that seem obviously laughable to specialists. And if Trump had mused aloud about a screwy, wrong interpretation of R_0, or even of the phenomenon of exponential growth generally, I would say that would be the explanation. Most people don’t get that if the whole lily pond is covered in 30 days then half the pond is covered in 29 days, and probably neither does the median politician.
But there’s a difference between that level of knowledge and the more basic experiential and practical knowledge of the world that most median-or-above-intelligence people acquire by puberty. I would argue that this latter level of knowledge includes both
— the fact that “X disinfects surfaces effectively” doesn’t even remotely imply “X would disinfect your body effectively and safely if you ingested it”
— the fact that ingesting Lysol is obviously and extremely bad for you
That Trump lacks this knowledge is not, I think, evidence of a lack of raw cognitive capacity; his extreme strategic cunning for publicity-seeking testifies that he has that. Rather, it is evidence that he is both unusually incurious and unusually sheltered. Most people learn the facts above, along with many other facts about the world, as part of learning to be ordinary self-supporting adults. Trump was too cosseted in privilege from a young age to ever have to learn them, and too uninterested in how ordinary life operates to ever want to. It’s the Bobby Newport syndrome, basically– or, if you like, a much more consequential version of Bush I having no idea what a gallon of milk costs.
Do you honestly believe that Trump does not understand that ingesting Lysol would be bad for you?
If you have someone who’s a billionaire, who’s built skyscrapers and golf courses all over the world, who ran a top-rated TV show for years, and who succeeded in beating the Most Qualified Candidate for President Ever to win the office of Literally Most Powerful Person Ever in Existence, and this person says something that sounds screwy, the correct answer is probably not “oh, he’s actually too dumb to tie his own shoes.” The correct answer is probably, “he messed up a word or two explaining a novel concept.” Which seems to be the case with the UV light in the lungs treatment.
I always thought Obama was a pretty smart guy, being president of the Harvard Law Review and all, and getting elected to the Senate, and the Presidency. But then he said he’d been to 57 states, when any school child knows there are only 50! I’m sure you now agree that the whole “Harvard” thing and “winning national office” thing were just dumb luck, and Obama is actually a blithering idiot, right? It couldn’t possibly be that he was tired from a long campaign and flubbed “47” for “57.” No, it makes much more sense that he’s actually dumber than rocks and the impressive accomplishments were just luck or cheating or something.
Yes. For my favorite example of how ignorant a top-level politician can be:
“When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed.”
That’s Biden in an interview, not a prepared speech. He apparently did not know either that FDR was not president when the stock market crashed or that television at the time was still being developed.
Seven years later, there were about 200 television sets in use worldwide.
Note that Trump is supposed to be a germophobe, so he’s probably pretty familiar with how disinfectants are supposed to work.
@Conrad Honcho
Trump built his business empire when he was younger and could string a sentence together. He’s now in his 70s and although this particular goof is worse than most of his others, it’s part of a consistent pattern. I highly doubt that Trump now could sit down for an hour long interview and talk like he does in that one linked to above.
He wouldn’t be the first President / PM / Chancellor to start to go senile in office. Or for it to get worse anyway.
And yet he does it quite frequently, and he holds rallies where he talks for an hour or more, frequently going off topic and speaking extemporaneously. These are the things I see, because I’ve watched dozens of Trump rallies. And now that I think about them I really miss them. Stupid virus. Anyway, but the media doesn’t show this stuff. It’s the 30 second outtake where he said something screwy, as people tend to do.
Trump has taken cognitive performance tests in office, and passed just fine. So, no, he’s not senile. This is just media manipulation. How about I put you on camera and record 90% of everything you say for a month, take the 5 stupidest utterances you produce during that time and show it to a test audience? What do you think their opinion of NostalgiaForInfinity’s mental aptitude is going to be?
Trump was amazing to be able to compose paragraphs on the fly. He could compose a better argument in his head than most people could sitting down with pen and paper and given a half-hour.
I think the refusal to admit this is part of the problem. People who never could do that would never start trying.
@David Friedman
There was a major stock market crash in 1937 in which the Dow fell more than 40%.
Exactly. Fantastic post.
And another fantastic post:
Leaders regularly have no idea what they are talking about, even smart ones. Sometimes they do, but they misspeak. Trump is somewhat more flamboyant in his mistakes, because that is how he is in general. The Obama example is perfect because it shows that making this an issue of basic knowledge is silly. We misspeak on fundamental things that we understand viscerally, especially when tired and on-camera all the time. Parents mixing up kids’ names and all that. You need to look at context. I’m sure Obama knows how many states there are.
That doesn’t mean that spending hours practicing a script produces better results–yes, it protects you against people drinking Lysol based on your comments, but that benefit may be outweighed by the cost of never being able to speak without a script and spending valuable hours polishing other people’s words. Obviously, the ideal is a leader who makes consistently sensible comments, but people seem far more concerned with the possible effects of Trump’s words than what he actually appears to understand. They’re often as upset with him for misspeaking as for just being wrong. This is an absurd standard for any leader in a crisis who has to be making public comments all the time on complex and changing issues and is probably *tired.* You can’t compare it to a SOTU address.
@salvorhardin
Trump grew up when ads like the following were still running in magazines.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/heidi-stevens/ct-heidi-stevens-coronavirus-lysol-disinfectant-women-douche-0424-20200424-jl7nwzpv7bdkve65chl3373yz4-story.html
Conrad:
Note that exactly the same thing is true of Biden.
@albatross11
Which is why I have posted precisely zero “ZOMG u guise Biden said something dum how can you vote for hime?!?!?” threads.
4d chess, or even just show-host level chess:
most people are either smart enough to know that President Trump is not part of the medical side of things (as an expert at least) and to disregard this, simple enough that hearing the President talk about possible fixes makes them feel something is being done, or anti-Trump/jaded/etc enough that they’ll pretty much disregard everything he says unless they are getting outraged
I mean, I’m not a biologist. I do strongly speculate that, I dunno, intubating someone with respiratory difficulties and shining a bright UV light into their lungs would trade sterilizing the surface viruses only for massive irritation and much worse respiratory difficulties, and yes the whole injecting light sounds very weird and I can’t even imagine any way to salvage that into anything vaguely reasonable.
But given that we are already pursuing novel and wide-sweeping changes in society, why not give a few mouse lungs bad sunburns to see what happens?
Read more carefully. The UV light was “under the skin”. It was “disinfectant injections” that was connected to the lungs.
Your theory amounts to “let’s get the monkeys banging on typewriters going. Maybe my term paper will pop out.”
Okay, so I found what he was talking about. Clearly someone medical mentioned this study to him.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29124710
Ultraviolet Irradiation of Blood: “The Cure That Time Forgot”?
It isn’t technobabble, he’s saying we should try a study a doctor mentioned to him under a doctor’s supervision.
Do you know that was mentioned to him or are you speculating?
@NostalgiaForInfinity
Speculating. Just as everyone on the other side is speculating that Trump is an idiot.
Do you have any evidence of your claim, besides “this exists”?
@HeelBearCub
I have exactly as much evidence as you have that he wasn’t referencing this.
I wouldn’t say I was speculating so much as I was just reading what he said.
So as long as there exists any published article, which – if you put it through a meat grinder – vaguely resembles something Trump said, there’s no reason to think that he wasn’t referencing that study?
So his advisors are bringing to his attention a paper from three years ago with four citations?
I guess that checks out with Trump’s self-proclaimed mastery of medical knowledge.
Any promising papers about injection of disinfectants?
It really doesn’t feel like you’re arguing in good faith on this.
@broblawsky
Were you under the impression that anyone here was?
@EchoChaos
I was (and I am still doing this). But thanks for admitting to not arguing in a good faith.
@matkoniecz
My statements here are in good faith. I genuinely believe that Trump heard of this or some other treatment. More likely the one @The Nybbler found, but who knows. This is the one I found when I Googled “UV blood irradiation”.
In this particular thread, I am frustrated at the entire assumption of idiocy and/or malice on the part of Trump, which is clearly not in good faith either.
There is a rather obvious explanation for Trump’s statement, which is that someone told him of some related medical procedure that he has mangled to one degree or another.
Assuming instead idiocy is more bad faith than my sarcastic rejoinders in this thread.
Edit:
Actually, thank you very much for your statement. You’ve reminded me why this kind of thing is such a mind-killer on this board. I will step back from this thread.
If you’re not going to argue in good faith, you shouldn’t be here.
In EC’s defense, he’s not wrong. HBC knows Trump is not stupid, and knows Trump is not senile, and posted this anyway. Love you, HBC, but this whole thread was poor form.
Bad form? What is this, the “Dear Leader” forum? Criticism of Trump will not be tolerated?
I don’t know what precisely caused Trump to say what he did, but he said it. Not me.
I just pointed out that it’s mind-bogglingly stupid. The fact that some are unwilling to recognize that isn’t my fault.
Can’t both of these things be true? Someone told him of the study, and his poor grasp of medicine led to him mangling it to one degree or another.
The real disagreement is some want to call this mangling ‘idiocy’, while others prefer to call it ‘mangled’
Unaccustomed as I am to defend HBC …
Unless I missed something, he said “impulsive and ill informed,” not stupid and senile.
Trump appears to be impulsive. Whether he was ill informed in this case is unclear — he may just have been talking loosely about real possibilities that he didn’t understand well enough to describe in any detail. But I can easily believe that HBC thought he was ill informed.
did trump say he was being sarcastic? does this eliminate the he was shown a study theory?
I don’t see how HeelBearCub could be accused of not arguing in good faith. EchoChaos claiming that Trump’s rambling diversion was “clearly” the product of him having a discussion with an actual medical professional is a lot harder to defend, especially now that he’s claimed that he was being sarcastic.
Yes, but only about the disinfectant thing, which is not what people (including myself) were talking about with the study thing. Besides, CNN has inside knowledge of Trump’s intention and says there’s no way he was sarcastic, and I believe them.
stupid or liar?
this is why I don’t buy TDS. It’s not a matter of being deranged, it’s just a matter of not having the secret decoder ring.
I’m saying it’s a lame argument, as if I were to post clips of Obama saying dumb things like “57 states” or “if if if if if if okie doke” (and don’t even get me started on Biden) so I could dunk on Dems, you might also consider that “poor form.”
And replying, “I don’t know what precisely caused Biden to say what he did, but he said it,” wouldn’t be much of a defense. We all know how selective quoting works.
@DavidFriedman
True, but that’s what he was getting at. For instance, his comment above yours,
But, HBC knows Trump is not stupid. Therefore, harping on this particular comment serves what purpose?
He already knows the response he’s going to get is the exact same response he would give if somebody started talking about how “ill informed” Obama is for truly and honestly in his heart believing he’s been to 57 states. It is not a good faith argument, because HBC knows Trump is not so dumb as to believe in injecting disinfectants, but he’s posting a confusing statement so he can dunk on Trump supporters. Great. Dunking achieved. Enjoy your two points.
You mean these monkeys?
It looks like Trump’s query about getting the sterilization ability of UV light directly into people’s lungs is already attempting to be a thing. And again, describing shoving a UV light source into people’s lungs as ‘injection’ is weird, but these are pretty clearly off-the-cuff comments.
Now, again, I’m not a biologist, and sterilizing with UV that’s not the UVC Shred All the DNA sounds slightly sketchy to me, but the concept Trump is clearly describing is plausible enough for a reputable hospital to investigate it.
Sounds to me like kind of a standard Star Trek-esque technobabble sort of thing.
Obviously the ultimate cure, treatment, vaccine, etc. for COVID will be medically and scientifically complex. But I’ll bet you anything the way it will be explained to the public is via some incredibly over-simplified and likely flawed analogy: “It’s like injecting your lungs with disinfectant!”
I feel like this is TDS and if Fauci said the same thing, nobody would bat an eye. I also think that this was not just Trump making shit up on the fly. It reads to me like someone probably already theorized this to him and he was repeating (in his own words, of course) some sort of theory he’d already heard. Whether he heard that theory from a legit scientist or read it on Infowars I couldn’t say.
I imagine the conversation went something like this:
Doctor: we’re looking for a treatment that can destroy the virus in the body.
Trump: how can we destroy the virus?
Doctor: on surfaces lots of things destroy it, uv light, disinfectant, …
Trump: so we’re trying to do something like that inside the body?
Doctor: something like that, yes.
And then Trump’s brain scrambled it into what we got. I don’t think he literally believes you can just use disinfectant on people’s lungs.
I linked the study (or one like it) that Trump almost certainly heard of that resulted in this.
“Almost certainly”.
You found a review article – not a study – on the historical use of UV as a treatment. You have no idea if that article or anything like it was presented to Trump, or if Kaitian’s description of what happened is what actually took place, or if he came up with the idea himself.
@NostalgiaForInfinity
I mean, it’s totally possible that Trump was brilliant enough to immediately reproduce one of the premier pre-antibiotic treatment regimens on his own, but I was assuming a more modest level of genius in our President.
@EchoChaos
One half of his ramblings, if viewed in the most favourable conceivable light, vaguely resembled an old anti-bacterial therapy. The disinfectant injections are yet to be explained as actually a stroke of genius.
Let me get this straight. Trump said something that you can’t tell if it’s legitimate medical advice or something he heard on Infowars… and you think this is an acceptable, normal level of communication, no worse than any other medical expert would have done to explain it? How low are your standards?
I feel like there’s some sort of opposite to TDS, where rather than parsing reasonable statements in the most unflattering light, people take Trump’s most absurd statements and explain why, if you make all the most flattering assumptions you can, they aren’t actually that dumb.
TDSDS: Trump Derangement Syndrome Derangement Syndrome.
Donald Trump is an idiot. I’m not saying all Republicans are idiots, I’m not saying all Democrats are saints, I’m not saying that no other politicians in history have spoken off the cuff and gone off the rails (sorry for the mixed metaphor). I think it is a calamity of historic proportions that Trump, rather than Obama, or Romney, or Clinton, or even (take your pick) a Bush, should be president of the United States during the COVID-19 outbreak.
So under your theory, can you explain why the US is not leading the world, by a significant margin, in per capita COVID deaths?
If Trump is uniquely ill-equipped to manage COVID, why are multiple European nations experiencing similar results?
Two possible reasons:
1) State governors have some influence over the response and were able to reduce cases regardless of Trump’s incompetence.
2) The US is behind Italy, France and Spain in terms of when their respective outbreaks really got going. There’s still time for the US to overtake them.
The places with the worst outbreaks are the ones that are the most stridently ant-Trump and have only Democrats in leadership position.
If you slice America into Trump states and Hillary states, Trump states have much better outcomes to this point. You can claim this is just a fluke and that they’re totally on the verge of having worse outcomes if you want… of course this is what red states have been hearing (just wait! in two more weeks you’ll be stepping over bodies in the streets!) for over a month now.
The US has many different separate outbreaks. The worst ones seem to have peaked. While it’s true that more may arise or get worse, that remains entirely hypothetical. It’s also true that Italy, France, Spain etc. have not yet achieved herd immunity and may very well have worse outbreaks in the future still as well.
Clearly confounded by fact that epidemics are quicker and worse in urban areas. And Democrats are typically getting better results in cities.
Possibly confounded also by other effects like quality of statistics.
@matkoniecz
Republicans control the second and third largest state in the Union (Texas and Florida), both of which have large urban areas and both of which are doing per capita fairly well.
Of course, this is confounded by weather, since Texas and Florida are hot and humid, which COVID doesn’t like at all.
Republican-controlled Utah and Democrat-controlled Colorado are very similar, each dominated by one large urban area with lots of rural areas and ski resorts. Utah is doing way better.
Or possibly:
3). Within broad limits, the competence of the executive isn’t actually very relevant to how the disease works out. You can maybe get exceptionally good (Taiwan’s VP being an epidemiologist) or bad (Brazil’s president denying the existence of the virus and overruling local-government shutdowns) executive responses, but anywhere in the middle 2-sigma band, it doesn’t matter much. A much more competent president would have been less useful to us that a slightly more competent CDC and FDA.
I don’t see how this follows? Isn’t the administration *less* likely to cooperate with democratic states?
1. Not based on evidence.
2. Even if you turned up a bit, he doesn’t have much ability to stop them from what they think is right without the cooperation of a largely Dem-Aligned bureaucracy.
3. And even if he had that, he doesn’t have much authority. Pandemic control is a classic police power mostly reserved to the states.
ventilation is a police power?
Thank you albatross for giving the much more likely explanation.
Worse than that, you couldn’t transplant the equivalent competence of the Taiwanese or South Korean system (their entire public health apparatus more or less) here and expect the same effect.
Although sometimes overrated, I think there is something to the idea that people in the U.S. and Western Europe are much less likely to go along with an effective policy response to a pandemic in time. The cultural tendencies that make this true are a positive sometimes, but not right now.
I can’t argue the point. I would say that Trump’s idiocy affects me more, personally, on a gut level, than any effect it has had on COVID-19 fatalities. It’s almost like an allergic reaction.
Would you argue that Trump is displaying a Roosevelt, Churchill, Obama level of calm, reasoned, determined, and articulate leadership through this crisis? I wouldn’t.
Edited to add: I’ve spent a significant portion of my career in science- and medicine-adjacent fields, and I’ve written a couple of books explaining those topics to kids. So to see a grown human in a position of power spouting this kind of nonsense is especially irritating.
On the plus side: there are a lot of people who can say idiotic things in an intelligent-seeming manner. Trump makes lots of people think for themselves rather than be suckered in by the charm 🙂
This is the closest thing I’ve ever heard to someone basically admitting, “Yes, I have TDS.” So uh, thanks for being honest about it, at least?
Honestly, I recommend you just turn off the news. I used to feel this sort of anger and resentment and hopelessness during the Obama administration. I just started trying to avoid him as much as possible and I started feeling a lot better in life…
TDS. Had to look it up. Yes.
Bobbob:
I feel your pain. At a personal level, I find Trump’s leadership style to be fingernails-on-a-blackboard level grating, and also find that almost any other political leader I can think of would be more reassuring to me in times like this. Most political leaders are not much for understanding science or math or technology or for valuing actual truth over social truth, but Trump takes the cake.
And yet, it’s not at all clear to me that this has actually made things much worse in the US w.r.t. COVID-19.
@Matt M I’m not quite sure what is meant by
“Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but I probably also qualify. I don’t pay attention to anything Trump says, because it would be likely to make me mad, but if I did, I’d come close to regarding “Trump said it” as increasing the odds that the statement was false. (As it is, I only hear about his most idiotic statements, because some people delight in repeating them ad nauseam. Of course that confounds the ongoing impression I get of him ;-()
> Obama
If someone’s going to screw up my life, I’d prefer it to be done out of idiocy rather than contemptuous malice. At least that way the magic 8-ball might sometimes work in my favor.
I think the #1 problem right now is lack of testing to open things back up.
A few weeks ago I was optimistic about the US capability to increase this capacity quickly, but the test numbers stalled out around then.
Consider something Trump does or says which it is possible, by stretching things a lot in one direction, to view as completely crazy, ignorant, and/or evil, and by stretching things a lot in the other direction as entirely reasonable, if perhaps mistaken. The bit this thread has been about is a good example, with comments demonstrating both possibilities.
TDS is the attitude that will always take the first option. I don’t know of a similar term for the attitude that will always take the second.
Note that this is a spectrum, and it was previously applied to Clinton, Bush, and Obama. Like, when Obama bowed to the king of Saudi Arabia during a meeting, this was seized upon by a certain subset of writers with moderately large platforms as evidence that Obama was signaling some kind of allegiance to Islam, or maybe to Saudi Arabia, or somehow was lowering America’s status. This was goofy, but sufficiently committed partisans could convinced themselves it was true because tribalism makes you stupid.
One difference is that, IMO, Trump intentionally plays up the things that get the TDS-sufferers going, basically trolling them in order to get their outraged takes in order to get his own base riled up.
I certainly understand why many people find Trump’s style grating, and it certainly isn’t maximally calm and articulate.
But I’m not looking for “calm, reasoned, determined, and articulate leadership”—I’m looking for effective leadership. And I think part of the problem is that we care a lot more about whether something looks right or is inoffensive (i.e. not grating) than effective. And I don’t think the correlation between the two is anything near what people think it is. (Effective leadership requires rational understanding, good communication, and resilience, but may not appear calm, reasoned, or particularly articulate). I’m not saying Trump has been effective, but that’s the real issue here. I am not confident Obama would have been any more effective, though he would have been more calm and articulate and he would have *appeared* more reasoned. My personal opinion is that , as other posters have said, this is a serious institutional issue that makes effective leadership by recent presidents very difficult.
Roosevelt and Churchill would have been better positioned institutionally than their predecessors, but i think it is a huge mistake to categorize them with Obama as some sort of coherent group. Churchill and Roosevelt’s style was not very Obama-like. It would also be foolish to categorize them as Trump-like, but in some ways their style was more like his. Would Obama have said something like this after 2008?
Roosevelt’s speech is more articulate than Trump’s speeches, but very aggressive. Then you’ve got the nothing to fear but fear itself thing, an attitude would go over poorly today, but was also pretty Churchillian.
Interesting Churchill excerpt:
This wasn’t a guy who just deferred to medical experts.
Executive competence is at least as much a symptom as a cause. Arguably what matters for effective pandemic response is institutional competence, not the degree of competence of any one executive. As albatross11 said, if the CDC and FDA had been on the ball this time as much as they have often been on the ball before, that would have made orders of magnitude more difference than anything Trump has done or not done.
The case for hating Trump in response to this crisis, then, is that the same larger forces that have produced general US institutional decline also produced Trump. These forces certainly include the Revolt of the Public that Gurri describes, where sclerotic and out-of-touch elites find it harder to hide their sclerosis and out-of-touchness, and some non-elites respond with a “burn it all down” sentiment that is, you’ll excuse the metaphor, a cure worse than the disease. This also likely contributes to the institutional dysfunction in many EU countries producing similarly bad pandemic outcomes.
I would argue that in the US the relevant larger forces also include the resurgent influence of the anti-intellectual, anti-institutional Borderer culture in the past 50 years, which has been both harnessed and stoked by two generations of right-wing politicians now, starting with Nixon and Wallace and continuing with Trump. TDS is a distillation of resentment of this culture and its continuing influence in the US. In my view this resentment is 100% justified, even if its focus on a single individual leads people to overstate the effect of that individual.
When’s the last time we had a severe situation where we could get an idea of CDC or FDA competence when swift action was required?
Ebola didn’t plausibly have an R0 > 1 in U.S. conditions. Swine flu wasn’t as lethal.
It’s difficult for me to see how an institution like the CDC or FDA can be kept well functioning for rapid pandemic response when the population doesn’t take it seriously and will not put up with costly preventative measures for low probability but extremely large downside events.
There is a huge amount of stochasticity (ie, luck) in how badly epidemics hit different countries. The explanation for why Italy is as bad as it is, is 90% luck or more.
But the US is in a unique position as a global leader. For a comparison of how things might have gone, look at the way the Obama administration handled Ebola.
I am not saying COVID-19 wouldn’t have become a pandemic at all if Obama had been president, but I’m saying there’s a chance of that. At least he would have tried to prevent it, and maybe succeeded the way he did with Ebola.
Ebola did not have an R0 > 1 in American conditions. It probably wouldn’t have if literally nothing was done differently from normal.
The CDC may have prevented some deaths in the U.S. during Ebola, but the difference in CDC effectiveness then vs now is mostly down to the disease being different.
Light injections sound rad. Hey, it cured dark matter syndrome on Exosquad.
“Injecting disinfectant” sounds kind of like my wife’s cancer treatment. It would probably have similar side effects, lol.
But sadly, if you are infected with a virus, it’s inside your cells. Disinfecting your interior tissue surfaces doesn’t seem sufficient at that point. Maybe it would slow the spread to other parts of your body or other people, in the hypothetical world where such a thing were possible.
Yep, Trump’s a dolt. Probably going to vote for him anyway. Such is life.
Someone probably mentioned this to him and he repeated it in his usual garbled Trumpian way. Yes, it’s UV light, inside the body. It’s crazy and probably won’t work, but it’s not so crazy that a legitimate company isn’t willing to take a shot.
Crazy or not, but thanks to this I just found out about two pretty rad technologies just in this thread. Second Aapje that he’s making people think for themselves, intentionally or not.
Wow, I bet someone explained that idea to him (maybe on TV) and that’s what he was remembering.
Seconded. This is more likely the treatment he was thinking of than the one I linked.
I’ll be damned….
That was unexpected.
While this might be something that will be leaned on after the fact, it doesn’t match other things he said in the same press conference
This is Trump clearly indicating that he wants to apply the lessons learned from killing the virus on surfaces, and trying to make a logical leap to what would kill them in the body.
ETA: Even if, the first time he asked the question, someone said “actually there is a potential UV treatment being looked at” (side note: that looks like a puff piece playing for money, but who knows). The link for Trump doesn’t appear to be that.
Even if you assume Trump made that up on the spot, and it’s overwhelmingly unlikely to work, what exactly is the harm in Trump asking the scientists to look into it?
To the extent that Trump has an idea of how to eradicate the virus, asking Deborah Brix to look into it seems like the exactly correct thing he should do. Now maybe you can argue that it might be better if he ask that privately rather than publicly. And maybe you can argue that such an idea is so obviously terrible that only an idiot could think it’s even worth looking into. But what exact harm is being done here?
I’m not sure which is more depressing, the jaw dropping scientific illiteracy that doesn’t immediately connect “inject* disinfectant” with “kill people,” or the absurd apologies in the comment thread. One can legitimately be in favor of Trump’s policies, and can legitimately point out that the leader of any nation doesn’t affect the course of a pandemic much, and still acknowledge that the things that come out of his mouth are utterly idiotic, worth criticizing if they came from the mouth of anyone over the age of 10.
*Edited; mis-typed “ingest” earlier
How do you think doctors/scientists initially explained the concept of chemotherapy to the public at large?
Was it “utterly idiotic” to suggest that we might cure lung cancer by blasting your lungs with high dosage of radiation?
You appear to be confusing chemotherapy with radiotherapy.
You’re assuming that Trump has good scientific reasons for suggesting disinfectant injections, and that he is simplifying the explanation for the public’s benefit. What is the evidence that this is what he’s doing, rather than that his grasp of the topic is as bad as it appears?
I’m not assuming anything.
It was overwhelmingly obvious that Trump was describing a hypothetical treatment method that he had previously discussed with someone else, that still needed to be studied, and that would only be administered through medical physicians.
At no point did he say “individuals should start injecting disinfectant” or anything even close to that.
@Matt M
That’s a highly flattering rephrasing of his statement.
The “hypothetical medical treatment” in question is “injecting disinfectant”. You were implying that what he said was actually a simplification analogous to how a doctor might explain cancer treatments to the public. If you called out a doctor on their simplification, they could provide an actual medical explanation that explained why the treatment was safe and sensible. You’re assuming that Trump could do the same. I do not think it is overwhelmingly obvious that this is the case.
Thank heavens for small mercies.
Incorrect. If someone asked Barack Obama to explain chemotherapy/radiotherapy/whatever, he would probably say something like “We expose the affected area to high dosages of radiation in the hopes that it will kill the cancer cells.”
And any journalist who tried to run a headline of “Obama recommends sticking your head in the microwave” would be seen to be obviously engaging in a partisan hit-job.
It’s pointless to speculate as to whether or not Trump understands the science behind this well enough to provide more details of exactly how it works if he would have been asked. Because nobody would ask him. Because asking him would be pointless. Because everyone understands that he isn’t a doctor and doesn’t have specific medical expertise and is not up on stage for the purposes of recommending individual treatment plans to be carried out without medical supervision.
Can you see why someone might consider changing “Expose cells to radiation” to “Stick your head in the microwave” to be more of a stretch than changing “I see the disinfectant… is there a way we can do something like that with injection inside” to “Trump asks if you can inject disinfectants”?
Like, it’s not the case that the moment you stop giving exact quotes then truth becomes meaningless and all interpretations become equally false. Some paraphrases are more accurate than others!
Fortunately, nobody said “ingest disinfectant”. Not sure why you put quotes around something that wasn’t said.
How is “inject disinfectant” any better?
“inject,” Sorry. But do you really think it’s fine with “inject” rather than “ingest”??
Yes, I’m in favor of Trump’s policies, I don’t think the president can do much about a pandemic, but I’m not overly bothered by Trump garbling some medical explanation. I’m an electrical engineer, so I know a thing or two about computers, and the things that come out of my grandma’s mouth about her computer defy description. But I can’t expect everybody to be an expert in everything.
It’s wrong but such botched understanding is depressingly common even among people who in theory would know better. After seeing plenty of doctors say stupid things back in February or March and then having my own doctor say multiple stupid things in April, well…
Let’s just say the President saying stupid things is the least of my worries. I already expect garbled nonsense from him.
One of the bitterly amusing aspects of Trump’s senile rambling is people contriving defensible interpretations of his statements that he undermines the next day by saying something completely at odds with them.
Trump now claims it was sarcastic and he was trolling the media.
This is entirely compatible with a senile narcissist incapable of admitting an error, less so with someone who was inelegantly summarising genuine medical research.
“They go out on a limb to defend Trump, and he saws it off right behind them. And then we repeat the same thing within a week.”
I’m pretty sure the part where he tells the media he was just pretending to be retarded is him trolling the media.
Gallows humor might have a place in society, but spreading misinformation during a crisis is a worse look for a leader than senile.
Heh, beautiful timing.
For the people offering the strained defenses above, I have no expectation that anything said here will function as persuasion, but I’d like to at least suggest that you recall moments like this if, in the future, you find yourself confused over why so few people coming of age around now want anything to do with you politically.
You’re free to call it Trump Derangement Syndrome; folks my age were told we had Bush Derangement Syndrome when we noticed that the Iraq War was a crock of shit.
Fundamentally, though, you sent a child to do a man’s job, it’s on glaringly public display, and people who are forming their political identity right now aren’t going to forget it.
+1 to that.
Neither less, nor more, so what’s the point of bringing it up?
The underlying thoughts are not inherently unreasonable. That internal illumination with spectrally appropriate IR/visible/UV light might be an effective way of attacking pathogens is a thought I’ve had myself, and done BOTE calculations and said “probably not but might be worth a look by an expert”. And as noted elsewhere in this thread, the experts at Cedars-Sinai still think it’s worth a look. That “X kills cancer cells/viruses/whatever” doesn’t mean “X may be the cure!” is something I at some point learned not to take seriously, but I’ve seen enough otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people fall for it that I’m not going to hold it against Trump.
That the appropriate place for these thoughts is in a private discussion with experts and with a willingness to accept “nope” or “not yet” as an answer, rather than in a Presidential press conference, obviously. But we all know by now that this isn’t how Trump rolls. And we know that the bureaucracy filters out the Trumpian nonsense before it turns into policy, and that Trump himself will forget it in a week. Aside from a maybe few complete idiots mainlining bleach and killing themselves, nothing will come of it.
It serves only to provide confirmation bias for a pre-existing case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and to drive his opponents into an apoplectic rage that does pretty much the opposite of facilitating their effective opposition to his rule. Which may be deliberate on his part. So why play along by dwelling on it?
Is injecting disinfectant also non-crazy?
It’s crazy, by definition.
Disinfectants are for surfaces, antiseptics are for external use and antibiotics/antivirals are for internal use.
What exactly do you think Penicillian is?
Because if you try to “well akswually!” me on this you will be proving the point. I know it makes you tear your scalp off in rage whenever you hear someone in a position of power use a low-class dialect. Which is deliciously ironic because the Academic English world has turned descriptivism, as opposed to perscriptivism, into unquestionable gospel. If they aren’t updating the OED as we speak I will be very disappointed.
If you are attempting to round Trump’s statement off to “Have you looked into injecting medication”, that statement is possibly even stupider, if less dangerous.
Actually.
I honestly do my best to avoid listening to or reading anything he says because it makes me tear my hair out. Having done a reasonable job at this the last few years I haven’t gotten down to my scalp yet. But if you are going to call out two words as especially worthy of scorn I am going to respond on that basis.
And on that basis I don’t think the majority of English speakers agree with you. (ETA: Or, for that matter, product labeling regulatory agencies.) To basically everyone I know, using “disinfectant” means you are not making specific claims about the biology; whereas using a term from the tree rooted at “antibiotic” means you are making specific claims about the biology. Antibiotic meaning it an anti-fungal and/or an anti-microbial. An anti-microbial is an anti-bacterial and/or an anti-viral. Plus wherever paramecia and eukaryotes fit in there. Etc.
This contrasts markedly with Lambert’s taxonomy———
Which, by the way, thank you for letting me know I can safely inject my underwear. I’ve got a wicked case of gonorrhea coming on, what do you recommend? Grind them up in the blender and shoot `em straight into my scrot?
———So I really don’t think that this is something to flip your shit over.
If you want to analyze words free of the context in which they are uttered, I got nothing for you. Maybe if you had kept the underwear on you wouldn’t have gonorrhea.
Then maybe don’t call out two words and act like they are so obviously worthy of scorn that the context doesn’t matter?
But also reading your excerpt was surprisingly coherent for a Trump Salad. Others have addressed your other objections and I don’t have anything to add if they can’t explain it.
Thank you for your concern about my health. To be honest, though, I did it through the fly. I thought that was how it was supposed to work!
What Another Throw says. If say Barack Obama had been giving a speech about the glories of science and the need for STEM education, and said something about how we lived in an age of darkness until Fleming discovered we could “cure infection by injecting bread mold”, no one in Blue Tribe would have used pedantic literalism to mock him as an imbecile.
Partly because he’s one of yours, partly because he would have spoken in upper-class erudition, and partly because pop-culture STEM education has done a really poor job of explaining what the hard part of curing a disease really is.
Again Jon, if you want to make that statement mean “Have you tried medicine? I really think we should try medicine.”, then it’s even more dumb.
And Trump recognizes just how dumb it is! That’s why he is now claiming it was “sarcastic”. He himself puts the lie to this interpretation.
Come on.
Oh, fuck off. You’ve been arguing in extremely bad faith from the start here, and this is no exception. The more appropriate reading is, “I’ve learned that this thing is really good at killing viruses – maybe it would be the basis for an effective antiviral medicine”. Which is naive, but neither crazy nor tautological – and it’s a brand of naiveté that even otherwise intelligent and knowledgeable people often fall prey to.
He’s lying now when he says that it was sarcastic then. You know this. But your Trump Derangement Syndrome is making you sound crazier than Donald J. Trump, and you really need to knock it off.
The two specific things that were mentioned in the press conference were bleach and isopropyl alcohol. Those are the disinfectants mentioned. They were specifically talking about killing the virus on surfaces with disinfectants.
How does that map to a reasonable “maybe it would be the basis for an effective antiviral medicine”?
ETA: Because to me, it looks like you are the one who is arguing in bad faith. Seriously, understanding that injecting bleach or isopropyl alcohol is a bad idea is not a high bar to clear.
@HeelBearCub
Look, you’re arguing that Trump must have “really” meant that you should inject bleach. Step back for a second here. There are two possibilities:
1) A guy made it to his 70s without a minder but thinking that you can inject bleach
2) He’s inarticulate and completely fumbled what he meant to say.
It’s possible you can sit down and make a sentence diagram of his statements that imply you should inject bleach; if you say he did this, I’ll take your word for it. Listening to what he says is such a phenomenal waste of my time that I won’t bother. But ask yourself: is this at all a likely interpretation of what he thinks?
Is he screamingly inarticulate? Yup. Prone to garbled off-the-cuff statements? I think the mangling of his speech that resulted in a rush to the airports because people couldn’t tell whether or not they’d be allowed to travel shows this. Utterly thin-skinned and prone to saying something and walking it back? Yup again. Unfit for office? Well, I didn’t vote for the guy before and probably won’t again, and you’ve seen my opinion of the Democratic party in another thread which should give you an idea of how much of a push to pull the lever for (R) that I have.
But the dude doesn’t have an IQ of 60. If there’s an interpretation where he doesn’t think you should mainline bleach, it’s a safe bet that’s what he was groping towards.
More importantly, if people hadn’t idiotically made a big deal out of it no one would have contemplated the idea of bleach injections. To the extent that someone did, it would be like the fish tank cleaner story: Most likely a cover up of a murder.
“My rich 80 year old husband was so scared of Covid he drank a bottle of rubbing alcohol and shot bleach into his arm.”
-25 year old wife 3rd wife.
@CatCube:
a) I don’t think it takes an IQ of 60 to believe in the power of anti-scientific health cures. The last year plus has seen a rise in people thinking that ingesting bleach was a good idea. Pretty much every snake-oil remedy out there has it’s backers. I’m guessing their median IQ is around 100. The average might be less, but not by huge amounts.
b) I also think the iconoclastic urge of “People only think this is crazy because they are conformists” is in play frequently. People love a good counter-intuitive hunch on what you should do. Trump is definitely high on the iconoclast scale.
c) (Note: I would really like you to think about coming up with a similar example to this within the field of engineering.)
Let’s consider the following scenario: A research hospital is currently undergoing a MRSA outbreak. As a result, they have been doing some testing of the requirements for disinfecting surfaces and equipment. UV is shown to effectively sterilize instruments, and disinfectants such as bleach, Lysol and other detergents are shown to disinfect surfaces.
c1 – A patient asks “Why can’t you just hit me with that light, maybe under the skin? Or inject me with disinfectant?” This is standard “Today’s 10,000” kind of stuff.
c2 – The patient having had it explained, persists the next day wanting to check with the doctors about “UV light sterilization under the skin” and/or “disinfectant injections”. We are now starting to deal with something different. They are suffering from confirmation bias. They’ve decided this should be worthwhile pursuing and are disposed to reject evidence to the contrary.
c3 – The CEO of the hospital has heard about the research. They ask these same questions in a small meeting with the infection control team, after the outbreak has been going for quite a while. This is quite a bit more concerning. They should already have some working knowledge of the domain.
c4 – The CEO of the hospital repeats this questions in a news conference wherein the research results of the measures to combat the MRSA outbreak are being presented to the public.
c5 – Rather than c3/c4. the CEO of the hospital simply blurts out these questions during the news conference, but lies and presents them as if they have already been reviewed and approved by staff.
Are you really telling me that c3 – c5 aren’t enormously concerning? In ways that “Jo Q. Public has uninformed ideas” are not?
@HeelBearCub
The problem with your hypothetical is it’s assuming those previous conversations have happened in the way you sketched out. I think you’ve let yourself get talked into that by Trump’s defenders here. They…might not be super-great sources of interpretation of his words either.
We already know that Trump can garble things into incomprehensibility, and I think that taking whatever he said and turning that into “LOL, he thinks people can inject bleach!” is probably overreading his statements. I’m going with Ockham’s Razor: he probably doesn’t think you should inject bleach.
Further, why should either of us care if he thinks that? That’s a problem that solves itself! If he really thinks injecting bleach is a good idea, then soon somebody’ll find him laying on the floor of the bathroom with a syringe hanging out of his arm and a jug of Clorox next to him, and you don’t have to hear from him again and I get to vote for President Pence. I’m not counting on that, though, because again: I don’t think he thinks you can inject bleach.
I feel like I’m arguing with my Birther father* here–and I also hated President Obama along with him! There are so many good reasons to hate this guy, why do you insist on latching on to the worst and least-likely ones?
* It’s worth noting that my Trump-voting dad seems to really be souring on him because of how inarticulate and combative he is at these briefings. I don’t argue with you that he’s doing a bad job, but 1) this exact thing doesn’t fall into that bucket, and 2) much of what went wrong is more a function of failures by the permanent bureaucracy, and not the President. He’s certainly not helping, but probably not hugely hurting. Who’s been elected has way less to do with what happens on a day-to-day basis than is healthy.
@Cat Cube:
Read c5 again. I’m not assuming that conversations occurred before hand. I’m laying out possible scenarios c4 and c5, one of which has to have occurred. Either he had conversations about the ideas that he expressed at the press conference beforehand, as he says he did, or he did not, and lied about them.
I’m not asking you to conclude that Trump thinks injecting bleach is a good idea. I’m asking you to accept that he was genuine in his statements that linked the idea of “these things kill the virus on surfaces” to the public announcement “we should investigate whether we can inject disinfectants because we know they kill viruses” and think about the possible ways to reach that conclusion.
What is especially amazing is that he said this just after promoting chloroquine as a safe cure. A competent and morally decent politician would know not to publicly suggest any hypothetical cure in the first place, a reasonably incompetent one would learn to shut up for at least a month on this subject after provoking one death, but as usual Trump can’t even manage this incredibly simple thing, and it’s his opponents that are supposed to be irrationally hateful, not his supporter who by their own admission would vote for anyone who is for their pet issue and had to settle for this.
Sorry but no. It is not “irrationally hateful” to vote for a politician who is a horrible person with poor policies but prevents politician with policies believed to be horribly awful.
Still, it is hilarious and scary to see people claiming that comments about injecting disinfectant were in any way defensible. And attempting to compare this to penicillin/chemotherapy.
It was simply a contentless rambling due to lack of brain-mouth filter revealing appallingly low level of medicinal knowledge. Probably caused by overestimating himself (‘Maybe I have a natural ability’).
As a non-USian I am not quite intimately familiar with the electoral system over there and it has recently come to my attention by following the democratic primary that US state and local governments are directly involved in primary elections.
This confuses me. Primary elections are private affairs are they not ? They are events by private organisations, in this case political parties, why are state governments involved at all ? How enshrined are political parties in law over there ? Can I set up a new political party in some state and get that state government to foot the bill/organise our private election of a candidate we intend to run for any official election ? Just presidential candidates ?
No. There was a court case about this very question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Allwright
Hmm, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there that seems to suggest that the state(s) have had a hand in primary elections for a long time. All the way through it seems to be treating the primary as a kind of state election (or at least that’s how it seems from my outside perspective)
Which still leaves me with the question, why are election commissioners counting ballots for Democratic primaries at all ? What happened in US history that got primaries wrapped up in state election infrastructure ?
Not only can you not do that, it’ll take a lot of time, effort, and money to even get on the ballot at all.
The libertarian party has been the largest and most popular “third party” in the US for a couple decades. Only last cycle (2016) did they manage to achieve the feat of getting on the ballot in all 50 states. And this was considered a huge and celebration-worthy accomplishment that had been decades in the making.
They did get their Presidential ticket on the ballot in all 50 states + DC in 2016, but not for the first time. The Libertarian Presidential ticket was also on the ballot everywhere in 1980, 1992, 1996, and 2000. The problem is that minor-party ballot access in many states requires requalification every election cycle. For the 2020 election cycle, for example, the LP is currently qualified for the ballot in 35 states plus DC, and are still working to qualify (mostly signature-gathering) in the other 15 states.
That, I believe, is down to their candidate not getting enough votes. In NC in the 90s and the 2000s the Libertarian party maintained ballot access, with candidates for both President and Governor, by getting a small percentage of the overall vote. I can’t recall exactly what the percentage was. 5% seems too high, but that is what comes to mind.
Then they ceased to get the necessary votes, so they lost automatic ballot access.
Thanks for the clarification. I must have misheard or misunderstood the semi-regular propaganda I receive via e-mail from the LP 🙂
I’ve noticed this is a source of confusion. I get weirded out by how you have to “register” with one party, then the American gets weirded out that I can’t vote for the party candidate. Then gets more weirded out that I could, but I’d have to join the party, for which I would have to pay the annual membership fees. “You have to pay money to be allowed to vote!?”
(to avoid more confusion, of course nobody has to pay to vote in the election, for one of the many candidates, some of whom have the nomination for a political party. It’s just that nobody outside the party had a say who got the nomination, because it wasn’t our business)
It’s worth noting that this varies from state to state. In some states, primaries are “closed” (only registered party members can vote). In others, they are “open” (any registered voter can vote).
Yes, but you still have the register. We don’t have a register (the parties have membership records, but I doubt they share them)
This leads to statements like “I’m registered Independent”, with the explanation that Independent is not the name of a party. We’re like “you’re what?”
“The Independent Party” would be a pretty cool name. We have a newspaper called “The Independent”.
The United States already has the (fringe right) American Independent Party, which in fact does get a good number of voter registrations by people who don’t read the fine print and think they are registering their independence from party politics altogether.
I don’t think this leads to many people actually voting for their candidates in general elections, when you’re picking named individuals rather than party labels, but it makes them look bigger than they are in the primaries.
Is this really what an open primary is ? So if I’m registered to vote I can participate in the Odin Party candidate selection even though I’m actually a Satanist Part Member and just want to select the Odin Party candidate who I think is most likely to lose the general election ?
@Dewwy:
Modulo that there are different forms of “open” primaries, yes that is correct.
It does mean you have to give up the option to influence your own parties selections, but you will occasional see party figures encouraging the behavior you are suggesting.
Yes, some people vote in the other party’s primary for their weakest candidate. Alternatively, if your district is overwhelmingly Odinist and they’re sure to win, you might as well vote in the primary that matters.
I read something here recently about registered party members being given different ballots. Didn’t care enough to google, but I really hope I misunderstood.
That’s the case here in Massachusetts, for the PRIMARIES (not the general election). If you are a registered party member, you automatically get the ballot for your party’s primary. If you are not, you can ask for either party’s ballot. (Note–some states have closed primaries, where you have to be registered with a party to vote in that party’s primary. Massachusetts has open primaries.)
Ah, makes sense. Thanks.
Different primary ballots? Yes.
You only get to vote in one party primary. Why is that weird?
Some states strictly restrict party ballots to registered voters. In some other states, you can chose to vote in any party primary, regardless of registration. There are states that give only unaffiliated voters the ability to vote in any party’s primary. Another set of states have “jungle” primaries, where there is a combined primary and the top two vote getters, regardless of party, advance to the general. (That obviously doesn’t apply to the Presidential primary).
In California, a “jungle primary” state, the “America Independent Party” still exists as a party (not the same as unaffiliated) that you can register with. That’s a long story tied up in the civil rights era of American politics. If you mistakenly register with that party, you won’t be able to get a Democratic or Republican presidential primary ballot.
I think the confusion doesn’t come from this, at least not for me. It comes from the involvement of government officials in the internal affairs of political parties beyond things like financial fraud and other lawbreaking.
For example, in the UK (to the best of my knowledge) if I am a Labour party member, or a member of certain affiliated groups (mostly unions), I can vote for the Leader of the Labour Party. The Labour party conducts this election on its own, the UK electoral commission/returning officers are not counting ballots for them.
If am a Labour party member I can’t vote in elections by the Conservative Party for Leader of the Conservative Party not because I am registered as for Labour and won’t get a ballot from the electoral commission but because the Conservative Party won’t let me be a member of theirs if I’m also a member of another party, and only their members vote for party leader (after their members of parliament whittle down the candidates to two in a multi-round elimination process, but I digress). Basically the parties can do whatever they want in choosing their party leaders (who are effectively their candidates for Prime Minister but only by strong convention)
Conversely it seems to me that in some US states that election commissioners for states and other local government are actually counting the ballots in various political party primary elections. For example this Wikipedia page for the New York City Board of Elections says its responsibilities are
Emphasis mine
On the other hand, American’s get weirded out when they hear that the British prime minister was chosen by a relatively small group of party members with no input from voters. (Though there has since been an election, so Johnson does have electoral legitimacy now).
Different countries do things differently and people are weirded out by what they’re not used to. I was recently surprised to learn that in Canada, people buy milk in bags.
It weirds out Britons who aren’t aware of it at first (which is many of them), though I think this may be due to American pop-cultural influence to some extent. We do get people who think parts of our legal system work the way they do on TV (the way they work on Law & Order)
Of course, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to have these things tied together. It’s just interesting as a point which causes some confusion between countries. That and I’m curious about where this difference came from, what problem was it a solution to ?
I was charmed, not weirded, to learn that in some parts of Germany you can buy milk from a machine, putting your own bottle, or a bought bottle, into the machine as if you were filling your car with gas.
Apparently you can do this somewhere in England, but I’ve never seen it. Years and years ago this was done in a much less technological way, of course, by bringing a jug to a store, or to a passing cart.
> why are state governments involved at all
As with everything weird in this country, the answer comes down to “slavery”. After the Civil War, the former Confederate States enacted several measures to disenfranchise (among others) the former slaves. Unpassable literacy tests were one mechanism, but poll taxes were another. And for the same reason, the Democrats were the party of the South, having risen in response to the acts of President Lincoln (a Republican). With the ratification of the 24th Amendment in 1964 this all changed. Text of
Requiring party membership as in paying dues is treated as a poll tax. So everybody needs to be allowed to participate without spending money, though the specific terms are dictated by State law.
Thanks for that very interesting history. I hadn’t thought about it that way.
Was John Kennedy’s nomination race against Johnson a small scale affair, even a smoky back room arrangement? Not picking on Kennedy, Johnson, the Democrats or anybody, just wondering how different the atmosphere was before 1964.
The current primary system dates back to 1972, as a response to the fiasco of 1968 (when the Democratic convention experienced riots). I’m not sure exactly how things were before, but my impression is that it was mostly party insiders in smoke filled rooms choosing the nominee.
This says that the US or the state government can’t require party dues, not that the party can’t. Formally it doesn’t imply that the state should be involved in the primary, or that the party can’t restrict primary voting to dues-paying members, though it may follow in judicial interpretations.
Government-run party primaries go back further than that. New York’s primary dates back to 1890 and the other states
don’t matterprobably adopted it at about the same time.Now obviously a reformist Democrat wouldn’t trust the Tammany-dominated Democratic Party to run a primary between a Tammany candidate and a reformist candidate. What’s unclear is why they’d think the government would be any more trustworthy.
Recombinant vaccine trials have begun in the UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52394485
https://www.covid19vaccinetrial.co.uk/press-updates
It’s developed by a team at Oxford who previously worked on MERS vaccines.
They can’t directly challenge with SARS-NCOV2 for ethical reasons but the test subjects are healthcare workers so enough of them out to get infected. Failing that, there are plans to test in parts of Africa, where cases are yet to peak.
It’s an RCT of 800 people, using a meningitis vaccine as an active placebo.
“They can’t directly challenge with SARS-NCOV2 for ethical reasons”
(tears hair out re: incoherent ethical standards costing both liberty and lives)
meanwhile, I assume people in the UK remain able to volunteer to join the military and get shot at?
Nonetheless grateful that the thing is happening at all.
see also:
“Our ability to determine vaccine efficacy will be affected by the amount of virus transmission in the local population over the summer, and we are also beginning to consider initiating trials with partners in other countries to increase our ability to determine vaccine efficacy.”
i.e. unlike a challenge trial, a normal vaccine trial works less well the better social distancing works.
It sure looks like what Canada is doing about COVID-19 isn’t working all that well. The number of new cases is every day is rising roughly linearly. Yesterday we had a new high of 1920 new cases.
Some provinces are doing OK. The graphs for British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and New Brunswick look good. But the largest provinces, Ontario and Quebec, continue to struggle. Nursing homes in particular are a real problem.
It seems like every time we praise some country for their response in keeping it from being an epidemic, it doesn’t mean they are actually doing anything to stop it. It’s just coming later. The exceptions being a few East Asian countries and some islands.
Whats interesting is that this is what the initial doomsday models predicted: You could either take the disease slowly, or quickly. The preference is slowly so your hospital situation doesn’t collapse, but that doesn’t actually improve your actual C19 situation all that much.
Since then that talking point “flatten the curve” has been bastardized into a new motto which doesn’t make sense which is, “wait for a while, then we will use omniscience.”
Not omniscience. We had reasonable hope – at drugs, ventilators, random new information. At the time it was the right decision to play for time.
What we got is a very mixed bad. Drugs turned out not to work (not shocking, in retrospect – there’s that old bite about science not being able to cure common cold). Ventilators apparently are much less useful and possibly harmful. IFR is much lower than expected, but still pretty high. Masks work.
Was it worth it? Doesn’t matter – at the time the box was not transparent.
Edit: And in time to edit my comment, I’m just reading a local hospital is changing its treatment strategy to prevent thrombosis as a high risk for ICU. The bet for time may yet turn out a big win.
Strong disagree.
Figuring out whether it was worth it matters a lot for the next time around we have to deal with something like this.
Pandemics are … very different. A small coefficient change made Sars 2 be so different from Sars 1. Next one could be all over the place. I think we’re in the mess we are partly because we did take the lessons from the last 2-3 new viruses and applied them.
Disagree here. There isn’t/wasn’t any reasonable expectation that a vaccine would come on line early enough which is the best case scenario. Drugs are almost always a mixed bag on their own and we knew (or had good reason to expect) early that the elderly were more at risk, and the elderly already take a large amount of prescriptions, a hope that we would find workable drugs quickly that didn’t interfere with the treatments these patients needed as it was a distant hope not a reasonable one. Basically every piece of data that came out, starting early, should have made it abundantly clear that it would take multiple combinations of drugs to treat the majority of those who were at risk of death.
Finally though, and I made this comment early on this is not back seat prognostication, playing for time sets up the absolute worst case scenarios where the economic slowdown cannot be reversed without encouraging a massive reemergence of people who have had their immune systems weakened by the measures. We know that people under prolonged stress have weaker immune systems, that lack of activity, purpose, sunlight and socialization can exacerbate these problems. The play for time strategy assumes that our vulnerable population is more or less static, and that our capability to service them won’t be hampered in anyway.
Scare tactics up front with optimistic estimates on treatments is not a good combination, and causes people to make bad decisions.
Indeed.
I think at this point it’s almost certain that we haven’t had the best possible response. But it is entirely possible we’ve had the worst one.
The worst case scenario is not, as most would have you believe, “do nothing and COVID kills millions.” No, it’s something much closer to “have a lot of lockdowns that do tons of economic damage and also COVID kills millions.”
My primary reason for opposing lockdowns is less that I don’t think COVID might kill millions, and more that I’m not confident the lockdowns will actually stop COVID from killing millions.
At the time it was the right decision to play for time
I think Nate Silver tried to enumerate all the points of what the delay was supposed to accomplish in a tweet, but I can’t find it any more.
Anyway, there were lots of different reasons, and I remember #4 was basically “we are delaying until we figure out the right thing to do.”
Are you guys sure you’re not just a bit affected by hindsight? I remember I was pro isolation at the time, and my logic was simple: with overwhelmed hospitals, we’re looking at a potential 10% fatality rate, for anything from 20-80% of population infected.
I was actually quite the moderate then, because I agreed with Britain being a bit more flower power, even if it was only to have some variance in the response to be able to optimize it later. That was not a popular opinion in most places.
Even now, I can pretty much go into my then-head and think: no knowledge of masks, no knowledge of real IFR but strong hints it’s above 1% with hospitalization… yeah, I’d close things down for a month. Not two. Maybe 6 weeks. Except in regions like Lombardia where medical system is clearly overwhelmed. It’s pretty hard to use just my then-head … I keep wanting to add how concentrating covid cases in hospitals is a bad idea – but I didn’t suspect it at the time.
I think it is very likely (p = 0.95) we will look back five years from now and still think, in retrospect, that *some* fairly severe level of restrictions was justified.
I also think it is fairly likely (p = 0.7) we will look back and think that the Swedes got it about right, and that interventions more severe than theirs (and note theirs are still pretty severe vs pre-pandemic baseline) ultimately saved few incremental QALYs at high incremental cost, except possibly where needed initially to build up hospital surge capacity and PPE supplies.
How could we not be affected by new information and time in some way? I don’t see that it changes the core position. The economic costs of a broad shut down are obviously very large, this is obvious from a basic logic and math perspective and it was also obvious from the early data coming out of China. It was also obvious that the lock-down would not be lifted quickly. 2 weeks was the bare minimum for a perfect lock-down that immediately dropped transmission rates to zero, and that would include perfect border security, no healthcare workers getting it and transmitting it etc, etc, etc. It is also true that the better your lockdown works the larger the cost of a reinfection.
These aren’t details that we couldn’t know, or weren’t obvious that are only now clear, they were just shouted over. You can’t value lives over jobs! One death is to many!
@Edward Scizorhands
Here is the Nate Silver tweet you were talking about.
Time to do what? If all you’re going to do is hope for “a miracle occurs”, that’s not the right decision unless you can buy time on the cheap. And we paid dearly for this time.
Which we have very nearly squandered, as near as I can tell. No attempt to develop the infrastructure for large-scale contact tracing. No attempt to develop accelerated testing protocols for vaccines or other new drugs, nor willingness to accept even small risks to that end. Not even any attempt to do serious research on the relative transmission risks of e.g. schools, subways, parties, theaters, restaurants, churches, parks, offices, etc, so that we can make informed decisions on how to eventually relax the lockdowns. We have to look to random nerds on the internet for that vital information.
This would have been the right decision if the decisionmakers had any clue what to do with the time they were buying at so dear a price. They didn’t, so it wasn’t. Or maybe it wasn’t cluelessness but political risk-aversion – all the realistic plans involve accepting the fact that a bunch of people are still going to die after the lockdowns are lifted, and “lockdown until someone else makes us lift it” makes that Someone Else’s Fault in a way that “here’s my plan…” doesn’t.
Lots of scientists have been doing research on the virus, and doctors have been working out what techniques are more or less helpful (don’t put people on ventilators so fast–first roll them on their bellies and see if their O2 sat numbers start looking better). But it sure is hard to see a lot of steps toward a coherent response. As you said, public health authorities in every state should be hiring people to do contact tracing, everyone at the FDA should be doing everything in their power to get experimental treatments tested and vaccine trials going and tests done widely, OSHA or CDC or someone should be working out protocols for going back to work without COVID-19 spreading, etc. If that stuff is happening, it’s sure not very visible. I’ve seen a ton of efforts from different people to find ways to contribute, but not much from the top.
New York City has had over 1.5 million cases, according to the antibody tests. Contact tracing simply isn’t going to be practical. As for anything else… the lockdowns took the pressure off, so why should they do anything? Governor Inslee swears he needs “an order of magnitude more tests”, but Washington State has made little progress in testing since the lockdown. Meanwhile, Governor Cuomo claims if he lets off, you get a second wave that’s way bigger than the first by fall… but he’s not saying how he can ever avoid that, nor is anyone asking him. So there’s no real plan to get out of lockdown, only excuses not to, and lockdown will end when people the governments or press are sympathetic to start rioting.
Yeah, it seems to me that early lockdown is just extending the pain. California was praised for its swift lockdown and New York lambasted for its slow one, but New York is now on the downswing and California still headed up (from a much lower number).
There’s a “momentum” to epidemics (basically, the number of infected), so it’s possible the slow way gives you less total death, but that’s going to be really hard to figure out and you have to wait a long time to find out.
And it’s worth noting that this is exactly why many of us opposed such extensive lockdowns in the first place!
If you accept that “lockdown until vaccine/track and trace” is infeasible, then herd immunity is the only ultimate solution.
And if that’s true, the only benefit of lockdowns is to “flatten the curve” in the original sense (i.e. prevent hospital capacity from being overwhelmed).
Which strongly implies that any lockdowns in places where the medical system isn’t/won’t be overwhelmed are all cost and no benefit. You are merely delaying the inevitable at the cost of economic destruction and massive reductions in human quality of life.
Examples, please.
The medical system isn’t overwhelmed anywhere in the US to my knowledge. The nurses are all dancing on tiktok. Restrictions should be lifted to the point where the medical system is at least whelmed.
Yeah, it certainly seems like the only place in the US where the medical system was ever overwhelmed was NYC, and even there only for a few days.
Even in Seattle, where things looked really bad early, they built and scrapped an entire military field hospital, which saw a grand total of zero patients.
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
Indiana. From the state dept. of health: Scroll down for ICU and ventilator usage.
We are 10-15 days past the resource peak depending on the model you loo k at but this capacity was never overwhelmed.
The medical system in NYC was what I think Conrad Honcho calls “whelmed”. A small number of hospitals briefly overwhelmed, a larger number more hectic than usual for a while. And hospital morgues overwhelmed, which is gruesome but since temporary expedient measures were able to keep up, not harmful to outcomes. This is all past now.
From a purely public health point of view, the lockdown timing in NYC was probably exactly right; the peak hospitalization hit right about the available capacity. But when you add the politics in, there shouldn’t have been a lockdown. Because here we are, over three weeks past that peak, and the lockdown continues in both NY and NJ with no end in sight. Once the lockdown is in place it’s easy to justify keeping it in place.
It doesn’t help that the media is fearmongering. In NJ there have been breathless stories about hospital emergency departments going on divert. Sounds scary… but it’s actually pretty common. At least one of the stories in NJ, when I investigated, included a hospital that was on divert for lack of psych beds, which is rather unlikely to be due to COVID-19.
@2181425
Indiana with the Rep. Governor?
I have several friends who are part of the medical system in NYC, and none of them are dancing. One of them described his job as a, and I quote, “corpse parade”. How confident are you in your sources?
Right. As much as I hate to say it, I think the politicians have made the right political calculus here. As grumbly as the public is starting to get about these lockdowns, it’s still going to be much easier to keep the current lockdowns in place than it would be to end them, and then attempt to re-institute them some weeks/months later. If you want to lockdown, this is probably your one and only shot. People aren’t going to agree to this again, absent the real, no-kidding, bodies-in-the-street, everyone knows at least 1 COVID fatality scenario.
But is quite plausibly due to government policy placing the entire country under indefinite house arrest. My understanding is that volumes of calls to suicide hotlines are several multiples higher than normal.
@TheAncientGeek
Yes, Holcomb is a Republican.
NYC is the worst hit place in the US and it’s not overhwelmed. Did they put a single patient on the hospital ship? If they didn’t, then no, while the NYC medical system is burdened, it’s not overwhelmed. Therefore, no place in the US is overwhelmed.
My local hospital certainly isn’t. For the past 5 weeks or so since this all took off, every Friday the CEO puts out a video for the hospital staff on YouTube. I’ve been watching them (they’re not private). The first four weeks were pretty inspiring when they were talking about all the preparations and progress they made for the pandemic to hit. Overflow capacity, drive through testing, massive rollouts of telemedicine capabilities, plans to redeploy people from the clinics closed as non-essential. But last Friday it was a completely different tone. “Well, I don’t know about you guys but I sure am looking forward to the weekend. Anyway, here’s a video montage of all you wonderful folk” and then straight up played a video of pictures of the nurses at their stations looking bored or, yes, nurses and staff doing stupid dances. Oh, and they sure didn’t need that redeployment: everyone is now required to take one day of paid time off a week because they have so little business. I don’t know about you, but that does not sound “overwhelmed” to me. That sounds like we’ve massively overreacted.
Please check your sources before posting. Quick googling found that it is untrue since at least 3 weeks.
See https://www.navytimes.com/news/coronavirus/2020/04/02/just-18-patients-combined-were-sent-to-the-usns-mercy-comfort-this-week/
Not sure about the current state (article is really old) but your “Therefore” is based on clearly false claims that hospital ship received 0 patients.
Oh okay 18 patients were put on the ship. I stand corrected, let’s keep the lockdowns forever.
ETA: Correction 3 patients were seen at the NYC ship, Comfort.
The conversation was about NYC as a whole. If the Comfort saw less than 100 patients, it’s almost certainly true that most hospitals in NYC sent them zero, and therefore that NYC as a whole was probably not “overwhelmed” by any reasonable definition.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Comfort_(T-AH-20)#New_York_COVID-19_response_(2020)
It was more than 18 and it was more than 100 and it was more than 0 and it was more than 3.
sourced to https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/cuomo-tells-trump-usns-comfort-no-longer-needed-in-nyc/2384637/
Probably indicating NY hospitals being at capacity – maybe a bit above or a bit below.
The option I haven’t seen calculations on is the more extreme version of the Swedish approach. Isolate the vulnerable population, mostly the old. Do nothing much for the rest. Let the non-vulnerable population reach herd immunity, then let out the vulnerable population, into a world with almost nobody contagious.
Optimistic estimates of the overall death rate for infected people, based on random sample estimates of how many have been infected, suggest about .1%. I’m not sure how much of that is from the vulnerable population, but my impression is a sizable majority. To be optimistic and make the arithmetic easier, I’m going to assume 90%. So getting to herd immunity for the non-vulnerable population would kill one in ten thousand or, for the U.S., 30,000.
The U.S. has a little under 3 hospital beds per 1,000 people. If we assume that the number of infected people who require hospitalization is ten times the number who die, that’s only about a third of the hospital beds. If we assume they all require ICU beds, of which the U.S. has about .3/1000, and we use all the ICU beds for the purpose and each takes two weeks, we can accomodate all the patients in a month and a half.
There is a lot of hand waving in the numbers above, most of it in an optimistic direction, so I would be interested in seeing a more careful calculation. But it does suggest that the strategy I described might make quite a lot of sense.
Around .15% of NYC is dead already, and we don’t think they have all had it.
Imperial College looked at various models, including SDO: Social Distancing for Older people only. This was combined with two other obvious proposals: CI, Case Isolation for those showing symptoms; and HQ, Home Quarantine for those with a symptomatic person in the household.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
This was what made the UK change its mind, because they would still get overwhelmed.
Maybe they were wrong to change their strategy, but “isolate the old” is something that some governments considered then tossed.
My gut says it’s not actually possible to “isolate the elderly”. I think that might be a semi-interesting hypothetical to think about.
However, I bet this is actually more important. If you isolate the old, guess what you don’t have when you stop isolating them?
Herd immunity goes out the window.
In theory, if we could isolate the elderly such that, say, 90% of the rest of the community had it, wouldn’t that be “enough” to keep the elderly safe? You would have a lot of available workers who had passed a serological test, too.
@Edward Scizorhands:
Whatever the percentage is that we need to get herd immunity, we won’t surpass it unless we purposely start infecting people.
And once we let those old people out and about, no we no longer have herd immunity, so when the virus reenters from some pocket of infection, now it just spreads.
Especially if you consider environments like rest homes, where they won’t be anywhere close to herd immunity.
That’s not true. At the point you reach herd immunity in an epidemic you have momentum (the number of currently infected), and you will overshoot it. So it’s quite possible that once the epidemic has died down among the un-isolated, you still numerically have herd immunity in your un-isolated population + your formerly isolated.
Of course your rest homes and such are still basically dry tinder if a case reaches them. But there’s no practical way of avoiding that.
People 65 and over represent about 15% of the US population.
I don’t think overshoot is going to get you there.
Which basically just means that the dry tinder will burn.
> Imperial College
That estimation may have been the best available at the time. But it was still trash. It made a significant number of assumptions (without support). Most notably, it assumed a significant number fraction of the elderly would not comply with the isolation, it assumed that half of the infected people ordered to quarantine would not comply, and that exactly 1 month after stopping all other interventions all of the elderly/vulnerable people would go out without any isolation. There never was a “isolate the elderly/vulnerable until the herd immunity has develops” in that model.
Just a quick comment on the percentage. We live less than 100 years, so over 1% of the population dies every year, or about 0.1% per month.
Found it’s useful to keep in mind when talking about deaths.
It’s 0.15% over and above the base rate, though. You can see that in year-over-year all cause mortality. Not that you are necessarily making this mistake, but it’s very easy to speak confusingly about this.
Which basically just means that the dry tinder will burn.
I dunno how late I am. This was in my head all weekend.
Given: if we let herd immunity build up by letting the disease run wild in the “normal” population, the nursing homes will still be dry tinder when we return them to the normal population, because there are too many of them.
(I don’t necessarily agree with that. But I am accepting it for now, because I want to see where the conclusion leads us.)
Taken that given, there is no way for us to ever have the nursing homes be safe, until we have a vaccine. Whatever mitigation strategy is insufficient for a herd-immunity population, it won’t work for a non-herd-immunity population.
Is anyone here in a position where they may be in charge of laying off workers? If so, I suggest reading this first:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/23/business/economy/unemployment-benefits-stimulus-coronavirus.html
And considering the moral hazard in laying off your worst-performing employees. Instead, get your employees together, explain the situation, give them pieces of paper, and ask them to indicate privately if they’d like to be laid off or not. Collect all the pieces of paper and lay off the best worker who wants you to do so, or the worst worker if nobody wants to.
I don’t have access to the NYT, but I cannot imagine the rational for this. The moral hazard argument sounds ridiculous for what I know the explanations of moral hazard to be.
I think the argument here is:
– Unemployment benefits are high enough that some people would like to be laid off, as they’d see their take-home income increase (or decrease so little as to be a good trade for 40 hours of their lives).
– If a company is clearly following a policy of laying off the worst workers, workers that want to be laid off will adjust their productivity downwards to try and be part of that set. This is the moral hazard (or at least incentive misalignment).
– As an employer you can circumvent this issue by first using layoffs as a reward for high performers for as long as people are expressing an interest in being laid off.
Frankly, it may be worth running the experiment to gauge morale. If your workforce would rather be unemployed than work there, you won’t long have a workforce and should probably look into increasing compensation or something.
Or else unemployment is currently stupidly good, which I doubt is commonly the case.
This kind of mentality is part of the problem. Most people don’t like work and would prefer to not do it if they got just as much money.
I was intending that to be read “given the price you are paying them.”
Note that my remedy was to pay them more, not hold surveys on how to improve morale.
I would like to have guaranteed income (or equivalent wealth) and total freedom; given that I don’t expect this to be on the table, I value a solid employment history of well paying jobs above time off on the dole.
Even more simply than that… if you want to reward your good workers and/or punish your bad ones, you should ensure that the thing you are doing to them (either keeping them on or laying them off) actually matches their preferences (or doesn’t, for the bad ones), and not what you might assume their preference is…
The rebuttal is simple- if you refuse to fire the worst employees then there is no incentive to be a better employee. You are sacrificing your primary leverage against the very people you have identified as the worst employees, then of course your firings are weighted towards better employees and you know what companies who are in cost cutting/panic mode need? Its not your worst employees, its not the people who are the easiest to live without I can tell you that much.
BTW there is no real moral hazard here- MH is a problem in a repeated game, if you forgive my bad behavior this time then I can behave a bit worse next time, and worst the time after that. There is no repeat here, someone behaves badly and they get fired* and now they cannot behave badly again against you. Firing ends the iteration and that is where most of the damage comes from.
*Also the simple fact is the people who will try to get fired are showing you a pretty negative side, if you are willing to act badly to get a few hundred extra dollars of UE payments then you are way more likely to be willing to act badly in other ways as you continue to be an employee.
Next time find a way to get around the paywall or don’t comment, you seem to have missed the point that unemployment benefits are for some people better than working.
Even if there is no technical moral hazard, I personally would have a hard time looking at my employees with a straight face if I told them for years I wanted them to do X, then took an action which penalized them for doing X.
Workplace performance is a spectrum: some will just shoot for the average.
I know that going in, it doesn’t change a single damn thing about the analysis. Moral hazard and incentives are iterated, not once off, when you know that you know that you can’t apply moral hazard to firing employees in this way because once they are fired you lose all the costs and benefits of iteration. The only way you can build this in a MH framework is to start with the assumption that you are completely indifferent between employees, which breaks the assumptions you laid out originally.
But if you fire them they aren’t your employees anymore. If you want to reward your good employees they have to remain at work to reap the benefits.
Then commit to re-hiring them when their UE runs out. If they come back, it was meant to be. If they don’t, they were never yours to begin with! Or something…
This is what makes me angry about furloughing. One of my friends is furloughed for three months from his job. So, he’s not getting paid, he’s not getting UT…and there’s no guarantee any time in the next three months they won’t just say “nope, fired anyway.”
My understanding was that furloughed employees are eligible for the full $600 a week from the feds and UE benefits in most states (though not full benefits in every state).
This is further complicated by the small business support loans, which can be forgivable but only if the business follows certain rules – one of which is not laying anyone off!
There was a story about a spa owner who got a support loan and used it to hire back her staff. (The spa had to stay closed) Most of the staff was pissed because their pay was lower than the newly increased unemployment benefits. They weren’t working either way, but they got bigger checks with unemployment.
And this wasn’t “minimum wage is not livable!” issues – the break even point for unemployment vs working was over 20$ an hour.
Funnily enough my employer recently recieved the following email from our state’s unemployment insurance bureaucrats.
So it looks like your proposal would probably be considered illegal? It’s a bit confusing, given a scenario where you were going to lay off X employees anyway. It is in any case something bureaucrats don’t want to happen.
It seems possible that we will get to a situation where by the fall the evidence makes it clear to the dispassionate observer that the lockdowns were a mistake from the post facto perspective. The fatality rate turns out to be in the .5 range. Everywhere is going to reach herd immunity and lockdowns were not the best way to spread the strain on the healthcare system. A much more mild form of social would have been better. Thus they were very expensive mistakes though they did save some lives.
I do not know if that is the world that we we in fact are in, but it is possible that it is and we have a decent chance of knowing if we are in that world by the fall.
If it is, what impact would it have politically? I do not see Biden really being able to say “Trump did too much to save grandma” even if that was in fact the case if most people know someone who died from covid. The lack of clear party divides makes things harder.
Yet campaigning on anything other than covid seems hard as well.
I think it’s very unlikely that that’s the world we’re in, and even more unlikely that evidence that convincingly illustrates that it is comes to light.
Essentially, the only thing that would qualify is if coronavirus /does/ get out of hand and spread massively, and turns out not to be that bad after all. 0.5% fatality rate * 60% infection rate is still about a million people dying in the USA, so clearly that’s not going to cut it, but if the fatality rate turned out to be 0.05% (which it won’t) then we might be looking at a political impact.
And if you don’t get massive infection, we won’t know whether the health care system would have stood the strain if you had, and so there won’t be convincing evidence that lockdown was a mistake.
I posted here right around the time the lockdowns started being implemented that I purchased shares of Biden on predictit, because this is exactly what I think will happen.
Biden will run on “Trump wrecked the economy.” Regardless of how bad COVID is. And this will be a factually correct statement. All media outlets will confirm it. The fact-checkers will (correctly!) declare it to be absolute truth.
The obvious counter-argument of “yeah he did but it saved millions of lives” or “Biden would have wrecked it even more” will be unheard of outside of FOX News, talk radio, and the usual such places.
I expect it will work, and most of the public, being generally dissatisfied with living through an economic depression, will vote for the non-Trump guy. But I could be wrong about that.
That checks out as the correct political move. Presidents are unfairly viewed as having more power over the economy than they actually do, but Trump leaned into this perception particularly hard in the good times. If he wants to own a market he has limited control over, he has to keep owning it.
I’m skeptical. Right now,roughly, the left is the one who is pushing for maximal social distancing while the right is talking about opening things up. They could turn on a dime but I just don’t think it would work. Most likely they would say something about how if Trump did more in the beginning, then it wouldn’t have been so bad and we wouldn’t have needed to wreck the economy.
That rounds to “Trump is the reason the economy is so bad.” Same argument.
It has very different implications. “If Trump did more in the beginning, then it wouldn’t have been so bad and we wouldn’t have needed to wreck the economy” suggests that by the time the Coronavirus hit, we needed to do lockdowns to stop the spread. But Matt is suggesting that they’ll promote the idea that it was never so bad, and that the lockdowns were a complete mistake. Both involving criticizing Trump. But one jibes with what the left is saying now while the other doesn’t.
I would argue that if the economy is bad, Trump will get the blame for it regardless of whether he deserves it. He would get the blame even if it had happened due to a literal act of God that everyone agreed there was nothing he could have possibly done anything about. There’s a lot of gut feeling that goes into people’s voting decisions, and voting to re-elect the incumbent party is voting for more of the same. So if things are good they will be inclined to the idea, and if they are bad they will instead be inclined to the alternative. That inclination is generally not enough to swing an election by itself, but given Trump’s scandals and the lack of major policy accomplishments, I think it’s ultimately going to come down to that.
@Wrong Species
That’s not really how political arguments work. You don’t need to make a logical proof. It’s mostly just capturing an emotion.
I saw an ad the other day of Reagan’s “Are you better off than you were 4 years ago” speach intercut with images and news coverage of covid-19 and Trump’s various false promises.
Joe Biden doesn’t actually have to make the argument we would have been better off under Clinton or Democratic leadership. He just has to point at Trump and say “He failed.” Then Biden talks about his plans for right now, and points to all of the times he was calling for more action, better action.
Biden had a different, more aggressive plan and Trump’s plan failed. Boom, done.
@Wrong Species:
Here is the ad I mentioned.
Note, this isn’t trying to get steady Trump supporters to vote for Biden. Attempting to get solid partisans to flip is near impossible.
This is “get the waffling voter to vote against Trump, reduce the desire of the begrudging Trump supporter to get to the polls, increase the desire of the tepid Biden supporter to vote, amp the base”. So, if you recoil because it feels to harsh, well, Reagan’s “Daisy” ad was harsh, but it’s regarded as one of the more effective of all time. Vote for me or your kid gets nuked.
The “Daisy” ad I know was LBJ’s. Did Reagan have one too?
@Paul:
No, I just munged it with “Morning in America”, the other most effective ad of all time, because I was already talking about Reagan. Not the same kinds of ads at all.
Nah. I think they’ll just say “Economy is bad because Trump” and leave it to everyone else to fill in the blanks.
Providing details in this case is a bad idea, because the details do in fact lead to questions like “Would Biden have made decisions that resulted in a better economy” which are harder for them to answer.
I don’t think there will ever be such evidence by the fall unless the world is in horrific economic shape, in which case Trump is a dead duck as president.
Evidence, schmevidence. If people have paid dearly for a vital thing, and now have that thing and are no longer desperate to secure it, they tend to be very receptive to arguments of the form, “The thing didn’t need to cost nearly that much; they took advantage of your desperation to rip you off for their own nefarious ends”. Come fall, if people believe that they now have an acceptable level of security from the coronavirus, they won’t demand evidence that they paid too much and were ripped off.
What would it matter? The voters are not dispassionate observers, the media are not honest reporters of the facts. So even if this does happen, and I don’t think it will, I say it won’t have any effect at all. It’s kind of like World War II. After Germany declared war on the US:
What happened after this, politically? Nothing. You have to understand how many normies operate. They want to see that their leaders “feel the pain” of the victims and are “doing something” with the intention of helping them.
I’ve talked to people who were angry with Trump over global warming and I’ve asked them, ‘what do you want done,’ and suggested raising the gas tax, so it costs 4$ again, so people will use less gas. And they’re like, no, no, not that. They want “scientific research.” Okay, nothing wrong with that. But what I think they really want is for Trump to get up there, signal his empathy with the alleged victims of global warming, and say he’s doing something to solve the problem, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of their lives.
With coronavirus, the emphasis in the near future will be on empathizing with the victims. Through a bunch of statistics and numbers at normies and they don’t respond to that.
The obvious answer to what he should do is the reverse of everything he has done so far — resigning the Paris agreement, and so on.
If I give you 10-1 odds on a coin flip to come up heads, and it comes up tails, was it a mistake to bet on heads?
While it will certainly be obvious retrospect that there were particular things that could’ve been done differently to great net benefit, I don’t think that the lockdowns, as implemented in the US, will be the biggest thing.
The most obvious post hoc criticism of our response will be (and already is!) that we completely botched the development and deployment of testing, and then dithered for a month when COVID-19 went from a small but manageable problem to something that required a dramatic response similar to the one we made. “We should have had a lighter touch in Wyoming” is irrelevant in comparison.
Why focus on the hard stuff (“What is the precise level of lockdown would have been optimal in at each point in time at each locality in each state?”) when the big stuff is starting you in the face?
I wonder if some of the people arguing that the lockdowns to reduce spread of coronavirus should be lifted are being mislead by an instinct that’s generally sensible but doesn’t apply here, for interesting reasons.
To a spherical-cow level of approximation, we have two problems – people dying of coronavirus, and people losing their livelihoods because of the countermeasures – the severity of which is determined by a single parameter: how severe the countermeasures are. The more steps you take to stop coronavirus spreading, the less severe the medical consequences will be, but the more severe the economic consequences will become.
The goal, obviously, is to choose a level of severity that minimises the sum of the two problems.
In general, in this sort of problem – minimising the sum of an increasing and a decreasing function of a single parameter – there’s a very useful heuristic, which is “balance the two sides”. That won’t necessarily give you the lowest total cost, but it will always get you within a factor of two of it, because even if making the lockdown just slightly more/less severe than the point where the two costs balance were to completely eliminate one of them, the other could only increase, and so you’re still left with at least half the problem.
Now, obviously, I don’t think that most people are actually thinking in terms of algorithmic optimisation here. But I do think that a lot of people have the instinct “if we’re trying to trade off evils A and B, and B is much worse than A, then that means we should probably accept more A in order to get less B”. And most of the time that instinct is absolutely correct. So why isn’t it here?
Well, first of all the dual of the rule “balanced solutions are always close to opimal” is not true: optimal solutions are not always close to balanced. In particular, if the derivative of one of the two functions is high, an optimal solution may be radically unbalanced.
In this case, as I understand it, in fixed conditions coronavirus will either spread or decline roughly exponentially. If n people have it today, then about rn people will have it tomorrow, and r^2n people the next day, for some number r. This exponential growth or shrinkage will continue until either a) most of the population has been infected and we achieve herd immunity, b) coronavirus dies out, or c) we tighten or relax our social distancing rules and change the value of r.
Let us say that there are going to be 200 days more of this, and then a vaccine will be discovered and coronavirus will magically go away. So, barring changes to social distancing, we’re going to tend towards r^200 n. If r = 1.035 then that will be 1000n; if r = 0.966 then that will be n/1000.
So if r is even slightly greater than 1 then we’ll grow to herd-immunity levels. How much greater than 1 doesn’t make much difference – if r^200 n is a million times the population of the country, that doesn’t mean we’ll all get coronavirus a million times, it just means the exponential approximation will break down sooner and herd immunity will be reached faster (but probably with more deaths along the way).
In the other direction, the number of people infected is the integral of an exponential, which is proportional to n/(1-r).
So (under spherical-cow conditions, which in particular don’t include people from other regimes entering the country), number of deaths and illnesses as a function of severity of lockdown is roughly hyperbolic in r on one side of the critical value, and roughly constant on the other side of it.
The optimal sum of costs will be somewhere very close to that critical value, but slightly more severely locked down than it, where the gradient is very steep; the extra cost of deviating from it in the direction of too tight a lockdown is non-trivial (we suffer even more economic damage than necessary), but the cost of deviating in the direction of too loose a lockdown (coronavirus has 200 days of spreading slowly-but-exponentially instead of 200 days of declining slowly-but-exponentially) is massive.
The balance point is somewhere very close to both the critical r=1 point and the optimal point, with very similar measures, a tiny bit less economic pain, and many more deaths.
This is probably a bit clearer with a graph; if anyone’s interested I’ve crossposted this with a graph here
Of course, cows aren’t actually spherical. There are many different forms of social distancing that can be turned on or off, not just a single parameter; people from abroad will add extra infections that will become relevant if coronavirus becomes rare here; and, critically, we can intersperse periods of tighter and less tight control, letting the number of infected people grow and then forcing it down again.
But hopefully this gives some insight into why the instinct that the lockdown is too severe is a natural one, and correct in a lot of situations, but not this one. At the moment, I think it’s pretty clear that the cure is worse than the malady, but not as bad as the malady would get if untreated. And treatment significantly less effective would accomplish very little.
This oversimplifies in at least two relevant ways. For one, the economic impact of Corona virus is also related to people’s perceptions of the dangers of the virus, especially for every voluntary social venue, which are related to the response but not the same.
Also, the economic impact of lockdown measures is not strictly proportional to their effectiveness.
We can and should be regularly adjusting as new information is uncovered and the scenario adjusts.
In the same way that there are at least two stars in the sky, yes. I’m trying to illustrate a point, not provide a comprehensive or accurate model.
+1
The problem is that we don’t have a good measure for R right now.
Deaths are a decent proxy for R two weeks ago but confirmed cases still depend too much on how many testing kits we make. Until randomised testing becomes widespread, we’re trying to drive at the speed limit with a speedo that has a five minute delay.
I think you can measure ‘amount of lockdown’ as a single parameter: a point on the pareto frontier of possible things to lock down. There’ll be a low-hanging fruit effect leading to diminishing returns.
I think one issue I have is that we don’t know how to get to the best set of tradeoffs for a given stringency of lockdowns. To use a simple example, how important is it to keep theaters closed down? You can make some kind of argument that it’s not very important because we don’t know of superspreader events there. You can make another argument that it is important because the nature of droplet spread indicates that a theater full of people who occasionaly all burst out in laughter, or where a couple people are coughing a lot, should be a good place to spread the disease. I think we don’t know whether “close the theaters down” should happen at lockdown level 90% or lockdown level 10%.
“Boisterous laughing” seems similar to “boisterous singing” so maybe don’t allow comedies?
Oh, hey, someone already made a YouTube clip out of that scene in Outbreak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy-w1-g7OvY
It sure seems like theaters should be prime spreading grounds.
Maybe a bit less than churches, since everyone faces the same direction (unless they turn around at some point) and generally are encouraged to be quiet–though who wants to bet their life on a quiet theater? Also, maybe sick people are less likely to go to the theater than church?
On the other hand, you are in church with the same people each week, give or take, but theaters have strangers. And eating, ie, energetic repeated opening of mouths. And in either case you are confined a couple feet from several people for an hour or two.
Similarly, if mass transit doesn’t have very high risk–for riders, as opposed to the employees HBC mentioned recently–I’d be shocked. 2-3 feet from a stranger, possibly facing each other, on a subway at least.
This is based on supposition rather than case studies, but it seems like the presumption would be that these are dangerous.
Right, hence the “counterintuitive” part. Supposition, intuition, and simple logic all suggest that these should be prime superspreader events, but we keep not finding them.
Sure, and as above, my position is that we should modify the specific policies as actual facts about the virus are uncovered. If that means the movie theater is low risk but the high risk Opera, great, open the theater.
Well, probably.
There’s the risk people get pissed because I can’t go to church/the buffet/whatever actually spreads disease, while he can go to the theater, which is superficially identical? Not that irrational behavior is an overriding concern, but it bears consideration.
Trial and error.
Devote a lot of resources to testing and contact tracing. Open things up gradually, in the less bad areas first and shut them back down if they result in a lot of spread.
That would be great, except apparently American industry has decayed so much that we can’t produce enough test kits.
As someone who opposes the lockdowns, I agree with most of your analysis (in particular, the point that a partial lockdown may be the worst possible policy) but I draw a different conclusion. Since we will still reach herd immunity whether r = 1.05 or r = 3, I think we should repeal most of the lockdown restrictions immediately and allow the epidemic to spread quickly (as long as hospitals are not overwhelmed). I believe that the alternative – a very strict lockdown to keep r below 1 until a vaccine is developed – is worse than the disease.
I think this is the key phrase that invalidates the rest of your point. Once we can tell that the hospitals are going to be overwhelmed, it’s already too late.
Have ICUs been shown to be effective? It seems ventilators have not. I think its pretty feasible to have makeshift beds that provide O2+IV drips
Could you expand on why you think this? Epidemic modeling still isn’t perfect by any means, but we have learned a lot about the coronavirus over the last few months. I would expect that we should be able to make reasonably accurate predictions within a time horizon of a few weeks. Indeed, if that’s not true, it seems to me that the strategy advocated by the OP (a lockdown just barely strict enough to keep r below 1) would be very risky. A serious modeling error, especially near the peak, could easily cause many extra deaths if we relax the restrictions too much and accidentally allow the pandemic to grow rather than shrink.
Also, to me, “too late” means primarily that we reach a point where running out of ICU beds is inevitable. Given that that hasn’t happened in Sweden, I don’t think it is a particularly plausible scenario in other first-world countries either, especially with simple mitigation measures like masks and social distancing. The most likely exceptions would be very dense major cities, but antibody test results suggest that a significant percentage of the population (probably >10% in New York City, for example) has already been infected there.
This type of reasoning can be flipped against the lockdowns. The majority of the economic damage that will be done will be long term, not short term. The spherical cow here is the expectation that we can paper over the economic pain for a little while and then everything goes back to normal. Just because you aren’t experiencing what the long term damage is right now doesn’t mean that the long term damage isn’t there. More or less to make your argument you have to assume something that you can’t possibly know, when the lockdowns will be lifted, how effectively the re-emergence of the virus will be addressed and what happens to the economy as it tries to restart. If you aren’t going to include estimates for how bad an economic depression could be then you can’t possibly make this argument in good faith.
An important argument against lockdowns is that part a of your 2 part proposition is unproven, and indeed not really supported. The medical consequences will be mostly similar whether you lockdown or not, provided you have enough IVs to plug into patients (because ventilators and the other extreme measures have proven less effective than the shutdowners had hoped, if not wholly ineffective).
The fraction of people removed (either recovered or killed) by a disease at the end of an epidemic (roughly what you refer to as “herd immunity levels”) is sensitive to R_0. Reducing R_0 reduces this final fraction, even if R_0 is still greater than 1. See these notes on the SIR model.
@Tatterdemalion Why do you think the damages you’re referring to as “economic costs” won’t also have sharp transitions?
The graph is a nice visual, but you are trying to minimize ‘total cost’ which is the sum of ‘medical cost’ and ‘economic cost.’ ‘Medical cost’ is mostly deaths and suffering and some money, and ‘economic cost’ is mostly money and suffering and some deaths. You can’t add the two costs together unless you convert them all to $$, or QALYs.
I also disagree as well with your blue line (economic cost vs. R). I think getting R anywhere close to 1 for your 200* days is not possible without widespread breakdown of law and order, possibly famines, war, horrifying authoritarian control. Then you have the blue line flattening out, but getting the R to .001 for 200 days would require welding virtually every single person into solitary confinement, which would result in death by starvation for 99% of the population, so the blue line needs an asymptote on the right edge.
*what happens when we are at day 199 with no vaccine, and 20% of the country is starving, protesting and rioting while the police and army struggle to maintain control? Does the government tell the people just a few more months?
Wait, where did you even discuss these costs that you are now “optimally” summing? All I’ve seen so far is a bunch of math about reducing coronavirus spread, nothing about the costs associated with doing so.
And here’s the first discussion of cost, and very nearly the last discussion of cost, in your analysis. If your cost function is just that economic damage is “non-trivial”, I’m going to call your analysis non-sensical. And why haven’t you moved to Venezuela yet? Their economy is rather seriously damaged, yes, but their coronavirus numbers are really good.
But there’s also the problem that your proposed solutions can’t be implemented. A 200-day lockdown actually implemented at “optimal” levels from an R0 perspective, is as ludicrous a thing as a Soviet Five-Year Plan. We’re dealing with human beings, not New
SovietAntiviral Men, and you aren’t their God-King. They don’t have a God-King. There’s been non-compliance with your lockdown from day one, and it’s only going to get worse with time. And it’s going to get worse with the perception that the virus has already been licked and the lockdown is nonsensical. And the manner in which it is expressed, is going to get increasingly unpleasant in “non-trivial” ways.So, for starters, redo the math including a noncompliance term in the lockdown that is exponential with both the severity and duration of the lockdown. What now is the optimum? Do we even want to implement the lockdown now, or do we want to wait until later so that we have stronger compliance near the peak of the pandemic?
And then there’s the part where you are treating 200 days as a constant. It is looking increasingly unlikely that the FDA will approve a vaccine in 200 days – such a vaccine would be slightly risky and very imperfect and they’d be blamed for all that. Same goes for any of the other possible countermeasures. Contact tracing would be imperfect, it would miss some people who would then die, so it doesn’t look line anyone is seriously planning for contact tracing. Maybe that will change in the future. But how it changes, depends on the threat driving the changes.
So, instead of “200 days”, progress towards a solution that is a variable function increasing with the perceived severity of the crisis. Arresting the spread of COVID-19 early, means reducing the urgency with which the government pursues a lasting solution or allows medical researchers to pursue a solution. Now what does the optimum look like?
And there are many ways that your solution can wind up terribly suboptimal, only one of which is “dialed in the wrong level of officially-mandated social distancing”.
The biggest problem with spherical-cow analysis is that, when you’re deciding which dimensions to wholly leave out in the name of simplicity, it can be awfully tempting to leave out the dimensions where you intuitively know the analysis would point contrary to your preferred solution. And when the dimensions you leave out are practicality of implementation and economic cost of implementation, yeah, that’s not going to give you a viable answer.
https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/ has an interesting claim based on review of sources – apparently PTSD caused by warfare has not existed in ancient and medieval times.
Dan Carlin (Hardcore History) would disagree, IIRC.
I believe he has referenced ancient works that sound a lot like descriptions of PTSD, for example when he did the review of the various Greek vs. Persian Empire battles in “King of Kings”. But, like I said, IIRC.
ACOUP counters that those are a few cherrypicked accounts from a historical record that follows milennia of endemic warfare.
Millenia of war, handful of written accounts, and those mostly written by people deeply, deeply steeped in honor and glory cultures. It would not have mattered if a fifth of all their friends were suffering from ptsd, they would very rarely write about it.
Explicitly addressed by acoup, and no – we’ve got enough material from people who explicitly weren’t honor/glory martial enthusiasts that widespread PTSD should be evident and isn’t. For example, monasteries had instruction manuals on how to take care of all the honorable glorious warriors who had gotten sick of all that and wanted to retire to monastic life, and the troubles they describe don’t seem to match up with PTSD.
One of the book reviews here suggested that PTSD was caused by immobility while traumatic things were happening to you, so more like being in a trench that was being shelled than fighting for your life at close range.
It’s strange that author didn’t consider change in fighting tools as cause for emergence of PTSD.
BTW if it is true and rightly explained by the “change of culture” hypothesis, then we have a question about culture and other causes of PTSD to answer.
It certainly sounds plausible. I remember hearing about a WW1 soldier who was fine with a rifle but couldn’t handle artillery. If I was going to theorize, I would suggest that it was because our weapons are more… not abstract but something like that. It’s one thing when your enemy pulls out a knife. But an RPG or a mine is just something that springs up out of nowhere, killing a group of people in an instance. There used to be a more clear delineation between combat and non-combat. But when you’re on patrol, you could suddenly die from an explosive at any moment. Maybe that kind of messes with your mindset, making the transition out of the military more difficult.
There’s a theory I’ve run across, but can’t find quickly, that PTSD is primarily driven by artillery, theorized to be due to the concussive effect.
I know (somewhat distantly) a guy who was caught up in a mass-shooting, and he apparently had serious PTSD symptoms for many years afterwards. The SWAT team did *shoot* the mass-shooter in the course of rescuing this guy and the other people caught in the middle of it, but they didn’t use any artillery.
I think you’re thinking of traumatic brain injury due to blast exposure, which can present like PTSD but isn’t exactly the same thing.
I think we’ve discussed this here recently, and it’s a nice story that doesn’t really hold up. Doctors in WWI who specifically looked, couldn’t find much difference in “shell shock” rate or severity among soldiers who had been exposed to artillery and those who hadn’t. If you spent enough time on the line, you were at risk even if people were “only” trying to kill you with machine guns. Also, while traumatic brain injury is a thing, artillery does most of its killing by fragmentation rather than blast. Before the invention of kevlar, if you were close enough to an exploding shell to get clinically significant TBI, the TBI was probably the least of your worries.
It was, however, a very nice story back in WWI, because the official policy was still to shoot soldiers for cowardice or “lack of moral fiber”. Which almost nobody really wanted to do, so commanders were very happy to have doctors spin them a bit of pseudoscience about how this was really a physiological injury no different than e.g. a bayonet thrust even if the symptoms don’t include bleeding. So it stuck in the popular consciousness, and military and to some extent even medical lore.
This reminds me of the story of Sammy Jenkis’ wife in Memento, who really wanted her husbands injury to be physiological rather than psychological, because psychological means you can stop if you really want to.
Of course, that’s hardly evidence of much, being a fictitious story inside a fictitious story. But it illustrates the mindset of the time, perhaps.
That doesn’t explain how people in non-military events can develop PTSD. Like public safety or rape victims.
How would you pick it up against the background noise? During large swaths of history losing multiple children to death before they reached adult hood was the norm, what does PTSD look like when the average soldier has watched multiple siblings die before he goes to war?
My understanding of PTSD is that it’s caused by extended exposure to the feeling of “people are trying to kill you.” The vast majority of casualties in all wars prior to the 20th century were caused by disease/hunger/exposure, not the enemy, and most of ancient armies would spend very little time in the presence of the enemy. You’d march around for months, but outside of sieges, the battle would be over in a few hours. Modern combat requires (and enables) soldiers to spend far more of their time within reach of the enemy, so you’d expect far more PTSD.
That said, this is a very controversial topic among people interested in the issue.
Why not compromise. PTSD did occur but at far lower rates. High rates of PTSD for much of history are prima facia implausible. It is non adaptive and does not seemingly driven by genetic load. Full modern PTSD would not have been adaptive and yet would impose costs historically which implies that it is new. A certain high level of caution perhaps and even some manifestation of excessive caution would be an acceptable cost but PTSD suffered by a significant percent of the fighting population seems way too high.
But evo psych is speculative and most reaction to trauma seems maladaptive.
Azathoth is not that efficient an engineer. Something being mal adaptive is not a very good argument as to whether it exists. Evolution is powerful. It is also the blind gibbering god falling about with no plan, no purpose and no intent.
I was surprised by the lack of discussion about the fundamental difference between ancient and modern warfare.
Ancient warfare was basically a long, miserable camping trip with your best buddies, punctuated by very occasionally spending a few hours in mortal combat of the most glorious(*) type. And “long, miserable camping trip with your best buddies” is something that some of my best buddies report as being one of the great formative experiences of their life. Somewhere between 1850 and 1915, that transformed into very prolonged near-continuous mortal combat where you can’t even take a nap without having to tune out the harassing artillery fire that might kill you before you wake.
And, we are now pretty confident that the most effective treatment for PTSD is that which is prompt, close to the front, in the company of one’s comrades, and followed by getting back onto the (perhaps literal) horse rather than being sent home as a loser/coward/victim while your comrades go back to the front without you. Which is difficult to arrange in modern warfare, but pretty much the default in ancient (or even early modern) conflicts. So, much less exposure to the things that cause PTSD, and a much better environment for recovery. Even if ancient treatment fro PTSD consisted of a quiet chat with the unit chaplain rather than prolonged attention by a professional psychiatrist, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if ancient societies suffered much less in the way of PTSD.
* relatively speaking; net glory may still be negative, but going shield-to-shield with an honorable foe is way above lobbing shells at map grid over the horizon and even more so being on the receiving end of the shells.
It occurs to me that this might show up in differential PTSD rates for the World Wars – am I right in remembering that Allied troops get leave individually and German units are rotated out of the line together?
Yes, and I think we’ve discussed that here before. The Americans blundered into the worst way to handle the issue, and the Germans blundered into the best.
Yeah, I knew it had come up a few OTs ago but I wasn’t sure I had the details right. Does anybody know if the Germans had an equivalent euphemism to ‘battle fatigue?’ I know the Soviets did, ‘affective shock’ or something like that.
I’ve heard a theory (I think from Grossman) that PTSD is most likely to occur in cases where you have a triggered fight or flight response but cannot act on it and lose a sense of agency.
If this is the case (and that’s a huge if), you’d expect PTSD to start occurring from combat roughly in the mid to late 19th century. That’s when an important part of warfare became, “Take large amounts of enemy fire and don’t do anything.” Line infantry before that had to take enemy fire but there was a smaller volume and they were expected to shoot back. But the volume of fire by the mid-19th century had become so large that sometimes the best response was to hunker down in a trench and wait until the bullets and bombs stop flying. We don’t use trenches as often but soldiers still have the experience of getting pinned in mobile warfare.
Stolen Valor (30 minutes)
Stolen Valor is falsely claiming to have been in the military and/or to have gotten honors.
It’s unsurprising that there are people making these claims, though I’m amazed at the gall of people including false claims as part of their political campaigns. Democrats *and* Republicans, in case you were wondering.
What really surprises me is that people who haven’t been in the military are able to fool those who have been in the same branch in the same campaign. Military talk has so much jargon and detail that I’m amazed an outsider can get it right. Maybe it’s no harder than learning a new language? Still, learning a language isn’t the same as convincingly appearing to be a native of a particular place. Maybe military experiences are so varied that when a statement seems to be a little off, it’s written off to that.
One of the fakers in the podcast said he’d had a head injury, so he was cut slack for a while.
It gets weirder– while making these false claims (some of them are to get quicker service at the VA) is illegal, the easiest way to make it possible to check on them would be for the military to make service records public. This has been declared illegal on privacy and freedom of speech(!) grounds. In general, freedom of speech doesn’t include fraud, though I’m interested in other examples.
I don’t *think* people generally have a privacy interest in keeping their military record quiet (assume an honorable discharge), and at least there could be an opt-in system for disclosure.
Also, the podcast includes a snippet of the Marine choir singing “Let the Sunshine In”. This is from “Hair”, a profoundly anti-war musical. I don’t think it has much to do with the subject, but I can see the temptation to include it. The narrator points out the irony. The lyric fits the subject, but still…
I didn’t watch your video, but my impression is that most of these people are the types that are very much interested in and fascinated by the military, such that they learn enough about it “as a hobby” that they can speak the jargon convincingly enough.
Most of it isn’t literally secret in any way. If you have military friends and keep up with (public) military information sources and such, you can immerse yourself in the culture without actually being of the culture.
Edit: For a perhaps too close to home example, do you not think that our very own bean could pass for a Naval officer, if he so chose?
I think bean would be excellent about ships. I’m not as sure that he’d get details of daily life right.
You’ve got a point about hobbyists, thoguh.
I think he could. And remember, you don’t have to get every last thing 100% right. You just have to get enough right such that nobody is willing to publicly accuse you of being a complete and total fraud.
Bean would have the additional advantage of having hung out with a whole lot of naval veterans for a long and amicable time. That probably counts for more than knowing about the hardware and the history.
I’m reminded of Frank Abagnale almost blundering his way into a PanAm cockpit just by keeping his ears and eyes open, and soaking up the patter.
Are you my deadhead?
And they can always claim to be some bullshit MOS nobody knows anything about.
I think that if someone defaults to trusting you then you get a lot of leeway and if someone who defaults to not trusting you then you get a lot of scrutiny. I would expect that saying you were in the same branch of service as a military man would default to trust, you would really have to be obviously faking it to break that for most people.
One probably underappreciated aspect of this is that a lot of veterans do not have clear memories. I don’t mean that perjoratisvely. I’ve met a lot of very nice veterans who swore up and down to things I can prove are not true. A lot have told me that battleships move sideways when they fire. They’re arguing with basic physics, and as an engineer, conservation of momentum beats everything except thermodynamics. One insisted they’d had remote control of their Tomahawks in Desert Storm, a capability that is well-documented to have arrived over a decade later. If you’re familiar with this (and I imagine it’s just as bad on non-technical subjects) you’ll probably cut people slack and/or use it to your advantage.
As for actually knowing this stuff, it’s not that hard to pick up if you’re interested enough. I’ve been a military nerd for 20 years now, and in that time, it’s possible to soak up a lot of the culture. My biggest surprise from my visit to the USS America was how much it was like I expected. Unless you take the BS too far (claiming to be a SEAL/Ranger is the common pitfall here) or happen to get really unlucky, it really wouldn’t be too hard to get away with.
Especially if you claim to have served 1500 tours of duty.
The United States seems to be trapped in a cycle of polarization between the red and blue tribes, and it seems to be getting worse every cycle. How can we fix this?
Dissolve the federal union and return sovereignty to the states (with the option of some of them coming together to form new nations, if they so choose).
+1, and you can already predict which subsets would come together to form new nations: the same subsets now coming together to do regional compacts for pandemic response. I for one would love to be an independent Pacific Coaster/West American/Cascadian/whatever, especially after we sign a Schengen style agreement with Canada.
One of the most important lessons from this and many other recent experiences is that no institution can be governed well if there isn’t a supermajority consensus among the stakeholders on certain basic facts and values. The US doesn’t have that consensus and hasn’t for decades. No matter who you blame for that, it ain’t coming back anytime soon, and there is certainly no 2020 election result that will bring it back.
This sounds more like a recipe for war than depolarization. State lines aren’t currently doing a very good job of convincing people to “live and let live”, what makes you think calling the same lines national borders would help?
More optimistically, I think there is still a substantial set of shared values in the United States, if only because both sides tend to accuse the other of very similar failings (authoritarianism being the easiest one to find examples of). More generally, many/most criticisms of opposite tribes involve ascribing values to them that they do not themselves profess. If there was actually no middle ground left, the dialog would be less like today’s “You’re authoritarian! No, I’m not – you are!” and more like “You’re authoritarian! Yes, and you should be too!”.
Because all of society is constantly saying that state lines are silly and irrelevant but national borders are super important and must be respected. People in California are taught, from birth, that is their birthright to be able to boss around people in Mississippi, and vice versa. The way to stop that is to simply stop teaching that. There is no culture war between California and Alberta, or between Alabama and Quebec, because there’s no expectation of association between those places.
Because in modern usage, “authoritarian” is just a buzzword that means “bad.” It is a contentless smear.
Look at the Indua)/Pakistan/Bangladesh split for a cautionary tale.
Do you think the people of all three countries would be happier/better off had they been forced to remain together under one unitary government?
That’s a very hard question to answer, especially while the events are still in progress and we don’t have the benefit of hindsight. For instance, if India and Pakistan vaporize each other’s largest cities in a nuclear exchange, it’s safe to say the answer would be yes, they’d have been better off a single united nation. It’s an admittedly extreme and unlikely example, but I think it proves my point.
Let’s say a full-scale non-nuclear war breaks out between India and Pakistan. Would that be better or worse than a civil war drawn along similar geographic and demographic lines in an alternate universe where they were still the same country? I’m really not sure.
This guy
Context for the plebs
Ah yes, Sulla. Famously the guy who ended all factionalism and strife in the Roman Republic forever and ensured no civil war would ever happen again. (/s, obviously)
It’s a meme I’ve seen. He’s basically the father figure that ends our squabbling through brute force. The non-tongue-in-cheek argument would be something like that Rome was inevitably heading towards strongman rule and that Sulla’s only problem was trying to turn it back to a Republic instead of passing the mandate on. The better example would obviously be Augustus, but of course, the Republic was already dead at that point anyways.
@Wrong Species: technically popular rule and the republican constitution don’t die until two progressive brothers are murdered by wealthy politicians, then the citizen army is replaced by professionals and political norms are eroded in the name of the common people (Marius), then the Sullan dictatorship followed by–
… oh, well crap.
I honestly don’t know the answer.
But I would suggest that the following is at the very least not helpful:
I’m not sure if writing that caused you to write this, but it is an interesting duality.
This is just as true today as it was when it was posted two years ago.
I fall out a little bit differently that @Two McMillion, where I think Trump’s a dolt and probably won’t vote for him, but I’m not going to vote for the party of baby-murder either.
Ah. So nice to see that in a post bemoaning the rise of polarization.
*Shrug* If the Democrats want my vote they can change their platform to not be so monstrous. Republicans nominating Trump doesn’t change that fundamental fact.
More broadly, there are many people who see some important aspect of one party’s likely policies as so horrible, they’re never going to be okay voting for them. With respect to abortion, there are substantial numbers of voters on both sides for whom that’s the core issue–I’ve certainly seen plenty of appeals to shut up and vote for the Democrat for president because it’s the only way to protect abortion rights from a Republican appointing too many supreme court justices.
Ah. So nice to see that in a post bemoaning the rise of polarization.
Given this article, which starts off with how Crisis Pregnancy Centres are serving poor women in deprived communities (and which had me thinking “Well, the New Yorker Magazine is covering this fraught topic in an admirably even-handed manner”) but which then slid into “pro-life is anti-woman, anti-poor, taking money from the poor and giving it to programmes which force women to have babies, and it’s all got Mike Pence behind it who is driven by religious ideology” of the usual type I originally expected, I’m with CatCube on this: if they’re so wedded to baby murder, then call a spade a spade.
I’ve read screeching articles by both professional journalists and ordinary people calling for pregnancy centres to be made illegal because if they’re not offering abortion, they’re fraudulent and trying to trick women by fear and coercion into continuing with pregnancies, and it’s all to do with relgious bigots and fanatics trying to control and punish women’s sexuality as well as being homophobes and transphobes yadda yadda yadda. I think ‘baby-murder’ is exactly the term.
The Wikipedia article on this topic is cute.
I particularly liked the comparison with abortion provision centres – so those do offer medical services, hmmm? Funny, I seem to remember howls of protest about requiring such places to have admitting privileges to local hospitals as this was all part of a sinister plot to force them to close down. And it’s nice to see we can take the word of an independent abortion-providing agency as fair, unbiased, disinterested, and certainly not with an agenda of their own.
Would that make you happy? Fine. I admit it, you caught me. I consider myself to have the right to murder any baby that, in order to continue living, would require me to be mutilated and tortured. And especially if, even after I was done screaming, it would try to hormonally brainwash me into destroying my life for its benefit. I would not necessarily be happy to have to do it, but if it was me or it, guess what? I was here first.
That, however, is the only circumstance in which I would want the right to murder a baby. It is not a circumstance that I expect will occur in my own life, but since I want that right for myself, I also want it for the people for whom it is more possible that it will at some point be a concern.
I’m just disappointed that the Democrats don’t actively support baby murder. It’s hard for me to intellectually care and shape policy about a being that’s so fragile it can suffocate if put on the ground in the wrong way.
We can’t, but leave if you don’t want to be around when it gets really bad.
We can’t fix it because the politicians don’t want to fix it.
My list of things that would help a lot includes:
* end gerrymandering
* jungle primaries
* take party affiliation off the ballot
* state funding only for political campaigns
I think these reforms would remove power from the political parties and make centrist candidates more viable.
This is a really hard question. But it’s one that I’d like to try to engage with, rather than just snarking away.
So consider this a brainstorm and feel free to add to it.
1. Rebuild a centrist media. Much hay has been made over media bubbles and politicized news, but I know one major challenge to cross-tribal discussions is the difficulty of finding any news source that at least one side won’t reflexively distrust (usually with good reason).
2. Push political reforms that would erode the two-party system. Parliamentary representation and ranked-choice-voting are both possibilities, but by no means the only ones. Serious campaign finance reform might help here, but is probably not sufficient on its own.
3. Figure out a way to make appealing to undecided/centrist voters more effective for the parties than increasing turnout among their core base. My favorite idea for this is to make any registered party member that doesn’t vote worth 50-60% of a straight ticket vote (thus halving the relative benefit of convincing them to go to the polls relative to getting someone undecided to vote for you). Any other method of making voting substantially easier could probably have a similar effect (among many others).
4. Invent artificial wombs. Abortion is one of the main wedge issues between the tribes and this is a technology that would enable a compromise that most people on both sides might actually be able to live with.
5. Develop a healthier social media culture/ecosystem. I’m somewhat optimistic that this will happen organically as more people encounter social media during their formative years.
6. Form some kind of activist group dedicated to moving calls for violence outside the Overton window. I know I had an easier time being charitable to my political opponents before I read my hundredth “people like you should be shot” article. If we could take one step back from this sort of rhetoric, I think it might help people step back from siege mentality.
7. Actively promote anti-polarization values. While culture consists of more than the sum of individual actions in the moment, those actions do exert a real influence. I know this sounds idealistic, but it’s how several major social changes came about in the last century and change.
I read every one of those while concurrently asking: “and how is this going to be used against me?”
We live in an environment with a lot of groups trying to weaponize vast swaths of society against each other, so that sort of caution is entirely reasonable. But would you prefer the status quo?
Put another way, someone has to be the first to deescalate. If one believes that any deescalation is merely weakness that will be ruthlessly exploited, then “How can we reduce polarization?” is the wrong question and we should be asking “How can we completely defeat our outgroup?”. I am more optimistic than that. We’re fond of calling this sort of conflict “Culture War”, but wars can be ended by measures short of one side’s annihilation.
Re: centrist media, you need an audience and you can’t force people to listen. It’s not clear to me how centrism is going to hold its own against polarizing clickbait.
Re: political reforms, I would love this, but actually enacting most of the big ones requires supermajority consensus (e.g. for constitutional amendments) that in the current environment amounts to assuming a can opener. RCV state by state and NPV compact expansion are worth pursuing, though.
Re: anti polarization values, what prior social changes would you model anti-polarization on? The big social changes that come to mind from living memory are largely those where what is now the consensus view used to be a polarizing view (and before that was a fringe view). The change didn’t happen by avoiding polarization, but by leaning into it and achieving complete cultural victory for one side.
Ending explicit racial discrimination and allowing gay marriage were both of this type, for example. In both those cases the side that won did so partly by finding sympathetic victims of the other side’s preferred policies, partly by letting the other side defeat themselves in the court of public opinion by their own inflexible and inhumane defensive responses. Both sides of the abortion debate see themselves as heirs to the civil rights revolution; both have pushed hard on this exact strategy for decades and failed. Advocates for loosened immigration restrictions are starting to use this strategy now (e.g. highlighting the kids in cages) with modest and uncertain effect. But I don’t see examples of successful movements achieving cultural change through depolarization and reconciliation and compromise. Do you?
Religion A vs religion B ending in a religious freedom.
I am not talking about a modern Europe, where it is mostly achieved by not caring about religion. But rather about examples of areas with religious freedom during say, medieval times.
—-
Political situation in Western and Central Europe after WW II can be also described as of 2020 as “depolarization and reconciliation and compromise”.
Yeah, those are good examples, and it’s noteworthy that they occurred in the aftermath of terrible, exhausting wars. IIRC Jacques Barzun has a discussion in _From Dawn to Decadence_ about how the modern idea of tolerance was seeded by that sort of postwar exhaustion, where two groups had fought each other to a standstill and were simply unable to go on, and it’s not clear whether it would have ever taken off otherwise.
It seems that religious freedom in Poland was a bit unusual here.
It seems partially rare case of thoughtful action based on what happened elsewhere ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Confederation ), but religious tolerance had older history. Now I am curious what was the source of this situation.
I don’t think we know what media will look like in ten years. Most of the industry is not financially viable, and clickbait to harvest ad revenue from hatereads is probably not actually a workable strategy to support it. Certainly not to support anything worthwhile, and probably not to support anything at all.
With a different funding model will presumably come different incentives and constraints, and thus different behavior. I sure don’t feel like I have a good intuition what that will look like, though.
I’m not interested in forcing people to listen, I’m interested in people having the option to do so. Reliable information and righteous outrage are different products. I don’t currently buy one because I don’t particularly like it, but would happily buy the other if I could find someone selling it. I don’t think this is an inherent state of affairs so much as a correctable market failure.
The examples you provided will work fine. The gay rights movement didn’t succeed by making straight people stop being straight. Its “complete cultural victory” was to spread the idea that culture need not be homogeneously straight. That looks a lot more like depolarization to me than it does destroying one’s enemies.
You’re forgetting destroying the enemies’ bakeries.
They also liked to shut down adoption agencies. And as we’ve seen in recent threads, trying to shut down emergency hospitals.
I have not been aware of this and my search-fu has failed me. Would you be willing to share a link?
They did not succeed, but they tried.
And as for hospitals, it’s about Samaritan’s purse denying a gay volunteer because he wouldn’t accept their guiding principles.
@Skeptical Wolf @ana53294
Some adoption agencies in fact closed because of it. See this history from the USCCB on legal challenges.
@ana53294
Other way around. A gay activist volunteered and refused to accept their principles in order to provide a cause of action against Samaritan’s Purse.
@The Nybbler
That’s what I meant, but I guess my wording was poor. But somehow I came to say the opposite of what I meant (although I still don’t see the mistake).
That part seems easy. Polarizing clickbait gets shared because it pisses people off. Centrism pisses off twice as many people.
That certainly describes my social media experience.
1. Change election systems to not be FPTP. (Or, make it a rotation of election systems.)
2. Make it so that voting is easy-and-often.
So, in other news from that press conference yesterday, we got the following interesting information that gives us a plausible reason to believe that sunshine and humidity (seasonality) do indeed reduce R0, by at least some amount.
Type -- | Temp | Hum | Sun -- | Dur.
--------|------|-----|--------|------------
Surface | 70-75F 20% | No Sun | 18 hours
Surface | 70-75F 80% | No Sun | 6 hours
Surface | 95F -- 80% | No Sun | 1 hour
Surface | 70-75F 80% | Summer | 2 minutes
Aerosol | 70-75F 20% | No Sun | 1 hour
Aerosol | 70-75F 20% | Summer | 1.5 minutes
(Has to be a better way to do tabular data, right?).
The reason given for humidity mattering is that it essentially diluted the saliva, which was needed to keep the virus viable.
So that gives a plausible mechanism for seasonality. But, it also strongly cautions against gathering in dry, indoor air, or at night.
Of course we don’t know how these things affect R0. What steps would you take to harness this information?
Honestly, I kind of want to gut check this. Miami or Puerto Rico have been in those temperatures and humidities for most of the outbreak. Are they seriously underperforming the rest of the country in infection rate? If you expect weather will have that effect, then we should see differences where the weather conditions already match that.
If outdoor transmission of the virus is rare in all cases (relative to indoor at least) then this won’t have much of a regional effect overall. Which I suspect might very well be true.
The data says it should be reducing the lifespan of the virus indoors with no sunlight from days to a few hours. That should still be having a serious effect if true, not to mention the fact that equatorial regions also get a lot of sunlight which might reduce its lifespan well under an hour.
In the south, people love their AC though.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the average indoor temperature in the summer in Houston was colder than the average indoor temperature in the summer in New York.
I agree that it would be good to compare this to whatever we might know about spread in equatorial regions.
But I haven’t seen a lot of data on that. I’m also not sure what percentage of those we might be likely to get data from have AC. I would think there would be selection bias favoring that, at least somewhat.
So, here is some data on New Orleans humidity in February (the month before Mardi Gras, which led to a large outbreak.
Humidity average over 70%, pretty much year round. A data point moderately against humidity hugely affecting R0.
Except the question is whether seasonality will affect the virus’s spread. AC is a constant: you have it in New Orleans and Boston. But while New Orleans will be hot and humid both now and in the summer, Boston will be colder now and warmer in the summer. In effect, Boston has seasonality while New Orleans has the conditions Boston is hoping will change the calculus.
If you’re counting on seasonality (specifically heat and humidity) to have an effect, you should be observing that effect in New Orleans or Miami or wherever now. If it’s foiled by AC, it will be foiled by AC in Boston in summer too.
New Orleans and Miami both had big festivals which appear to be the source of spread. These are festivals in which tens of thousands of people from all over the globe pack themselves as tightly as they can into bars, yelling, touching, kissing strangers from early in the day till the small hours of night. The effects of humidity never had a fighting chance.
New Orleans the past few weeks has been as hot and humid as some parts of the country ever get. That said the numbers here don’t look too bad if you squint. It’s possible we had one really bad event (Mardi Gras) and apart from that the spread hasn’t been too bad.
AC certainly makes the air dryer relative to the outdoors as well.
As much as people make fun of Florida for opening (some) beaches, it looks much safer than being at the grocery store.
+1
In a not terribly surprising turn of events, I’m going to admit some ignorance here.
Why
are virusesis this virus harder to spread in humidity? It seems to me that water spreads everything better, especially across mucus membranes in humans.Is it basically functioning to periodically collect water soluble droplets and pull them out of the air, like small drops on your windshield coalescing and rolling down?
I edited in a that what was presented is that the humidity essentially mixed water with the saliva, effectively diluting it and making the droplet less hospitable to the virus.
Whether that is a generic result, I don’t know. This presented as novel information, but it could be just reconfirming something we’ve always known. Although, I’ve never heard this discussed in reference to flu seasonality, so we might be breaking new ground.
I edited in a that what was presented is that the humidity essentially mixed water with the saliva, effectively diluting it and making the droplet less hospitable to the virus.
At the risk of sounding like Donald Trump here, so the old home remedies like gargling with salt water might indeed be of some use? You’d definitely be diluting saliva and spitting everything out, and if you did it regularly every hour or couple of hours, you might see some benefit?
Not enough information. It’s possible that the bits responsible for spreading come from deeper in the lungs and so you’d only be getting trivial improvements. And saliva is continually produced.
Benefit in preventing you being spreader? On the bare edge of maybe, I’d guess. But no effect on either your risk of infection or disease progression, so not at all like the folk remedies.
Gargling salt water is supposed to help with swelling and pain, and in my experience it does. I don’t think it has any effect beyond that.
@Kaitan:
I think that frequently gets rounded off to “gargling salt water cures a sore throat”.
And of course what’s going around social media is that it will keep you from getting covid-19.
Immediately re-open every park, playground, and other outdoor space in the Southeastern US.
We don’t yet know how this affects R0. This could all be distinction without a difference, no matter how intuitive it is.
The question I was asking was how we could smartly determine which actions were prudent.
So now the default is we can’t do anything until an impossible standard of accuracy in determining its impact on R is made? You wouldn’t accept this in any other scenario in life.
Matt:
But that was also what you wanted to do *before* you heard this result….
Yeah, and “centralize all economic decisionmaking in the hands of a few government executives” is what a lot of people wanted to do before COVID, too. What’s your point?
I _really_ don’t like mixing parks with playgrounds. Park = place you go for a walk, maybe get an ice cream, sit on a bench and read. Playground = place where little critters run around in close contact with each other.
One is much safer than a grocery store, the other much less safe.
Thankfully, here outside Seattle, the local government has indeed distinguished between the two. Playgrounds have been closed for several weeks, but almost all local parks have been open.
No, there is no evidence that kids playing on playgrounds is less safe than a grocery store and no reason to believe it is. We have a ton of data showing that outdoor activities are unlikely vectors for transmission and that kids are unlikely to get and spread this illness.
Just tried inputting an HTML table. No dice.
My guess is that you should just give the data in csv format, and everyone can open the data in their spreadsheet program of choice.
On grounds of “paternalism is bad”, I think I support ending the lockdowns. If people want to accept a 1% chance of death (and a much higher chance of lung damage) in return for not being stuck in their home for months, we should let them make that choice for themselves.
We should couple this with a clear message that the plague is very dangerous and bad. We should do reasonable things to make it easy for people to stay home if they want to, such as cancelling rents for a few months.
But if people understand the risks and want to go to the beaches anyway, let them go to the beaches anyway. It’ll build herd immunity.
(I, personally, will be staying inside whether the lockdown is cancelled or not.)
If the only effect of breaking quarantine conditions was an individual incurring some X% chance of death, yeah, 100%. But that’s not how infectious disease works. If someone contracts Covid-19 (symptomatic or not) they expose others (who may not have consented to bear the risk of breaking quarantine) to the same X% risk.
Further, the risks are very different for different people. Some folks are driving around in SUVs and others are driving around on mopeds–if we just say “don’t worry about traffic laws, just drive in a way that you’re willing to accept whatever risk you’re taking on,” the SUV drivers will fare a lot better than the moped drivers.
I don’t think that’s how quarantine works.
I think that, if someone is quarantining, they’re not exposed to the people who are breaking quarantine.
If someone contracts Covid-19, they expose other people who are breaking quarantine to the disease.
And also essential workers and those going outside to buy essential supplies. Thus my mostly-not-serious proposal below.
If the essential workers are out of quarantine only to work, they are unlikely to be exposed to non-essential workers in the process. And if people who go outside to buy essential supplies do it via curbside pickup, or if they have their essential supplies delivered, they too are unlikely to be exposed to the people breaking quarantine.
Most of the burden of increased infection goes to other people not quarantining and doing so for a purpose other than working at an essential job.
Also, you are ignoring the external benefit that people who break quarantine provide. People getting infected produce a benefit by moving us closer to herd immunity.
Hmm? Do only essential workers go to the grocery store?
I must not be understanding you here.
How is someone who is breaking quarantine exposing those who are not breaking quarantine to more risk? In reality, what you are actually comparing is people who are all breaking quarantine. The only way to ensure you don’t get sick is to stay isolated.
I really think you want to walk that one back.
I was only 5% serious.
The intention of the proposal is to ask the people who think it’s the flu and demand the “right” to go outside, because liberty, would they be willing to agree to that proposal? And if not, why not? Is it just the similarity to certain historical events? Or does it say something more about how much these people really believe in freedom?
Then you really want the other 95% to include a bare minimum of gratuitous mocking insult. And the bare minimum for that is always 0%.
Because that’s not really a proposal to restore anyone’s freedom. It’s a (sneering) proposal to take it away by other slightly more deniable methods, and (perhaps partially because of those historically significant events) doesn’t really fool anyone.
Liberty isn’t freaking liberty if you get to impose restrictions like this.
Hey, you guys are all pre free speech, how about you get to say whatever you want, whenever you want but we won’t prosecute anyone who punches you in the mouth for saying something they don’t like. Sounds fair right? If you REALLY liked free speech this should be totally acceptable.
How much is being taken away, though? From the perspective of the deniers, if it’s not a danger to you, why do you need to go to the hospital? We allow people to gamble their money away and have their assets seized when the gambles don’t pay off. We don’t consider that a restriction on freedom. And as for giving up anti-discrimination law, that’s not a restriction on your freedom from a libertarian perspective, which is what most of these people claim or at least appeal to. You want to be free from the government telling you what you can and can’t do? Okay then, give up your right to use the government to coerce others to associate with you. As for the symbol, yes, that’s a restriction on freedom. Yes, some would see it as a badge of shame. But it’s only worn by people who made the decision to cease social distancing. They think that behavior is reasonable. So you really can’t compare it to other instances when people were made to wear warning badges for things which were not their own choices.
I was quite serious when I said you weren’t fooling anyone, and repeating things that won’t fool anyone more emphatically doesn’t make then fool any more people.
Why do you assume that the only people who want to leave quarantine are ones who think the virus is of no danger to them? Indeed, why do you label people who have made a different evaluation of cost and benefit than you have “deniers”?
Do you drive? Does it follow that you believe auto accidents are of no danger to you, that you deny they exist? Was everyone in the military there only because he didn’t believe that bullets kill?
Read your own words. Can’t you see how arrogant they are? The implicit assumption is “it’s so obvious that people ought to behave in the way I think they should that only someone denying reality could disagree.”
Correct. People should be free to discriminate for or against others on the basis of what precautions they are or are not taking.
Thus, for example, the only people outside of my household who I have let into my house in the past five weeks are my older son, his wife and their infant daughter — because they, like us, are self quarantining.
But your version of the badge doesn’t make much sense. If you are not taking any precautions, it should be pretty obvious in those contexts where others might encounter you, since they observe you not wearing a mask, not social distancing. What I really want to know is whether you are infected.
@DavidFriedman,
It seems to me like everyone demanding an end to the lockdown is also repeating this “corona is the flu” nonsense.
@Alexander Turok
No, actually, many of the people who are demanding the end of lockdowns acknowledge the coronavirus is more lethal than the flu, and accept the cost of lifting the lockdown because they see a higher cost to the economy.
Not around here (SSC) at least.
It seems to me like it’s easier to be confident you are right if you get to make the other side’s arguments for them.
Have you been reading this blog? If so, have you noticed that some people here think the current lockdown may be a mistake, and none of them are claiming that Corona is the flu?
While we are in the mood for trading civil liberties to save lives, we can make abortion illegal. Or, if people really insist on control over their own bodies, they have to get a tattoo on their forehead for each abortion. We can make it a tally like fighter planes get for each kill.
The forehead tattoo doesn’t seem to serve any purpose. In contrast, the corona symbol has a clear purpose of warning others away from the potential danger.
There were actually suggestions to put tattoos on the butts of people who had AIDS.
It’s a punishment. It would save lives, and that’s all that matters.
More to the point: I find it depressing that human lives have such a wide range of value. The average age of COVID-19 death is about 79, and yet we are willing to spend something on the order of $1MM to $40MM per life saved. You can save a child from dying from malaria for about $2k. There is no clamoring to save African children though. To a westerner, one elderly westerner is worth between 500 and 20,000 Africans.
Or in another context: we are perfectly willing to kill many Iraqis and some Americans in order to depose a despot like Saddam Hussein. A busload of soldiers dies or a wedding gets bombed and that is business as usual, normal, expected.
I find it particularly annoying to be lectured about how we can’t put a value on human lives from people that will spend more on medical care for their own pet than that of a human being in another country.
I think we should put a value on human lives and would like to see the calculations. There was an estimate in TheMotte of about 30,000 per life-year, which compared favorably to standard medical care. I also think the desire of younger people to not be sickened should also count.
Also, a not inconsiderable portion of the ‘economic loss’ involves the shuttering of zero-sum signaling games which don’t produce any value.
Zero sum games? What
People will lose their homes, some will become homeless. Tens of millions will go bankrupt. Marriages will dissolve, millions of families will implode.
Hundreds of thousands will turn to drugs or alcoholism.
Don’t think so:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4444228/
Drug use typically begins in a social context, we’ve wiped that out.
Previous recessions did not lock people in their homes away from outside-the-family friends. Divorce rates have skyrocketed in Wuhan after the lockdown was lightened.
Not sure. Note that during lockdown it was impossible to divorce, one week of doubling divorces after one week of making impossible to divorce would result in 0 additional divorces.
For how long?
I really wish you’d hold yourself to a higher standard of discussion than “freedumb”.
Point taken, thanks.
I composed the idea for use on the Unz Review comment section and exported some of that persona here, will try not to do so in the future.
It would be useful if there was some way of distinguishing four categories — people who are infected, people who might be infected, people who are definitely not infected, and people who are immune. Your proposal doesn’t do it very well. For one thing, “people who work jobs which must be done” are as much at risk as people who work jobs that don’t have to be done, so your symbol does a poor job of distinguishing those who might well be infected from those very unlikely to be, which suggests that your real objective is not to provide information to others as to whom they should avoid but to punish people who don’t act as you want them to. For another, someone who isn’t in lockdown but has gotten a negative test recently is unlikely to be infected, so shouldn’t have to wear your symbol. More generally, your symbol isn’t a sign of likelihood to be contagious so much as of not having followed the particular strategy for avoiding contagion that you prefer.
I suggest instead three symbols, all based on testing. One is for people who have had the virus, recovered, and so are presumptively neither contagious nor at risk. They ought to command a wage premium on the market, both because they are not a risk to others and because they don’t have to be protected in their work.
A second is for someone who has recently been tested and found not to be infected. The third is for someone known to be infected. Others wear no special symbol, indicating that they might or might not be contagious.
The assumption is that those working in essential jobs will still follow the rules outside of their workplace.
On some level. You don’t want to be in a situation where your healthcare workers are suffering negative repercussions for doing their jobs. But of course that needs to be balanced against the safety of everyone else. So you could change it to a three-tier system of deniers, essential workers, and quarantiners, with the immune able to move among all the groups freely.
You might think about the implication of “deniers,” both in this context and in the more common context of climate arguments.
You undoubtedly deny the truth of some propositions I think are true. What do I imply if I label you a denier? What would I have to believe to justify the label? Is that belief justified? Is it in your case?
The whole point of breaking quarantine is so they can work and go to the shops, and socialize with people at places of business.
Except for Spain and Italy, AFAIK, people are still allowed to go out for a walk in the park. You’re already allowed to do that. Breaking the quarantine is to get everything else (get a job, date, go to church, etc.).
And yeah, “freedumb” is a mind-killing attack on the outgroup. Just because others value some things more than you do, doesn’t mean they’re dumb.
We had Italy/Spain isolation in Romania even with a much lighter case load. Probably worse, if you take into consideration the absurdly high fines (500-4000 EUR). There’s also the logic that less confident you are in your health system, more motivated you are in having a hard quarantine, so we’re probably not a singular case.
The fines in Spain are 300-60,000 euros.
Or maybe countries with more autocratic regimes enjoy the power trip and were just looking for an excuse.
The lack of trust of Romanians in their health system is a reason to voluntarily self-isolate, not to impose strict home jail on everybody.
Strange thing is, we have a very new temporary government, closest to (ideologically) libertarian we’ve ever had. And they have everything to lose by pushing too much right now – elections are coming in a few months. Whatever this is, I’m pretty sure it’s not autocracy. Incompetence, maybe. Or plain fear.
We can go out but with a written plan for the trip, and there’s rumor of people being fined for small mistakes or misunderstandings. And given the size of the fine, it’s a pretty big incentive to stay on the safe side. Which is probably what they intended, so in this respect it’s working.
How are you personally happy with Spain’s, btw? I was wondering.
I don’t live in Spain at the moment (I’m a PhD student in the UK). But no, I’m not happy with a system that is driving my family members and close friends nuts, and is impoverishing people who have just started to recover from the previous crisis (saved enough for a deposit, got a stable job, that kind of thing).
But I’ve been against the lockdown from the beginning, since I don’t think it’s worth the cost. And the way it was implemented in Spain had so much more to do with politics. It was implemented the 11th of march, just three days after the 8th of march, after our politicians were telling us that it was perfectly safe to go out for the demonstrations. Since this government is explicitly trying to appear feminist, it shows the kind of political thinking going on.
So I see it as a power play on the autonomy (health is supposed to be a transferred competence in the Basque country, at least), and one done after a massive politically motivated fuckup.
In New Jersey most parks are closed. Same in Texas until tomorrow.
I’m on the far side of an ocean and a continent from Spain and Italy, and I’m not allowed to go out for a walk in the park.
I’ve suggested a plan to give people their freedumb back if it’s what they want.
C’mon mate, I’m pro-social distancing and lockdowns and caution and prudence but this kind of language isn’t helpful. What next, you’re going to rant about “sheeple”?
The problem is that the risk isn’t confined to oneself; if you get sick who are you going to infect?
If the risk amongst the “healthy 20-40 year old population” is minimal, then great, take your chances – oh, but what about any 40 year old asthmatics? or 20 year old Type 1 diabetics? There’s a proportion of the “healthy young population” that is not that healthy.
“Herd immunity” is a great concept – if it’s done under controlled circumstances. As it stands, these circumstances are not controlled; it’s not like “expose little Johnny to the measles” (and remember, back before all this, the concerns over the rising cases of measles and mumps and anti-vaxxers?)
There isn’t any way to avoid these risks. Either we reach herd immunity (and right now there is no controlled way of doing it) based on an R0 for an unrestricted population, or we stay restricted indefinitely.
And yet mandatory quarantines for people with AIDS was considered bigoted.
Because at time of proposing them such quarantines would be lasting for the entire life?
And waiting for a full cure would mean life-long quarantines also nowadays?
No, just until the FDA approves a vaccine or a cure for AIDS. Which seems to be exactly the standard for the coronavirus quarantine, so the analogy holds.
Everyone’s talking about social distancing vs opening up but there’s one point I haven’t really seen and it’s that, theoretically, the Coronavirus should be exterminated if everyone limits their social contacts to people that they regularly come in to contact with. If no one is interacting with new people then it should die out on its own. It’s the same reason why we talking about being inside your own home but not in your own room. Obviously, it’s more complicated than that but surely it’s something to keep in mind when opening things back up again. So that means higher priority should be given to things like opening up schools, office jobs, churches, maybe gyms, or anything that’s part of your regular schedule.
That assumes no one gets sick at the grocery store.
Or, more likely, the hospital. The way hospitals work, generally, you can never really root out a virus like this.
The people you see at church also go to work and see other people that have families, churches, gyms, etc of their own, etc. I think the graph of social connections would have to be much more cliquish than it is for “only go to places where you see the same set of people” to be helpful.
That theory is only sound if you remove the word “social”, and make clear that the word “limits” is a literal absolute. Doing so makes clear that the proposal is wholly impractical.
Most places have been under lock-down for weeks now, yet the transmission rate is only moderately low. Why is it not extremely low?
Do we have good data on how much transmission has taken place?
I’d guess most transmission in most places is happening in a healthcare setting right now–if you have a few people coming to the hospital with COVID-19 every week, there’s lots of opportunity for doctors and nurses to take it home with them.
Because “lockdown” is an exaggeration; grocery stores are still open, and so are enough other places.
Indeed, everywhere that supplies grocery stores and hospitals is necessarily open. My brother who works in pharmaceuticals, for example, has to go into work. Otherwise people will die of non-C19 things, notably he had to just ramp up an emergency production of a new MRSA drug because the regular supplier got interrupted.
They are open, but are taking measures to operate at reduce risk. Most places still have transmission barely below 1, or even above 1. This is not encouraging.
I think this is doubtful. The one “real-time R0” site is not credible scientifically based on analysis I have read.
Because hospitals and retirement homes, among others, aren’t locked down.
It’s somewhat difficult to distinguish transmission from discovery. As testing ramps up, we find more institutions where the virus is running rampant – jails, old folks homes, meat packing plants, etc.
The lockdown is also leaky. Many people are working outside their homes; many of those are in contact with random strangers (retail, medical care). And some quantity of people are still breaking their local rules – something I personally find more and more tempting as the rules get more and more onerous.
Mostly though, it does seem to be working where I am. Our local cases are down – even while this is swamped in most news reporting by new cases found elsewhere in the state, including a different metropolitain area that seems to have screwed up by the numbers.
I understand all of that, but we are still barely below one, and this is likely the strictest form of lockdown we will have. Nobody is talking about increasing restrictions, only relaxing them. The strictest lockdown seems to barely be doing the job.
It’s not clear to me that we even know whether this is true or not. Testing is still not being done widely, and it’s still a common story that someone is quite ill but can’t get tested.
where are you seeing estimates that state otherwise?
Frankly, I’m not clear that R0 is barely below one in the SF Bay Area – the 6 counties where I live that started closing things down by at least March 5 (when the city health department told my bridge club to close) and went to official lockdown on March 17.
Now that the local news is not so scary, it’s getting drowned out by California averages (not so good) and particular institutional disasters. I’ve had a lot of trouble recently finding a source for deaths/known cases in our 6 counties – or in any one of them – plotted against time.
When I finally found one at https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/coronavirus/list-of-coronavirus-cases-in-the-bay-area/2248581/, the cumulative number of cases over time appeared to be increasing linerarly, not exponentially, and possibly even dropping below linear over the past couple of weeks.
Note that AFAIK, the graph is “total ever diagnosed up to date x” rather than “total diagnosed on that day”, which makes the graph less convenient for estimating R0, or even eyeballing it. But since it looks nothing like a hyperbola, it’s not exponential.
When I harvest actual numbers from the badly designed graphic, I see something a bit less flat. Assuming 14 days from inception to cure or death, I get numbers like this for Santa Clara. [I chose it because I live there.]
Mar 12 cases unreadable; 115 by March 15
Mar 26 542 cumulative
Apr 9 1380 cumulative, so 838 new cases since Mar 26
Apr 23 1987 cumulative, so 607 new since Apr 9
So between Mar 26 and Apr 9, less than 542 cases generated 838 new ones. R0 > 1, assuming no effect from improved testing
But between April 9 and April 23, 838 cases generated 607 new ones (same assumptions). R0 is about 0.72
That’s not “barely below 1”, particularly when it’s likely that more of those who contract Covid-19 are being tested and diagnosed over time.
@DinoNerd:
You are making an assumption that cases found is always equal in ratio to cases existing. There are reasons to believe it might be so, but there are reasons it may not be. You are going to need to show that Bay Area tests are staying the same or increasing, and they are increasing in a way that should keep the ratio the same. And that case growth isn’t skewed from previous. I don’t think that’s trivial.
For example, if the Bay area “looks good” and tests they would have had are diverted elsewhere, we could see a decrease in testing locally, as we see fewer people who are symptomatic.
This might be especially the case if those most likely to be symptomatic have changed their behavior more than those who are more likely to be asymptomatic. The young may be much more mobile than those who are older.
I’m not saying the raw numbers don’t look good, just that I don’t think you can draw conclusions unless we actually have sufficient testing, or at least a good handle on any changes in how and where tests are being administered over time, which I don’t know that we have.
I’m not sure this is the correct approach but-
If we start with 600 active cases and an R0 of 0.75, and a 2 week contagious period then we should have 450 cases in 2 weeks, 337 in a month, then 253 in 6 weeks, then 189, 142 and then 106. So with an R0 of 0.75 and 600 current cases you are still above 100 active cases in 12 weeks, and you need 10 more weeks to get it below 25 active cases. 6 months of lockdown and an R0 of 0.75 would be almost eradicating it in an area, down to less than 10 cases and some positive variance away from being zero. Anything less than that is going to lead to an immediate surge once lock downs are lifted*.
Anything over 0.5 is to high for lockdowns to be successful, and even at .5 you need 12 weeks to get to single digit cases. This is one reason why Singapore is still extending its lockdowns, actual eradication through this method is extremely difficult with any notable base number of cases.
*assuming its the lock downs keeping the R0 down.
@baconbits9:
It’s actually much worse than that, I think, because those are diagnosed cases, which we know is an undercount.
Declining diagnosed cases may be a reasonable way to conclude R0 is under 1, but they don’t help you determine how many actual cases are out there absent a good measure of the undercount.
I suspect that after following the moderate measures of covering your face and staying six feet away from other people, most transmissions aren’t driven by the 99% who are following lockdown except to go to the grocery store, but the 1% who simply are not following lockdown.
This model:
https://rt.live/
says most places are above 1, some barely below 1, and a handful significantly below 1.
Any reason I should believe that model? It looks to me like they’re basing it on new positive tests, which is still a signal completely swamped by artifact. They show NYS being below 1 until recently; a check of the data reveals a spike in new tests recently.
@The Nybbler
I asked upthread where people are seeing other estimates. Where are you seeing other estimates?
If you want, I could make up my own; they’d be as valid. I’m not going to consider known bad data just because good data isn’t available.
@The Nybbler
yes, I do want. What are your estimates?
of course they would. you’re an SSC commenter.
The only thing I can tell you is that in any area where daily deaths (collected by date of death) are falling, R was below 1 as of about three weeks ago. In any area where daily hospitalizations (by date of admission) are falling, R was below 1 as of about 1 week ago.
Any more precision than that requires a lot of information I don’t have. If you pick a period where R0 is constant, you could theoretically get some of this information. But in addition to that, you need to know both the recovery rate and the IFR or hospitalization rate (to scale deaths or hospitalizations to the population infected). There’s enough unknowns that I’m not willing to guess anything other than “clearly above 1, about 1 (plateauing), clearly below 1”.
There was a link recently from MR about that site. The linked people who were shitting on that site said there’s no way we can know what R0 is but they put a maximum of 0.7 in the U.S. if I recall correctly.
well done to everyone. the rt.live site i was looking at has updated their model, and is now mostly below one.
@HeelBearCub
Not really. I’m just suggesting that the % of exisiting cases which are found is not decreasing. Put that explicitly, I agree that we can construct scenarios where that would not be true. I don’t think those scenarios are likely.
If we were deciding when/whether/how much to reopen, it would help to have good error bars on my estimates – and that’s not possible with the kind of back-of-the-envelope estimates I produced. Hopefully the PTB have better data, and know how to use it.
But I think I produced enough to challenge “barely below 1” – you need better evidence to support that claim than “there are possible patterns of systematic reporting errors that might produce it”. OTOH, that was never your claim in any case, if I’m reading backwards in this thread correctly.
[Oops – this response appeared right below HBC’s comment, but at the wrong level of threading. Unfortunately doubt I can fix that without the anti-spam feeatures preventing me from reposting in the right place, even if I delete this post.]
Yeah, those are all valid points.
I think it’s likely we have R0 under 1 in some specific areas. But I also think that, based on what we know about where diagnosed cases are growing, that those local conclusions only spread out so far.
It should be extinguished if we can make each new infection cause less than one additional infection on average. The lockdowns probably accomplish that, but they’re expensive and unpleasant. The interesting question is whether we can maintain that less-than-one-additional-infection with something less restrictive.
Not in practice unless you are keeping lockdowns in place for extremely long periods of time and every other country in the world also does the same (or you heavily restrict border crossings).
I wish we had better stats on which people are getting covid.
In the news I see mostly cases in long term care homes, meat packing plants, and prisons – all the places where people can’t isolate.
Natural reservoirs would persist even if human-human contact was reduced to zero for months. These reservoirs can range from animals carrying the disease to blocks of ice preserving the virus until they thaw and are spread by birds.
According to Reuters (and NYT, apparently), top Navy brass recommended reinstating Crozier.
This seems like the morally correct outcome, but what does it say about Navy leadership? My assumption is that the “independent investigations” are going to pin any wrong-doing on Modly (perhaps justly?), and the Navy as a whole will wash their hands of the saga.
Here is something that bears watching closely.
Hopefully we can get some good epidemiological data from this unfortunate set of circumstances. I’m guessing another week and we might have some idea on some bounds on herd immunity, IFR in certain demographics, etc. Not sure what the demographic of the prison is (aside from male), but I’m guessing it’s going to skew young, especially given that it’s minimum and medium security.
To put this in context, here is the Ohio DoH’s coronavirus data. You can see pretty clearly when the testing happened (April 16th and 17th), and if you click on Marion Country (the dark area just north of Columbus) you’ll see an even more dramatic spike.
Looks like there’s another big outbreak down below Columbus at Pickaway Prison.
I wonder how many total cases in Ohio (and other states) are in prisons. In Arkansas, apparently 38% of the state’s cases are from one prison.
From googling, it seems like globally 10-12% of people are 60+. That’s 6% in the US prison system. So they do skew younger but not terribly so.
Do have a cite for 6% of the US prison system being 60+?
And does that cite break out state vs. federal, and minimum/medium vs. a maximum security?
My thought is that a) youth predisposes you to crime in general, but b) sentencing can make you old. Thus the population in state minimum security prison should skew younger than the prison population, and the population in general.
ETA: Oh, and percentage of the US that is 65+ is 15% (probably more now). The first world in general is going to skew much older than the world, for a variety of reasons.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_age.jsp
If the testing was done April 16 and 17 then we haven’t seen all the potential deaths from it yet, especially given that it would have spread VERY fast. Most of those 80% would have gotten it within the week prior to April 16 and 17 I would guess. So not too useful yet to get morbidity rates, and it skews young, and male, and probably really unhealthy.
So with all those factors I don’t know how useful it will be: we already know people who are fairly young have <1/1000 death rate, so a sample of 2000 prisoners won't tell us much unless loads of them die.
Later on we'll be able to see if they get reinfected, so that might be useful.
That’s the Feds. They don’t prosecute all the piss-ant stuff that lands you in a state minimum security prison. That age demo isn’t really relevant. Off to see if I can find stats for Ohio.
Radu Floricia had a comment (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/22/open-thread-152-25/#comment-886210) about how without omniscience, the lockdown was the logical thing to do at the time–and most comments disagreed. I did agree, and then had lots of other observations, so I thought I’d bump this up to the top as a new comment instead of burying it in the replies. I’m new here, so I hope that’s not too much of a faux pas.
FWIW, I agree with Radu, the lockdown in the US was seen as the only way to save lives. There was the example of China and we knew we could neither weld people into their homes or build 2 dedicated hospitals in 2 weeks (that was before people had heard of our own hospital ships). There was also the ongoing example of Italy and its first-world healthcare system visibly overwhelmed. CA started early and kept things in control, NY started late and almost lost it. It seems like NY was right at the edge, any number of factors being different and it might’ve been a disaster. So while it looked like they were just whelmed the right amount, it was pure luck it wasn’t worse.
Then there is the issue of nursing homes. I think the description of dry tinder is apt. Again, there were examples of very high mortality in certain ones where the virus got in. I think they are still very much at risk in any re-opening, and may be like the smoldering stumps of a forest fire.
Personally, I agreed with the lockdown at the time, I still think it was the right thing to do around the CA timeframe, and I still agree with it continuing now. Yes, it has flattened the curve, and yes, it will make the lockdown last longer. The things that countries can do to avoid lockdown and keep spread of the virus in check, such as phone surveillance and GPS ankle monitors in Asia (Taiwan and South Korea), are things that the US will not do. In the category that we could do but don’t I will include competent contact tracing and keeping sick employees at home with benefits. So the mostly voluntary and goodwill lockdown in the US will continue.
If the US reopens too soon, we will be hit by second waves, and like the 1918 flu, they could be even deadlier. I think one under-appreciated aspect of lockdown is that it still allows the asymptomatic spread. As several recent studies have shown, there have been more asymptomatic spread than expected, so the lockdown will still help reach herd immunity (provided having it confers individual immunity–which still seems unclear).
On the example of Sweden, I see it as an outlier like Taiwan and South Korea. They had little to infection to begin with, and when everyone else went into lockdown, that protected them from more outside cases. I’m not sure what their border protocol is right now, but I see them like an island: low infection rate with competent tracing, socially minded population doing things to personally reduce the spread while still allowing work and life, and no cases from foreigners to spark new spread. I don’t think conclusions about Sweden can be generalized.
From an economic point of view, there is no doubt the lockdown will kick the US into a recession. But I think we were already on the brink of one, with everything very fragile, so it’s unfair to blame it entirely on the virus response. I see the people clamoring for no-lockdown or opening-up-now to be selfish and borderline greedy. Yes, people are unemployed and truly suffering for lack of money, but the trump-bucks, and rent and mortgage relief should kick in, grants and food donations so no one starves, small business loans, etc. Ideally, it’s just a pause, people survive, and for all business purposes, it’s like those/these months didn’t exist. I understand it’s not working, and people are really feeling the pinch. But instead of saying “end the lockdown,” they should be saying “make the lockdown survivable.”
I think there’s a certain character that doesn’t like being told what to do, and opposes the lockdown on that one pure principle. Then there is the type of person who can’t stand not being productive and making money, who can’t stand pausing for a few months. I also think there are those who are overly leveraged and feel their financial dealings will collapse if they don’t have all 12 months of income/profits in the year, who effectively cannot pause. I’m afraid there is too much of that in the economy, making it fragile. Ideally, every lease, every loan, every contract, and every arrangement will be renegotiated so that the months of lockdown are neutral to both parties.
And then there is greed. Just like all the people being caught speeding over 100mph on empty freeways, I think there are a lot of people who see the lack of economic activity as an open opportunity to grab if only they’re the first to reopen. There are fewer competitors now, there are lots of potential customers itching for some entertainment, so the ambitious or greedy want to re-open ASAP so they can take advantage of this first-mover advantage.
Personally, I’m for limited reopening in counties and states that have very low cases, but with some strict distancing and mask-wearing rules still in place. But there is also the issue of movement and travel. Again, short of being an island nation that either keeps planes out or quarantines ALL arrivals with an ankle monitor, how do you stop people from other places from bring the virus back? So you have reopening of a few restaurants with sparse seating, maybe campgrounds and national parks in some areas, but not airline travel, concerts, hotels, conferences, etc. So it won’t look like much of a re-opening and people will continue to chafe.
Finally, as if I didn’t have enough SSC-controversial points in this post, I don’t like Trump, but I don’t think the lockdown or the recession will hurt his chances at reelection–and I think there’s a high chance he’ll win again. His waffling and timing of the lockdown was definitely late, but he can spin that to his followers. Yeah, he’s in charge during the ensuing recession, but he gave out checks with his name on them so he looks like a savior. The only thing I think that might hurt him is saying obviously stupid stuff like injecting bleach, that might turn off a few swing voters, but I don’t think it will last for many news cycles.
This is almost certainly true. The question is whether or not the words “too soon” add anything to the evaluation. If we’re burning the economy to the ground so shit can hit the fan two months from now instead of now, that doesn’t seem especially helpful.
Granted there’s a lot we can do to mitigate the effects that would make those two months valuable, but I have seen no attempts to do any of those things.
Attempts isn’t relevant until you have a strategy. None of the high profile people who are currently very strong on lockdown (say more bearish than the Gottleib or Manhattan Institute plans) has articulated a reasonable strategy to start preparing for. There is only so much testing you can do. Track and trace is only viable if you have testing capacity that seems 6+ months in the future based on current burn and buildup. Vaccines are too speculative to set any timeline around them, and therapeutics share the same weakness now that the possible low hanging fruit of Cloro+Zpack+Zinc isn’t a silver bullet (it might be effective to some extent, but not nearly enough to really change your plans). So what is the plan for lockdown bears? How could they even prepare for it?
The mechanism by which the second wave of the Spanish Flu was so deadly is pretty unique and interesting. The second wave refers to a more deadly strain of Spanish Flu that mutated from the first waves strain. Viruses usually ‘burn out’ if they become too severe, because they kill off their hosts before they can spread very much, or at least make it obvious to the host that they need to quarantine themselves or be restricted to a hospital. Since the second wave of the Spanish Flu occurred during WWII, many of the victims were soldiers deployed to the European battlefield. When they became critically sick, instead of confining themselves indoors, they were put on trains, ships, planes, etc. and sent back home or to public hospitals. This allowed the virus to have much more exposure to people than would occur under typical circumstances, and makes this type of virulence and death rate very unlikely to occur with the current coronavirus.
It’s not unfair because we really, genuinely were not ‘on the brink’ of one. The US and global economies weakened in 2019 (probably as a result of accidental over-tightening by the Fed trying to shrink its balance sheet combined with risk aversion surrounding the trade war), the US was in recovery and the rest of the world was showing signs of moving in that direction. Had there been no pandemic, unemployment would still be low, wages would still be growing, and it wouldn’t be totally crazy (although by no means the only possible outcome) to say we had five more years of growth in front of us.
Expansions don’t die of old age. Australia went a quarter century without a recession. There’s no really great reason to suspect there was going to be a 2020 recession without the epidemic and attendant lockdowns.
This is specific to some peculiarities about Australia, they avoided technical definitions of recessions for a long period but not in a way that is repeatable/imitable for larger countries.
Also, a lot of Australia’s growth came from shipping rocks and metal to China and thus piggybacking off China’s economy.
You can’t piggyback off others so much when you’re already the largest economy.
Actually they did it in a way that is eminently repeatable/imitable for larger countries. They kept a steady NGDP growth rate.
And how did they do that? No, its not the ‘they did monetary theory right’ answer, its a simple demographic answer. Australia has high levels of immigration and they specifically choose wealthy immigrants to admit. They had a per captia GDP recession in 2008, their UE rate jumped from 4% to 5.9% between August 2008 and May 2009, but it wasn’t a recession because they posted a very high immigration rate (over 2%, the highest in at least the past 40 years).
Likewise they posted an UE increase from 6% to over 7% in 2001-2002, but had a 10 year high in immigration in 2001.
My personal mind has changed from “we should open everything up immediately” to “in many places we’re being overly cautious to the point of ignoring real harm to people”, so take whatever I saw with whatever size piece of salt you prefer.
I don’t think greed or some need for financial well being is the primarily motivating factor – I think people want to live their lives. I think a lot of people want to see their friends, go to their neighborhood bars or restaurants and have those places continue to exist into the future – and I think that there are people (including myself) who are seriously suffering when they can’t do that. For instance, suicides aggressively spiked in Tennessee when they imposed stay at home restrictions.
Donald Trump is incompetent and has clearly made this crisis worse, but if lockdowns in my state continue past mid May I will vote for the incompetent the GOP is running against my Democratic governor solely on this single issue.
Thanks for bumping. For the record, right now I think the lockdown should be selectively eased. It was a good idea when the worst case scenario looked pretty bad, but right now quite a few things have changed. No, we do not have a treatment, nor a vaccine, nor a proper strategy. But that’s ignoring the pretty important things we do have:
– We know we can stop it. Whatever we do right now is working, so that’s a hard cap on “worst case scenario”. We’re definitely not going to a 5% of population dead scenario, no matter what. That’s a BIG relief.
– We know it’s not as bad as we thought. Two months ago we assumed >1% IFR with a potential of much higher numbers in case of overwhelmed health systems. Now we’re leaning towards <1% IFR, and since placing people on their stomach is much much cheaper than ventilating them, health systems are less likely to be overwhelmed.
True, this isn't a miracle cure. But, like I said, the very important thing it does is limit the worst case scenario, a lot. That's why lockdown under fog of war was the right decision, and that's much less so right now.
This being said, I think most discussion should focus on what "selectively eased" means, because that's the truly relevant question right now. I don't have strong opinions on that, but I very much like to see the conversation.
Disclaimer, re the "greed" comment: crisis is starting to affect me financially, possibly pretty bad in a couple of months.
On the other hand should it prove necessary in the future, Lockdown v2 is likely to have a lower compliance rate than the first one.
Lockdown v1 is likely to have a lower compliance rate in June than it did in March.
We’re not going there no matter what we do, because the virus is just not that deadly. Even in a scenario of completely unmitigated spread, we’d only lose <1% of the population.
Well yeah. That’s what I mean. But that’s hindsight – we had no idea what the real mortality is at the time. Now we know it’s just not that deadly, and we should reconsider the lockdown. Not back to normal (as if back to normal is even an option now…), but we can start talking options.
And speaking of options, the one I really don’t see mentioned, probably because it’s politically incorrect, is reverse quarantine. It’s much easier to determine a county is clear, so you can give it a “green” status and check only traffic between green and yellow/red areas.
We should reconsider the lockdowns, but we’re not going to, because the politicians like it and in the police state of New Jersey, the police like it. Got thrown out of a field in a park this morning (where I was flying a model helicopter, alone), along with a bunch of other people in other parts of the field, by a Sheriff’s Department officer who obviously had nothing better to do. Far as I can tell one of the major purposes or perks of government power at all levels is going around and ruining everyone else’s fun, so if you give them an excuse to do so, they’ll seize on it.
I touched on this by mentioning island nations. Once they have no new cases for 2 weeks, they can open up internally, as long as they keep the borders closed or strictly regulated. But a lot of island nations depend on tourism, so they might feel better having restaurants and hanging out with friends and family, but their economy won’t recover to the same point. Then again, some places were overly-touristed and might appreciate the opportunity to take back their beaches—or at least their short-term rental stock.
And I think a lot of the US internal economy depends on easy travel. That’s why I mentioned concerts and conferences, and even forgot about sporting events. A lot of people hop on planes to the next big city for business for 1-5 days, or drive to the races for the weekend with the family. So reopening one county or state at a time won’t bring back the economy (the airports and airplanes will still be empty, and so will the Boing and Airbus factories and suppliers, etc.). Not to mention the logistics of roadblocks to enforce it, let alone the strangeness of enforcing internal borders that the US has never enforced before.
Nybbler: see this is the attitude I would call selfish or entitled. Presumably, exercise is allowed but other outdoor activities are not. Presumably, you are aware of this, so you’re just hoping you won’t get caught. When caught, you complain about the heavy-handed police and say nothing about your rule-breaking. You know, we all get it: many outdoor activities are solo and naturally distancing. I can go hiking because it’s allowed for exercise, but I can’t go camping like I usually do.
I believe the rationale is to limit going out because there are always chance non-distancing (parking lot, restrooms, etc.), and also because when everyone goes out for fun, it’s no longer possible to keep your distance. Keeping everyone mostly isolated only works if people voluntarily stay isolated. Some places are starting to crack down and give out fines—France is one example where people were warned and then fined by the Gendarmes.
So saying we’re going to keep lockdowns for the reason that authorities like to bully the population is just nonsensical. There are lots of common sense reasons for the lockdown—we all know them even if we don’t like them, but you prefer to ignore them, which is disingenuous.
First of all, you are factually incorrect; all activity in county and state parks, including solo hiking and other solo exercise, is banned by order of the governor.
Second, we have a clash of values, which is that I put little to no moral weight on the law itself. That the Governor arbitrarily made a rule to bully the population (his claimed reason was that people weren’t social distancing in parks, so he had to close them entirely; classic collective punishment even if true) is not better than the police arbitrarily bullying the population on their own accord. It may be “selfish” to wish to engage in recreational activity without getting rousted by the police, but I’m not so selfless as to think it’s OK for the police to prevent that, not for the benefit of others, but for no benefit to anyone but merely to enforce the state’s arbitrary whim.
@The Nybbler
Just a comment on having no intrinsic respect for the law. It’s of strictly theoretical value because in this case I happen to thoroughly agree with you.
We (homo sapiens) have a pretty big coordination problem that’s not entirely solvable by non-aggression libertarianism – commons. Health is one of them – if a certain percentage of the population isn’t vaccinated, we don’t have herd immunity and he have epidemics that affect even some that did have the vaccine, or those that for medical reasons can’t have a vaccine. Or well, the classic example of thread depth in tires.
Add to this the studies we know of that say we’re much likelier to see the straw in the neighbor’s eye. For example asking husband and wife what percentage of chores each of them does will constantly sum over 100%.
Put the two together and your should be very careful when you say you’re above the law. If everybody does it, we’re wired to go WELL over 100%.
I don’t say I’m above the law. I’m not; the law has guns and I don’t. It’s plain old force and while most people choose to pretend otherwise (while carefully avoiding any situations which would put them in a position to face said force), I don’t. I say the law has little moral suasion.
If the law is solving a co-ordination problem (e.g. setting which side of the road to drive on), it’s an exception, but in this case it is not.
That’s an argument against saying it. It isn’t an argument about believing it or acting on the belief.
I only control my own actions. I should take account of any effect my actions have on other people, but that’s an argument for hypocrisy — pretending to endorse the rules you want other people to follow, but not following them yourself when you can get away with not doing so.
The situation where I see that as a real issue is jury nullification. If I am on a jury and defendant is charged with, and guilty of, some law that I think is unjust, my moral obligation is to vote to acquit, so that he will not be punished for doing something that, in my view, he had a right to do. But if everybody believes that and acts accordingly, it may become impossible to enforce many laws I approve of, because enough people disapprove of them, say 20%, so that a jury will usually have at least one such person on it.
@DavidFriedman
I just see it as an argument for adding a reflex nudge towards cooperation. The jury example is clear cut – you can follow the numbers and reach a nice, clean conclusion. But in most real life situations you don’t have this luxury – but you do know that the metaphorical percentages tend to add over 100%. Doesn’t matter if it’s the husband or the wife who overestimate their housework – on average, human beings overestimate their housework, I am a human being, therefore it’s a good idea to be just a bit more cooperative than I’d feel like. This would be the gist of my argument.
Not sure if your ever got to read EY’s Timeless Decision Therory. I’m pretty sure you’d like it. It’s not directly related to this conversation, but it’s a good practical exercise in abstracting the “I am a human being”.
We surely can’t lock down forever, so we can’t stop it if it doesn’t die out completely before the will/ability to lock down does, barring effective vaccines.
We’re under siege, and the walls are holding. But the enemy is still at the gates.
We also have improved testing capacity, despite widespread incompetence around this, in ways that meaningfully improve the ability to slow a resurgence via test-and-trace. In parts of California, for example, “essential” workers can now get tested even if asymptomatic, which matters a lot since these folks are both at highest risk of infection and of spreading infections to others.
My preferred solution would have been to make February 2020 99 days long, thereby postponing all human-set deadlines by 70 days (and then make every month after that one or two weeks longer than normal until the seasons got back into alignment).
Uhm… you know this is worst for the poorest, right? It takes care of the fixed expenses, but not the variables ones. Like gas for transport companies and… food for people. Poorer you are, bigger percentage of expenses is just survival.
There’s no “losing it”. If the lockdown had significant effect in NYC, and happened later or not at all, then hospitals in NYC would have been overwhelmed. This would have resulted in a combination of harsher triage, adding capacity in NYC (as was indeed done, and not nearly filled) and transferring patients elsewhere. And would likely have resulted in more deaths. But there’s no positive feedback here; the epidemic doesn’t get worse because hospital capacity is reached.
Despite Business Insider’s story, the second wave of the Spanish Flu pandemic was widespread and was deadlier everywhere it hit; it is believed (but never shown, as only the second wave virus was ever recovered) that it was a slightly more virulent strain, and it is known that getting the flu in the first wave provided immunity against the second. If that’s true, lockdowns which protected against the first wave were actually (in hindsight) counterproductive.
So are states and localities going to stop collecting taxes? Certainly New Jersey localities have not, my town has been quite adamant that everyone pays their property taxes on time or else.
The modern economy is not fragile compared to past economies. But “a few months” is not a short time, and the entire country or world cannot simply pause with little consequence.
I’ve seen this point multiple times that NYC hospitals weren’t overwhelmed. Can you link a source on that? Accounts seem to say differently.
I’m currently of at least two minds.
I don’t believe it’s possible to keep everyone safe. It’s too late to eliminate the virus entirely, as was done with past smaller potential pandemics. Vaccines and/or significantly improved treatments are likely to take longer to develop than we can possibly maintain a lockdown; a single year seems implausible for a continuous lockdown, and it took 20 or more years for AIDS to reach the stage of no longer being an automatic nearish term death sentence.
If it’s only a matter of time til I catch it, and my chances of surviving it are much the same whenever I get it, so long as my local hospitals are not overwhelmed, then where I am – with plenty of hospital capacity – lockdowns should be relaxed. Instead, each renewal of the lockdown seems to add more onerous rules.
I’m also seeing a nasty assymmetry in who this lockdown actually protects. I’m WFH, mostly protected from both catching the disease and being unable to afford necessities. A lot of people are stuck in harms way, either as essential workers at more risk of catching it than I am, or as freshly unemployed people wondering how long they can pay their bills.
I could pretty easily be convinced that the right thing to do currently, in places doing as well as the Bay Area (where I am), is to relax the lockdown enough that more people can work, moving carefully enough that the resulting increase in cases doesn’t overwhelm any local medical system.
All this goes out the window, if the risk of dying of it (having caught it) really is likely to decrease significantly over short periods of time. At that point, delay is valuable.
It also goes out the window if there’s no significant post-infection immunity, no vaccine (ever), and no treatment improvements. If people are just as likely to die the 5th time they catch it as they were the first time, then the only question is whether to implement some permanent measures to reduce the frequency with which people catch it.
I’m pretty much discounting contact tracing and quarantine as a way of doing that. If we can get it together to do that effectively, that would be great – but it doesn’t seem to me as if the US is likely to manage that. (At best, it will trace people who carry cell phones everywhere they go, and keep their bluetooth signal turned on, in spite of the effect on battery life, presumably because they use non-wired ear/headphones. Because the methods being proposed seem to be entirely technological so far…)
If we can keep the frequency down with contact tracing, that’s great. But I’m kind of expecting a permanent partial lock down, and, most likely, an under class that can’t work from home and/or can’t work at all, with a statistically reduced life expectancy.
One more time.
Everyone is invited to an online meetup on Mozilla Hubs, starting 2:00 P.M. Pacific time. It will start at the Parthenon [hub.link/Zd85BZs]. If there is a problem with that, or if more people appear than will fit — I think the limit is fifty — it will shift or expand to a meeting space I constructed [hub.link/q7PLxgT]. For details see the webbed announcement.
Mozilla Hubs provides a VR scene which multiple people can enter and move around in. The farther you are from someone the fainter his voice. That should make possible the sort of meetup that consists not of a lecture but of multiple simultaneous conversations. Wander around listening to what other people are talking about, join any conversation that seems interesting.
Just as happens in at least some realspace SSC meetups.
I tried to join, but my browser basically couldn’t handle it. I spent most of the time banging into walls, and lost connection a couple of times. I do wish there was a less system-intensive way to do it.
We had about sixteen people there, and the meetup lasted for a couple of hours.
If you want to try out the software, you can put in the link I gave and visit the Parthenon, or my meetup space, by yourself any time. You can even use one of them for your own meetup.
There is another one at the Parthenon, not organized by me, at 10:30 A.M. tomorrow morning, Pacific time.
Given the discussion below, how come that the US places that much political emphasis on abortion? As far as I can tell, it’s pretty much a non-issue in most European countries. Sure, there are always some smaller groups that protest, but even in Italy it seems like a pretty settled question.
It’s a non-issue in most European countries because most European countries have more restrictive laws than the US.
I don’t see how that answers the question. People are vociferous and angry and involved… on both sides of the argument in the States. In Europe it’s much more a non-issue for everybody – both those who are generally ‘pro-life’ and those who are ‘pro-choice’.
I think the majority of people in Europe couldn’t tell you what the laws concerning abortion are in their own country.
You’re correct, it does not explain why pro-choice people in the US vociferously defend and attempt to expand already unusually lax laws. That is very curious.
Do you think it would become a non-issue in the US if the laws of say France (on demand up to 12 weeks, no limit if two doctors agree that the woman’s health is endangered or that she would give birth to a child with an incurable illness) were adopted? I am certain it would not, and in fact I don’t think there would be much of a change in the discussion at all.
That’s my feeling too. I read – and enjoy – Kevin Williamson’s writing in National Review, and whenever he mentions abortion I suddenly get the impression that he’s really serious about the issue. If he was magically transformed into an Englishman or a Frenchman, I doubt that he’d say ‘Oh, that’s more like it – I don’t ever need to concern myself about abortion anymore’
Opposition creates polarization? American feminists would not be satisfied with the French law… but maybe they’d be happy with French law plus no major movement pushing for more restrictions?
I don’t think “Free abortion until birth or you are ENSLAVING FEMALE BODIES” is actually a popular position, but that voice gets a lot of airtime because somebody needs to fight the good fight.
Note that I think this works in the other direction as well.
I’m not sure whether they’d be satisfied with it as such, but I think if the anti-choice movement could somehow credibly commit to “French law, and that settles things forever” they would have a very compelling argument because it’s difficult to claim France is a patriarchal dystopia. But I don’t think they would want to do that. “Life begins at 12 weeks gestational age” is a weird position to take.
This, exactly. My personal take is that on-demand abortion should be legal until the fetus has reached a certain stage of development, probably somewhere in the 12-20 week range (though I’m not an expert on fetal development and would defer to someone who is). After that, abortion should only be performed if the mother’s life is at stake and/or the fetus is going to die anyway.
The problem is that the pro-life crowd doesn’t want that. I’m sure there are some individuals within the pro-life movement who’d be okay with that, but for the most part, it seems that the movement as a whole wants a complete ban on abortions and won’t be satisfied until they get it. If they support something like the French law, it’s because they see that as a stepping stone to full prohibition. So even if I’d otherwise be willing to support a ban on third term abortions with exceptions for health conditions, I don’t trust the opposition to allow those very necessary exceptions. You can criticize me for assuming bad faith, but it’s not without reason: There are some states that do ban late abortions, and I’ve heard too many horror stories of women who died because they were forced to give birth even though it’d put their own lives at risk, or women who were forced to carry fetuses that had no chance of survival. That, combined with the fact that late abortions are an extreme rarity even in the states that allow them, makes me skeptical of laws aimed at preventing them.
I think you’d be surprised. American culture is very individualistic, and American views on abortion – on both sides of the debate – are no exception. In Europe, abortion is largely justified as something necessary for the overall well-being of society; it’s beneficial not to have too many unwanted children around, especially if their parents can’t afford to take care of them. In America, abortion is largely justified as a part of an individual right to bodily autonomy, which makes compromises like “you can have an abortion, but only in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy” less palatable. On the flip side, those who believe the fetus to be a unique individual that itself deserves human rights are also going to be less willing to compromise.
Not really? That actually seems like the most natural and logical position to me. “Human life begins at conception” and “human life begins at birth” both seem like weirder positions to me, at least if you consider consciousness and self-awareness to be a part of what makes human life human. “Consciousness begins at conception” is almost certainly false and can only be justified through some belief in an immaterial soul, which isn’t very convincing to secularists. As for birth, it’s a very obvious and useful Schelling Point, but I think few people would seriously argue that there’s any real dramatic mental difference between a fetus that’s about to be born and an infant that was just born. I don’t know if 12 weeks is exactly where the line should be drawn, but “when the fetus has achieved a certain amount of cerebral development” seems like the most ethical place to set a boundary.
I think a focus on consciousness and self-awareness is a fairly modern, individualistic thing. Drawing the line at birth seems most “natural,” in that it is what most societies did in terms of practical enforcement before the modern era. Abortion was not highly regulated until the 1900s.
I don’t deny the ethical concerns by any means, but the practical concerns seem so much more relevant when we’re talking about abortion laws, as opposed to moral or philosophical beliefs. The fundamentals are just different prior to birth. For example, if I believe that life begins at conception, can we really treat that as we would a born life when an embryo can split and then recombine, or partially combine and cause a parasitic twin situation? That’s not life that can neatly be protected under the existing framework for regulating human life. You don’t have to consider a fetus essentially non-human to consider it incompatible with the legal concept of human life. It seems like a false dichotomy to me.
LadyJane’s standard is very close to the traditional standard in English law of “quickening” as to when the fetus is a person for purposes of inheritance law.
I judge the politics differently: I think that banning abortion after the first trimester (aka after quickening) unless it’s a “life of the mother” case would take a huge amount of support from the pro-life movement. The thinkers and people who get on TV wouldn’t find it satisfactory, but the mass of emotionally-involved opponents would be a lot smaller.
@SamChevre: There are only seven states in the US where late abortion is allowed without any restrictions: Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont. In the rest of the country, the limit is either somewhere between 20-25 weeks, or at the point of “viability” (which is currently around 24 weeks, but keeps getting earlier as technology improves), with exceptions made if the mother’s health is at risk or if the fetus can’t survive. Here in New York, the limit is 24 weeks.
I could be wrong, but I’m doubtful that moving the limit up from 24 weeks to 12 weeks would satisfy the pro-life movement or take the wind out of their sails. Nor do I think that banning late abortions in the seven remaining states where they’re not already illegal will make much of a difference.
Re New York law: the Reproductive Health Act of 2019 repealed all remaining state laws restricting abortion and explicitly said that abortion until the 24th week was legal. So I think late-term abortion is legal in New York now, or possibly illegal but without any possible penalty or enforcement mechanism (whatever that means).
@BBA: Yes, until the 24th week. That’s exactly what I said. “Late abortion” typically refers to third trimester abortions (i.e. those performed after the 26th week), which are still prohibited in New York except under specific circumstances (e.g. the fetus is entirely non-viable, the mother’s life or physical health is at risk).
EDIT: I did some research and it turns out the new law does change the level of offense. Previously, an abortion performed after the 24th week would’ve been considered a distinct felony in its own right and literally treated as a form of homicide, whereas it now falls into some broad “unauthorized medical treatment/medical misconduct” category. This is a lesser offense, since the penalty has been reduced from definite long-term incarceration to censure, revocation of one’s medical license, fines, and public service. The revised law also spares those who induce the death of a fetus through non-medical means (i.e. poisoning, assault, murder of the mother) from being charged with homicide for the death of the child, although by definition any such act would still be a serious criminal offense regardless.
The other major change that comes with the new law is that non-viable fetuses can now be aborted, even after the 24 week mark. Previously, the mother’s life had to be at risk; even if the fetus was bound to die before birth, the mother would still be forced to carry it until it died.
Interesting/good point. I was going to get into quickening being a theological standard, but thought it might get too abstract. I didn’t realize it had legal recognition in inheritance laws. There’s no question that prior to the 1900s, unborn children were regarded as human life, but the criminal code didn’t treat them the same way. That’s why I see the “when does human life begin?” question as rather unhelpful in dealing with abortion laws, or laws of any kind–“personhood” is more relevant. I imagine the inheritance law chose to define personhood there because they needed to split up the estate without too much fear of a future challenge by an unknown heir. Before pregnancy tests, quickening was a reasonably reliable sign that you needed to set aside a share for the unborn child.
My own personal opinion? Religion.
Europe is more or less post-Christian now, and it doesn’t much matter which denomination you mean. The Protestant state churches have all obediently gone along with the Zeitgeist either enthusiastically or dragged along by legislation; the smaller Protestant free churches aren’t big enough or important enough to have any real political clout; the Catholic church has been embroiled in so much scandal, and has engendered enough rancorous and organised opinion and activism against it (to flog a dead horse, Richard Dawkins isn’t one whit concerned about the Church of England, even though as an atheist he should be very much opposed to ‘this is the state church established by law’ – I haven’t seen him protesting about the bishops in the House of Lords – but he had very definite things to say about the Catholic church and the Pope).
Look how Ireland has modernised in social opinion over the past forty years – it has flipped from very heavily and publicly Catholic to “we’ve got divorce, contraception, co-habitation, gay marriage, openly agnostic and atheist and gay and lesbian government ministers, and now abortion! yay us!”
In America, the religious section of the population was numerous enough, organised enough, and able to wield enough political clout that abortion could be opposed successfully (by which I mean “still is a live issue” rather than “never legalised”).
I tend to agree. The US has a lot of nasty disagreements that basically boil down to religion at second hand. (Or has had them in my adult life time; in some cases, they’ve stopped making such a giant fuss about a particular issue.)
Not all the people involved are religiously motivated, but a lot of the heat comes from those who are.
I suspect part of the problem is that their constitution won’t let them make their arguments explicitly about religion. So instead it’s about enforcing some element of “morality” that turns out to be “what our church requires”.
Mostly though, showing your friends and neighbours what a good whatever-religion-follower you are is much more profitable (socially) here, and it’s easier to do that by trying to enforce (some of) its rules outside the church, rather than by following those you personally find inconvenient.
If you tried to show what a good Anglican/Presbyterian/Methodist/whatever you were in the UK, you’d probably be seen as a bit weird, though tolerated/supported as an eccentric. In the US, unfortunately, you wouldn’t be so weird.
It is quite obvious when you have group that sincerely believes that doing something is evil and there is a group that sincerely believes that not doing this is evil then you will have a genuine conflict.
“Europe is more or less post-Christian now” +1
Similarly agitating for changing abortion laws in Saudi Arabia will likely go nowhere, so it is not particularly active topic.
Countries that have both groups will have more or less active discussions. See Poland with large protests demanding more access to abortion and official attempt to change law to further restrict abortion that gathered over 830 000 signatures (in country with total population below 40 million).
There also seems to be a reactionary affect. The late 2000s saw a huge wave of anti-gay marriage measures. Not because gay marriage was becoming less popular, but because it was becoming more popular, and hence an actual threat.
Yes, and why do you think that might be? Is it because Dawkins is a hating hater who hates and is doing it just because ewwwwww, icky Catholics, let’s kick them while they’re down?
Or could it possibly be because the Church of England has, as you yourself note, gone along with the Zeitgeist while the Catholic Church has dug its heels in at every turn and insisted on its… old-fashioned, shall we say, way of doing things? In much the same way as New Atheists have gotten all sorts of flack for opposing Islam more vigorously than they have opposed either Protestantism or Catholicism, because Islam is even more resistant to secularisation than they are?
I mean… congratulations, you have cunningly deduced that a prominent atheist is opposed to religious people in direct proportion to just how religious they are and just how much their religion influences their actions. That sure is a display of rank hypocrisy, somehow.
A significant part is because the issue wasn’t settled through legislation but instead through a Court decision that created a right which ends up applying *only* to a woman seeking an abortion from an established medical provider. The same logic of Right To Privacy can’t be used for protection for anything else, *especially* those things which those on the right care about.
The gay marriage issue was also settled through the Supreme Court, and doesn’t generate that much controversy anymore.
That particular one is due to all the arguments against it that people used looking very damn stupid in a context where it has been legal for years and the sky staying aloft.
No more so than the arguments about “safety” or whether or not abortion is really an important part of Planned Parenthood’s mission are for the abortion debate, yet those are used to eke out a little ground by the entrenched sides.
Gay marriage is not considered to be a murder by any actually existing religious group.
Yeah but some consider it a mortal sin, which isn’t supposed to be any better
Don’t be absurd. Mortal sins admit degrees of gravity, too. Murder is worse than adultery, for example. As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it,
I think the fact that 37 states already had legal gay marriage when Obergefell was decided played a role there. When Roe was decided, 30 states had it banned and 16 more had only narrow rape/incest/health exceptions.
Most of those were also a result of court decisions in the preceding years. Only 11 states legalized gay marriage by legislative statute or referendum, with 5 more confirming its legality with legislative statute by the time Obergefell was decided.
This, but because a court decision tends to be an either-or thing, and not a reasonable compromise. In Europe, legislators could get together and work out a compromise (abortion up until 12 weeks, then only after application to a medical committee, which is a minuscule fraction of them and practically always granted). And perhaps due to the particular American mindset, where every cause is a “war on” something. Drugs, immigration, freedom, terror…
That is not to say there isn’t conflict. Back when (70s or 80s), there were a couple of radical ministers and other religious people who were quite outspoken against abortions. But we’ve had our compromise for something like forty years, and changing it doesn’t seem to be high on the agenda for anybody. Recently, there was a dispute about “twin abortions”, whether it should be legal to remove one of a set of twins (which for medical reasons has to be performed later than 12 weeks, I think). This caused a ruckus, with the religious stating that if you can carry one to birth, you can carry both, and the feminists dressing up in full Handmaid’s garb to protest this violent oppression of women and their right to govern their own bodies. I think these are the fringes, and seriously, there is like two of these procedures a year, and always for medical reasons. And there was, I think, some voices on Women’s Day arguing for raising the limit to 18 weeks, and how horrible it is for women that they have to apply to a committe of old men, blah di blah. Again, it’s not high on anybody else’s agenda – the current compromise is good enough for most that there are other things to worry about.
Yeah, sure it is. That’s why something like 30 or 40 state legislatures have enacted changes in abortion laws over the last 16 years or so, and why several different novel challenges to Roe v. Wade are working their way to SCOTUS, including a few states with outright bans.
Note that the euro laws are rather conservative compared to what abortion advocates push for in America.
OTOH, I think it’s weird that Europe doesn’t seem to care. Because if you assign pretty much any non-zero moral value to the issue, it instantly becomes a strong contender for Worst Thing Ever.
That is because Europeans, unlike Americans, do not think of everything through the lense of morality. Morality is not an operative concept in how Europeans think about and discuss policies, or really anything else. I believe this is due to the fact that the presupposition of shared goals is still much stronger in Europe. Political disagreements are seen as disagreements about how to get to that place that we all presumably want to get. Thus, when the vast majority of society agrees on a policy and what its consequences are, for a few people to come and say “but this is morally abhorrent!” would be viewed as… somehow absurd. Talk of morality as such tends to be perceived as kind of… childish? Immature? Which I do think is enabled by the essential post-religiosity of Europe that Deiseach points out.
This isn’t to say that people are above invoking ethics when it suits them. The Germans in particular love to do it in support of their atrocious medical “ethics”. But it’s invoked, if at all, to support the majority position, not the minority. The dissenting minority will point out consequences and ask “guys, seriously, is this really what you want? ’cause it’s kind of absurd and unreasonable”, not cry “but this is unethical!”. Somehow it feels like “unreasonable” seems to have a stronger pull on Europeans than “unethical”. My theory is that this has to do with how people determine their identities: Europeans want to be intelligent and rational, so accusing them of unreasonableness forces them to think and defend their status as rational beings. Accusing them of being “unethical” just gets you dismissed as a weirdo because morality is not part of people’s self-image in the same way that it is in America.
I find it unreasonable to be dismissive of morality.
If one were to assume for the sake of argument that right and wrong don’t matter or don’t exist, then why should we bother having laws in the first place?
I suppose a flippant phrasing of “the European position” would be: without laws, society turns into a mess, and nobody wants to live in a mess because it’s really unpleasant, so let’s not be stupid and let’s have laws, shall we?
And more specifically, without the moral angle, why restrict abortion at all?
Surely you don’t just want to have laws for the sake of having laws and expect that to make life pleasant/unmessy.
For example, if there were only 10 laws total, and they all had to do with parking regulations, this would not be a pleasant and unmessy state of affairs, right?
So some laws must be better than others. Now the question is what makes a good/right law and what makes a bad/wrong law?
It feels to me like to even ask that question once again presupposes that you are thinking about the matter in terms of morality. And what I’m saying is precisely that that’s just not a good framework for making sense of Europeans’ policy preferences and disagreements.
I’m not saying Europeans don’t have intuitions that you might want to call moral intuitions. They find certain acts icky or grossly indecent or what have you. Certain things are just Not Done. All of that is there. But they do not enter into the discourse as “but that’s immoral!”.
And so there is an answer to your question that does not take resourse to moral language. It would probably not be most people’s answer because most people haven’t thought about the question and would probably be kind of dumbfounded by it and find it a weird thing to ask. But here’s what I think is a decent rationalisation of their attitude: to simply have unrestricted abortion would make a lot of people uncomfortable and they probably wouldn’t want to live in a society where that’s a thing. It’s also not really clear who would benefit from totally unrestricted abortion, so why make a whole lot of people uncomfortable for no reason? That’s not going to yield a nice society to live in.
Of course not, why would you think that anyone does that?
“Moral correctness” as an answer has been out of fashion in some circles for two centuries, and is still very much out of fashion in Europe.
Which explains why abortion is not a burning political issue, because if you remove the moral question, there is no question left basically.
On the other hand, climate change is just fine as an issue, because it’s a question of policy consequences, and if nothing gets done about climate change, we’re all going to die and wouldn’t that be horrible? Of course, I’m not at all saying that Europeans are rational consequentialists or anything like that. People are as irrational and tribal just as they are everywhere else. My claim is solely about which terms and frameworks are acceptable in European discourse – and that this explains the absence of certain issues because they cannot be meaningfully discussed outside certain frameworks.
One thing that I now wonder about: is there anything that’s a hugely contentious political issue in Europe, but a non-issue in the US?
EDIT: I should add that there are some things in European political discourse that look like they may be moral arguments, but they are not. They are, in fact, appeals to “don’t be like the Nazis”, which is considered a terminal good.
European here, chiming in in support of Creutzer.
Government and morality together make a notoriously bad combination. Here’s a prime example from Mussolini:
So Europeans generally Just Don’t Go There. A European state is not an ethical or (God forbid) a spiritual entity. It’s exactly what Mussolini does not want it to be: it’s a board of directors organized to achieve material prosperity and relatively peaceful conditions of life.
why should we bother having laws in the first place?
To live peacefully even though we have different personal preferences.
without the moral angle, why restrict abortion at all?
Why has Germany (almost) banned smoking? Because people with personal preference for a ban on smoking have prevailed. I don’t recall anybody saying that smoking is immoral. Such a claim would probably even harm the anti-smoking case.
what makes a good/right law and what makes a bad/wrong law?
Is the law going to increase peace and prosperity?
So is it “we don’t discuss morality” with a wink and a nod (and presumably, codewords), or is Europe really utilitarian enough to be destined for a Repugnant Conclusion?
Repugnant conclusion are artificial situation without winning move. Once you have understood that, you have understood their lack of use in real life.
But in practice, even the euthanasia debate is generally framed in a utilitarian way, and one attempt to frame it in the “sacred life” angle was generally frowned upon (the opposant to it prefer to use the too much power easy abusable by the doctors). Another example was that even people that I consider really into religion were shocked by the one MP who choose to use the Bible as an argument in a session.
I think it’s two factors:
One, most European countries have more restrictive laws about abortion than the US (at federal level). In Germany, for example, abortion is technically illegal but will not be punished if certain criteria are met. Doctors can’t advertise that they perform it.
There are some groups that protest this and want the law to be more liberal, but most people, including most feminists, are pretty OK with the status quo. Religious opponents of abortion seem to focus on persuading individual women to keep the child instead of trying to change the law.
And secondly, people in the US on both sides have deliberately been persuaded into an emotional frenzy. It’s a war on women, or it’s industrial level baby killing. This is because only two parties in the US have any chance of winning major elections, so an emotional issue like this is a welcome opportunity to make the other side look monstrous.
I’ve always suspected that this and similar polarizing issues are constantly brought into focus because they get people to use up their time and energy on something relatively unimportant, and therefore reduce their ability to get serious about the various bigger and more substantial problems the nation has that nobody in power wants to be forced to deal with.
It seems to me that there’s a lot of path dependence in which issues get politicized. For example, people make a big deal about (perceived) food safety in the EU, but it’s a complete non-issue in the US.
European countries have tons of laws about food safety, but is that the same thing as it being a politicised issue? Are there major political disagreements around the subject?
See Brexit and chicken quality discussions.
Could you elaborate, please?
My recollection is that anti-brexit rhetoric focused a great deal on how if we left the EU, we’d end up being flooded with poor quality, welfare-free, chlorine-soaked chicken from America.
And we’d be too stupid to read the labels and a make an informed choice about whether we wanted to buy it or not.
One of the argument against Brexit was “without EU regulations, the Tories will relax food standards and import shit-tier food from Murrika which will make us all fat and stupid”.
Specifically, the talking point was about chlorinated chicken. Apparently it won’t happen.
Food safety politicized for the sake of protectionism.
I see. But was it just a talking point, or were people actually in disagreement about the issue, i.e. was anyone saying “yes, we really should relax food safety regulations”?
It was never really about chlorinated chicken. That’s just a good headline.
It’s about food safety, environmental and welfare standards as a whole.
As far as I know, the EU thing’s a bit of a red herring too. It’s not like the UK didn’t have any food standards pre-EEC.
But as part of the EU, it would be almost impossible to roll back those standards.
Now they can do it, and import the crap food.
But do “they” want to? Because otherwise it’s just a talking point, not a political disagreement.
(It may look like I’m shifting goalposts here, but I’m not. I totally concede that this shows that it’s just fine to call food safety a “politicised issue”. Rather, what I’m doing is asking a follow-up question: given that it’s politicised, is it, more specifically, the subject of disagreement?)
“They” might not want to, but “they” will have no choice once the UK becomes America’s bitch now that it refused to be an equal partner in the EU. The US hasn’t taken the EU ban on chlorine chicken, raising the issue of agricultural imports every round of negotiations. Without the clout of the EU, does the UK really have a choice?
The chlorinated chicken issue was always more about being America’s bitch than about food safety.
Thank you for clarifying!
There was also the story about Eastern Europeans getting worse food for the same price.
To what extent is the European hostility to genetically modified crops a religious issue, with “religion” broadly defined? Part of it is presumably just an excuse for agricultural protectionism, but is a large part hostility to what feels unnatural, hence polluted?
Is the European enthusiasm for doing things to prevent climate change in part a substitute for religion? Most of Europe is far enough north so that warming is as likely to make the climate more attractive as less — the countries where there is most reason to be worried are either very hot already or very low lying. But those are not the countries willing to do expensive things to reduce CO2 output.
Similarly for the anti-nuclear sentiment that resulted in Germany shutting down reactors at the same time they were trying to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels.
Now I’m wondering if there is a general pattern of more enthusiasm for secular “religions” in the absence of conventional ones. A possible counterexample would be communism in Russia, which I think was a pretty religious society c. 1918. Is the U.S. less inclined to such things than Europe, or is it only that European enthusiasms feel more religious to Americans than American enthusiasms do?
Yes, absolutely. Same thing for nuclear power.
I suppose it is in the same way that American-style progressivism is a substitute for religion – in fact, in an even more uninteresting way, since I don’t think anyone has managed to tell a story about European environmentalism that is analogous to a certain story that has been told about the Puritan roots of American progressivism. 😀
My own impression is that this isn’t really supported. That is to say, Europeans don’t quite make up for their lack of enthusiasm for conventional religion with extra enthusiasm for secular issues. (Unless my perception of the enthusiasm of American progressives in comparison is very miscalibrated.) Europeans are just less enthusiastic overall (and in some European cultures, being too enthusiastic, just like being too optimistic, is seen as kind of gauche).
@David Friedman
I think many European enthusiasms have a hint of religious feeling about them.
My Guardian-reading friends who are anti-GM crops would be horrified at the suggestion that agricultural protectionism could be part of their mindset…. they are anti because, as you say, GM is unnatural, untested, and unwholesome.
The climate change issue has even more religious feeling about it. We were tempted in the garden of Eden, partook of the fossil fuels, and are now paying for our sins. There is hope of redemption but we must repent!
It is also true that when my same Guardian-reading friends quote Michael Mann or James Hansen, it really seems as if they’re quoting their high priests. And you know how they refer to heretics…..
Germany seems something of a special case – their relationship with nature and the environment goes back a long way with deep roots. But there, too, I sense a religious flavor to the Energiewende.
As Deiseach points out above, we in Europe are effectively ‘post-Christian’ and as many people have observed, quite a few environmentalists are people who would have been fairly fundamentalist Christians of a few generations ago.
You’re right! I may have to take back my above assertion that the connection isn’t very interesting. German culture in particular seems to have a lot of thinking about sin going on. The holocaust ist basically the new Fall of Man, too.
Damn hippies. I want my glowing tomatoes.
Well, the environment affects whether we live or die.
a traditional focus of religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Products_produced_from_The_Simpsons#Tomacco
A possible counterexample would be communism in Russia, which I think was a pretty religious society c. 1918.
I don’t feel it’s a counterexample. Russian right-wing became really ugly after 1905. Russians eventually overthrew the regime and banned the far right organizations. (This wasn’t the communist revolution yet.)
It’s plausible that religion in Russia formed such a tight bond with monarchy (and its propaganda) that the crumbling of monarchy left everybody confused enough to redirect their enthusiasm towards secular religions such as communism.
It think Europeans have a greater distrust for modernism and technology than Americans. Maybe it’s because Europeans burned themselves with modernist ideologies (fascism and communism), maybe it’s because European countries have older traditions e.g. people can just walk down the street and notice that centuries-old buildings look nicer than the modern ones.
Distrust of modernity ties togheter anti-GMO, anti-global warming, anti-nuclear sentiments, and even the more fringe positions such as anti-vax and anti-5G.
Does that also mean that the SF Europeans read is more likely to be steampunk, less likely to be high tech futures, than what Americans read? Or that historical novels are more popular, SF less, in Europe? Or fantasy more popular, science fiction less?
So far as authors are concerned, my feeling is that science fiction authors are mostly Americans, although that’s biased by the fact that English is the only language I know well enough to read books in, so mostly a comparison between England and the U.S.. I think fantasy has a much larger fraction of top authors English than science fiction. For two huge examples, Tolkien and Pratchett.
I think all of these, maybe steampunk isn’t really big, but science fiction tends to be dystopian.
In fact I struggle to think of European science fiction that is not dystopian, maybe Lem’s Solaris which is neither dystopian nor utopian or maybe the comics series Valérian and Laureline which is sometimes considered a precursor to Star Wars.
In terms of contemporary pop culture, the biggest European science fiction franchise is Warhammer 40K, which is as dystopian as it gets.
And Rowling. I think she said she took inspiration for certain locations in her books form various places in Edinburgh.
And Tolkien based the Shire on the English countryside where he grew up.
Outside the Anglosphere, Sapkowski got big in the fantasy genre with the Witcher franchise, and Eco was arguably the most prominent modern author in the historical fiction genre.
Lem SF is certainly not overly optimistic. Even Solaris is about our failure in face of something truly unknown.
For example Fiasco by Lem is a really great story about the first contact. It is not going to be a spoiler that it is ending in a complete mess (if someone will read it – beginning is a bit weird, later it gets better).
Dukaj (not translated into English?) ranges from mildly optimistic through pessimistic into unbelievably pessimistic. Even in cases of high tech it is far away from Star Trek optimism. From what I remember in Perfect Imperfection character get resurrected multiple times on the first page page of the story, universes are routinely created, brain simulation is low tech etc but it is hard to describe it as an optimistic vision of a future.
Many minor SF writers were writing stories that were clear allegories of a communist regime, generally not optimistic at all. Even in cases of regime described to be failing.
—
BTW, it is quite popular to have SF rooted in history. All examples from Dukaj because I really like his books.
For example an alternate history with science fiction elements set in Tsarist Russia (Lód by Dukaj).
Or SF set in future but deeply rooted in a local history (Xavras Wyżryn by Dukaj).
Or Other Songs (again by Dukaj) set in universe ruled by Aristotle’s metaphysics with mix of SF themes and historic themes.
Because it got settled via the courts both the pro and the anti side think they have a chance of changing the status quo. European abortion laws were written by european parliaments, and generally speaking, all the main parties back the law as it is. That shuts down the debate because it is obviously futile – changing a law which currently has the support of 80+ percent of your national assembly is just not in the cards.
… note here that it seems to me the republican party is “pro-life” mostly because the supreme court keeps them from having to actually legislate the line their rhetoric implies – European conservatives are in favor of the status quo because locking up a lot of doctors and teenage girls would be obvious electoral suicide, but in the US pols get to grandstand without having to follow that up with legislation and enforcement efforts.
I think your last paragraph is key – both sides can afford extreme rhetoric because neither side has to put their position to a real vote. If they did, I suspect anything other than “pretty close to the current position” would lose badly, at least at the national level.
The downside is it turns every Supreme Court appointment into a screaming match where both sides stake out positions they don’t really mean (as Tara Reade is discovering).
I think I disagree with “anything but status quo” being a loser. You are going to get the vast, vast majority of the right voting for a total ban. A surprising amount of moderates I know are, if not anti, very uncomfortable with abortion; that doesn’t make for them even showing up to vote. I’m not sure if there’s enough people left who actually vote to save it after that. This is entirely my impression, though.
Because they have been staking out an extreme position for decades, and would find it difficult to recant. I agree with this, I just think it would promptly result in a landslide where they lost more or less every single seat up for election. Because actually locking up teenage girls and doctors by the thousands would not be popular, and conservative parties that have not been riling themselves up for decades can see this, so refrain from doing it, or indeed talking about abortion at all. (Because if they are not going to change the law, which they are not, the entire subject is a looser for them)
27% of Republicans describe them as pro-choice, I think the number would be significantly higher if the issue were actually up for a vote:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/244709/pro-choice-pro-life-2018-demographic-tables.aspx
No one wants their daughter to come home from college with an unplanned pregnancy.
This indicates a lack of familiarity with what the pro-life side actually advocates.
@Alexander Turok
That’s higher than I expected, but I would note that if you are using leaned party ID as a metric there’s more “defectors” on the left than on the right here.
This works, but only if you work under the assumption that the anti-abortion folks are lying about their reasons in a way where they will immediately abandon their principles when faced with an only slightly more immediate risk. Most of them won’t have pregnant daughters at that moment, after all. For the equivalent, I could say this:
I’m not sure I know how many republicans who are currently superficially anti-abortion would crumble under the slight pressure of their possibly non-extant daughter possibly getting pregnant out of wedlock and possibly wanting an abortion, but I’m also unsure how many democrats who are superficially pro-abortion are uncomfortable with it in the “well, I would NEVER do that myself, but…” way and would vote against or refrain from voting.
I think one big factor is federalism. Most Euro countries have settled on a reasonable and uniform middle ground that a majority of people can live with. That doesn’t work in America for two reasons:
– We have blue states with liberal regimes that are too liberal for many people, so they organize to stop it, and we have red states with conservative regimes that are too conservative for many people, so they organize to change it. Note also that once you have the level of institutional organization on an issue that this country has on abortion, it becomes fairly self-perpetuating–if Roe was overturned tomorrow, do you think pro-life orgs would disband on the ground that it was now up to the states, or get to work on restricting abortion in blue and purple states? Can you imagine circumstances under which pro-choice orgs would hang it up?
– It means there’s a real lack of trust that a facially fair accomodation won’t be undermined by enforcement differences or minor regulations in different localities. For example, if I were a German looking at a German law that barred third trimester abortions except when medically necessary, I would be confident that the exemption would in fact work, but if Louisanna did that, I’d assume that the exemption was accompanied by fine print that would make it worthless except, perhaps, to a few wealthier/well connected families. Note that disparities in health care access also contributes to this.
Altho, of course, the biggest reason is probably that it’s a big important issue that has nothing to do with economics, and in U.S. politics–with one major party being nominally on the left, but beholden to wealthy urban donors, and the other on the right, but a consistent interest in appealing to working class people anyway–that is a real golden goose.
A few thoughts to inject into the conversation.
The US religious history on abortion is more complex than people are acknowledging. Before Roe v. Wade, there may have been more vocal opposition to abortion bans, than the opposite.
Even post Roe, many religious organizations we identify as “pro-life” now had much more modulated views. The Southern Baptist Convention actually supported the Roe v. Wade ruling at the time it was issued, saying:
The history of abortion in the US can’t be separated from things like the absence of universal healthcare, the generally puritan impulses about sex, sex education and birth control and the easier ability in the US political system to create and foment wedge issues.
Agreed.
Note that part of what you’re seeing is the widespread adoption of Catholic arguments by Evangelicals, as they looked for better arguments. Until the 1960’s both opposition to eugenics and opposition to segregation were mostly Catholic concerns.
There was a huge and violent debate about abortion in France in the 60-70. The christian at the time had a lot of political power which they abuse by for example banning newspaper and controlling the unique television channel. Today, they don’t, in part because of these abuse, and neither does their at the time primary opponent, the communist.
I honestly think this is going to be a non issue in the next twenty years in USA. Like France in the 70 and Canada in the 90, the religious have lost the war but haven’t yet surrendered. They are going to lose more and more symbol as time goes, and abortion will probably be one of the first to go.
So we reached a point when I welcome a discussion of an abortion as a distraction from red hot CW topic of the day, great.
I do not think that is more complicated than that there is a much large contingent of people in the US that subscribes to “abortion is murder” as an article of religious faith than in Europe, combined with the fact that majority does not subscribe to that. Abortion is also unusually polarizing in Poland, but not quite to US levels, I think because “abortion is basically murder” crowd has a clear majority there.
What is somewhat puzzling is that despite that the US indeed has on paper lighter legal restrictions on abortion than many European countries. Probably it is because people who would prefer some but not absolute restriction tend to align with pro choice absolutists, since “abortion is murder” is a position that does not lent itself to compromise.
All the coronavirus update news I’m reading is depressing, and I’m not even interested enough to get into the latest slapfight over what Trump did/didn’t say/mean.
So let’s have some silly gossip-magazine fluff of the kind I would never ordinarily read or have any interest in instead! 🙂
Kanye West is officially a billionaire (though he’s still disputing his exact valuation with Forbes; they say he makes the $1 billion mark, he claims he’s worth $3 billion).
I have to say, I’m impressed. I was vaguely aware of the guy as a rapper but I couldn’t tell you any of his songs (I’ve probably heard at least one but I wouldn’t know that was him) and of course all the celeb nonsense with the Kardashians, but as I say, I tend to avoid that kind of gossip-column entertainment news so I knew no more.
I’m impressed because (a) I didn’t think there was that much money in rapping and self-publicity (b) even with the fashion/sportswear brand, that’s something that often fails – all kinds of sports stars etc. in the past have tried launching their own brands without much success (c) the conspicuous consumption of the lifestyle erroneously led me to believe he and his family were spending the money as fast as they made it and the end result would eventually be bankruptcy.
So congratulations, Kanye!
If you’re actually interested in his music, you should check out My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It is, by far, his best album, and it has his best hook (in Power).
Nah Watch The Throne is better.
+1 for Watch the Throne.
Eh, Graduation will always be my favorite.
All these kids are recommending things made in the last decade.
Kanye is kind of old news, in that he’s only occasionally current pop and his maybe-one-hit-wonder stuff is fifteen years old. I’m someone who appreciates going to the source on things. Hey Mama, Gold Digger, and Jesus Walks are the songs that made Kanye. Hey Mama especially makes me personally feel things because mine passed at about that time and it just reminds me about how little of my life and accomplishments she got to see.
I actually don’t know how it charted but it’s not a bad view into the man rather than just the artist. Gold Digger was probably the bigger song at the time.
But his money is in production. Kanye isn’t just Kanye, Kanye is a businessman. He’s got a label (more than one, I think). That sort thing is common in ‘rapping’, the whole industry is generous to really successful artists: Everyone has learned the lesson of the Beatles.
Almost all his wealth comes from his clothing brand Yeezy’s.
What I find more interesting: apparently he disclosed that he owns $300,000 of livestock. What is that?
He’s going all in on Red tribe culture?
Does he actually own and have possession of the livestock, or is he simply in cattle futures?
He has a big ranch out in Wyoming, which he bought last year, but I don’t know how much ranching he’s actually doing.
Wow, I’ve been visiting SSC for three years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen an open thread approach 2,000 comments.
Get out of the house, people! See a good movie! Have a nice dinner out! Hang out at a brewery with friends!
Oh, wait…
If I may quote The Simpsons, “Can’t you see this barnyard noise guessing game is tearing us apart?”
@Bobo..
I’ll add another comment to the thread, on the topic of…….your screen name.
After seeing it for a while I realized it looked to me like one of those magic eye images, which I couldn’t focus on properly, which was weird, but weirder still was that when I stopped to think about it, I didn’t know how to pronounce it. This bugged me, and I had to simplify matters by deciding that it should read as ‘Bobo-Bob’, which I suppose is as good a Bob as any.
At that point it occurred to me that maybe it was a name that came from Rowan Atkinson saying the name ‘Bob’, but I dismissed that as unlikely and too Anglophilic.
That would have been the end of the matter, except for the slight worry that you might be offended by some other anonymous commenter thinking of you as ‘Bobo-Bob‘ when you think of yourself as ‘Bob-o-Bob’.
As I preferred the sound of the former, I thought I’d stick with that, and not worry too much about offending you as you’d never know…. But then out of the blue I wondered if in a fit of quirkiness you thought of yourself as more of a ‘Bob-ob-ob’. Disconcerted, I once again resolved to see and think ‘Bobo-Bob’, and hoped that would be the end of it.
Unsurprisingly, just when I was least expecting it, I saw a comment of yours and your screen name jumped out at me as ‘B-Ob-O-Bob’, which is surely one of the rarer Bobs of the world, but it takes all sorts.
I’ll cut a long story short – there are heaps of Bobs, Bo’s, Obs, and Obo’s in many and various combinations, hidden in your screen name. Too many to get my head around! Perhaps you could put me out of my misery and confess to your own pronunciation of your name?
ETA momentarily lost amid the cacophony of intermingling Bobnesses was one version I thought particularly fetching – ‘Bo-Bo-Bo-B’
As is probably evident by now, my name is Bob. When my friends’ kids were little, they would get my attention by yelling “Bobobob!” I’m not quite sure why I picked it as my screen name here, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing.
Dude, stop erasing his proud embrace of his Irish heritage.
I’ve actually been on here a lot less lately. I’m bored with the endless covid discussions.
“You mean we’re trapped like rats?”
“No, rats can’t be trapped this easily. You’re trapped like… carrots.”
This would seem like a good opportunity for people to make predictions on whether or not Kim Jong Un is still alive/reasonably healthy.
I’ll consider it plausible when BBC News, a broadsheet or John Schilling reports on it.
So far, it just seems to be the rags putting out sensationalist stories.
They were saying it with no evidence beyond him not showing up for something.
But, there is more and more leaked evidence tht he’s dead, and no countervailing evidence that he’s alive, so the probabilities are shifting rapidly.
It ain’t over untill the Pink Hanbok Lady sings. And for this she’d probably wear black. But North Korea has reported the deaths of their last two leaders promptly and decisively, and would probably do the same this time.
There is a fair bit of circumstantial evidence that he is sick – well, sicker than usual – and hanging out in his Wonsan retreat rather than doing business in the capital. And since baseline sick for Kim Jong Un is pretty dismal, “sicker than usual” always carries the possibility that he shuffled off this mortal coil last night and they’re figuring out how to make the announcement. But all the claims that he’s definitely dead and we secretly know this, trace back to a very few anonymous sources. And there’s no reporting of e.g. panic in the streets of Pyongyang, elites putting on their golden parachutes and bailing out to China, etc. Everybody I trust in this field is still in wait-and-see mode.
But it’s not too early to start fantasy-casting our “Death of Kim” movie. I’ll go with Randall Park for KJU himself; he did just fine last time. Dennis Rodman can play himself as the surprise power broker in the succession crisis. And I wish Jason Isaacs had a kid sister to play Kim Yo-Jong, because she’s going to need a pair of metaphorical giant brass ones to fill in for the literal cojones she lacks.
Is it too soon to talk succession? What is Kim Yo-Jong like? What are the prospects for NK liberalizing?
KYJ is apparently KJU’s mastermind of public relations and international diplomacy. She was largely responsible for the partial rapprochement between North and South Korea at the 2018 Olympics, which in turn led to the summit with Donald Trump. She may also be responsible for KJU’s secure ascension to power in the first place, by running the more populist-oriented PR campaign during the transition. She has taken on an increasing level of responsibility in the government in recent years, and there are rumors that she took over for her brother during a previous health scare. But even less is known about her than about Kim Jong Un. She shared his overseas education in Geneva, is in her early thirties, married to a VIP and with one or two children.
Were it not for the matter of her gender, she’d be the unquestioned successor. KJU’s only surviving brother is described as too effeminate to be taken seriously as a ruler, and his children haven’t been formally introduced to society so they politically don’t exist. And nobody outside the “Mount Paektu Bloodline” is allowed to A: rule or B: establish the sort of power base that would plausibly let them rule. Women aren’t allowed to rule either, but it looks like her brother has allowed and maybe encouraged her to acquire real political power. It would be interesting to see her go up against the generals and the party elite.
If she pulls it off, don’t expect liberalization except to the extent that KJU’s distinct style and policies constitute “liberalization”. KJU is perfectly willing to kill siblings he can’t trust with his political agenda, and has instead made his kid sister into his confidante and closest ally. If she pulls it off, think Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, or Maggie Thatcher, with a smile and a pretty dress and with the don’t-fuck-with-me-or-I-will-end-you dialed up to eleven. Nothing less will do for her, in that environment.
If she doesn’t pull it off, which may still be the way to bet, I don’t think there is a clear favorite and it could be a bloody mess – but probably well short of a civil war, because a popular uprising would be shot down and military commanders aren’t allowed to have units personally loyal to them. Any violence will likely be handled quietly by the secret police.
You mentioned that previous deaths were announced promptly… but would the lack of clear succession change that here?
Yes I agree with gbdub. If Kim is dead, there is no way the top guard will announce it until they have a consensus amongst themselves as to who takes over.
@Mark V Anderson
I get they may not announce it formally–and therefore to their own people–but I question whether the rest of the world wouldn’t be able to find out even without a formal announcement. I mean, we have spy satellites. The power play you’re positing caused by the death of Kim Jong-Un, even if kept behind the scenes to the average North Korean, seems like the kind of thing that would result in fuckery visible from space. Major troop movements, especially if unplanned, are difficult to hide.
That assumes two or more factions who each control part of the military. I figure one of two things is happening:
There are two or more factions, but none of them control any part of the military, because nobody is willing to fight for anyone other than the properly anointed Leader. The military may well be designed for this; there’s a comment somewhere in this thread mentioning that the generals don’t have any troops loyal to them personally. So the power struggle is playing out in private without any troop movements.
or
There are no factions, just one person or cabal in charge who is trying to decide who to put on the throne.
Russia´s War by Richard Overy.
In an attempt to inject (sic) humor into the world’s terrible news week, I nominate a new entry for the official pandemic playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sumb3GYuAT8
When did your measure of coolness become how much you tolerate people insulting you? In Ye Olde Days, someone insulted you, you either fought or backed down, depending on how scared you were of them. Now, there’s this whole song and dance where you are supposed to not get upset about an insult, make it prominent that you don’t care, but not let them know that you are affecting an attitude of non-chalance. And if you ever get upset, you lose. It’s ridiculous but everyone acts like it’s the most natural thing.
While we are ranting about random things, I found this to be really really strange behavior, especially among jocks:
after-winning-big-game-minnesota-hight-school-baseball-player-ty-koehn-hugs-friend-on-losing-team
It is described on the news and elsewhere as heartwarming and empathetic, but if it was me that was just struck out I would be extremely embarrassed to be getting a hug. Because I don’t need a hug: I’m not a six year old who just dropped his ice cream. A friend doing this, in front of a ton of people, just seems cringey and awkward. And emasculating. And everyone around praising it and acting as if it is normal, it is like being on an alien planet.
In contrast, I find the level of stoicism you’re expressing weird. Crying over sports by the players is often portrayed as the manly thing to do in sports movies and anime. It’s a mark of their passion for the game. Manly hugs between comrades is also pretty common in these narratives.
There’s no crying in baseball.
Tell it to anime
I’ll let anime take it up with Tom Hanks.
Did you watch the video?
Yes? I see nothing wrong with this? This kind of thing happens in other cultures with no implications on masculinity?
I really enjoy some good banter, when among friends and you know that there’s no real ill-will in it. Being able to laugh at each other and ourselves is a lot of fun, and, I think, important for coping with reality.
Now, being yelled at by hostile people and random strangers isn’t nice, since in that case it’s probably not fun and games. But even then, what does showing that you are upset gain for you? If you’re lucky you might intimidate them into not doing it. At worst, you’ll fuel further conflict and, by having shown them that they can get under your skin, you’ll reveal that you are vulnerable to further harassment. Hostile people who are insulting you -want- a reaction. Why give it to them?
I think this mindset is ridiculous. Defending yourself is what “they want”, meaning that you win by doing nothing and letting them walk over you? That is completely backwards.
With random hostile verbal comments, I’ve tended to go the opposite way and immediately escalate to the maximum possible verbal response (C–T, etc.). In limited experience, this tends to discombobulate the person, and any hesitation tends to end things in that kind of situation where I’m already going on my way after responding. One of the few at least somewhat satisfying ways to resolve an incident like this. Now if you think the person might actually shoot you, of course don’t do this.
Adam Carolla used to say that you should always keep a “F- off” spring loaded on the tip of your tongue.
Hey, hold on now. Your initial post was talking about just getting insulted. Now you’re talking about “letting people walk all over you”. I think these are different things that can warrant different reactions.
When a random asshole insults you for no good reason or through some really petty dumb action, you really do win by doing nothing. If you don’t entertain someone accosting you for no good reason, they tend to get bored in not too long, and ultimately just end up looking like a child to anyone who is watching.
But “walking all over you”, I think, implies exploiting you to get something from you. That’s a lot worse than simply getting insulted and I think it generally warrants escalating in whatever way makes sense.
Maybe in your world, mere insult exploits you in that it takes some of your honor and you need to always fight to keep that intact. Since I don’t live in an honor culture like that, getting irritated by words seems silly to me unless those words are going to have concrete consequences for something that matters.
No. As a former poster used to point out all the time, it’s all about status. If you’re high status, someone insulting you will be jeered at by others and lose their own status in the process, and you won’t have to do anything. If you’re low status, you lose by someone insulting you, but anything you do back (including insulting them) will lower your status and raise theirs even more.
I think this is part of that larger phenomenon. Status has become abstractified and to some extent more solidified.
Think of the classic example of the the high school bully. You are the nerd who gets picked on. Then one day you punch him in the face and he backs off. You have gained respect.
It’s different now. They aren’t physically threatening you but you’re still in the same status. If you insult the high status guy, he doesn’t have to do anything because everyone will go after you. Meanwhile, if he insults you, you either defend yourself and get called thin skinned or do nothing and continue to be mocked. Both the high status and low status are told not to defend themselves but it conveniently works out for the high status guy.
A prince would not respond to a beggar, except to give him a pennyif the beggar truly irked him, he’d have the beggar whipped.
If you casually hold the offender in contempt, you win. Treat him like a joke, or a piece of cr#p on the ground – and if he takes it too far, like a joke gone too far or cr#p on your shoe.
The whole thing is an issue of framing.
With authority at all levels having obtained exclusive legitimate use of actual aggression, passive aggression is all that’s left. In the past, if you slugged someone who called you (or your wife) a name, probably nothing happens, maybe a night in jail. Now you’re looking at every charge they can pile on, hard time, long years of probation, and zero job prospects.
Related to this, I am really annoyed at how pushing back is equated with being “thin-skinned.” And I guess a related thing was equating insolence (probably not the term I’m looking for, but close enough) with criticism. This was not the case until sometime well into the last century.
Of course, some people who lash out are thin-skinned. There are different ways to handle negative commentary, and if you lash out at every heckler, it’s probably foolish. But there’s a difference between disagreement and saying things that are really disrespectful. And one can return fire in a way that does not indicate being thin-skinned. This isn’t just a matter of tone or phrasing, and it differs based on the people involved.
It is partly due to the turn away from physical aggression in our society, as The Nybbler says. That’s probably part of a larger turn away from an “honor culture” situation. In those societies, you responded to insult, but it doesn’t neatly track to “being offended” in a personal emotional sense. There were sort of honor codes that tended to clarify what sort of things you *should* be offended by, and be rooted in certain principles that were more than hurt feelings. And these codes provided specific ways to resolve the issue, usually quickly, including by physical violence. They forced a confrontation. A passive-aggression framework may avoid things like duels, but it has its definite downsides.
This may be a good thing or a bad thing, but when we kind of lost the idea of shared fundamental values, any way to deal with this stuff kind of disappeared, because you couldn’t tell who was “wronged.” If the judgment is based on people’s feeling of being wronged, then in many disputes, both will understandably feel that way. This type of dragged out and painful to endure drama probably led to the framework in which you dealt with it by not showing offense and moving on. The sticks and stones framework has been around for a while, though–responding to any negative comment does tend to come across as thin-skinned. You didn’t duel about just any negative words, or because someone disagreed with your view, and get taken seriously. The person wronged was the one who had his honesty or courage falsely impugned, for example, either knowingly or by someone who refused to retract his error. I suspect that the way the modern media functions has made things too asymmetrical for this approach to survive, and “getting offended” doesn’t tend to play well on television for various reasons, mainly the way it can be turned into a sort out-of-context clip and separated from the remark its reacting to.
This may be another victory by the well-educated over those less so, where the former have all kinds of ways to take revenge that the latter can’t use, while the more brutal solutions of the latter group have been banned.
A while ago, I attended a talk by Jason Manning from West Virginia University, where he talked about his new book:
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Victimhood-Culture-Microaggressions-Spaces/dp/3319703285
He talked about how we went from an “honor culture” where, as you said, if someone insulted you the right thing to do was to fight back to a “dignity culture”, where that is not the done thing anymore, and now to a “victimhood culture”, where the main response when wronged is an appeal to an external authority.
Anyways, you might find it interesting. Here is an article on The Atlantic I found on the topic (haven’t read it myself):
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise-of-victimhood-culture/404794/
Wasn’t that always the measure of “coolness”? I mean, it’s right there in the name–see phrases like cool-headed, playing it cool, etc.
This sent me right to West Side Story, where the mark of the characters’ immaturity was that they were engaging in a feud between juvenile delinquents (the Shark’s girlfriends continually call them children for their grudges). Tony is praised for leaving these petty conflicts behind to get a “real” job, and the tragedy is in how he is pulled back in by people who haven’t grown as much.
Of course, WSS itself is just an update of Romeo and Juliet. I don’t know if people considered the Montague/Capulet feud legitimate or not back in the day, but I’m leaning towards not. “Two houses, both alike in dignity” has a sarcastic ring to it.
So, the average reign of kings was measured in weeks, because their political opponents could always hire a series of professional duelists to insult them and then kill them in one of the resulting duels? Or, alternately, reveal them to be such rank cowards that the Council of Nobles would just ignore them and run the country?
Doesn’t work that way. If someone of comparable rank insulted you, you fought them or revealed your cowardice. More generally, insults are a status attack. An unanswered insult transfers status from the victim to the attacker – but the attacker has to be recognized as having relevant status for this to work. Donald Trump’s status is not even a tiny bit diminished by e.g. HeelBearCub calling him a deranged senile idiot one more time, because Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States and HBT is very much not.
Which means, if there’s any doubt as to the attacker’s status, ignoring the insult is the winning move because it marks the attacker as being of ignorably small status. And, if the attacker is of unquestionably low status, responding to the insult is a losing move because it implicitly raises the attacker’s status and lowers your own – your response indicates that you believe there is only a small status gap between you and the apparent nobody who insulted you. Only if the insult comes from someone of roughly equal status (as determined by the audience) is there any need to respond.
So, yeah, the number and quality of people whose insults you can ignore has always been a measure of coolness.
Good point.
I think this connects to your ability to *control* your responses. Someone who keeps their cool is able to insults if they want to–they don’t fly off the handle at any heckling. But they may choose to strike back in some situations, and I don’t think that makes them not “cool”–it can be quite calculating. The question is whether it is a choice or a reaction. An example who pops into my head is Gen. Dan Sickles, who was often described as “cool as an iceberg,” but was extremely aggressive fighter. I generally agree that he was in control of his rage and more manipulative than hot-headed. He was the first American to mount a temporary insanity defense successfully after shooting his wife’s lover. He claimed heat of passion, but his detractors argued it was cold-blooded with a lot of planning, and the evidence seems to support this. It is dangerous to confuse someone who uses volatility as a strategy with someone who can’t control their emotions.
I agree with your explanation in general, but there is a detail missing:
When the target is high-status, they can ignore your insult, because one of their followers is going to punish you (to signal their loyalty). It is precisely the reframing of the conflict as one between you and the follower, that demonstrates that the target is higher-status than you.
If you meet Donald Trump and start yelling abuse at him, some security guy is probably going to stop you. Even if you insult Donald Trump on a web forum that is not fully controlled by neutrals, someone is probably going to insult you back.
On the other hand, not having anyone come to your defense when you are attacked, is an obvious sign of low status.
So a question still remains — why are you supposed to stay cool in the situations when you are insulted or attacked, and no one is coming to your defense. (Yes, it would be preferable to remain cool and have someone else defend you, but they are not there.)
I suppose that for a high-status person, being temporarily without defenders is an exception. If you happen to meet Donald Trump without bodyguards, and start yelling abuse at him, chances are some bodyguard will appear soon and resolve the situation. Therefore, calmly waiting for the bodyguard to come is the right move. It shows the conviction that the inconvenient situation is temporary, which is a signal of high status.
But is this really a good explanation why an average person should act the same way? Is it a form of bluffing? But the person insulting them is already calling the bluff, isn’t it?
A cynical (but I have no idea how correct) explanation is that the official advice actually doesn’ t have to work for everyone. If it works for high-status people, it is a high-status advice, and it will get announced by the official channels. If it doesn’t work for low-status people, even if it actively harms them, who cares? (Advice aimed at low-status people is low-status itself; the socially savvy people would never be caught giving it publicly.) This doesn’t mean that all official advice is wrong for low-status people, rather that some of it is good for everyone and some of it only works for high-status people, because there is no reason for the high-status people to distinguish between the two.
If you see a guy screaming at someone else ona bus, and the other guy looks at him like he’s insane and puts on headphones, who is a low status weirdo and who is cool
@Purple +1
The rubber/glue and sticks-and-stone playground rhymes are teaching the children this concept early on.
@Mark V Anderson
I decided to start a new thread, because it took me a while to check a few more sources. In Spain, it is common knowledge, that prostitution is “alegal”, not illegal or legal either. Note: all my sources are in Spanish.
First, some history:
So, in the 19th century, there were no national laws regarding prostitution, and it was left entirely to city and regional authorities, which regulated prostitution on the basis of public health, due to the spread of venereal disease. It was already a big problem in the big cities since the 18th century, and something commented with disgust in the newspapers. But the local authorities just jailed the women who made “insults and scandal”, and sent them back to their hometowns or released them to the care of their husbands or family after chastising them to stop bothering the public.
Brothels had been banned and closed during Phillip IV reign in the 17th century (despite him being known for having many lovers). I went to check the history of prostitution before then, and it is even more fascinating: Phillip II (crowned in 1556; this was the heyday the Spanish Inquisition), made pragmatic sanctions that commanded the establishment of public whorehouses in all cities in Castille. It was especially noted they should be close to universities and ports. To be a whore, a girl had to be older than 12, not a virgin, orphan, and not of noble blood. She would have to go to a judge and say she voluntarily wanted to be a prostitute; if his moralizing didn’t work, she’d get a document allowing her to do sex work. Brothels were regularly checked by a doctor, who would ban the practice to those who had infectious disease, especially syphillis. The clothing of prostitutes was also regulated. They were also not allowed to participate in religious processions, so as not to get confused with decent women; instead, they were taken to a church where they’d get a sermon extolling them to leave their life.
So anyway, they went back to publicly regulated brothels, sponsored by a french naturalised Spanish Count Cabarrus, who had been in various troubles with the Spanish Inquisition. So, in 1845, they mandated prostitution be done in brothels, prostitutes carry documentation, and medical checks be made. This was all made for reasons of public health, as syphilis was a big problem. It was seen as inevitable, and regulating it would allow public health to be improved. Apparently, those laws or similar ones remained until 1956.
Going back to the discussion of why abortion is such a big deal in the US, whereas in Europe, it isn’t, I would like to point out that these quite liberal laws were in Catholic Spain, which was quite religious until very recently. If only American Puritanism is considered “religious”, then we are not defining “religious” fairly.
Even in the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition, prostitution was regulated more out of NIMBYsm and public health viewpoint than a morality viewpoint. Morality was not much of a consideration, although it was much discussed. But legislation is more pragmatic than that, and made from a more practical point.
Opposition to prostitution in Spain still mainly comes from NIMBYsm. Very understandable, by the way; who wants to live close to a brothel or to have prostitutes walking in their neighbourhood at night, encountering used condoms and pee in their streets in the mornings?
At the moment, Spain neither bans nor regulates prostitution. The current left-wing government is in favor of banning, but they haven’t done it yet.
What I mean by “not legal”: a contract for sex work cannot be valid, if a sex act is performed. If there is no sex, sex work (striptease, hostesses, all that), can be legally defined in a work contract, and a sex worker can sue an employer who does not pay. Don’t ask me what sex is, I’m unclear on this (PIV? handjob? not clear).
Prostitutes can be undefined self-employed workers, and thus pay into Social Security. There is a co-op of prostitutes in Ibiza, which was initially banned but the courts allowed it.
There’s a much criticised law that also establishes fines to clients of prostitutes who get sexual services in public places and places with minors. Nudity or disobedience of authority is also penalized for sex workers. Cities also regulate the activity; it’s banned in the streets of Barcelona, for example.
Pimping is strictly illegal, as well as forced prostitution and prostitution of minors or the mentally disabled.
So, at the moment, Spain has quite a bit of sex tourism (there is a huge brothel in the French border to acommodate French clients, for example). Apparently, it’s also the third country by the number of clients (20% of Spanish men admit having paid for sex). Brothels work like accomodation with extra security, AFAIU; they don’t take a cut, instead they take a fixed fee.
The demands to ban prostitution come mainly from NIMBYs and feminists. It appears that feminism is the new religion, in its puritanism.
My personal take: I think prostitution should be allowed and regulated, for adults, with consent, proper security and health measures. But I am skeptical of allowing non EU foreigners to practice it (if they’re illegal, they’re easily exploitable; but giving a working visa to practice sex work? that’s a bit too much for me).
There’s something amusing about a government program to license prostitutes that periodically nags them to give up the life and become honest women.
At a tangent:
It’s important to note that prostitution was the example in Catholic theology of something which human governments must probably tolerate, because prohibiting it forfeits greater goods or tends to greater evils. Aquinas, himself quoting Augustine:
The way this doctrine of toleration is understood is that enforcing such a law consistently would itself consistently violate natural law. This is really clear with an example like lying. Lying is always wrong, but you would need some kind of incredibly draconian police state to have any reasonable chance of enforcing a law against lying. And instituting and running an incredibly draconian police state is a very great wrong, and only produces the good effect by being so run, so it violates conditions 3 and 4 of the doctrine of double effect. So you allow lying to happen instead.
Interesting. Then the attempts to ban it by feminists, who are quite puritan, are because of a lack of Catholicism in Spain.
But if you look at the countries that strictly ban it vs those that allow it, it doesn’t map that well to Catholic/Protestant.
France banned it, Italy and Spain are a gray area, the Netherlands and Germany allow it, Scandinavian countries ban it, and for the rest, I don’t know.
Banning prostitution seems to me to be a pretty recent thing historically—I wouldn’t expect it to map well to Catholic/Protestant. And Protestant is also broader than Puritan, so I don’t know what e.g. Lutheran Sweden was doing for most of its history. I just figured this was relevant to your Spain example.
i think prostitution is legal in France, but brothel/pimping aren’t and you can’t do any soliciting.
That was until 2016.
@ana53294:
You need to distinguish between 2nd wave feminism, and 3rd wave , and 4th wave feminism.
3rd and 4th wave feminists are generally far more sex positive, and generally view the labor choice of sex-workers as an autonomous one. They are generally pro-legalization of sex work, as this increases the autonomy of those engaged in sex-work. They seek to destigmatize and legitimize these choices. This also applies to things like pornography, both consumption and production. See also things like “slut walks”, “yes means yes”, etc.
Thank you Ana, that was very interesting. It also explained a little some others comments about European laws being less moralistic than in the US, by describing the laws as NIMYism. That is, more that bad actors are nuisances than that they are evil people.
A couple weeks ago Bernie Sanders conceded the Democratic primary race but did not drop out, telling his supporters to continue voting for him. Apparently this matters because even though Biden’s victory is a foregone conclusion, winning more delegates will give Bernie more negotiating power with the DNC. This is confusing to me, and news articles tend to be uselessly vague about what it means. What part of the DNC is set up such that Biden’s majority of delegates doesn’t allow him to ignore Bernie? Can someone explain the details of what procedures Bernie is trying to influence and why they might matter?
It may be more about informal referendum and less about formal procedure.
World A: Sanders has 0% of delegates, Biden 100%. Sanders and his ideas can be dismissed
World B: Sanders has 49% of delegates, Biden 51%. Sanders and his ideas should be treated seriously (negotiating power).
In both cases Biden wins primary, but other effects are vastly different. It seems that Sanders is trying to get closer to the second case.
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Maybe there is also bizarre scenario with Sanders somehow winning primary, but I think that it should be treated as a fantasy as long as Biden is capable of speaking.
Yes, for example, it strongly influences Biden’s choice of running mate.
My guess is that there are votes at the convention on issues such as the platform. Biden’s delegates are committed to vote for him as the nominee, but I wouldn’t assume that means that he can tell them how to vote on everything else. So having more of Sanders’ delegates there might shift the results in a direction he would prefer.
There are two obvious reasons for Sanders to want more delegates.
a) The visible one. Democrats want to appear united this time around, something they were definitely not in 2016. More Sanders delegates means more influence on the party platform (which they probably want to pass unanimously). Platforms don’t matter so, so much, but they aren’t nothing. But having a ton of Sanders delegates in the convention (assuming it happens) will influence how Biden and all of the various Democratic luminaries speak (if they want that appearance of unanimity). That’s worth more than the platform.
b) The hidden one. Joe Biden is very solidly in the “at-risk” age group for Covid-19. What if Biden gets sick and dies/has to bow out in the next month or two? No one else is amassing delegates besides Bernie and Biden. Now all of a sudden you suddenly think you might have a way to, if not get Bernie the nod, at the very least heavily influence who those Biden delegates select.
A meetup is going on now on the Parthenon on Mozilla Hubs, and it’s just what I hoped Hubs meetups would be — lots of separate conversations, like a realspace meetup. It peaked at 51 people, is now down to 20 or so. I just left it to have lunch. If others want to join in, it’s at:
hub.link/Zd85BZs
In addition to Overy, mentioned below, David Glantz has good books on just about everything Ostfront related, although mostly military focused.
It’s not specifically Eastern Front, but Why the Allies Won, also by Richard Overy, has a lot of good material on the factories and production side of Russia’s war effort (in addition to good chapters on Stalingrad and Kursk).