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Sorry if that has been discussed already, but what do people here think about the probability that working from home will become a new norm for office workers after the plague is over? At least in software development? At least, like, 50% of the norm? Pleeeaaase? That would’ve been so cool and helpful with so many problems – housing prices, traffic jams, pollution, inequality between regions, not to mention making a lot of people happier, – with hardly any non-negligible downsides. But I feel like it’s too much to hope for.
I don’t think it will become the norm, or anywhere near 50%. Lots of people like the work life separation and meeting coworkers at the office. And lots of bosses like the control it gives them.
I do think that a lot of the companies that previously offered “no home office ever” will now have to offer “home office allowed if you book it for a specific day and reason”. So that’s an improvement.
Just personal anecdata. I think there’s good enough results from this that I’ll be able to push for working from home 1-2 days a week. Once this is done I’ll probably push to work from home on Wednesdays. My read on the room though would not be to ask for more though.
And I’m kinda not sure I want to. Quarantine is not fun and, fairly or not, 90% of people’s experience of working from home is poisoned by quarantine so it feels (probably) far more isolating and cabin-crazy than it really is. Still, my experience working from home in quarantine has decreased my desire to work 100% from home.
I live in London, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes more common here. Over the past two years, my employer has been pushing “flexible working” arrangements, including the ability to work from home when it’s convenient for the employee. I would usually work a Monday from home every fortnight or so, partly as an excuse to do laundry. There were rumours in other regional offices that they were moving to a hotdesking set-up (we currently have an open-plan office but with fixed desks), and as part of that they would require working from home one day a week for each employee, presumably so they could reduce the number of desks.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this trend is accelerated by the lockdown. While a lot of people are desperate to return to the office (myself included), I still think you would get most of the advantages of an office environment by working 4 days a week from the office rather than 5. My employer has also allowed employees to expense IT equipment needed to work from home, giving them a financial incentive to insist on more home-working.
Pretty big. A friend works at Honeywell and apparently they’re preparing to work in shifts – 2 weeks 2 whf, one week office. This would be for the duration, I assume, and I have no reason to think it’s not a general trend
So you have three pretty big forces going towards this:
– all the tech and paperwork already exists
– people are creatures of habit. I’m too lazy to dig up the Handbook of Self-Regulation, but the highest numbers I remember to form a new habit are about 10 weeks. And we’re talking 30-60 weeks here.
– and you have people actually wanting to push for WFH even when this ends – like yourself. Some will be in management – I think the distribution tends to be pretty random, except at the very top – C-level and close, which probably much prefer office. But don’t forget that some people at all levels will strongly prefer office as well.
So yeah, one way or another WFH is here to stay. Fortunately.
My experience (from earlier, not the current situation) is that communication over the internet is terribly inefficient compared to in person:
— In person I can pay attention to one conversation, and half-attention to another conversation at the same time. On Skype, sound quality is bad, and there is typically bad background noise. If more than one person is talking at the same time, chances are I can’t understand anything. Every once in a while someone has a problem with his mic or connection, and doesn’t necessarily realize it.
— Webcam is either zoomed on someone’s face and you can’t see his gestures, or if it’s zoomed out, and you can’t make out his facial expressions due to the poor quality of the webcam. Especially if there are multiple people. In person, you can easily change what you look at and focus on, and you have a wide peripheral vision in addition.
— It’s difficult to show something to others. In person, I can e.g. draw something on a whiteboard. Over the internet I’m stuck with awkward methods like drawing it on a piece of paper, and sticking it in front of the webcam.
Some of these could perhaps be mitigated with high-end hardware. But when people are stuck using their existing hardware in an emergency situation, their conclusion will be that it sucks.
Agreed that one or two days a week in the office would probably be helpful. But:
1) I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than one person talking simultaneously in a meeting unless it’s already kind of over and everyone is returning to their work. Are you saying it’s common where you work?
2) What about screen sharing? I think every video call app out there supports it, isn’t it?
I don’t work, I’m a student. My experience is working on research projects with others in rather informal settings, either in person or over the internet.
Over Skype it’s definitely a problem that two people speak at the same time, and one can’t understand them. Perhaps it’s not so much that they would speak at the same time at an in-person meeting, as that over Skype it’s harder to read cues as to whose turn it is to speak.
I find hand drawing faster than computer software for quick sketches. We’ve used online whiteboards, they were inconvenient.
I am a software developer. Currently I have to work from home. I knew even before this started that I want to work in an office, partly because the social contact and regularity helps, partly because it lets me acquire the information necessary for my work from co-workers, especially near the start of a project. In an ideal world, I’d like to work in the office about half of the workdays and at home the other half, but in reality that would probably result in sharing a desk with someone else in office, which I’d hate.
Increased flexibility for work-from-home, certainly. “New normal”, I think, is highly unlikely, and not just because the Evil Suits insist on being able to look over people’s shoulders to see that they’re really working. People, even STEM workers, are social animals. Collaboration and consensus-building work better when everyone is in the same room reading each other’s body language, looking at the same whiteboard, holding quick sidebars, etc.
True, but humans are also adaptable animals. We learned to understand our friends and loved ones over the social media just fine. And really you only need that much of complex body-language-reading rapport-supporting communications to get a technical job done, on most of the meetings most of the people’s body language says something along the lines “blablabla whatever I’m sooo booored”. But yeah when I said norm I meant more something like 2-3 days a a week every week is considered the default, rather than 100% wfh.
I think level of communication is a spectrum rather than a binary, and I think being remote is not a complete block to communication but is still a significant debuff, even with adaptation.
“Debuff to communication” is a good way to put it. Long term, in any competitive or contentious matter, the people who are willing to show up when it matters are going to come out on top.
Work from home has been awful. I have young kids and a small house, so my office is our living room. It’s hard to focus and harder to collaborate with others except via email, which slows things down a lot. A lot more of our skype meetings have been interrupted by kids or pets – which is fine during a laid-back standup, but makes things difficult if we’re troubleshooting errors.
When allowed I’ll be one of the first back in the office and I suspect I won’t be alone. It’s not something I feel I can talk about at the moment given there are no other options, and I don’t want to draw attention to the fact that I’m way less productive. I suspect others won’t either, so I’ll bet I’m not the only anti-wfh on my team.
Practically yeah, people with kids is something I haven’t though of. But theoretically, if you could commute to work just a couple times a month, wouldn’t you prefer to do that and have a larger house further away where the land is cheaper (I’m assuming prices in you area are follow the same distribution as in most metropolises)? And then this whole “having a time to spend with your family” thing that other people with kids I hear complain a lot about.
All new workers need some time to figure out how things work in a company, even if they have experience working in the same field. Being able to ask the guy sitting next to you about which form you need to fill or whatever is much easier than writing an email. Also, a lot of things that can be shown in a minute would need a lot more explanations*.
Especially for interns or those who just start their careers, wfh 100% is a terrible idea. I’d say that you should work 100% in the office when you start.
And with all the workers moving and changing jobs, there is going to be a more or less constant fluctuating X% in most big enough companies that are new and in need of training. But it’s not enough to keep those X% in the office; you need to keep the experienced workers, too, so they can train them.
Then there are security concerns, privacy concerns, house leases that don’t allow business from home, requirements for paper signatures, and many other things that have been waived during the coronavirus crisis but will return once things return back to normal.
*And sometimes, it’s almost impossible. When I go to see my parents, I can usually solve their issues with for example the TV remote in a couple of minutes by playing around and showing them how to do what they want. Whenever we’ve tried to do that with videochat, it was like the blind explaining to the deaf. And my parents are fairly smart and adept with technologies for their age.
I actually started working in a new company on March 9 and our company switched to mandatory WFH for everyone starting March 11. Bugging people over Slack was a bit more inconvenient than in person, but on the other hand I was less hesitant to do it knowing that they can ignore my message for a while if they are focused on something, and message or call back to me later. In fact my ramping up process was a lot faster and smoother than in the previous place, although that most likely has to do with differences between the companies.
With that said, I agree that 100% wfh for everyone is a bad set up. But for tech positions, having 1 or 2 days a week in the office should be plenty for communications, in my experience.
Interesting. I also started a new job March 9. I got in 7 days at the office before work from home started. It definitely was useful to have that time in the office at the beginning, but it is certainly lovely to be at home every day now. But I have no kids at home and have about 30 years experience in what I’m doing. I agree with Ana that new people need to be in the office most of the time, and there needs to be experienced people there to guide them. But I also agree that it will be much more acceptable to work 2-3 days / week at home now, and also acceptable to work several months at home in a stretch in certain circumstances.
It will be a godsend for those with chronic illnesses where they need to be at home frequently but can still work, and those that frequently work in different cities. I am a contract worker, and I suspect it will be much easier for me to get temp jobs outside my locality in the future.
Agree. I 100% WFH. But I’ve been at my job for a long time. It’s hard to mentor new people remotely, and everyone starts out as a new people at some point. Thinking of my first jobs and how I got some difficult tasks resolved in seconds because I could just ask someone and they pointed out the answer immediately. Or someone watched what I was doing and gave an immediate suggestion that vastly improved my workflow.
It will definitely be seen as do-able now, so the “well, we’ve never done it that way before” excuse has been exposed to sunlight, beheaded, and had a stake driven through its heart. But there are benefits to in-person collaboration that still exist, so the office isn’t going away.
Work from home is not going to become standard for those programmers who work for my wife. That was decided when one day there was a significant issue that had to be resolved and her boss and his boss continually interrupted the work with messages and phone calls asking for updates. With no visual feedback available as there would normally (ie seeing the whole team in a conference room working would force them to assess if right now was the right time to interrupt) it made the day completely miserable for her and inhibited their work, which made the next day also miserable.
On the other hand her plan for next years flu season is ‘if you come in sick I am sending you home to work, everyone has the set up and experience to do this and there is no reason to have a cold/flu run through this place every 3 weeks in the winter.’
Sending people home with mild flu and allowing them to work from home will be a massive improvement to work environments. It should have been a no-brainer a long time ago.
Should have been, but there are lots of complications, many of those have now been worked out though (for my wife’s and I imagine many people’s companies).
I’ve started playing Fortnite a bit during the quarantine. As I started to get better, I very clearly got moved up to some new level of opponents, and started getting smoked again. (In retrospect I seem to have gone from mostly bots to mostly terrible human players to a full island of human players at the absolute lowest level of competency.)
I haven’t played (current gen) videogames in about 10 years so I don’t think I’ve ever experienced what I have come to find out is apparently the somewhat controversial and increasingly ubiquitous topic of skill-based matchmaking. I think the most vocal complaints come from the great players, but personally I find it kind annoying as a noob. It feels like a treadmill and that I’ll be running faster and faster only to stay in the same place. I’d personally like to have some absolute measure I have access to that shows me I’m getting better even as I’m dying more, since it will get harder and harder to improve.
But there typically is such a metric: your rank in the system.
How are you going to get better when you never get a shot off before dying and mostly you don’t even see the guy who killed you? Do you think that will be fun? Do you think your teammates (if it is a team game) want someone around that has no idea what they are doing?
The fundamental problem is that a typical player wants to win most of the time (80%?).
This is not doable, especially as making bots is hard and people anyway want to win with other humans.
Win rate would be the same, but if game is designed well matches should become more interesting and fun with increased level of skill.
Yeah, skill based matchmaking is intentionally designed with a terminal goal of ensuring most players win ~50% of their matches. And yes, this percentage is intended to remain roughly fixed as you get better (or worse?).
The “problem” is that some people want to win much more than that. Of course, that’s not possible unless other people are losing much more than that, which basically nobody is willing to put up with (and will probably quit playing entirely if they find themselves in this situation).
If you can’t handle winning ~50% of your matches, you basically need to give up on any multiplayer online game that takes itself even the slightest bit seriously.
It’s possible I’m confused, but I seem to recall that Fortnite starts with 100 players and runs until only one is alive. Is that right? So Fortnite would be balanced so that each player wins only 1% of the time?
Yes.
(with caveat that in average it may be greater or lower than 1% due to some matches played with bots and possibility that due to server crashes/disconnects/failures some matches end before anyone wins)
(caveat – there may be something more to rules of this game)
As valleyofthekings alludes to, I think it’s kind of different in Fortnite, because if your metric for “felling good about my performance” is “winning” you’re going to quit fast since there’s only 1 winner out of 100 (or more commonly, 1 duo out of 50 or 1 squad of 4 out of 25). A good time in Fortnite isn’t just “I won!” but “oh, I came in 6th, that was pretty good!”
Personally I would be totally happy to always play against bots if it meant I could win >50% of the time.
I won’t play online PvP, for mostly the reasons OP describes, but also because online humans are sometimes really unfriendly and I don’t enjoy interacting with them.
There should be more online pure-coop games.
Sadly, in many types of games writing bots is horribly hard, to the point of making game lame.
I was doing it for one open source game, after hundreds of hours of work my AI (one of the best available) was at level of human who played for 2 hours.
And was completely smashed by any human who played for more than one day.
You’ll know you’re in the “good” tier on Fortnite when you’re getting involved with heavy build-battles at midgame. This is also about when I stopped being interested in Fortnite. It’s very annoying that at the beginning of the game, skill is “can shoot good,” which is kind of why you’re playing the game or FPS games in general. But once you hit a certain tier shooting good is still important, but you have to practice fast builds and edits, which are muscle memory techniques unique to Fortnite. Quickly building reinforced ramps or 90s or whatever and then editing out a triangle so you can get one shot on a guy between his builds is…tedious.
You start out playing a first person shooter, but once you’re good at the first person shooting it turns into a building game, which is not the first person shooter game you signed up to play.
ETA: I’m also not a huge fan of COD because the fast TTK (time to kill) means it’s just a competition of who sees whom first. My favorite current-gen FPS game is Star Wars Battlefront II, which has my ideal type of gunplay, where getting the drop on somebody matters, but a good player who’s surprised is not guaranteed to lose. Also Star Wars.
I strongly dislike the matchmaking in most online games. I want to play against opponents of a wide variety of skill levels, even if it means losing more than 50% of the time (and at the beginning this can often be 90% or more of the time). I find that this is how I best learn and improve at a competitive game while also providing me both enjoyment and motivation to play/improve.
When playing against someone much better than myself, I will see them use tactics I am unfamiliar with or have not yet mastered or see how they avoid/counter my moves (improving my knowledge of the game). When playing against someone of lower skill level I can practice these tactics I didn’t know or haven’t mastered while still leaving some room for error as I streamline my approach (improving my execution of the game). When playing against someone of similar skill level I am putting my lessons to the test and measure my improvement or my strengths and weaknesses. If I’m only ever playing against similarly skilled opponents, none of this can ever happen.
Furthermore, in many competitive games a strategy that is successful against lower skilled players isn’t just ineffective against better players, it’s actively a disadvantage. If I spend a bunch of time at the beginning of my play against low skilled opponents mastering strategies that only work against them, when I get to higher level opponents I have to unlearn everything I’ve learned and built into my muscle memory and start over rather than slowly building knowledge/skill over time.
0.82g/lb of protein is the maximum (and the maximum is probably lower than that) for useful protein. Does this also apply during a cut?
Like lots of people, I’ve reduced my activity recently. I was considering going into a cut and the quarantine was as good a time as any to start it.
I’ve seen some references say 1.3g during a cut because otherwise too much muscle gets lost. And one that even says 1.41g (3.3 g/kg expressed in g/lb) if I’m very lean and deep into my cut (I’m not, currently).
I have not been doing a lot of weight-lifting the past two months, if that matters.
But more importantly, why do Americans mix different systems of measurements?
This is nothing. We officially measure one dimension of our car tires in millimeters and another in inches!
https://www.goodyearautoservice.com/en-US/tire-basics/tire-size
Because measurements are our tools; we’re not answerable to them. If I know my weight in pounds but the weight of whatever I’m eating in grams, then grams per pound it is.
Non-americans do the same thing; fuel consumption is measured in liters per 100 km, not hundreths of square millimeters.
But a liter is a dm3, so it’s just an alias for a metric unit.
Yes, but the units aren’t “simplified” down to the greatest extent possible.
g/lb = 0.22%.
Perfectly reasonable way to write a number.
Does a diet like this mean eating pretty much nothing but chicken, white fish and protein shakes?
OP doesn’t explicitly mention an overall calorie restriction, though I think that’s implied by a “cut” phase. Even so, it is likely that other foods are possible, but in (very) limited amounts.
For example, I’m currently working to a target of 1.8 g protein/kg body mass against a calorie budget about 20 kcal/kg body mass. That means target foods are under 10 kcal/g protein. I’m using cronometer to track my diet, so maybe I’ve found entries with bad data (too low cals), but the following seem to fit the constraint:
chicken (all parts, though breast is highest protein/energy), turkey, canned tuna (mercury issues?), pork loin, tofu, low fat plain yogurt, tofu, sardines, egg whites.
Other examples of foods that are close enough that I don’t target them, but don’t especially avoid: whole eggs, pork ribs (!), ground pork.
While the first group are low enough energy/protein to give some space in the calorie budget, I basically avoid anything that is mostly carbs (rice, pasta, bread) or fat (cheese).
I also eat a lot of veggies which are nearly costless against the calorie budget.
FWIW, before starting, I thought this total calorie budget was ridiculously low. A couple of weeks in, though, I find it is physically satisfying and I’m rarely hungry. However, under shelter-in-place, having to avoid/restrict a lot of foods has been emotionally difficult.
Yeah, it seems crazy to me. That’s why I’m hoping to hear “nah, man, that’s nuts.”
I’m not a nutrition expert, but this much protein in a calorie-restriction regime sounds like pushing close to rabbit starvation. Unless you’re a professional bodybuilder preparing for a competition it’s probably not worth it.
I’ve been making some calculations on the alternative ways of testing a vaccine, and unless I misunderstand something, the current procedure not only takes longer, it probably kills more people. Here are my calculations:
Method 1: Give the vaccine to N1 people. Wait a month. If none of them get the disease, conclude that the vaccine works.
Method 2: Give the vaccine to N2 people. Deliberately expose all of them to the disease. If none of them get the disease, conclude that the vaccine works.
The following calculations assume:
A: We select N1 and N2 to reduce the chance of a false positive to no more than .05 .
B: Someone not already immune who is deliberately exposed has a .5 chance of catching the disease.
C: The probability that the vaccine works is .1, but if it works it works perfectly — probability of catching the disease zero.
D: The probability that the vaccine not only does not work but gives the recipient the disease is .01 .
In the U.S. at present, about one person in a thousand gets the disease each month, so with method 1, in the U.S., if the vaccine does not work each test subject has a .001 probability of getting the disease. So if it does not work, the probability that none of them get the disease is .999^N1. If we set N1=3000, that comes to about .05.
With method 2, if the vaccine does not work, the probability that nobody gets the disease is .5^N2. We set N2=5, giving us a probability of about .03.
With method 1, the expected number of people who get the disease because of the vaccination is .01xN1=30. The number who get it because because they are in the test and the vaccination doesn’t work is zero, since their exposure is the same as if they were not in the test. The number who avoid getting the disease as a result of being in the test and the vaccine working is .3 . Net increase in disease due to Method 1 is 29.7 .
With method 2, the expected number of people who get the disease because of the vaccination is .01xN2=.05. The number who get it because of the exposure (and the vaccine doesn’t work) is .9x.5xN2= 2.25 . The number who don’t get the disease as a result of being in the test and the vaccine working is .0005. So the net increase in disease due to Method 2 is 2.3.
For simplicity, I am calculating the number of people in the test who don’t get the disease as a result of the vaccine over a month in both cases. It’s small with Method 1, trivially small with Method 2.
Adding all of this up, Method 1 results in 29.7 people getting the disease as a result of the vaccine trial, Method 2 results in 2.3 people getting the disease as a result of the vaccine trial. Method 2 also gives a somewhat lower chance of a false positive and produces a result about a month faster.
This is obviously a simplified analysis — a vaccine doesn’t have to work perfectly to be worth using, and my particular numbers were invented. But given how much larger the first figure is than the second, the argument that we must use the first because the second is too dangerous looks implausible unless one believes that the chance the vaccine gives people the disease is lower than the chance that it prevents the disease by substantially more than an order of magnitude.
Also, even if there is no chance that the vaccine causes the disease, the downside of Method 2 is tiny. A small number of people, two or three with my numbers, get the disease as a result of the test. Since you will be using healthy young adult volunteers, the chance of death for each is about one in a thousand. Getting a vaccine out a month sooner, on the other hand, saves about 20,000 lives in the U.S. alone.
Am I missing anything? Is there any plausible set of assumptions under which Method 1 is better than Method 2? Alternatively, have I misunderstood what the methods are?
Couple of things missing from the simplified analysis.
First, the version of Method 1 that people are actually planning to implement starts with, “first inject twenty-five healthy volunteers with the vaccine, isolate for two months, and only if none of them get the disease do we proceed to the effectiveness trial”. So, from your assumption D, the number of people who get the disease from the vaccine is 2.5, not 30.
Second, your assumption C is too perfect. A successful vaccine may only reduce the probability of infection by 50%. So a five-person challenge trial per Method 2 is inconclusive. The modal outcome of a successful vaccine is one person infected, but there’s a 15.6% probability that a useless vaccine or a placebo will also result in one person infected. It’s going to take a lot more than five test subjects to achieve 95% confidence in a marginally effective vaccine, and we may only get a marginally effective vaccine.
Third, your assumption B is also too perfect. We don’t know how many droplets of what size and viral content we need to inject into a test subject to achieve p=0.5 of infection. Either we do a whole lot of testing with various exposure levels to healthy subjects to dial in the p=0.5 infectious dose, or we design a Method 2 trial with a best-guess infectious dose where we can be confident of the results whether the baseline p(infection) is 0.01 or 0.99 or anything in between. That’s going to take a whole lot more than five test subjects.
And we don’t want to cheat on that last one by using a massive infectious dose to guarantee p(infection)>0.5, because there’s evidence that the probability of our outright killing our test subjects is a function of the initial dose and because the marginal vaccine we may have to settle for may only be effective against low-dose exposure.
I’m in favor of starting challenge trials early, but it looks like you’re stacking the deck here.
I’m simplifying, obviously, but I don’t think I’m stacking the deck.
The fact that a vaccine is unlikely to be perfect means you need more people for Method 2, but also for Method 1. The initial two month test adds two months to the time delay, which much more than outweighs the savings — and if the vaccine only occasionally gives people the disease, as was the case with the live polio vaccine, it may give a false negative. If my .01 is not the probability that the vaccine always gives the disease but the probability that it will give it each time, 25 people has a .77 probability of doing so. If it’s a .1 probability that the vaccine gives one person in ten the disease, the probability of a false negative is still above .05.
Feel free to redo my calculations with more realistic assumptions.
Not to the people responsible for Method 1 being the norm.
These are not rationalist utilitarians, to whom a death is a death whether due to action or inaction and we can just add up the deaths and decide which plan is best. These are mostly deontologists whose most basic rule is literally “first do no harm”. Or virtue ethicists who believe causing active harm to a patient in their care makes them Bad Doctors even if they claim to be doing it for the Greater Good. Which are normally reasonable positions for a doctor to hold and for the rest of us to want doctors to hold.
In that worldview, nothing outweighs “I injected a patient with something and it killed them”. So, first we evaluate methods in terms of how many deaths are expected to occur because a doctor injected the patient with something. Ignoring the number of people who die on the sidelines while that is happening, just counting the people who die because of what their doctor actively did. Whichever method scores best by that count, is seen as the most virtuous and rules-compliant.
Only if we have two or more plans with zero expected deaths due to affirmative medical action (at say 95% confidence), are we allowed to then add up the people dying while waiting for our success. But your Method 2, with realistic numbers, is never going to get to 95% confidence of zero doctor-induced deaths. Method 1 as originally stated, is never going to get to 95% confidence of zero doctor-induced deaths – as you correctly note, it’s worse that Method 2. Method 1′ with the initial small-group safety test (possibly in escalating stages), can plausibly achieve zero doctor-induced deaths, therefore it’s the only method allowed by the rules. No matter how many people we die waiting for it, because at least it’s not us killing them so there’s no blood on our hands.
I agree with you that we should change or ignore the rules and go with your Method 2. Even though it means many of the key people in the program will be dissatisfied and demoralized and likely to dissent or defect at the grievous assault to their medical ethics; we can work around that and for this we should. But absolutely none of the disagreement on this point is based on the math of Method 1 vs 1′ vs 2. People are not miscalculating the total number of deaths such that if you show them the correct math they’ll change their mind. They are disagreeing with the premise that we can simply count total deaths, and the only thing you’ll convince them of with a proper death-counting evaluation is that you can’t be trusted to make moral decisions.
I think there’s one moral and one practical assumption you’re making that need to be questioned.
Firstly, one really obvious assumption under which Method 1 is better than Method 2 is if you’re at least partly a deontologist rather than a utilitarian, and believe that it’s more important not to kill people than it is to save their lives.
If you /don’t/ believe that, there’s a really quick win to be had by setting up a system of mandatory transplants, where anyone whose organs could me used to save two or more lives is executed and their parts distributed. And failing to donate money to save a life is morally equivalent to murder. Pretty much no-one believes either of those, so I think it’s safe to assume that pretty much everyone agrees that it’s more important not to kill than it is to save lives.
Method 1 lets far more people die than will die in Method 2, but you don’t have to tweak your number much before the number of people it kills is zero; under Method 2 with an imperfect vaccine you will be very likely to be killing some people who would otherwise have died.
And secondly, you’re assuming everything in terms of binary – either you’re exposed or you aren’t, either the vaccine protects you or it doesn’t, and either you get covid or you don’t. My (non-professional, so don’t attach too much weight to this) understanding is that actually it’s possible that different levels of exposure may result in different probabilities of catching the virus, that the vaccine may reduce but not eliminate those risks, and that it’s even possible that different exposure levels may correlate with the severity of that attack if you do get it (although this last one strikes me as unlikely-sounding). So testing under laboratory conditions may not give as much insight into how much difference a vaccine will make as testing in the real world.
With both of those said, I guess that deliberate-exposure testing is probably going to be the way to go. I think that using volunteers gets around a lot of the trolley problem type issues, and that the ability to gather more data faster may well outweigh the risk of introducing more artifacts from unrealistic testing conditions.
But I think this is probably an area where this kind of lay/statistician spherical-cow modelling probably isn’t much help, and you really do need the subject-specific expertise of epidemiologists about what effect the horns and hooves will have to make even informed guesses.
I am at least partially a deontologist, but I don’t consider that permitting people to voluntarily accept a risk of death is the same thing as killing them, and I wouldn’t expect other deontologists to think so either. So your problem only arises if you aren’t using volunteers.
Beyond that, I was obviously simplifying the problem in a bunch of ways, but I don’t see any particular reason to think doing so biased the conclusions. One could do somewhat better with expert information, but I expect a lot of the relevant parameters are simply unknown.
Also by double effect option two is OK. The death is proportionate(assuming math works), and is neither a means nor an end.
If you are getting volunteers, you aren’t murdering vagrants for their organs. I haven’t seen anyone suggest testing and deliberately infecting anyone we can get our hands on. https://www.thecovidchallenge.org/ is one place organizing volunteers; there may be more.
(It probably won’t work to pay people to be subjects, even though I’m sure David has an essay saying that it’s ethical. It will be too easy to say that you are picking on poor people. You can maybe thread this needle by “paying” them with the best health care possible.)(
Paying volunteers can trivially be made without “preying on the poor” : you simply require the volunteer to prove (from IRS and bank statements) that their income is above median income and net worth is posiitve.
There are already a lot of health workers who are exposed to the infection with a significantly higher risk than ordinary people. They tend to be healthy adults, because other workers aren’t allowed to care about ill patients now. I wonder if you could find enough volunteers among them.
Isn’t there the issue of side effects also? If you are going to give the vaccine to hundreds of millions, you want to make sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease. Maybe this is less an issue for a vaccine than other medicine? Is the only risk of the vaccine giving the person the disease when they wouldn’t have gotten it otherwise?
No. For example one of H1N1 vaccines increased narcolepsy risk. See https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.html or more specifically https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcolepsy-flu.html
Is safety testing gated behind effectiveness testing?
You test by seeing if people have side effects after N months. If David’s proposal lets us start those N months one month earlier, it still saves 20,000 people in the US.
There are also going to be several vaccines being tested in parallel. We might find different vaccines have different side-effects.
Is there a situation where, if some vaccine candidates show no side effects after N-1 months, that it’s worth giving it to more people? Not the general population yet, but more.
Method 2 has the obvious advantages you say, and I think I prefer it overall, but we should note the following disadvantages:
– There are different “scenarios” for infection. A young health person vs an old unhealthy person. A small number of viral particles vs a large number. Surfaces vs airborn droplets. Method 2 tests only one of these scenarios, conceivable the vaccine would be ineffective in other scenarios. Worth noting that volunteers are probably very unrepresentative of the population for various reasons.
– There are potential ethical issues. For example, maybe the volunteers don’t really understand what the risks of their choice are. I assume there is a large medical ethics literature on the subject of volunteers for testing medical procedures, but I am not familiar with the literature.
Russia is adding data points away from lockdowns being effective. After stopping their first exponential wave sometime around April 19th (6,060 new cases) and limiting new cases to between 4,200 and 6,500 for the next 10 days they are back on the exponential curve with 4 straight days of new record numbers with today’s report at 10,600 new cases. Russia had been a more aggressive than average tester (but well below SK levels, as everyone is) in terms of tests per confirmed infection. They have been right around the estimated range for tests/confirmed case need for test, trace and isolate to work (35) and have been more aggressive on lockdowns than many places.
According to Wikipedia Russian lockdown was scheduled to end on May 11th, after two previous extensions. This is another strong piece of evidence that temporary lockdowns must end up being indefinite lockdowns (or rolling lockdowns) if you can’t get your R values under 0.5 quickly (realistically I would say you need them around 0.25 once you are over 1,000 new infections a day).
How seriously are people taking the lockdown? I’ve noticed that, here in SoCal, compliance has definitely dropped in the last couple of weeks.
No idea, but that is a major part of the point.
Russian friends tell me that, at least in Moscow, it is being enforced strictly. Apparently you need to generate a QR code for your phone corresponding to an approved reason for being outside, which you are allotted a limited number of, and if the police decide to check you and you haven’t followed protocol you are heavily fined. Of course, many Russian police can be convinced to look the other way, but it’s still quite unpleasant.
Moscow had a higher density of visible police a year or two back when I was there than anyplace else I have been, most of them not obviously doing anything but recognizable by their uniforms.
If that was around the time the world cup was happening, that might be partially why. I was there last summer and didn’t see an excessive amount of полиция.
@Beans
Not sure what you compare with, but from living there for a few years Saint Petersburg definitely have more visible police than anywhere in the US I’ve lived or visited. And both from my visits and other people’s opinion Moscow has at least as many police as Petersburg, perhaps more.
The enforcement is overall harder than in the US (QR codes Beans mentions, fines, I heard of drones looking for people in parks, etc). But afaict public generally is not taking is seriously, and many people and businesses are doing their best to break the quarantine and get away with it. It’s hard to tell which of these tendencies is winning.
Around here we already have jokes on the topic. “Draft’s a killer in Russia, did you know that? You open a window, there’s a good chance you’ll fall from it”. Reference to the couple of doctors that were suicided recently.
I’d completely ignore any numbers that come from there. Even death counts. More than in China.
I am very suspicious about quality of the official data from Russia.
I am very suspicious about the quality of the official data from Everywhere.
Even the quality of the official data from Utopia?
Irrelevant. Utopians don’t get viral infections that cause diseases. Biology is easier than sociology, so they’d have solved medicine a few centuries before they set up the utopia.
As other people pointed out already, the important data point you’re missing in these calculations is that the Russian government are dirty fucking liars and any numbers they report come straight out of their asses. Also, the tests they administer are domestically made, so only marginally more trustworthy even it you’d conducted each one of them yourself.
Do you think they are dirty liars and that they are over reporting new cases? You can drop the testing rate comment and it is still a blow against lock downs unless you think that the Russian government is making things out to be worse than they are and making themselves look worse.
Maybe they need to report some growth to convince the population to take the lockdown seriously. Maybe they hope to achieve some plausibility and realized that the previous numbers were just ridiculously low. Maybe faction A just got in control of reporting, and faction B controls the pandemic response, and faction A wants to make faction B look bad. Maybe essentially random perturbations introduced on each stage of reporting due to people acting in their own interests in the system which has zero built in incentives for honesty and plenty of incentives for everything else just resulted in this figure for no single reason. And yes there remains a chance that some of these numbers are accurate. My point is that “actual number of people with coronavirus” is so low in the list of parameters affecting the reported numbers, and visibility in most of the things higher in the list is so low, that the reported numbers might’ve just as well been completely random.
Given that new cases peaked between 10-14 days after lockdown in China, Korea, Singapore, Italy, and Austria (to name a few countries I have checked – I’m sure others followed the same pattern), the evidence for lockdown working is overwhelming.
If Russia doesn’t match that pattern, then that says something about Russia, not about lockdowns. Perhaps Russia is making up statistics. Or they expanded tests more than on previous days. Or they started testing infection clusters not previously found. Or they aren’t actually taking the lockdown seriously. etc etc etc
Worth noting that despite the increase in the last few days, Russian cases are nowhere near the exponential curve they were following before lockdown and shortly afterwards.
Poland also had an exponential growth of cases that dropped to constant one in way indicating that quarantine had an effect.
Sadly we are now stuck at R0=1, so basically in the worst possible place as far as lockdown duration goes.
See various election anomalies making clear that resuts were doctored.
See obviously manipulated statistics of various kinds (if we go back to USSR then it gets totally crazy).
New cases peaking is not remotely overwhelming evidence for lockdowns. Italy is 6 weeks past their peak and they still have 1,300 new cases a day, Singapore has had to extend lockdowns and it has taken them 2 weeks to half the rate of new cases from the peak.
It’s overwhelming evidence that lockdowns reduce R0 to below 1. (Which is basically evidence “for lockdowns”.)
The average time between infection and transmission is about 5 days. So with R0=2 the number of observed cases will double every 5 days. And in fact, in pretty much every country before lockdown, cases doubled every 5 days or slightly faster, meaning R0 was 2 or slightly higher.
Now with lockdown, we can also calculate R0. In Italy since two weeks after lockdown, new cases per day have declined by about 20% every 5 days. So R0 is about 0.8. In Spain it’s 0.75, in Austria 0.6, in NYC 0.8. In the US and UK the number of cases per day is staying constant, but the number of deaths is dropping slowly, which probably means R0~0.9 but testing is getting more thorough.
Of course a country with R0=0.5 will quickly overcome its epidemic, while one with R0=0.9 will be stuck with a lockdown for a very long time. But each is vastly better than R0=2 without a lockdown.
No it isn’t. Reducing the R0 below 1 is a Pyrrhic victory at best. You have to reduce it below one for a length of time long enough to eliminate the infection and life lockdowns. We’ve been through the basic match here a bunch of times, getting the R0 down to 0.75 in a country with 1,000 active cases at the time of lockdown means a minimum of 4 months of lockdown without it ever decreasing in efficacy as people get tired of it/more jobs become essential.
No its not, you are just assuming that lock downs can be held indefinitely without any outside reinfection. Since niether of those is true your ‘overwhelming evidence’ is simple minded projection without context.
Each will have the same fraction of their population dead/crippled at the end, but the country without the lockdown will get there sooner and have a head start on reconstruction.
Unless you’ve got something in the works to replace the lockdown, in which case you need to start talking about what that is and how effective it will be and when we can realistically expect it.
No you don’t. You just have to get the number of cases low enough that you can use contact tracing to isolate the remaining cases and their contacts, while everyone else goes about their lives, and thereby eliminate the virus completely. South Korea is doing this as we speak.
There won’t be any outside reinfection if you don’t let people from outside enter the country, or else quarantine/test those who do enter.
First SK did it without lockdowns, you cannot translate that to a country with lockdowns because R is behavior dependent, unless you explicitly are claiming that people’s behavior will be exactly the same in a country like the US after lockdown as it was in SK without the lockdowns.
Secondly your claim was that getting the R0 below 1 was evidence for lockdowns, and that is the claim being pushed back on. There is zero reason to believe that Rs will stay flat under current policies, because the R level depends on the compliance (voluntary or involuntary) and your position assumes static (or perpetually favorable changes in) behaviors.
Nice spherical cow, the US has 150 million+ legal entries into the country most years, if 1% are infected and there is a 1% false negative rate for the test then a normal travel year would mean 15,000 imported infections a year from tested travelers on top of however many untested travelers exist.
Incorrect. They locked down Daegu.
Of course I don’t expect that R0 will always remain exactly constant. But the pattern seen in many countries is that it remains constant or even decreases as the lockdown continues. (The decrease because we gradually figure out things like “masks help” and “outdoor areas are safer than indoor”.) And in most developed countries (though perhaps the US is more akin to a third world country in the strength of its social fabric and government mechanisms), R0 under lockdown decreases quickly enough that within a few months of lockdown, the case levels are low enough for lockdown to be gradually lifted. This is happening right now in a number of European countries.
This isn’t a normal year, needless to say. There need not be any legal entries except from other countries that controlled the virus. (Though a safe mechanism could probably worked out for immediate quarantine coming off the plane, if that’s important enough.) As for illegal entries, there will be some of those (many fewer than normal because there aren’t jobs in the US), but these can be suppressed more forcefully than normal, and anyway only a tiny proportion of the population in Mexico or Canada is infected, so the number of cases entering this way would be minimal (and easily controlled by contact tracing).
Two is a coincidence, three is a pattern:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8282033/Third-Russian-doctor-plunges-coronavirus-hospital-window.html?fbclid=IwAR2QfUcIjYxOc1hrlc7igI0zvpDL2DFA7q92AbnbilIeGS4WRPPkWzscyac
Yeah, any official info from Russia is plain worthless.
I would not go so far.
It’s a pretty sweeping statement but I stand by it. It’s not worthless in the sense that it has no information content – it obviously does. It is correlated with reality, and people who know more than I can definitely pick and chose and extrapolate. But for laymen that just want to make an opinion, or for researchers that want to use it for statistical value, it has too much bias (not error) to be useful. I think the correct thing to do is to put gray on any map that includes Russia, for example – if the alternative is to use raw official data.
Late with this as I should have done it on Friday, 1st May – but anyways, happy May Day to you all!
The traditional poem for the time is the one attributed to Fionn Mac Cumhail, but the only English version I can find is a terribly stilted translation.
So here, have some Austin Clarke instead (Irish Civil War references and all):
The Lost Heifer
When the black herds of the rain were grazing
In the gap of the pure cold wind
And the watery haze of the hazel
Brought her into my mind,
I thought of the last honey by the water
That no hive can find.
Brightness was drenching through the branches
When she wandered again,
Turning the silver out of dark grasses
Where the skylark had lain,
And her voice coming softly over the meadow
Was the mist becoming rain.
Unite and unite, and let us all unite
For summer is a-come unto day.
And whither we are going we all will unite,
In the merry morning of May.
The young men of Padstow, they might if they would,
For summer is a-come unto day.
They might have built a ship and gilded it with gold
In the merry morning of May.
The young women of Padstow, they might if they would,
For summer is a-come unto day.
They might have built a garland with the white rose and the red
In the merry morning of May.
Rise up, Mrs Johnson, all in your gown of green
For summer is a-come unto day.
You are as fine a lady as waits upon the Queen
In the merry morning of May.
Oh where is King George? Oh where is he O?
He’s out in his longboat, all on the salt sea O.
Up flies the kite, down falls the lark O.
Aunt Ursula Birdhood, she has an old ewe,
And she died in her own park O.
With the merry ring and with the joyful spring,
For summer is a-come unto day.
How happy are the little birds and the merrier we shall sing
In the merry morning of May.
Oh where are the young men that now do advance
For summer is a-come unto day.
Some they are in England and some they are in France
In the merry morning of May.
The Steeleye Span version.
Oss! Oss!
I got an email from Plumber. He’s fine, has a working phone again, will be joining us shortly.
Glad to hear that, thank you.
Most excellent news; will be glad to hear how he’s been handling this now that we know the general answer is “fine”.
Very glad to hear this.
What happened??
He’s a literal plumber and has been doing essential work keeping California’s pipes functional.
His phone broke so he couldn’t post here. We hadn’t heard from him in a while.
And were worried.
I’m in awe that that man writes frequent posts of the length he does on a phone. Unless the interface on an Android or something is miraculously 10 times better than that on an iPhone.
We all want more testing.
Well, how about the proverbial metric shit-ton of testing? Hold on to your asses, because we’ve got population level testing going on right now.
I wonder how they estimate the number of cases in an area. I’m sure that can estimate the RELATIVE number of cases (area A’s sewage contains twice the viruses of area B’s, so it should have twice the infected people) but how do they arrive at an absolute number?
Testing sewage water, leads to fun results.
There were studies in Europe about the amount of cocain resedues in sewage waters.
Based on this they calculated how much cocain is used in Germany. Based on that a former German federal judge calculated how much off the overall German GDP is based on cocain, and how much of all German property therefor might be confiscated based on money laundering laws. (He did this in an article were he and agrued against prohibition laws). He came up with something like a third of everything.
How come the schedule for producing manga is so backbreaking?
I’m not asking why the work is hard. Obviously the better you want your art to be the more effort you will have to put in. I’m asking why the industry expects a certain rate of manga pages per week from manga creators, or why creators expect it of themselves or whatever is going on—a rate which takes incredible diligence to keep up with. It’s nearly killed some of them, to take one example. Even the highly successful ones can barely ever take a break.
But manga doesn’t need to be produced at this grinding rate, right? The industry wouldn’t collapse if creators produced two or three pages fewer in each manga chapter at the same price, would it? Help me understand what’s going on here.
the japanese national trait of taking things too far in action again?
Your average manga is published in a serialized magazine that costs the equivalent of a few dollars (Shonen Jump is 300 yen, or three dollars-ish). They contain somewhere in the range of ten to thirty individual manga chapters (last I checked Shonen Jump had twenty two). Take that plus income from ads and Shonen Jump (which is considerably more prestigious than most) gets about ten million a week, or about $450,000 per manga per week. About a sixth of that is eaten away by various taxes, leaving $375,000 (very small taxes add up for cheap high circulation goods). Distribution, advertising costs, etc, eat about 85% of what’s left (and sometimes more), leaving about $55,000 a week to cover everything from salaries to studio rent to materials (for about ten people).
That sounds pretty good but there’s two things to keep in mind: Firstly, this is the top of the industry, the equivalent of being a famous film star. The actual norm is about $1,200 per week with additional money if you produce color pages.
Secondly, even if you do get there, you get paid that while your manga is being published and not a second more. So the entire time you’re desperately squirreling away money for the winters. Simultaneously, you’re trying to do everything you can to push your manga further up in the book or to make a little more by getting a color page spread. But winter always comes eventually and when it does you are desperately working to get something new published, ideally in a magazine that pays at least as well as your last one. (Additionally, there’s a huge glut of labor because it’s prestigious.)
Of course, if you’re successful your manga might start picking up other sources of income: licensing on merchandise, anime residuals, tanboken republishing. This can make you very wealthy. But most manga, even in Jump, don’t get there. The bar for such things is much higher in Japan than in the US.
The number of pages or schedule isn’t the issue. It’s not even the percentages they get, which are pretty similar to the ones in America. It’s that prices are so low. American weekly comics produce more pages, often with color. But Americans pay much, much more for them. (Additionally, American comic companies are much, much better at secondary monetization than the Japanese, in no small part because they’ve accumulated organizational knowledge that is destroyed in the Japanese model.)
A much healthier system flows from this. American comics do not usually tie labor to specific books. If your book gets canceled, they just assign you to work on something else. You are an employee of the company rather than someone running your own mini-studio and you probably make a decent amount of money. They buy your materials and you work out of their office. This all leads to a significantly less stressful environment which is actually more productive. American comics have entire professions that simply don’t exist in Japan because everything is being done on the cheap.
(Then again, American comics have been declining in a way manga hasn’t been, partly because they are more expensive. And a lot of drawing is still done in Japan and Korea, even for western shows, because that system is so cheap.)
Then why not sell Japanese magazines to Americans?
Another group that gets paid peanuts are novel translators (because it’s fun). Manga translators in the internet do it for free, so presumably translating a Japanese magazine would not be too expensive.
They do. Overseas sales make up about a third of all manga sales. But it’s much more niche in America and so a smaller market and Americans tend to pay less for manga than American comics. (There’s also a booming business of outsourcing animation.)
In particular, no one has been able to make a circulating manga magazine that drives the industry in Japan profitable in the US. (They do exist in the US, by the way, but for American comics. And some European ones.) Additionally, they’ve been almost exclusively been reliant on American partners who take a cut. (They’ve had much more success in Europe, especially in places with anemic comics industries like Germany.)
More generally, these organizations are not well capitalized. Shonen Jump measures its revenues in the low to mid hundred millions. For pretty much all of its existence, Marvel’s net income (ie, how much money they made) has been bigger than Shonen Jump’s entire revenue. And this relative poverty has gotten much, much worse with American comic companies now earning buckets of money in film and videogames.
On top of that, tastes are different. The difficulty of a Japanese artist producing Japanese art to suit the tastes of a foreign country would be challenging, though remarkably enough some of them have done it. (Doing well in the United States and Germany is apparently the most lucrative fanbase a mangaka can have on a per fan basis.) Most of them just throw in references and kind of call it a day. (Also, manga is printed on lower quality paper, less detailed art usually, less color…)
Just realized *I* am not buying manga because it’s freaking expensive. It could be that I’m just out of touch with what constitutes fair price, but Naruto for example, bought from Amazon in the bulkiest form possible (3 box sets, plus a claimed extra 25% discount) ends up a bit short of $500. I don’t know about you, but $500 is a damn investment.
True, we’re talking about _a lot_ of content, 72 volumes – but they’re pretty fast to read. Much faster than a book of the same size.
There are shorter series, obviously, but they’re a bit more expensive per piece. I don’t think you can get away with buying anything good for a lot less than $50 (~5 volumes).
Anything regarding one of the big cash cow franchises is going to be a little bit different. Firstly, Naruto is the 35th(-ish) longest manga series ever. Secondly, it’s entered that cash cow phase where the company is trying to rake in as much money as quickly as possible from people who liked the manga before it stopped. Compare Kaiji, with a similar amount of content, which sells for closer to that $50 mark, which means it’s significantly cheaper than an equivalent amount of American comics. (By the way, even Naruto is cheaper than American comics: they’d run you about a hundred dollars more for the same amount of content.)
For whatever reason, Jump-style manga serialization never caught on in the States. Manga almost always gets sold in the equivalent of trade paperback format, with several issues in one thick paperback volume.
That’s increasingly the norm for American comics too, though — trades started catching on maybe fifteen years ago, initially for more literary-style comics like Sandman or Watchmen, but these days you can get them for most anything. It’s still more expensive than the Jump format, but cheaper than paying five bucks an issue, and you don’t need to deal with ads. Plus, it’s easier to keep up with a story that way — back when I was in the target demographic for generic superhero comics, the stuff I was following was often sold out when I made it to the store.
I suspect it’s the same as opening a restaurant in New York, or pursuing a career in academia or acting: you’re going to be competing against lots of people whose lifelong dream it is and who are willing to accept terrible conditions to pursue it.
Are there resources about the economics of what people love doing?
I assume it would be the same principle that unpleasant jobs need to pay more to attract people: pleasant jobs need to pay less. People look at their jobs as a package of benefits and costs. If the job has intangible benefits (social prestige, easy work, enjoyable work) it can pay less actual cash.
The example I usually give is modeling: because modeling is prestigious, particularly for women, and has no serious social sanction, amateur models, especially women, earn very little money. In fact, they often have to pay in various ways to participate (pay photographers to take portfolios, pay for travel and boarding, etc). Of course, some “make it” but even among those who don’t they get a huge boost in prestige from just being a model.
This is in contrast to being a male model, which is an entirely different market. It’s less prestigious, less chance of making it, and the pay for professionals is lower. As a result, amateur male models have an easier time entering the industry and are more likely to get paid from the start. There just aren’t as many of them ripping and clawing to break in and men seem less interested in being seen as sexy and fashionable.
In effect, the amateur woman is pricing in the possibilities of a more lucrative longer term career and the social status she’ll gain, so she’s willing to work for less money up front, while the male model isn’t.
Within tech, game development is a notorious case in point. Some large proportion of software engineers play computer games, and some large proportion of those would kind of like to be a game developer. The result is stiff competition, lower pay, and worse working conditions than other jobs requiring comparable skill and talent. I looked into it myself, some decades ago before specialization [in operating systems, not games] started giving me huge benefits on top of those I got for basic ability, and decided I’d much much rather contribute to open source game development as a hobby, other activities permitting, and/or simply play games.
This is a big thing for pilots and I think it is the major contributor to the gender gap there. For men, being a pilot makes it much easier to find sex and long term relationships. For women it harms their ability to form long term relationships because, particularly in the early years, the career requires a lot of moving around, shitty hours and time away from home.
Yes, plus you can make good money. The people who win and make one of the big series of the decade can make tens of millions of dollars. Again, sort of like acting or restaurants.
Thank you to those who responded! Especially @Erusian.
I came across something interesting on the web, today. Here’s there 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment. This is a report issued yearly to the US Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, compiled by the US intelligence community as a whole.
Here’s what they had to say about threats like COVID-19:
Apparently they’ve been issuing warnings like this for years.
the diseases they were waning about were malaria, measles, and cholera in latin america and africa, not strange new viruses. And they’ve also warned about a lot of stuff that didn’t happen.
They were warning about potential threats, not claiming to be clairvoyants and farseers.
Like, the very first sentence quoted
Which makes them the proverbial stopped clock. Except considering the wide range of things they were warning about, even worse.
They have not been issuing “there will be a pandemic this year” warning for years. They have been maintaining a constant “when the next pandemic comes, we will be unprepared and lots of people will die and the global economy will suffer”.
If your friend builds a brick house over an active fault line, your regular warning that when the quake comes his house is going to collapse around him, is not stopped-clock correct. It’s absolutely correct.
Similarly warnings about volcano eruptions, mudflows, catastrophic floods, collapse of nearly collapsed dams (especially tailing dams), deadly accidents in factories ignoring security measurements, solar storms, wars etc
Claiming that such warnings are “stopped clock” case just because they were unable to pinpoint exact data of catastrophe…
And
was 100% true. Sadly, it was not specific but it is better than to make falsely specific claims.
The single weirdest point in the report, in the section about transnational crime, is this one:
Illicit mining, huh? You have a really impressive level of government dysfunction if you can’t keep track of and tax mining operations, since they tend to require large workforces, hefty amounts of gear, and literal holes in the ground that absolutely can’t be moved. If you can’t police that, maybe it’s not really your territory in the first place.
They can police it in the sense that the local thugs/officers show up, collect protection money/bribes/taxes and go away. They won’t enforce environmental, workplace safety and child labor regulations, though, even if the laws are technically in the books, so the operation is formally illicit or semi-illicit, because the government doesn’t care (up until it does, when e.g. they want to shut down the place or trasnfer it to somebody else for political reasons).
Sounds like we need more deforestation and pollution to kill off all these filthy animals! Ok, maybe not.
Score one for instinctive cuteness response as an indicator of whether we ought to drive a species to extinction!
Interpreting the interpretors
In the 1920s and 30s, there was a British project to collect and analyze the dreams of their colonial subjects. They found that the dreams weren’t especially different from ordinary British people, except that the Empire was very much disliked.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161758
Potential discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/186845/The-British-Empires-invasion-of-the-dream-world
I’m posting this because it’s an effort to apply rational thought in what a modern person would probably think was an unlikely subject, and yet it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
Also, it’s got that science fiction feeling, probably Jack Vance. And, well, what if you could improve predictions of political developments if you knew about a lot of people’s dreams?
The Third Reich of Dreams, a collection of dreams gathered in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939. Free at archive.org, and a good thing, too. The book is hideously expensive and mysteriously unreprinted.
New Yorker review, unfortunately behind a paywall.
Of course, it’s only a coincidence that anxiety dreams about school are very common.
Prediction with low (~60%) certainty:
Counter to what we’ve been talking about a bit lately, I think that the increase in homeschooling by not discontinuing doing so after the quarantine will be offset by a decrease in new adopters who otherwise would have tried it voluntarily at some future point.
I say this for a couple reasons:
1. My social media is awash in people who are indicating without quite saying so that they are finding out they dislike their children and want them absent more often than they currently are.
and
2. What people are trying right now is homeschooling as thrown together by schools who weren’t prepared to do so and who (mostly) dislike homeschooling as a concept anyway. This is a non-optimal way to try homeschooling that is likely to obscure a lot of the value it normally has (flexibility, customized structure, etc).
On the other hand, a lot of people are trying home schooling who otherwise wouldn’t, and some of them, even if a minority, will find that they like it. If five percent liked it and switched to it, that would more than double the total number of children being home schooled.
This is really the norm. they just arent allowed to talk about it as much as the people who like children.
The teacher lied: my son is NOT a delight to have in class.
(From facebook.)
It is strange to see how admitting to being terrible parents or having bad kids is suddenly socially acceptable- or at least numerous people think it is.
Her son could be a delight in class and a horror out of class, because the teacher knows how to manage the student and the parent doesn’t.
It may not be a lie, compared to the twenty other little horrors he is indeed a delight 🙂
Talking about something in itself shifts the Overton window more than saying good things about it. A variant of “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”.
It really depends on who COVID is killing. If the average 76 year old man will live 10 years, and COVID kills 76-year-old men indiscriminately, then it’s taking an average of 10 years per 76-year-old male victim. However, that average is comprised of 76-year-old men who will die tomorrow, those who will live another 30 years, and everything in between. If COVID preferentially takes the ones who would have died sooner, it’s taking less than 10 years per 76-year-old male victim. It would be really hard to tell now, though. A well designed retrospective study in 30 years or so might be able to determine the actual effect.
I have been taking a Catholic marriage preparation class, and I’m rediscovering the teachings of the church.
I find it very appealing, but there is one thing that still rubs me the wrong way.
What is God’s plan for members of the LGTBQ+ community?
I find it hard to believe that, God being love, would deprive them of finding love and experiencing their sexuality the same way that straight couples do and are encouraged to.
The problem is that in Catholicism, the only accepted reason for marrying and having sex is procreation. Since gay couples can’t have children, their sexuality cannot be accepted by the Catholic church as long as this principle stands. Obviously, this principle is bizarrely backwards. It plays a role in most of the other troubles the Catholic church is involved in the modern age (sex before marriage, abortion, contraceptives, sex as fun, celibacy).
Obviously, this principle is bizarrely backwards.
Obviously. As eveyone knows, marriage is about “I really want to fuck this person but as soon as I don’t, all bets are off”.
No, wait, that’s what co-habitation is for!
Marriage is really about – um, what were those arguments again? Oh, yeah!
Marriage is really about hospital visitation rights and filing joint tax returns!
I would like to see a real response from you to lemur, any chance?
No chance, not up for arguinng theology which is explained better elsewhere online anyway, and the cultural underpinnings have shifted so much I’m like one of those stern Victorian grandmothers disinheriting my wayward offspring for daring to have Opinions.
Too old and tired to try swimming against the tide with concrete blocks tied to my ankles!
“The problem is that in Catholicism, the only accepted reason for marrying and having sex is procreation.”
Obviously false statement, given that there are a lot of saints canonized exactly because they had married not wanting to procreate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephite_marriage
Also, history wil tell who has it backwards, but I (and demographists) bet that it’s your memes that are maladaptive and will be wiped out. You may see your way of life as better, but it means nothing if no one adheres to it.
there are a lot of saints canonized exactly because they had married not wanting to procreate
There are also people who decided before the marriage to have a companionate marriage but changed their minds afterwards, and are also saints 🙂
This doesn’t change the fact that chaste marriage exist, or that you can marry without being able to procreate (for instance, you lost your penis in an accident), making the catholic position incoherent.
“or that you can marry without being able to procreate (for instance, you lost your penis in an accident)”
Another obviously false statement. Seriously guys, go read something before writing anything.
A marriage has to be consummated to be valid.
If it wasn’t even the Catholic Church will grant you an annulment and you’ll be able to marry again through the church. And the Catholic Church does not accept divorces.
@FilaretaThis is a consistent problem with Ant. He doesn’t know what he is talking about when it comes to Catholicism. See e.g. just last week.
On consideration I shouldn’t post things like this. Sorry.
@ana53924
Is that so? Fascinating. And indeed I see, Catechism of the Catholic Church 1640:
That certainly seems to confirm, a fortiori, what you are saying. Another point at which there is a quiet correction–but probably not nearly so quiet in the underlying, likely Scholastic, literature!–of some of the more free-wheeling ancient ideas. Augustine thought, or claimed to think, that marriage doesn’t require intercourse, because Mary and Joseph were genuinely married. It’s certainly not the universal view–he’s arguing against Julian of Eclanum, who appears to have held that Mary and Joseph were not really married–but not one I think I have ever heard voiced nowadays. It probably involves piling on too many theological inferences to convince many people (or maybe I just don’t run in the right circles). Would be interesting to know where it dies away: Thomas, Summa Theologiae suppl. 42.4 seems to me to make consummation secondary but still ordinarily necessary, and so to stand reasonably close to Augustine.
(The text I’m thinking of is Against Julian 5.12.46, but he says it elsewhere, too; sorry I don’t have a translation to link. That’s Contra Julianum by the way, not Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum, also in six books. Writing so much has its drawbacks….)
I’m not aware of the doctrine on consummation. In practice, AFAIUI, you can be married without consummation, and as long as none of you testify to it, you’ll be legally married. It’s just that at any moment, any of the spouses can claim the marriage is invalid, and the Church will accept it. But as long as none of you don’t, I don’t think any priest will ask you about your private business.
Marriage law is complicated, so there are some distinctions we need to keep in mind. Canonically being perpetually unable to consummate the marriage is a diriment impediment, that is, an impediment which invalidates the marriage. I touched on this just the other day. A marriage can however be valid without being consummated. I think the usual opinion, especially later, was that Mary and Joseph’s marriage was a true one, though it was not consummated.
In traditional Jewish law as I understand it, there is first a betrothal then, substantially later, the relation is consummated, and only at that point is the couple considered married.
The betrothal is, I think, a binding contract.
Conversion therapy? :p
No.
Why?
If your answer is: current methods don’t work and are harmful, I understand. But there is certainly some safe and working method to do a conversion therapy, even if it demands gene editng developed humans, it is tech that we will have some day.
If it works, why not?
My answer is indeed that current methods don’t work and are harmful. I don’t understand either why you are certain a method will someday exist.
Were conversion therapy safe, convenient, effective etc, I’d totally turn myself from straight to bi.
OK, I should have add some probablies or something. But in science, I suppose, if we don’t know that something is certainly impossible (like ftl communication) it is quite a safe assumption that discovering a way to do it is unavoidable.
@Nick if it’s at all possible (and my priors are that it very much is) then there should probably some actual scientific effort put into finding a way to do it consistently without traumatizing the the “converts”, but it’s currently taboo.
Which is really sad, there are many religious people who are just resigned to a less fulfilling life.
@Purplehermann
As others have argued below, Catholics will maintain it is not a less fulfilling life.
My religious friends are not the ones filling Facebook with memes about how depressed they are and how pointless life feels.
Speaking of conversion….
Jewish lesbian converts to Catholicism, lives by teachings of the Church! Read this impossible incredible story on her blog!
She’ll have a lot more resources and lived experience to answer this question than I would.
min(a)
This is a toughie, and part of why it’s tough is that there are fundamental worldview clashes happening that aren’t easy to bring into harmony.
So here you are making a couple assumptions that a lot of Christianity doesn’t:
1. That homosexuality is unavoidable, unchangeable and hardwired. If this is true, then your model of “If God is a nice guy, why would he make a person gay, then penalize him for this?” doesn’t parse any better than “Why would he make a guy a chronic thief and then not let him steal?”.
2. If homosexuality is unavoidable, unchangeable and hardwired, then there’s still another conflict: that God is nice to the point where he will disregard virtue. Consider that some people are probably born to be more prone to lying; some are prone to alcoholism. The bible isn’t kind to either, but also doesn’t cut slack – the expectation is that you change to conform to the standard, not that the standard changes to conform to you.
If a person is born or develops biology-caused psychological problems that make him prone to rage it might be a lifelong struggle for him to control it that requires him to make lifelong changes to his lifestyle and experience a lifelong struggle. The Bible typically expects him to do this. The perhaps most relevant verses are Matthew 5 29-30:
Those are words in red, I.E. represented in the text as spoken by Jesus. They aren’t particularly consistent with the “If God is nice, why is he asking me to do unpleasant things?”. They are consistent with “God is nice, within other limits that he also cares about a great deal and thinks you should care about a great deal.”.
The summary on this is that this kind of conflict occurs a lot if your approach to the whole thing assumes that a 2020 general western worldview is correct, and that A. Where God/the Bible deviate from it they are wrong and B. That God’s ultimate, overriding value is “being nice”. My read of the Bible(which is not absolutely correct and immune from challenge) is that it doesn’t consider any of those things to be true; that makes for clashes.
I’m assuming that homosexuality is unavoidable, unchageable and hardwired.
I agree with you that rage, theft, lying and alcoholism are sins. That they cause suffering to ourselves and others, and that we must deal with them even if it’s a lifelong struggle.
But I don’t understand why is homosexuality a sin?
Leviticus 18:22.
Edit: To clarify: Leviticus 17 to 26 is part of what’s sometimes more broadly called the “Holiness Code”. It covers a bunch of commandments that the Israelite people are required to obey. Leviticus 18 has a number of sexual morality laws that are intended to set the Jews apart from the rest of the people of Canaan, where God has lead them. Most of it involves banning incestuous relationships, but it also explicitly bans (male) homosexuality and bestiality. This is part of the basis used by the Catholic Church to construct its philosophy for sexuality.
There’s also a verse in Deuteronomy that is sometimes interpreted as banning homosexuality, but is probably just about temple prostitution.
Which verse?
Deuteronomy 23:17.
Not temple prostitution specifically, general prostitution AFAIK.
There is a seperate issue of not using an etnan zona as a donation to the temple. This may be a source of confusion?
The Hebrew word used in that verse is kedeshah/kadesh, which definitely isn’t the normal word for prostitute. I’ve always been told it’s specifically about temple prostitution.
Edit: The next verse uses different words (zonah/kelev) to refer to regular prostitutes.
The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome, gave a long list of signs that a culture has separated itself from understanding of God and His ways.
Near the end of that list, Paul adds various sexual behaviors. He implies that sexual pleasure is easy to twist away from it’s Divine purpose, and warns that sexuality can become an object of worship, in opposition to God.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Most Catholic theologians expand on that distinction between natural/life-affirming and unnatural/lustful.
Most Protestant theologians care more about the Sola scriptura of being able to cite chapter and verse.
I find it strange that this passage in Romans is cited less often than various parts of the Law of Moses.
Paul also explicitly said (in Corinthians) that people shouldn’t get married at all, if they could help it:
It’s definitely not something you can easily cite in an unqualified way in defense of traditional marriage.
You had to leave out a TON of stuff for your statement to seem true. Here’s the section, without convenient edits:
So immediately Paul isn’t commanding people to stay unmarried; he’s making it clear he thinks it’s a good idea, but not a command(such as God gives). He says he wishes some people are celibate as he is, but that it’s a gift, and not everybody has the same gifts. From later in the same chapter:
So he makes very clear, twice, that this is not an anti-marriage stance in the sense that marriage would be sinful, and that even if it were he’s speaking for himself, not God.
So yes, you can cite it as a defense of traditional marriage, since it includes a defense of traditional marriage. Paul elsewhere says this:
I don’t think it’s very cool to take a guy saying “This isn’t a command, and it’s just my personal advice and not God’s, but it’s better in a utilitarian sense to not get married, but only if you have the gift of celibacy and won’t have problems with sexual urges because of it” and cast it as “Gotcha! Paul says you shouldn’t get married”.
I did include “if they could help it”. Also, I don’t see how anyone can read that “if they cannot exercise self-control” line as anything less than Paul considering the state of being married as being evidence of lesser personal virtue, as compared to being celibate.
You are correct in that Paul isn’t phrasing it as a direct divine command, but I would argue that it isn’t “utilitarian” advice; it’s purely deontological. If anything, Paul’s concession that marriage may be acceptable is a utilitarian one: there are plenty of anecdotal examples of people in ancient times converting to Christianity and thereafter refusing to marry (e.g. pretty much any female saint, especially Thecla) and thereby causing substantial social disruption.
The view that the celibate life is a higher calling has never really been abandoned in Catholicism (I don’t know about among Protestant folks, but TBH just about the only celibate Protestant minister I have ever seen is Shepherd Book). I’m not sure I would translate that into “greater personal virtue” (ETA: though it is not unrelated) but it was and is certainly contended that one can grow closer to God without the distraction of marriage and family. Consider for example the vocation of monks.
I was wondering when SSC would mention St. Paul’s apocryphal female sidekick! Not that her existence is necessarily apocryphal, but the events in Acts of Paul and Thecla get about as wild as the Golden Legend.
* “Thecla was a young noble virgin from Iconium who listened to Paul’s ‘discourse on virginity’, espoused the teachings and became estranged to both her fiancé, Thamyris, and her mother. She sat by her window for three days, listening to St. Paul and his teachings. When they witnessed this, they became concerned that Thecla would follow Paul”
* “Thecla was miraculously saved from burning at the stake by the onset of a storm and traveled with Paul to Antioch of Pisidia. There, a nobleman named Alexander desired Thecla and attempted to rape her.”
* “Thecla fought him off, tearing his cloak and knocking his coronet off his head in the process. She was put on trial for assault.”
* “Thecla was sentenced to be eaten by wild beasts but was again saved by a series of miracles, when the female beasts (lionesses in particular) protected her against her male aggressors.”
* “Not yet baptized when she was to be martyred in the Arena, she baptized herself by throwing herself into a nearby lake full of aggressive seals.”
* “Thecla rejoined St. Paul in Myra, and traveled becoming a popular role model for women.”
* “According to some versions of the Acts, she ended up living in a cave in Seleucia Cilicia for 72 years.”
* “She left her cave to go lie down on St. Paul’s tomb in Rome after he was martyred.”
* “She became a cave hermit in Maaloula, Syria, performed many healing miracles, but remained constantly persecuted. As her persecutors were about to get her, she called out to God and a new passage was opened in the cave, and the stones closed behind her. The passage and caves are still found in Maaloula which became a very important site for pilgrims.”
I think the implication about the seals is that the Romans were keeping them around to eat people. That’s an exotic way to die, you’ve got to give the Romans credit for that.
@broblawsky
If either are utilitarian, both are. From the chapter:
.
or, very, very explicitly saying “unmarried is good” is a utility argument:
.
Your argument that this is deontological advice is wrong on its face, and he makes that clear a minimum of three times in the same chapter you are quoting.
Again, I’m responding to this:
Paul is responding to this: Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.”
Note that the quotes above are included in most English translations of the Bible – it’s generally thought to be a specific statement he’s responding to.
which is usually read similarly to this summary from Jamieson-Fausset-Brown:
If that’s true, it’s specifically a defense of traditional marriage.
Even if it’s not true that Paul is responding to a quote, the arc of the chapter is still “Hey, even though marriage can be expected to distract you from God and is troublesome in some ways, it’s still so valuable in terms of lust abatement and societal order that you should do it unless you have a specific gift from God that allows it to be feasible”.
I want to be nicer here, but I think an average person reading your quote would come away with the impression that Paul thinks people shouldn’t get married, and I think the post reads in such a way that it’s probably what you intended. That’s enough different from “people who don’t have the specific gift of celibacy I have should absolutely get married for a variety of reasons, even after we consider it takes time away from God” that I didn’t feel I could not respond to it.
Firstly, I appreciate that you’re trying to be nice, and I didn’t consider your first post to be a personal attack. Theology can be a bruising form of argument; I’m not easily offended by it. I appreciate your learned commentary; you’re clearly someone with substantial scholarship under their belt.
Secondly, I’m an average person (in terms of Biblical scholarship), and I can’t read Paul’s commentary on marriage in First Corinthians as asserting anything but that marriage is a less desirable state than celibacy. Marriage may be acceptable, but it’s still inherently worse. If Paul is responding to anti-marital comments from the Corinthians, they may well be Corinthian interpretations of Paul’s own teachings, which he was forced to make more nuanced – hence my note that his acceptance of marriage may be utilitarian in nature, e.g. Paul was trying to make early Christianity more socially acceptable. I don’t think that this is an unreasonable interpretation.
I think the key here for me in how I’m reading it is that, if you look at his restrictions on “non-marriage is good”, Paul is saying something like:
My uncharitable take is that this is a lot like saying:
I don’t think that’s fair or the tone he was going for, though.
So on one level I agree with you – Paul IS saying non-marriage is optimal because of the extra spare time for piousness and the added simplicity. But that has to be tempered with him immediately saying “so long as you have a specific spiritual gift that makes it possible, and you wouldn’t be uncomfortably horny”.
I think that’s a big enough exception that he’s now essentially saying that:
A. Best case scenario is a person with this specific gift who isn’t bothered by celibacy(at least to the point where it causes him to have lust problems)
B. Not everybody has that gift and sex drive, so
C. Best case scenario for everyone without that gift and sex drive setting is being married.
I would argue B. is most people, and that he’s essentially then saying that most people’s best case is marriage. I do think with this last post of yours neither of us is that far apart from the other though – I’m in agreement that the ideal state of a theoretical person can be is unmarried, just differing I think in that I don’t Paul is saying that it’s the ideal state of most actual people.
That seems reasonable.
This is sort of two questions, and both are big:
1. Is homosexuality a biblical sin?
and
2. What makes things sins?
Both things are fraught with disagreements. I don’t think 1. is very ambiguous either in the old or the new testament; some people do, although I don’t find their arguments persuasive. Mostly they argue that when Paul references homosexuality, he’s talking about a particular kind of temple prostitution. I’ve never seen any argument for this that boiled down to anything other than A. Temple prostitutes existed and B. So he must be talking about that even though he didn’t mention it. But some people very sincerely believe this, it’s not a niche belief only a few people hold.
The second is perhaps more of an argument, and one we had some threads back at great length – what makes things sins? Are they sins abstract of God as some sort of ultimate natural force, or because he picked them to be sins, or because they have to do with what he is and wants?
This matters kind of a lot. You might not have been saying this, but your question implies something like “I understand why murder is a sin, because it hurts people. I’m willing to grant God the right to call that a sin in that case. But I’m unwilling to grant God the right to call others things that don’t inflict clear harm on others sin”.
So we would have to break it down – are you willing to grant God unconditional rights to be the arbiter of what’s right and wrong and/or does God merely accurately relate some abstract ultimate concept of right/wrong to us that exists separately from him, or is God the thing and deviation from the standard set by the inherent qualities of ultimate thing what right and wrong is?
If any of the above is true, then in an ultra-simplified version of this there’s no issue. God either has a right to set rightness/wrongness standards, or he himself is the rightness wrongness standards, or rightness/wrongness exist as an ideal apart from him; in any case, it’s a sin, and it’s wrong and you shouldn’t do it.
If none of the above is true, you get either “nothing is wrong in an absolute sense” OR “things are only wrong if X” where X is either “they fit some standard which is more important than God” or “I/society agree(s) with them”.
There’s a venn diagram overlap of both to some degree that says “There’s a God, and he sets rightness and wrongness standards that I’m obligated to follow, but he’s doing it wrong and is bad”.
I’m sure there’s some fringe categories I’m missing, but I think those are the main ones. I’m pretty firmly in the camp of “Right and wrong are determined from the character of God, who exists as the absolute thing” camp, so I don’t see the same conflict you do. But it’s fairly cheap for me to be in that camp because I agree with him on most things.
Note: not a Catholic, or an expert in Catholic theology.
My understanding is that the Catholic stance on sexual intercourse requires that sex maintain the possibility of procreation. I’m not sure how they square this with, for example, sex involving post-menopausal or barren people, but there’s enough examples in the Bible of God giving children to older/barren people (e.g. Sarah & Abraham) that it’s pretty easy to get around. Since same-sex acts can’t produce children, and there’s no Biblical precedent for God giving people children ex nihilo, same-sex individuals are obligated to practice chastity, and master/suppress their sexual urges.
It goes a good bit beyond this, incest, bestiality and (male) homosexuality pretty much go together in the Bible. (One of those categories does give children). It is an abomination.
(Not a Christian, but am pretty familar with what Christians call the Old Testament.)
Sure, that’s all part of the Holiness Code (Lev. 17-26).
The difference is between acts that are, of their nature, nongenerative and that are non generative due to extrinsic (accidental in the philosophical sense) reasons.
By way of analogy, consider someone eating knowing that he will probably throw up because he is sea sick. That might not be the most virtuous example of eating but that is eating and not seriously problematic. We would not give the person a blank check to eat in this circumstance but it might be the right thing to do in a particular circumstances. On the other hand imagine someone cramming food into an orifice that by nature of it can never digest food. This is arguably not even eating and is seriously problematic. Again consider someone who eats planning on inducing vomiting. The latter two are very different than the first.
I’m reminded of a very weird argument I had with a Catholic friend in college, where he maintained that sticking a slice of pizza in one’s ear would be inherently sinful.
Sticking a slice of pizza in one’s ear might be irrational, but that is not enough to establish it is sinful. Next time you see this friend, ask him what common good pizza in the ear concerns.
Adversely impacts no more common good than getting yourself off does.
Look at that sinful pizza pioneer!
The results of the aging process are no more extrinsic than the sex you’re born with: both are results of the natural human development and maturation process.
I am somewhat confused by your comment. Many things are part of natural human development processes but do not deterine if one act is part of one act type or another act type. Engaging in reproductive activity with someone that has blue eyes is the same act type as engaging in reproductive activity as someone that has green eyes. Engaging in mutual masturbation with some one that has green eyes is a different act type from engaging in reproductive activity with someone that has green eyes.
I was making a point about sex with someone who is barren being just as nongenerative as sex with someone who is incapable of bearing children for other reasons (e.g., wrong sex).
Age does not effect the nature of an act. It does impact the likely consequences which are relevant but it does not change the nature of an act. Neither does per se the sex of those involved, or at least they do so less clearly. Anal sex is definitely a different kind of act than P in V sex. This is true regardless of the sex of those involved wether male male and male female or other permutations are the same kind of act I do not know. But if they were different, they would be so do to different organs being relevant.
Maybe this is a specifically Catholic thing, but I don’t see how you can separate the ethical nature of an act from the context of the people performing it. Taking a knife to someone is completely ethically different depending on whether the two people involved are surgeon and patient or, uh, literally any other scenario.
@broblasky
(This is long, and apologies if isn’t helpful. I’m trying to work through questions I’ve long had about recent Roman Catholic appropriations of natural law–a concept I accept in general, if not in their specific terms–so if I’m wrong or illogical, I’m certainly open to debate.)
Modern Roman Catholic moral theology is (IMHO) working with a very particular definition of “intrinsic” and “extrinsic.” Remember, another branch of the same system argues that the identity of a consecrated host, down to the distribution of fundamental subatomic particles, does not reflect its metaphysical “essence.” The counterintuitiveness of that claim may not impinge upon the philosophical coherency of the argument–though I think transubstantiation, reframed by modern physics, is just a clunky way of describing the Lutheran view, that there is a “mystical union” of Christ with Eucharistic elements that nevertheless remain really bread and wine–but it does mean we should be on the lookout for similarly counterintuitive reasoning elsewhere.
“Intrinsic” here means–so far as I understand it–that the sexual act (in its old sense, i.e., the act that depends inherently on the difference between the sexes) works procreatively. That it does, and that there is only one such act in the ordinary order of things (“nature”) is intuitively obvious. What is not obvious is that the intrinsic quality of that act justifies any instantiation of the act that will not, in fact, lead to procreation (your objection, I think); nor that the divine command (as Christians see it) against certain acts that are non-procreative is ipso facto extensible to all non-procreative acts, because non-procreativeness is all that is wrong with them.
To my understanding, the disdain for intercourse within marriage that proliferated in the Christian churches after the first century (but casts only the thinnest shadow in the New Testament books) has little to do with such niceties about “intrinsic” qualities. It is rooted instead in conviction of the evil of pleasure, the need for ritual purity, and the general unseemliness of the marriage bed. In the Reformation–to make the story very short–that tradition bifurcates, into one that rejects non-procreative sex (until the sexual revolution of the long 19th century, anyway) but holds marriage to be a virtually unqualified good, and the nascent Roman Catholic tradition, which still upholds celibacy as the ideal. Where the arguments from intrinsic properties come in, I don’t know, though I can tell they are not the ones the ancients typically made.
Now, we have a Roman Catholic Church that has accepted marital intercourse that is non-procreative in intent (“Natural Family Planning”)–something specifically condemned by Augustine, who knew of the rhythm method and had likely practiced it himself as a young man–yet has received a teaching that separating sexual intercourse from procreation is bad. Intuition suggests that an act is procreative if it is reasonably likely to lead to procreation. The solution is thus to argue that the procreativeness of a sexual act resides in something else intuitive: that the purpose of the genital organs in the order of nature is procreation. To that, however, is added the corollary that, because the purpose of the organs is to come together and procreate, such coming together counts as “procreative” without any regard for whether they are being used for that purpose right now.
Procreation is indeed the biological function the genitals achieve in humans as in all animals that have them, and an appeal to their “natural” function to establish their moral use is older than and independent of a neo-Thomistic account of natural law (see, e.g., Paul in Romans 1 or the later Stoics). But justifying intentional frustration of procreative purpose by insisting that only the “intrinsic” quality of the act itself matters seems to me a morally incoherent attempt to retcon a theological tradition. While insisting it hasn’t really changed anything at all, Roman Catholic moral theology has accommodated modern demands (heightened by the shift to low-birthrate, low-deathrate, urban living) for some kind of contraceptive method and modern expectations (heightened by increasing lifespans and better health in old age) that spouses past childbearing will still lie together.
Both accommodations weaken the old insistence on procreation alone as the hallmark of legitimate sexual activity, but of course that insistence had no firm biblical root, anyway. What does are the rejection of fornication and sodomy of all kinds (probably including that between men and women, too), rejection of divorce under most circumstances, and a belief that polygyny was never a great idea and now belongs firmly to the past. A moderate view that holds the union of man and woman to be natural and procreation to be its ordinary end, but does not interrogate every act within that union or judge contraceptive methods by a casuistry that specifically excludes intent, is certainly possible. Many Protestants hold to something like it. It just isn’t the Roman Catholic view.
So yes, I think what you’re objecting to might just be a specifically Catholic thing, though of course ideas the position is trying to justify are universal Christian doctrine.
@broblawsky, that is rather like saying that it’s unethical for someone who is going deaf to try to listen. Our senses degrade over time, but their proper function remains what it is, even if it’s rarely or never achievable; no aspect of the maturation process* changes a faculty’s nature or its ends or which uses conform to those ends. It’s not as though, when your hearing degrades enough, your ears stop being ears and become pretty ornaments (or ugly ornaments, as the case may be). They’re still ears, and they’re still for listening; they just can’t anymore.
*and wouldn’t both examples be better characterized as senescence?
ETA: Oh, about the surgery analogy, maybe I should make a different post. rahien.din asked about that too last thread and I did not respond.
@MPG Thanks for your explanation. That makes sense as a part of the overall Catholic philosophy on sex & marriage, although I don’t think I can get behind the fundamental theory that an action has a morally acceptable or unacceptable “essence”. I believe that actions should be justifiable on the basis on either a deontological rule or on the basis of some kind of utility function; “essence” seems much more philosophically shaky to me.
@Nick I don’t think I can get behind that justification, for the same reason. Trying to listen when you’re incapable of doing so doesn’t violate any kind of reasonable deontological rule, nor does it produce negative utility. If a philosophy has a deontological rule about sex only being acceptable for the purposes of reproduction, then any kind of sex that can’t reasonably be expected to result in reproduction is immoral. Carving out many different special exceptions (e.g. age, sterility, natural contraception) in a deontological rule is evidence that you either shouldn’t be holding to that rule, or that you don’t really want to, IMO.
@broblawsky
To be clear, I think the Roman Catholic view has for ulterior reasons adopted a morally incoherent separation of intention from the posited “essence” of an act. (This, N.B., is distinct from the double-effect problem in medicine, which involves being forced to do someting harmful to prevent another harm–the couple using NFP is not preventing a harm, according to my logic or theirs.) The only place where I introduced any essentialism in my own voice was (I think) in observing that vaginal intercourse is inherently (= essentially?) procreative, which is just a truism. I mean, it does do that, not all of the time or for everyone, but as a rule. That’s like saying eating is nutritive or taking medicine is healing. It might not be; it might even harm people (and sexual intercourse can endanger a human already procreated, by stimulating pre-term labor); but it’s ordinarily true and in a real sense the point of the action, so powerfully so that it may result if you don’t intend it at all. That doesn’t bear on whether it’s right or wrong per se, but it does distinguish copulation from other, potentially orgasmic acts.
Can we agree on that?
EDIT: If we can agree on that, it may well be an important datum in developing any further ethical arguments. But most Christian views are likely to involve an element of divine command, and so to approximate to some sort of deontological rule. I think the average Protestant is fine with that, for example.
@MPG
If you don’t like NFP you don’t have to do it. 😉 But I would make two points in defense of it:
1. It is entirely possible to do it contraceptively. The obvious way is for one spouse to say to another, “Honey, let’s practice the rhythm method so that we’ll never have kids again!” The rhythm method is not per se contraceptive but people can still do it as if it is. NFP teaching material will say over and over that a couple must remain open to life; it’s not saying that on the fear that mom is going to go abort the baby the moment a fertility test unexpectedly comes back positive! Put more directly: the intention does matter, but in the usual case there is no intention to frustrate procreation.
2. The justification for NFP being consistent with the Thomistic natural law reasoning @edmundgennings and I have been using here is that you’re not actually doing anything to frustrate procreation; you’re not having sex on the days when you’re most fertile, rather than doing something to frustrate the sexual acts that you are having. The rhythms of human fertility are after all simply a part of it, and noticing that doesn’t make refraining consequent on it necessarily wrong.
Relatedly, regarding Augustine’s condemnation of Manichean rhythm method usage. We should take the opinion of Augustine very seriously; there is hardly a more preeminent authority among saints and theologians. But we must always interpret carefully. I won’t pretend to be a scholar of the early Church, which is evidently your specialty, but still it seems to me that Augustine condemns use which is clearly and blatantly contraceptive in intention. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Manicheans thought having children at all was immoral; they prescribed the rhythm method specifically to make pregnancy as unlikely as possible. I don’t think the passage has to be interpreted as a blanket condemnation of the rhythm method.
Sorry, but I don’t think I can agree that there’s some essence in the act of vaginal intercourse that sets it apart morally from other forms of intercourse. I believe that actions have moral weight based on either their consequences\utility or on whether they violate (or uphold) some kind of deontological rule. The action, in and of itself, isn’t special.
@broblawsky
Don’t think about it in terms of “deontological rules”; you’re just going to confuse yourself. What I’m assuming here, if I can try to put it minimally, is:
1) humans have certain faculties like the sexual or nutritive which are ordered to certain ends like procreation and unity or sustenance;
2) they can use them, which means voluntarily and deliberately exercising them;
3) using one in a way contrary to its ends is irrational.
A faculty isn’t just a body part, because body parts can be for different things. We urinate and copulate with the same organ, after all, so it of course doesn’t follow just because you’re urinating that you’re misusing your sexual faculty. And using excludes passive or involuntary bodily functions; we don’t have a faculty for sweating, because it is entirely outside our control, but I think we plausibly do have a faculty for hearing because listening is something we can do actively, not just passively. And contrariness is quite a strict criterion; it’s not simply doing something other than the ends, but doing something actually contrary to them, usually put as frustrating them. For instance, you start trying to listen to Bach, but you put earmuffs on first. Obviously you aren’t just “doing something else,” like trying to sleep, you’re actually interfering with the act of listening you set out to do.
Relatedly, and more to the original objection, a faculty which has decayed is certainly still ordered to its end; that’s why I said you’re talking as if ears stop being ears when we become deaf. And the principles I’ve laid out here like (1), (2), and (3) are AFAIK definitional or exceptionless. So to the extent that you disagree with this analysis (and your latest responses to MPG and me sound more like plain disagreement than critique), that’s fine, but it’s not susceptible to the objections you’ve raised.
(ETA: And to bring (3) into this, which part I added and deleted for some reason during writing: irrationality isn’t enough to say an act is immoral, but when the end is a common good like procreation it is. You can call that (4) if you like. It’s also exceptionless AFAIK.)
@Nick
If you’re using “frustrate procreation” to mean “never get pregnant,” then sure (and I never defended that). But if “frustrate procreation” means “not get pregnant right now,” then what is the method being used for, anyway? The aim is surely to help “space” and so on, which is precisely frustration of procreation right now (and what many people hope to achieve through other methods). The difference is thus between a view that assumes sexual acts are to be considered in absolute isolation, and one that thinks the overall pattern of life and intention are what matters–but it’s the overall pattern of life and intention to which you are appealing, in saying that “in the usual case there is no intention to frustrate procreation.” If the reasoning doesn’t seem to you incoherent, it’s still rules-lawyering, and (if we believe the New Testament, surely the most authoritative source for all Christian theological debate) God hates rules-lawyering. But I’m even less likely to convince you, I’d guess, than you are to convince me.
You’re right on the Manichaeans, but I find it very difficult to imagine Augustine allowing an “out” for someone who said, “But I mean to procreate, just not now, and so I’m only taking my pleasure with my wife [to borrow his language] when I’m sure she won’t get pregnant.” You can judge for yourself, of course (the relevant section is 18.65, here, and yes, it is framed to a debate different from any modern one). I can’t fully justify that apprehension with citations, mind you–it’s the feeling one gets from reading a lot of him and a lot of other ancient Christian authors. It’s just not the way they think, you know? But my speciality is not in ancient sexuality, and someone who’s specifically studied it might come to a different conclusion.
@broblawsky
I agree with Nick that you and I (and he) are probably just disagreeing on the point, but I do think that–ethics entirely aside–there is a special quality to vaginal intercourse, just as using teeth to eat, using teeth to fight, and using teeth to hold onto your coat when you’re zipping it up are different. All of those acts are distinct in intention and effect (very, very few humans are going to kill prey with their teeth and eat it raw); all of them may be good, bad, or morally indifferent–only further reasoning can tell; and only one of them is the main biological purpose of teeth, the most fundamental purpose they achieve in the Darwinian contest of survival. That can all be true, even if you don’t think anything ethical follows–but the ethics may want to take those data into account.
P.S. (Too late for an edit) “Absolute” isolation was overstatement, but I think there’s still an unhelpful atomization of actions going on here.
I’m certainly not arguing against practice of NFP, of course.
I don’t think I can unreservedly agree with postulates #1 or #3 (e.g., humans have abstract faculties with specific purposes that are independent of specific organs, and that use of those of those faculties for purposes other than those ends is irrational).
I disagree with postulate #1 because I have a low personal opinion of teleology. I recognize that this is somewhat at odds with my religion, but I think that teleology is just the product of the human pattern-matching capability, and that teleological arguments are no more inherently reliable than any other output of our pattern-matching ability. Making ethical judgments based on teleological arguments seems unwise to me.
I disagree with #3 because individuals may have coherent and ethical individual reasons for doing irrational things. To re-use an example from up-thread, it might very well be rational (and ethical) to stick a piece of pizza in your ear if you’re trying to make someone smile. Any moral system that would judge someone harshly for doing something like that would seem to me to be in need of some recalibration.
Based on my disagreements with those postulates, I don’t think I can agree with that element of this philosophy. However, @Nick and @MPG, I appreciate both of you taking the time to explain this to me. Thank you both very much.
@broblawsky
I’m glad to be some help, at least. (And don’t take my comments as authoritative on Roman Catholicism, of course; I’m obviously at odds with aspects of their reasoning, and on these points not much more than a moderately well-informed amateur.)
What is God’s plan for celibate clergy? They also do not get to experience their sexuality the same way that straight couples do.
The way I understand it, going into the clergy is a vocation and a voluntary choice, whereas your sexual orientation is not.
So celibacy in clergy is chosen, but celibacy because of your sexual orientation is a mandate.
From a secular POV, sure, it’s a voluntary choice.
But there’s the argument that being in the clergy is a calling, and if you hear the calling you ought to respond. So not as much of a choice as one might think.
I’ve never felt right about that argument, but it’s there.
Do people generalize the book of Jonah that much?
Do people use the terms “calling” and “vocation”? Yes.
Of course, lemur used it backwards, but language demonstrates the history.
The theological reasoning behind this is notoriously weaksauce, it is a rationalization. The church was loosing a lot of property to priests offspring, and put a stop to that by ensuring they could have no legitimate heirs of the body. Mostly, this was even limited to the sacrament, and parish priests having a housekeeper that was obviously their wife in all but name was ignored.
Concerns about inheritance are relevant for why the norm of clerical continence which naturally is linked to clerical celibacy, became more enforced at particular times but they do not tell us why that law was on the books to begin with.
The practical reasons behind a push for enforcing a law that is on the books is very different than the reasons for that law particularly in a religious context. Clerical continence (which is interestingly different from clerical celibacy though it obviously tends to lead to it) was seemingly regarded by all as an ancient tradition from the mid fourth century onwards until the havoc the Persians and Islamic war decimated the east. We do not have great sources from before then but it is at least as plausible that the norm of clerical continence started in 33 AD as that it started in 250 AD. And it is really difficult to argue that it started much after 275 AD given the difficulty in imposing something like this when it was not at least theoretically required before hand.
The alternative, clerical incontinence, sounds like a problem you’d face in an Oregon Trail/Dungeons & Dragons hybrid!
@Le Maistre Chat
I’m sure there’s an orison for that.
You just have the explain why you can only cast spiritual weapon once that day.
I would agree that the justifications I hear from modern Roman Catholic on celibacy and especially contraception are rationalizations in the strict sense: they supply a philosophical explanation for views adopted in antiquity for different (if not necessarily incompatible) reasons. Modern appeals to the intrinsic procreative quality of sexual intercourse absent certain drugs or barriers, for example, simply are not defending the same view someone such as Augustine did: he expressly rejects the rhythm method as a Manichaean practice that makes a wife into a prostitute. The general ancient expectation of married clergy, expressed with great moral fervor, is that they will not have intercourse with their wives, because that’s wrong. I’ve laid out more of that reasoning in the last open thread and so won’t repeat it all here.
What these arguments are not is rationalizations to cover over some greed on the part of Roman Catholic (or pre-Great Schism) hierarchs. The “housekeepers” you name are, for example, the subject of conciliar judgments and a great deal of opprobrium from famous theologians, certainly in the period of my own study–so the third through fifth centuries–though of course they were still around in the sixteenth century (just as there were pederast priests in the 11th; these things stick around).
And (to comment on the main subject of the thread now) of course both the ban on homosexual conduct and a belief in the naturalness of marital intercourse–prototypically what makes babies–is a general Christian, because biblical, belief entirely apart from specific Roman Catholic arguments. They do not stand or fall with them, and there are (or were) Protestant natural law theories that made the whole of the Ten Commandments, interpreted in the expansive way typical of Protestant catechisms, part of the natural law.
I would also add that the modern ideal heterosexual/ heteroromantic fulfillment is not merely new but also Western. This is less the case than it was 50 years ago, due to western cultural influence but there is still an important divide. There was a somewhat humorous disagreement among Catholic bishops at Vatican II. The European bishops wanted what some language that would be very mild in the contemporary purview praising- presupposing the a weak form of the heteroromantic fulfillment view of marriage and it just offended the Indian bishops, not as celibates but as Indians, and they successfully got it removed.
Praise the Holy Spirit, who worked through Hindu culture to make the Church speak for the human race when she was most in danger of speaking only for WEIRD people!
Enthusiastically endorsed!
I am very wary of anything that looks like a reduction of love to the modern erotic romantic involuntary account of love. Yes that in its full flowering can be quite beautiful. But it is rare and fragile. But the beauty in the forest is much less in the fragile flowers than the stable and far more common other forms of love. The vast majority of love worthy of the name is non erotic. Just limiting oneself to unchosen familial love, one only has one spouse and two parents and let us say 2 children and one sibling. Spousal love is what 16% of the familial love one has. And I think that even with in marriage there is more beauty in the chosen decision to love one’s wife as Christ loved the Church than in the biological grounding that normally makes that easier (or female version).
As for your question the same thing it is for everyone. Holiness. How people live this out will depend on their individual situations. There is nothing that prevents them from getting married and having children. There might be a bit more difficulty in conception and there will not be the same initial passion but there is great beauty in a same sex attracted man who has chosen to love his same sex attracted wife and vice versa and raise a family together.
You need to not think of LGTBQ as a coherent ontological category and ask “What is God’s plan for members of [group]?” for each abnormal sexuality.
Bisexual: isn’t this one obvious? If monogamy is moral, they can get married and repress acting on their erotic desires for the same sex just like straight people repress our desires to commit adultery.
Transgender: This one is a HUGE can of worms, as theists who believe in the Natural Law disagree on what these people should do. Penis-bearer + vagina-bearer only? Well in theocratic Iran, MtFs are encouraged to get the surgery and marry men.
Lesbian/Gay: You say
But do you really know how many people are hardwired homosexual and not bisexual? We live in a WEIRD society where people can experience peer pressure for things like political lesbianism. You know what’s even WEIRDer? The central example of male-male sex being two men over 18 wanting to get married. You’ll note that in Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian defense of homosexuality, he spends all his discussion of men defending pederasty.
So what do you think God’s plan for pedophiles is, either the clinical type or the colloquial type who experiences eros for members of the opposite sex from puberty through age 17? You mentally left out any sexual community that’s not PC. But God doesn’t care about PC, so this is a bigger question than you assumed!
Quite a few of the gay people I’ve met have told me they’ve experienced heterosexual sex, that it was pleasurable and nice, and that they prefer homosexual sex. They just feel attracted to people of their same sex.
So there’s nothing that says that gays and lesbians can’t marry in a traditional marriage, have kids, and then stop having the not really nice sex, like a lot of heterosexual couples while their kids are growing up.
That’s quite true; people who are same sex attracted have been happily married to the opposite sex. It’s quite uncommon, though, and results are confounded by folks who try to repress their attraction, which can cause serious problems for a marriage outside of just not liking the sex as much as other kinds. I’d only recommend it if the couple really knows what it’s getting into—though I guess that’s no different from the usual advice….
The idea that God is love is an expression of God’s character in the Trinity, and should point us towards what the ideals of what love is.
In this context, considering sexuality and “finding love” to be incompatable with the idea that “God is love” is actually saying that “love is God”. Putting our own conceptions of what love is (and as others have pointed out, these especially are modern, western conceptions) above the character of God as he has revealed to us is making an idol out of the concept of love.
It’s a fundamental part of Christian doctrine that since the fall, the Earth and mankind are no longer the way we were created by God. It affects us all in different ways, and unfairly too – the curse of Adam was to toil and sweat and die rather than to experience life in all the fullness God intended. And we certainly see that for some it is more painful and toilsome than others.
I believe the church should uphold it’s traditional beliefs on marriage and sexuality and teach them as God’s intended plan for humankind. This will be unfair for our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, especially in this age that idolizes sex and relationships, and no doubt be made even more painful given how the church has often wrongly singled out homosexuality as especially sinful rather than, say, the more common (and probably more harmful and destructive) adultery.
What is God’s plan for members of the LGBTQ+ community? The same as his plan for all of us sinners – to be reconciled to him through Christ, and to glorify and enjoy him eternally.
“What is God’s plan for members of the LGBTQ+ community? The same as his plan for all of us sinners – to be reconciled to him through Christ, and to glorify and enjoy him eternally.”
The problem is that that’s no feedback for whether the Catholic Church’s ideas are accurate. We can’t know what various people’s afterlives are like– that’s even before finding out how their behavior is related to their afterlife.
I don’t know if I understand the point you’re trying to make. I think you’re objecting to the bit where I make reference to eternal life and you are saying that telling one group of people (LGBTs) to give up something enjoyable in this life (sex and marriage) is a bit unfair if I can’t prove it will make things better in the next. Is that what you’re saying?
That’s about it. If there’s some error in the Catholic Church’s reasoning, there’s no way to really check on it.
I think you are overstating your case a little. We can’t check on what gets us into heaven. But surely the religion also makes predictions of a general sort about things on Earth. If we observed that most people who lived up to the rules of the religion ended up miserable that would be some evidence against the religion’s claims.
I don’t think Catholicism counts misery on earth as evidence, though I might be wrong.
Also, I apparently wasn’t blunt enough to get my point across. A number of Catholic rules– against homosexual behavior, against abortion, against divorce– have a lot of potential for producing misery on earth, and it might be presumptuous to assume they’re correct when there’s no way to check on whether they’re accomplishing their purpose.
I see a lot of people responding with arguments about why the church’s teaching is what it is, but the question lemur actually asked, it seems to me, is more important—given that the church does not permit homosexual marriage, what is God’s plan for unmarried LGTBQ+ people?
God being love, he creates and blesses a rich variety of different kinds of human loves, each of which reflect some aspect of his own character: loves between spouses, between parents and children, between friends, between people who would never have come together or enjoyed one another based on their personal tastes and preferences but have become family because of a shared commitment to something far more important, between those who are in need and those who are able to give and serve…. Every human being needs to love and be loved in order to flourish, but not all of us can or should find love in the same ways—if that were possible, it would diminish the richness of the human experience and even limit our understanding of God, who is too much to be contained in one metaphor (he is the Father and the Son, the Bridegroom and the Friend, bread from heaven and a gate by which to enter and a hen gathering her chicks under her wings).
The church requires exactly the same sexual behavior of everyone: either fidelity in marriage or abstinence. People who experience persistent or exclusive attraction to members of the same sex and accept the teaching of the church that they should not act on that attraction thus have two possible paths to follow. It’s perfectly lawful for them to get married and have children with someone of the opposite sex, just like anyone else. This is sometimes called a mixed-orientation marriage and opinions differ about how prudent it is. Such a marriage requires openness, total honesty, and extremely strong trust and commitment; marrying someone while in the closet is a very bad idea. People who pursue this path report that even if their spontaneous physical desire is primarily, say, for men, they can develop genuine attraction toward a specific woman in the context of a relationship. Almost undoubtedly, most same-sex-attracted people in previous generations married someone of the opposite sex; this was much easier before we developed the idea of fixed “orientations” that constitute a major part of an individual’s identity, rather than thinking about sexuality in terms of actions and behavior.
Christians who don’t marry, whether because of how they experience their sexual orientation or for any other reason, also have a vocation that is blessed by God and valuable to the church and the world. In fact, the celibate person is free to love more people and in more diverse ways than the married person. St. Paul writes, emphatically, that singleness is preferable to marriage: “Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do.” His rationale: “An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband.” The celibate person, especially someone who has made a commitment to celibacy and thus is not concerned about finding and pleasing a future spouse, can focus on serving God and neighbors in a way that married people, especially when they have small children, cannot. In general, single people have more free time and more flexibility in how they allocate resources, which they can dedicate to close friendships, community service, and evangelism. They thus have enormous potential to bless others. Singleness can feel hard and lonely, but part of the problem is the way that we’ve set up our cultural expectations around the romantic couple and the family, ignoring, excluding, and devaluing other kinds of love—a richer and more serious understanding of friendship, for example, might alleviate a great deal of the suffering that singles experience in our culture.
The Catholic Church is great about this! You have tons of role models, contemporary and historical, of people living awesome lives in celibacy—not only priests, but monks and nuns, friars and religious sisters, hermits and anchorites. Catholic celibates have the option of joining an institution—indeed a whole slew of different institutions—that order their members’ “freed up” time and resources toward a worthy goal (worship, scholarly study and argument, service to the poor and vulnerable) and give them an enormous family of adopted brothers and sisters to love and be loved by (and to share the difficult, sanctifying work of living together). There are also plenty of individual Christians, Catholic and Protestant, doing the same kind of celibate living in less structured ways.
There’s a decent population of LGBTQ-identifying Christians who are doing fantastic work thinking about these issues—see the blog https://spiritualfriendship.org/ and the conference https://revoice.us/, for example. For a specifically Catholic perspective, check out Eve Tushnet (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N2OISBK/), who memorably writes that “You can’t have a vocation of ‘no'” and tries to find out what the “yes” is. It’s an exciting conversation to be part of, and it has the potential to teach straight and married Christians a better understanding of love as well.
What’s to talk about? It’s pretty clear that Catholicism’s plan (attributed to God) for LGBTQ+ people is the same as not-Catholicism’s plan for e.g. pedophiles. For them to not have sex the way they want to, ever. And to not marry or form domestic partnerships with the people they want to have sex with. And, if they can pull that off without whining too much, to be treated with compassion and sympathy.
Except that the Catholics are I think more likely to come through with the compassion for sexless gays than the not-Catholics are with the sexless pedophiles.
That being the answer to the question, “What is God’s plan…”, people are instead debating the much more interesting and open-ended questions of “Why is that God’s plan?”, “How do we know?”m and “What should God’s plan be?”. I expect “Who is this God person anyway?” to show up soon enough.
+1
I believe empirically that most homosexual humans have been, if we have to put them in modern “orientation” categories.
I believe empirically that while most bi women may have been attracted to other women 18+ (50% confidence), most bi men have been pederasts (95% confidence). “The gay (male) community” is a social construct, a peculiarly modern way of canalizing homoeroticism, as even Michel Foucault claimed.
In that frame, Catholicism’s plan for humanity doesn’t seem much more restrictive than not-Catholicism’s plan.
And yes, I also believe conversion therapy doesn’t work (confidence uncertain; I’d have to read the studies used by psych professionals to justify its universal condemnation as pseudoscience. Politics, replicability crisis, etc. But I wouldn’t be shocked if it is true at >99% confidence.)
I am uncertain but some of the evidence on conversion therapy if one combines it with other info suggests that it preforms significantly worse than a placebo. Sexual orientation is a surprisingly messy and fluid empirical reality and conversion therapy if anything seems to reduce that.
Taken as a theodicy question–is God unfair?–this is really quite mild. God also allows famines, war crimes, plagues, rapes, murders, pederasty, you name it. Having some people want sex incorrectly is rather mild by comparison.
Taken as a question about what’s wrong, my Orthodox, not Catholic, perspective, is that sin is simply Being Human the Wrong Way. We were made to act in a certain way; deviating from the pattern produces suffering and estrangement. The thing is wrong in itself. Or so I am told. We’re all born wanting to do it wrong in one way or another. It’s not really fair that this one subset of people are born with a particular weird temptation that doesn’t go away, but it’s also not fair that some people are born into horrible abusive homes. One hopes God is merciful and it will make sense in the end, because the alternative is that the suffering doesn’t have, and can never have, any meaning at all.
I refrain from dogmatizing on the matter both because I have little experience with it and because it’s a really hot button. Oh, and also it doesn’t really bother me. Heterosexual fornication causes so much more misery.
Isn’t this just another instance of the Epicurean Paradox?
Here the particular piece of suffering is gays unable to have sex. And god doesn’t need to use his magic omnipotence powers, he just needs to be able to communicate with us. And if god isn’t communicating with us in any way shape or form, then all religious texts are made up by humans and right only by coincidence. (Ie almost certainly wrong. ) People believed in gods that actually made all life, and then evolution came along. Religion has a bad track record of making correct unambiguous predictions. (If you take a large pile of random facts, and random sentences, you can find some that look kind of similar by the law of large numbers) Religious morality is just whatever the surrounding culture or priests thought was moral with a “god said” on the front. One person thinks that homosexuality is sinful, and says ” god told me to stone the gays to death”. Another person has more enlightened values and says “god says to love everyone”. If the boss is never seen to give a clear message to all, people can say they are following the bosses orders without being called out by the boss. Is it any wonder that the “bosses orders” are inconsistent?
A question that needs to be answered for this to be particularly convincing as an argument is this: If the boss sent down relatively unambiguous orders, would we expect them to be interpreted and obeyed that way, or would we expect ambiguity?
Let’s imagine that there’s one valid religious text, and all it says is “God exists, and is the arbiter of what is right and wrong. He says that eating butter is wrong and that you shouldn’t do it”. We’d certainly expect ambiguity on the first – an enormous amount of people reading the book would deny the existence of the existing God, some because they simply don’t believe it from the get-go and some getting there because butter is delicious and a valuable source of protein in livestock-reliant cultures and they want to be able to eat it. Some, and this is important, might eventually reject it because they’ve been eating butter on the sly and feel guilty about it, but want to stop feeling bad.
Say someone accepted that God existed; he might then reject that he is the rightful arbiter of right and wrong because he doesn’t feel God deserves to be, or because he feels right and wrong exist outside of God. He might also reject it as above because butter is nutritious and delicious, whether outright beforehand or after guilt from eating it anyway.
Say someone accepted that God existed and was the rightful arbiter of right and wrong – we’d still expect to see a significant amount of people interpreting that butter was OK to eat in this maximally non-ambiguous text. One reason is because butter is tasty and available and people rationalize to get things they want. Some people do so more when these things are denied to them, taboo being a powerful motivator for some.
Some people might misinterpret this obvious section of the text even if they aren’t stupid and don’t like butter – say they had a friend who they found credible who told them that butter is the only food they could ever enjoy. Their friend had from earliest childhood felt an attraction to butter as a foodstuff and while they could eat other foods and certainly survive, they did not enjoy them or feel fulfilled in the absence of butter. Their friend is visibly miserable as a result. They have other friends who they know to be decent, nice people in all non-butter related ways but who are vilified for eating butter. They, seeing the suffering of both groups of friends, are motivated to rationalize the command away.
What rationalizations would we expect? Didn’t we used to use dirty churns which were dangerous to our health? When the command was written, wasn’t goat butter the only butter we had? Wasn’t there a false cult of butter that predated the text that no longer exists, worked against our God and did other worse things with the butter? Considering how much everything has changed, can we really consider this command to be absolute and not speaking to a particular people at a particular time in a context that no longer applies to us?
You see where I’m going. I’m not trying to convince you of the existence of God here – this isn’t a good argument for it anyway – but pointing to diversity of interpretations alone isn’t a workable argument for the absence of a God unless we wouldn’t expect diversity of interpretations with a maximally unambiguous text. But with restrictions on sex and food in play alone, we’d expect diversity of interpretation for the reasons listed above even when the text was black and white; for your argument to hold water, it needs some way the ambiguity that exists is unique in a way that “fake text” produces but “real text” can’t.
As a matter of fact, this paradox was one minor part of my deconversion from Catholicism. A rule, like that against female priests, which smelled a lot more like a fallible human law than anything an all-knowing, benevolent God would decree.
Sounds like you’re probably not up for a crisis of faith, though, so I’d recommend chalking the inconsistency up to the imperfections of the people responsible for writing down, spreading, and teaching His commandments. I’m sure that strategy’s a blatant violation of some part of the Catholic canon, but eh, seems to work for my parents.
Originally, people read “underlying conditions” and somehow came to believe that those who died of covid were already hanging on by a thread and this just happened to be the feather that knocked them over. But as we learn more about the disease, it seems that covid interacts with things like diabetes and hypertension in unforeseen ways. So even people who could have lived with their condition for decades can be killed by covid. So on this aspect, public understanding of the virus has changed a lot.
Not understanding how life expectancy works is on you though.
Has anyone considered the risk of human extinction as a result of birth control? I came to think of this when reading the review of The Precipice. Surely other people must have thought along the same lines, as simple extrapolation of the current European fertility rate would produce extinction in a mere hundred generations, but the only thing I was able to find on Google on this subject was one paywalled article from 1932.
I think it probably will not happen, as fertility is probably heritable enough that the hyperfertile will replace the rest of us rather rapidly, and if that is not the case, even if liberal civilization does crumble due to population decline, reactionary (e.g. Amish) and authoritarian (e.g. China) societies will expand to fill the void, and even if those societies were somehow to fail to stop the onslaught of birth control, in the end civilizational decline would probably halt the production of birth control long before we reached extinction. But even so, I do think extinction by birth control is a risk worth considering, as the reasons to believe that it will not happen seem far from conclusive, and because some of the ways for it not to happen are not so nice if you like liberal civilization.
You don’t have to talk about heritability to get repopulation. If the streets are emptying out, people are going to have more space and it’s easier to have more kids with more space. The reason we don’t see that now is because of a combination of immigration and even the places losing people are just starting to do so.
I believe the bottleneck is the desire for children. Easy birth control means selecting for the desire to have children, both genetic and memetic.
Most people have some desire to have children. It’s all about thresholds.
Lots (maybe most) of behaviors have some genetic component.
If there anything genetic about how much people want to have kids, the next generation is going to have more of that the prior one.
There is definitely some evidence that number of kids people have has a genetic component. I vaguely remembering it being higher than I would have expected but not like hight vaguely in the range of .4 .
@Edward
It’s way more complicated than that. If you take the son of Mormon parents and raise him as a generic Protestant, his lifestyle is going to look way more like the latter than the former, including fertility patterns. Genes for wanting kids is probably swamped out by culture and economics which can both change fast. That’s why people in Africa average something like four kids while black people in America don’t.
You would think we would be selecting for forgetfulness (missed pills) and acting in the moment without regard for future outcomes. I had a pet theory to blame rising incidence of ADHD on this but I was not able to find a correlation between larger families and ADHD.
Do we really have more space? There’s a pretty big trend towards agglomeration, and there’s an argument to be made that even if we were half as many, we’d still mostly want to live in big cities.
There’s even an explanation for it – there are many many dimensions on which leaving in a city brings a small (even 1%) advantage. But they are more than we can count, from “a place where both you and a SO can find employment in your respective professions” to “better specialty coffee”.
And ontopic to @Wasserschwein – don’t underestimate plain desire to have kids. It depends on personality and culture, but also on age – most people want at some point in their life, even if, say, at any one point most people don’t.
Do you have any good reasons for believing that space is all that important? Developed countries with low population densities are also below replacement.
I’m pretty sure rural areas are more fertile than cities, which is certainly suggestive(and even if it’s because of other reasons like culture, it would still imply that depopulation would eventually stabilize). I wouldn’t claim it’s the sole reason but I certainly believe it plays a big role.
My sense is that housing prices are the relevant factor.
People are much richer now than even a century ago, and the richer you are the easier it is to have kids. Yet we have fewer kids per adult now, not more.
@DavidFriedman,
Anecdotally, it seems to be far more difficult to have kids now than a century ago. In terms of
How much time spent raising, supervising, and worrying about the kid
Hours worked to provide for it including paying to live in a good school district, saving for a college fund, the increased required living space, higher quality of food
Technically you’re right in that giving a kid a 1920 standard of living would be really easy. But nobody does that for a variety of reasons which aren’t going away.
Since the number of people in the world is still growing, it doesn’t seem that birth control is reducing the number of humans more than diseases and other early deaths did back in ye olden tymes. It just shifts the age of people alive at any given time upwards.
I think if we ever need more people, governments could easy shift fertility upwards by creating the right incentives. But right now, it would be better to let the world’s population shrink for a while.
There have been efforts to increase birth rates, and nothing seems to work. Let me know if I’ve missed something.
As far as I can tell, sex is a reliable human drive. So is willingness to raise children if the children exist. However, the availability of birth control means that people are less likely to have children unless they really want them. (Is this a feature or a bug?)
Raising children is enough work that governments don’t seem to have anything big enough to offer which will get people to have more children.
Religious leaders can raise the fertility of their congregation.
Sweden has also managed to get eugenic birth rates (i.e. more children among the educated and rich than among the poor and uneducated).
Not sure any of the two examples are replicable, but it can be done with the right institutions.
Israel was also able to raise their birth rates in an attempt to prevent an Arab majority in democratic Israel. I am not aware of the particular measures, but do know that the birth rate is also higher among secular women (so it’s not just the orthodox population picking up the procreational slack)
Something, possibly birth control, is reducing the number of humans in developed countries, not counting immigrants. More countries are becoming developed. When almost everywhere is developed and the pattern still holds …
When almost everywhere is developed and the pattern still holds, technology will have developed sufficiently to make childmaking independent from sex, in which case it really will be about creating incentives to create, which may entirely divorce child-rearing from parental (individual household) responsibility. Humans shall be as pandas.
I don’t know exactly what a generation is, but I’m guessing about 20-30 years, which means that 100 generations in the future is at least as far away from us as 0CE. I really think that any model that has humanity dying out, literally to extinction, over such a huge time scale proves nothing interesting (so many more immediate existential threats exist, plus the rate of technological change makes even much smaller timescales hard to predict), and is worthlessly simple. If you’re willing to concede at all that fertility is inversely correlated with population, then well before extinction you should reach a point where populations rebound.
I usually see reduced fertility talked about as simply pointing to an end point for growth, when populations will become more or less stable. These numbers are weird to think about anyway. For instance, if half of all people on earth died tomorrow (let’s say it’s not a weirdly problematic half like all males, but a truly random sample) it would be both the greatest catastrophe by orders of magnitude to ever befall humanity, and also just the 1970s (in terms of how many people there were afterwards, half of humanity did not in fact die off in the 70s). Anyway, if this is anything to worry about, I think Japan will be a pretty good test case since they actually have sub-replacement fertility coupled with low immigration; obviously it’s not universally generalizable with cultural differences, but they also won’t have the culture which produces their low fertility changed from the outside by higher fertility immigrants.
But we know that fertility is highly heritable, and that the hyperfertile will in fact replace the rest of us. Sure, you could speculate that this effect would disappear somehow, but then the “somehow” seems to matter quite a bit.
I’m reminded of some series of blog posts about this exact scenario that was linked at some SSC-related place a couple of years ago. It was called “The age of industrial Malthusianism” (I think), it had an alt-right vibe but was interesting, and it basically laid out what you are looking for: What if there’s no great singularity or x-catastrophe and humanity basically continuous on the current trajectory for the next century or so? The author argued that the heritability of fertility combined with dysgenic effects on IQ (as I said: alt-right) would cause human population to spiral with less and less ability to regain control and we would end up trapped in a hellish dystopia with hundreds of billions of people living in a subsistence-level Malthusian trap. It was an interesting read, but now I can’t find it for my life: it looks like it has been scrubbed from the internet (as I said, alt-right). If anyone has a link I’d be grateful.
here
I found that doing a site search.
Bringing in a touch of the singularity to the argument, it’s questionable as to whether this is an issue that won’t be made moot in the coming years. Artificial wombs are one of those technologies that aren’t conceptually that complex as long as someone is willing to put the funding in. With a state run system for just growing new people, population growth can be set as a government target in the same vein as the inflation rate.
Is there any information on who, weeks into lockdown, is getting the coronavirus, and how? Is it mostly people still working? Or are there super spreader house parties?
Not really, because we don’t know who is getting the coronavirus. We only know who is getting severely ill with the coronavirus.
The counties with the biggest growth over the past two weeks have all been in prisons and meat-processing facilities.
I’m trying to find a citation for this.
EDIT: https://twitter.com/ginasue/status/1255847979740794885
https://www.dailyyonder.com/meatpacking-and-prisons-drive-the-rural-infection-rate/2020/04/30/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html#clusters <– click on "show all"
I don’t know any statistics, but my schadenfreude is enjoying what happened to the health-order-defying local branch of a major tech company.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/coronavirus/broadcom-closes-for-virus-case-days-after-workers-return/2282908/
(As it happens, the affected employee’s test results were negative. So this is only tengentially related to your question.)
I want to publish a collection of essays/articles online but don’t want to use WordPress. Can someone recommend a reliable web hosting service that would facilitate such a website? All it needs to do is allow me to dump text, format it somewhat, and embed images and video.
Edit: In order of most important to least: No ads; simplicity of interface/setup; non-prescriptiveness of content and usage guidelines; cost.
buy a domain and use netlify- it is exceptionally good at this particular thing
@WashedOut, you can try Neocities. My editor, Ludovico, set my website up there, so you can click my name for an example. It’s easy to get started as long as you’re comfortable editing basic HTML, and it’s free to run a single website on their domain, with a URL like washedout.neocities.org.
They don’t run ads on your site. Their front page advertises the following features:
I do not know whether they have any kind of content policy, so you’ll have to investigate that yourself.
~
If you intend for this website to be at all permanent, you should purchase your own domain name (as @ltowel suggests). These typically cost about $1 USD per month. The reason owning your own domain name is important for website longevity is that as you publish, you’ll be giving out links to your site to other people. If you own your domain, these links can stay the same even if you switch hosting providers. Otherwise, all the links you’ve given out over the years will no longer function, which is a great way to destroy any readership you build up, or confuse family members until they get the new URL.
I can offer you further assistance if needed. Cheers!
+1 to buying domain (and actually controlling it!)
Github pages (upload HTML files, enable this feature, Microsoft hosts your static site for free).
Using you own domain is optional.
Excellent if you used git already, terrible UI if you never used git/Github, run away if you expect something for non-technical user.
It’s hard to know what you mean by “simplicity” without knowing what you’re comfortable with, but for this task I’d rent a Digital Ocean droplet for $5/month and a domain name for $10/year, install Apache 2 and it’s pretty easy to serve 25 GB of static files from it. I did something similar for a personal project.
I would say that Digital Ocean + Apache 2 is overkill for many static pages.
If you need to serve 25 GB files then it is necessary,
If you have static site that in total is about 1-2 GB then Github Pages are likely simpler, cheaper and require less maintenance.
Christian poisonous snake-handling, arguably using ecstatic states as a cure for drug addiction. It’s dangerous, but so is base-jumping, which seems to be basically a secular search for intense experiences.
Base-jumping is a lot more legal, which might fit with a previous discussion about how much money it takes to be permitted to risk your life for the fun of it.
Anyway, I don’t have an articulated question about this, maybe just an interest in values and legality.
I think two distinctions may power the intuitive repulsion toward snake handling that explains why that’s illegal and base-jumping is generally not. One, nobody really believes there is such a thing as being so talented at snake-handling that it is inherently safe to test one’s faith by poking at poisonous snakes, but some people likely explain most of the risk of basejumping to ‘carelessness’ implying a subset of people who are ‘careful’ could base jump risklessly. Two, snake handling has a more visible social-bonding-peer-pressure element, some people are likely not really into it, but feeling extremely pressured.
I personally am not that inclined toward equating them. If I try to steelman it, I can argue there’s no such thing, in my experience, as people who aren’t so lonely they risk becoming dysfunctional (at least over timescales > a few years), and who are perfectly immune to peer pressures akin to the kind that cause people to base-jump if their friends/family/news-outlets/employers do, or handle poisonous snakes similarly. Most of us are somewhat insulated from that kind of dumb decision-making by the pressures/narratives acting on us from our less fringe-y social groups and narratives, but ‘there but for the grace of god/there but for circumstance’ we’d be just as dumb. That’s what I’d argue, but the fact is I think some people are very vulnerable to ‘religious experience’ and in that state are exploitable–and a law can protect them, and I don’t mind using the power of a law to accomplish that goal. I don’t think that is the same set of people as the people who are prone to finding thrills by risking their lives–those folks will just find another way to risk their necks, or break the law, and it’s just their own preferences speaking, so if they really want to base-jump, I guess my instinct is… let ’em.
Part of the issue is that most Christians think that they are heretics and in a relatively if undesirably bothersome sense. Secularist obviously dislike them. Yet as a form of Christianity they do not fit in well to coalition of marginal groups.
I guess one difference is that no-one claims that base jumping is safe, or at least those who do claim it’s safe can point to specific verifiable precautions they’re taking.
The snake handlers claim to believe that handling snakes is safe for them because God will protect them. They also handle snakes in front of an audience, so they’re exposing other people, who may include children and others who can’t or didn’t consent, to dangerous snakes.
But I think the really central factor is cultural: the anti snake handling laws were passed decades ago, when there wasn’t as much emphasis on a right to endanger yourself as you please. And base jumping is somewhat on a continuum with mountain climbing, a dangerous activity that has always been tolerated. Snake handling, on the other hand, is on a continuum with spiritual abuse and harmful religious cults, which lots of people have a strong revulsion towards.
Wait, isn’t BASE jumping super illegal? According to this article:
So if I’m reading that right, there is one place where it’s legal, and another where it’s legal on a specific day if you’ve passed the rigorous approval process. Is snake handling more illegal than this?
And it seems that BASE jumping is not illegal by itself, but doing it often breaks some laws, typically trespassing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE_jumping#Legality (I have not verified given source)
I am morbidly curious about how Christian poisonous snake-handlers
are reacting to social distancing orders…
(I have Googled, but unsuccessfully…)
Government: “You’re going to have to stop handling snakes.”
Snake handlers: “Bite me!”
🙂
god I am going to have to try really hard to keep this charitable
As far as I am aware, there is no organization whose parents raise their children to believe that BASE jumping is a sign of holiness, and that it would be sinful to seek medical attention after breaking your ribs while doing so.
“One day I’d like to be just like my dad and my brother, I’d like to die with a rattlesnake bite in church.”
That’s not a sentiment you get without some serious indoctrination.
Tell me about a good teacher you’ve had.
I’m posting about Mr. Gummery (sp?), a high school chemistry teacher.
He had boring, sensible virtues. He got started immediately at the beginning of a class. I never figured out what other teachers were doing instead (actually, I didn’t think about it and I wish I had), but he was noticeably doing something better.
He said he didn’t expect us to memorize atomic weights because we’d learn them anyway if we did the work.
These two things are what I remember explicitly, but I suspect they were indicators that he respected our time.
Aided by a student named Skip Rafael who kept asking questions I didn’t quite have the nerve to ask, the class of 25 students or so turned up 6 800’s in chemistry and 2 795’s.
;Facebook discussion. This is the first example I’ve seen of Facebook in its ideal form– there are some people who are in touch with teachers who made their lives a lot better.
I had a math teacher, Mrs. Brooks, who taught AP Calculus B.C. (A.P. means advanced placement because it is college-level and taught with an eye toward an A.P. test awarding college credit. B.C. means the A.P. test in question is the one that covers college Calc I and Calc II, not just Calc I.)
She started class on-time, and she was one of the better teachers for knowing all her students’ names and expecting solid work from everyone, despite having class sizes running toward 30. She repeated once per week that the course was stupidly hard, in terms of how much homework she knew was assigned, and it obviously pained her that we were working 2 hours or so per night and many of us were chronically frustrated. She consistently reminded that it would mean we would do very well on the test if we really did all the problems assigned, and once or twice noted that our high school’s reputation as having a disciplined math program helped all of us get into colleges much more than a shoddy willingness to give out easy As would. She had three different textbooks she had worked through carefully. One was, the one we got 80% of our problems from, I think the standard James Stewart calc book, maybe 4th edition. Another she liked for the examples in the teacher’s manual, which didn’t just list problems and answers, but also showed every step from problem to answer. Finally, she had–and we all dreaded [drumroll, ominous scratchy voice]–the Leithold problems. She’d usually give us two or three extremely difficult problems from Leithold to keep us humble. Most days nobody in the class got more than 50% of the Leithold problems from the previous night’s homework correct. She used assigned seating so she didn’t have to fuss with attendance–empty seat, you’re not here, so she’d start when the bell rang. She wrote on the chalkboard, or used a projector and wet-erase markers and a rag, and spend less than 5 minutes on theory before just jumping in with an actual word problem she would solve in front of us. E.g., “Today we’re going to learn about using integration to find volumes defined by rotating a defined curve, such as y = sin(x) from (0,0) to (pi/2, 1) around a line, such as y = x or y = 10. There’s a formula for that, which is this: ____. The deriviation for the formula is on page __, and I’ll go over that at the end of class if you are curious, but for now let’s do some problems. Let’s look at a case where a tire, when inflated, has a cross section at any point is an ellipse of the shape described by the ellipse given by x^2 + 2y^2 = 100 inches, and where the whole tire’s outer edge is 200 inches from the center of the wheel. If the tire is filled to 2x atmospheric pressure, what volume of normal pressure air was used to fill it? (Then she proceeds to set-up the problem and integrate, and then multiply by 2, to reach the solution.) She graded homework with a simple “you did it or you didn’t” where she’d just walk down the row and look at a few problems she’d decided to check for completion. Homework was worth 5% of your grade, and completions were usually given even if many problems stumped you so completely you couldn’t start, so it was mostly just her pressuring you by physically looking at your work while standing over you–it otherwise didn’t really matter if you did the homework, except of course that doing the work made all the difference for the tests.
Her class in my year had more than 25 students, and all but 4 got 5s on the AP exam (and most of the 4 who didn’t got 4s or 3s). One of my first serious brushes with how stupid the adult world is, was that I researched and found a national award available for exceptional calculus teachers, which required a nomination from a principal, and met with my principal to recommend Mrs. Brooks be nominated, only for my principal to research it, learn the award was given by purely numeric formula, to the teacher whose class of 5 students or more (something like that) had the highest average score on the B.C. test, and so obviously not available to a public school teacher with a large class when many teachers only had to teach 5 students, and would get 5 perfect scores. Brooks was exceptional for being possessed by boring, sensible virtues. Notwithstanding that I tried to get her nominated for an award, I undervalued her at the time. I was blessed with many other great teachers, so she didn’t actually even stand out that much.
Dang, I’m taking AP Calculus BC right now and the AP tests have been moved online.
Good luck!
I recall 3 good teachers in my life. This list is, more or less exhaustive, unless you count teachers that I thought were nice, but idiots.
1. Mrs. H. Middle School English teacher who immediately on 9/11 prepared the class for almost everything that was going to unfold over the next year. She also was the one who sent messages to the principal to pull 2 kids out of school because they had family in New York that day. Also she was by far the best liberal arts teacher I ever had. She was great. I never had competent LA teachers otherwise.
2. Mr. S. High School AP chemistry teacher. Former Chemical engineer who was easily, by a huge amount, my best science/math teacher before undergrad. Actually had lye burns on his legs because a tank at a plant he had worked at had burst and flooded the factory. 100% of our class got 4/5 on the AP exam. This is in contrast to the previous year of AP Physics where we got one 5 and one 4. Not only did he improve the bottom, he improved the top, helping me to win the state chemistry championship.
3. Prof. Ginsberg of Civ Pro and Evidence. Just a pro. Had real life experience, and actually kept me awake in a 9 AM class. Extremely adaptive and also helpful in office hours. By far the best University-on teacher I ever had, and one of the few that I think could actually pass a final that he wrote (had he not written it, if you know what I mean).
Mr. Colyer, 9th grade English. Pretty much every other year, English was my second least favorite subject (after phys ed), because I already knew English and didn’t find any value in the pretentious twaddle that was being taught under that name. 9th grade, English was my second favorite subject, because Mr. Colyer was I think only incidentally an English teacher and more of a how to think and understand teacher.
And a how-to-recognize-bullshit teacher, which was something that in retrospect I think is extremely rare in public school systems. He explicitly assigned readings on common propaganda/advertising techniques, so that we would know them when we saw them. That was the year Animal Farm was on the school’s reading list, and we certainly got a full exploration of that one. Also the year of A Separate Peace, and he gets huge marks for not minding that I considered it pretentious twaddle and didn’t bother actually reading it. And a couple of Shakespeare plays, because I think that’s a federal law or something, but we jointly read Julius Caesar aloud, in character, and with a full understanding of the jokes and references.
On the writing side, he understood that a bunch of us were going to grow up to be professional STEM nerds, and that if we chose to write our research papers on highly technical topics it was his job to meet us halfway on understanding them. With other English teachers, I was guaranteed an easy B+ for any technical essay that went over the teacher’s head; with Mr. Colyer I had to actually learn basic technical writing.
A nice essay otherwise, but how did you know this book was pretentious twaddle without reading it.?
I started reading it. Slowly and painfully. And then asked some people whether it got any better, and I think they mostly just told me it was awesome for all the reasons I had been so dissatisfied with the early parts.
Okay, that’s reasonable. It’s interesting, I read that book in high school, thought it was fine as light reading, but had no idea that people thought it was awesome for some reason. Of course I was totally oblivious to most of the main themes in almost all the books I read for English in high school (For example I found out the main character in A Farewell to Arms was impotent many years after I had read it for class, and this apparently explained many of his motivations. I had no clue of this when I read it). I suspect most high school kids are the same — one reason high school English is basically a waste of time.
Somewhat surprisingly (to me, at least), I had a number of K-12 teachers that were substantially better than the vast majority of college professors I had. Only a single college professor was really great, so I’ll start with him, then tell about K-12 teachers.
Dan Barnett (http://www.butte.edu/directory/faculty.php?username=barnettda) – best philosophy teacher I’d ever had, and I took classes from several at 4-yr institutions with PhDs- this guy had only an MA and taught part-time at a community college. (Among other things- he also had a radio show for a while, did book reviews, etc). Just an incredibly patient, conscientious teacher. He was always on time, always showed up for office hours (My four-year experience was that a prof would be at their office during their posted office hours maybe 1/4 of the time, or about 1/2 of the time if you made an appointment first!), always gave great, lengthy answers to email questions. Taught a “Ethics in Education” course for would-be teachers that was a lot of fun, with great moderated discussions. I enjoyed our mutual horror at several college-age classmates expressing a willingness to rob, cheat, or murder if God did not exist and an after-life was unreal, during one such thought-experiment-discussion. Made us do classic “blue book” exams, when every other prof was figuring out ways to cut down on their grading work and put in as little effort as possible.
K-12 highlights:
My AP Calc teacher (the name escapes me atm) was very good. She was only a few years out of college herself, and actually used some of her own Calc 1-2 notes to help create her lesson plan. Very diligent, made the class fun. There were only nine of us taking it, and most of the other students were Mormon kids- I’d recently left the church, so not the best relationship with them. She made me feel comfortable learning, which I’m thankful for. Got a 5 on the AP test, and my in-class final was dressing up as Mr Rogers and teaching a calc lecture in-character. (Gods, I hope that video was destroyed!)
Both of my AP English teachers, Mr Boag and Mr Peery, were phenomenal. Peery was the older- he had taught my father English at the same school 20 years earlier. Boag was his protege, a rake that taught French too, and always had half the class crushing on him. They combined the Jr and Sr grades, mixed everyone up, and rotated which one of them taught which group every month or two. Incredibly fast pace- lots of novels, plays, poetry covered thoroughly, and tougher graders than any professors I ever had in college- if anyone got an 8 or higher (out of 9) on an essay, it was posted on the wall as a point of pride. Usually each’d have a half-dozen or so a semester, out of 30 kids and multiple essays. I got an 8.5 once, never a 9, and passed both AP exams with flying colors. Friends with both of them on FB now (they’re both retired).
Mr. McCoy- taught middle school history. Incredibly knowledgeable teacher, and just loved his subject. Spent every summer/winter/break traveling to old battlegrounds and cathedrals and libraries, and brought back photos and stories that he incorporated into his lessons. He had a passion, and it shined through everything he did. Came from a family that ran two businesses- they were all schoolteachers, and co-owned a tree removal service that they worked to make ends meet, so they were all (men and women alike) big, burly sorts. Could easily have intimidated us all, but instead he was usually everyone’s favorite. In my middle school years, I was arguing with every teacher and generally being a little prick (so many suspensions…), but never with Mr. McCoy!
Both of my physics professor (high school and college) were good. They put things in very tactile and visual terms.
In the complete opposite direction, I had a professor in college for several classes whose lecture style was simply to write everything sequentially on chalkboards, and we dutifully copied those chalkboards exactly. Not about getting us passionate about the topic at all, but basically forced us to simulate studying in class, and the tests were all very fair to what we wrote down. So I somehow have more retention of those topics than other classes that appeared to be taught in a more engaging way.
Teachers who were important as teachers:
Dr Whitton, who taught me calculus. He was semi-retired (after helping develop raster graphics), and his explanations just made sense. The first day of class, he had us write our names on an index card, along with our home town and an interesting fact; next, he had us write our name on the board, stand under it, and he took a picture of us. He taught three sections of freshman calculus most semesters: ten years after I took his class, I was walking across campus and he saw me and called me by name. He was walking home from campus and was hit by a car and killed.
Sister Ruth, who taught me from first grade to 4th. She loved to read, and taught generations of children to read, and sit still, and hold their pencils correctly.
This amazingly cool webpage lets you play around with epidemiological models for COVID-19. It also explains some of my own thinking on how to respond to COVID-19, though the people who did the page have a much deeper understanding of those models than I do. (But I did hack together some simple epidemiological models and play with them a bit to get a feel for how disease spread works.). I very strongly recommend playing around with the models (which is easier and more intuitive than typing some parameters into an interactive Python shell and then debugging your SEIR model when you get negative numbers or something).
Note that this page is only talking about epidemiology–it’s not discussing economic or social costs of lockdowns and such very much, other than pointing out that we obviously can’t stay locked down forever.
Among the things it shows are stuff like what happens when you lock down for a couple months, and open back up with no additional measures–you just get the same spike of illnesses and deaths as before, shifted over a few months. They also show why “flatten the curve” is a pretty unworkable strategy.
The way I’d put the lockdown-skeptic position is that this is basically what we’re doing. We are not in practice going to find a way to get R down below 1 in any sustainable way, so the lockdown is just going to kill off about the same number of people, but the survivors will be poorer and sadder and paler thanks to a a couple months of everything being shut down. If you believe that, then nationwide lockdowns don’t make much sense, and we probably just all catch this crap sooner or later and a million or so people die and there’s not much to be done about it.
Their position (and mine) is that there are a lot of things we can do short of total lockdown to probably bring R down below 1. Probably masks, symptom checks, and physical distancing go a long way in that direction, but it would be good to try to nail it down more. I know there are people working on this, and I wish I saw more of that work being reported on. In general, boring unsexy uncontroversial things get little media or internet attention, even if they’re incredibly important for keeping the world working.
Lockdown skeptic here. When the lockdowns began, I would have been completely on board with trying masks, symptom checks, and physical distancing for two months or so. (To be honest, I wouldn’t even consider this a lockdown.) If that’s enough to bring R below 1, great! These are very sustainable measures and we can keep doing these things for 18 months if we need to.
But we need exit criteria. If this sort of policy does not succeed in Western countries, which I now think is rather likely, we need to be able to recognize that we are in your first scenario – the one where a lockdown is just going to kill off about the same number of people, but the survivors will be poorer and sadder and paler thanks to a a couple months of everything being shut down. I don’t trust our leaders to figure this out. A second wave followed by more lockdowns and then more waves of coronavirus cases is pretty much the worst-case scenario, but I think that’s exactly what will happen if we try to partially loosen the restrictions at this point. I’d rather just end the lockdown now, while society and the economy are still relatively strong, and deal with the losses as best we can.
I too would like to see more reports about boring unsexy uncontroversial research into questions like what restrictions are required to keep R below 1. But I don’t actually see much news or serious discussion about these topics, and given that we haven’t invested enough resources into the right things over the last few months and everything about the issue is now highly politicized, I don’t see what is going to change.
So, just to clarify: is the common “lockdown skeptic” position here that it is in theory possible to do a hammer and dance strategy (as Nicky Case pushes for in that site), but government incompetence/logistical issues will render us unable to pull it off as well as certain Asian countries, and we’ll end up in a “flatten the curve” situation that kills the economy and lives? If so, the difference (at least on SSC) between anti and pro lockdown seems to be one’s faith/optimism in the ability of the US government to do things without screwing up.
(Sorry for talking over the heads of non-US commenters)
I don’t know the “common” position. My own position is that the “hammer and dance” is not possible is in theory with this virus (because the feedback loops are too slow, because of false negative PCR tests, because of the long incubation period and proportion of asymptomatic cases), and also not possible in practice (not enough testing, people avoiding tracing, the “hammer” would take too long to result in a reasonable number of cases). As for the Asian countries, containment in the first place is not the “hammer and dance”; we’re past that point in the US and have been since at least late February.
The current situation is that the epidemic is going to continue through to its end regardless of what we do. I’m not even sure the lockdowns are doing much significant (though I admit that makes no sense and thus I don’t believe it, just give it a non-zero probability) — here in New Jersey, hospitalizations in North Jersey are going down while in South Jersey they are increasing, despite the same lockdown in both places. The epidemic is apparently simply progressing geographically outward from NYC.
In the worst-hit areas (NYC in particular) I expect we’ve already taken the worst of the epidemic and releasing lockdown entirely would not result in an as-large second wave. In some areas where there was early lockdown, there wasn’t even a first peak and the epidemic is still increasing, but the only choices are release the lockdown and take the hit, keep the lockdown in place and collapse the economy, or mixed strategies which aren’t any better.
It is very likely that specific behaviors/combinations of behaviors are the main cause of high spread rates. This is my position unless we start learning of significant spreader events happening on trains and planes.
A couple points the article makes: Nearly all “asymptomatic” cases are actually pre-symptomatic, so a widely-adopted track-and-trace system would still pick up on them and possibly inform their contacts in time for them to quarantine before becoming contagious. And there are privacy-respective designs for contact-tracing apps that do not reveal or log any personal information (they’d work by swapping anonymous codes with nearby apps). Another point is that nothing has to be 100% effective to be significantly helpful in a general campaign of slowing the spread–all interventions together don’t have to be 100% effective, as long as they get R below 1.
However, I don’t think your pessimism is unfounded; getting down to a manageable number of cases will indeed be quite difficult, as will implementing all these measures.
In Louisiana the lockdown seems to have had a significant effect. We went from a peak of 2700 new cases in a single day on April 2nd to about 300-400 new cases a day for the last couple weeks. It looks like that’s the floor though as far as lockdown effectiveness, and 300 new cases a day seems like way too many for effective contact tracing. Especially seeing as nobody is making any attempt to gear up for contact tracing.
The idea of “hammer and dance” is reduce spread low enough and buy time to gear up for contact tracing. Well we bought the time but haven’t done anything with it and nobody is making any move to. Meanwhile the hammer helped but it didn’t hit hard enough. It’s looking more and more like we’re in the worst of all outcomes, where we crash the economy and the disease runs its course anyway.
Hey guys, I made this account today to participate in this thread so that I could talk about MealSquares. Just want to say to anyone that cares: the “Jeff” mentioned in the latest official email from MealSquares is my dad! I discovered MealSquares from SSC, showed the product to him, then we bought it. I really feel great that this has come full circle. Thank you Scott!
What was your Dad’s success story?
I invite you to look upon Italy’s most recent Covid-related decision making and weep.
Perhaps that’s a bit strong, but they still seem to be especially screwed up in their process, and I’m a lockdown-easing-leaning kind of fella, but it seems they’re going to do their best to mess that up as well, with confused/contradictory announcements, fixed pricing on PPEs, and likely limited testing capacity.
If only there were some area of research that could shed some light on the relationship between price ceilings and shortages….
And people were considering lack of companies witching to PPE production as a failure of capitalism…
Dear Italian government, thanks for making response to the next crisis worse.
I’m not weeping and I find the article not particularly charitable. The “leak and circulate” strategy is reasonably useful – not sure why they don’t do official public consultations, but that’s pretty much the same thing. As for creating confusion… if you take a leaked document as fact repeatedly, it’s kinda on you.
The price fixing thing is dumb at first glance, but seems like it’ll end up as subsidy in practice. And I happen to agree with a subsidy in this case – you want everybody to wear masks regardless of income, but the state buying in bulk and distributing free is usually not a great idea – everything free is less valued by recipients. So having a fixed small price and having the gov foot the rest of the bill for the duration of the crisis seems pretty much what a government should do (it’s a commons problem).
I strongly dislike lack of transparency but well, politics. Overall not great, not terrible. About as expected.
This can work relatively well if they also put limits on how many masks one can buy (i.e. ration them). Otherwise a few people will buy up most of the masks at €0.50.
Or better yet, put limits on masks one can buy at 0.5. Anybody can buy as much as one wants at market price.
Agreed with Radu, this does not seem too bad. While the reasons for that number may be unclear, I prefer a government that says “we will open when case numbers are below 2000/day” to a government that decides these things without any apparent plan mostly based on public sentiment.
Also +1 for face masks at work.
So Elon Musk has tweeted that, quote, “Tesla stock price is too high imo”. This has lead to Tesla’s market price to fall by $14 billion.
Other than, “Elon Musk is too high imo”, what can be surmised from that?
Musk has been in trouble with the SEC before, over a tweet about going private. But this time, he isn’t saying something many people are not already thinking (especially all those shortshellers). While I can’t imagine his legal counsel clearing this, is he really going to be in big trouble over this?
my understanding is he has some kind of SEC settlement governing what he’s allowed to tweet. So possibly? On the other hand, he’s done obviously stock manipulation inspired tweets before and mostly gotten away with it, so I don’t expect “big” trouble.
Given other posted tweets…
I am pretty sure that Elon is 17 years old.
As long as he gets away with this behavior he will keep doing it. I wonder if the shareholders can sue his ass off this time.
Elon Musk would be better off if he replaced his Twitter-enabled phone with something less likely to lead him to self-destructive behavior–like a hypodermic needle full of morphine, a fifth of vodka, and a loaded handgun.
This is most of twitter…
If part of the settlement this time is Musk requires to stay off Twitter, everybody wins.
Part of the settlement last time was “additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk’s communications”, I don’t think it’d stop him.
The other wild thing that happened this week is their D&O insurance dropped or raised prices enough that Musk is personally gurantteeing the board’s exposure. They sold stock at a pretty similar price to the current, so this is potentially a bigger deal than the typical CEO who publicly discloses they thing the stock price is too high.
Further he appears to have told the WSJ that he violated the settlement agreement with the SEC in that the twittter sitter didn’t review that tweet.
Maybe one of his existing kids got to his phone…
What is crazy about this tweet is that Musk has massive compensation bonuses attached to the value of Tesla stock which could be worth something like $60 billion dollars between now and 2026. The first level is Tesla staying above $100 billion in market cap for 6 months, and is worth several billion (close to 10 iirc).
4D chess time: he’s trying to pre-emptively deflate a bubble or something that would cause more damage in the medium term.
Not that Elon seems like a very 4d chess sort of person.
That’s not 4d chess.
That’s just being good at 2d chess.
4d chess is plans within plans within plans and stuff. Feints and counterfeints.
Elon’s plans tend to be relatively unsubtle but exectuted very competantly.
Doesn’t work for a CEO. If he thinks his stock is overvalued he can issue more stock at that price and use that cash to either expand or buy back stock if it starts to fall. This tweet seems like a 0D checkers move.
@Lambert
Unfortunately, the odds of success of a plan are inversely proportional to the number of moving parts within it that must go the right way, so most higher-dimensional chess reduces to 2D.
So, what price should we buy tesla stock at?
When are the stockholders/board of directors going to boot him out? Isn’t this the second or third time that he’s monkeyed about with the stock price?
The price may well be too high, but even I can see that having your head honcho declaring it and having the stock price plummet as a result is not a good thing for the business.
On average his theatrics are good for PR. I mean, what’s Tesla selling point compared to any other electric car brand other than Elon’s eccentric bigger-than-life persona?
He can overdo it at times, and this is probably one of these times, and perhaps eventually he’ll be booted for it, but so far it has worked well for him and his investors.
Supercharger network. I didn’t buy a Tesla, but what brought me closest was the existing and planned supercharger network. Being able to charge up while grabbing lunch at the Burger King when I’m on the road is so much better than taking an hour or two at a trickle charger.
The Model S is a legitimate luxury/performance car in its own right, on par with e.g. a BMW 5-series, but tailored to the tastes of upscale Millenials and Generation Z. And maybe part of that is Elon’s persona, but there would be people buying it if it were a hybrid or a tech-heavy pure-ICE platform. Just about every other pure-electric (and I think literally every pre-Tesla pure-electric) car explicitly traded performance, comfort, and luxury for “green” cred; Tesla didn’t.
Your eccentric billionaire buddy has spent a decade and much of his forture perfecting the cloning of dinosaurs. He has succeeded, and now has several hundred of them on his secret private island. They range in size from tiny scavengers the size of doves to the really big sauropods, with some clever-girls in the middle.
Having created these creatures at great expense, he figures he’s ready to monetize. He wants your advice on how to do so. He wants to make a lot of money, while avoiding the really cinematic failure modes with the running and the screaming and the dying.
What advice do you have for your buddy?
Big game hunting and safaris. You can charge a king’s ransom for the opportunity to bag a T-Rex.
Same setup as Jurassic Park, but ban the importation of idiot balls.
you could achieve a similar result by mandating the importation of a lot of M2s…
There’s a surprising number of weapons known as the M2.
I think you mean the M2 Browning, but maybe you’re a very kinky girl.
There’s a surprising number of weapons known as the M2.
French submarine-launched ballistic missile
That’s it. That’s the one I want. Gimme that package deal submarine trip plus offshore hunting party 🙂
If we assume a brachiosaurus has 30,000 lbs of muscle mass, that’s 120,000 ¼ pounders.
McDonalds partnership?
Or Denny’s Carnosaur Slam!
T-Rex Burger is the King of Hamburgers
I love that.
He spared none, I take it.
This billionaire isn’t already making bank from the patent licensing fees on the cloning tech?
Show the dinos to investors to prove his inventions work, then sell the cloning tech for billions.
Large concrete ditches are better than wire fences…. Yhea, that will do it. T-rex cant jump, and if you make them deep and wide enough, the clever girls cant jump them either. Right, make sure none of the dinos are badger equivalents.
Yes, having the park in the original novel rely on electrified fences was a bit of idiot-plotting. I’ve never seen such fences in any zoo I’ve ever visited.
I told them a chain link fence wouldn’t hold rhinos!
But seriously, I’ve seen plenty of zoos use electrified fences to confine some of their larger animals and it’s pretty common for cattle. The key, is that such animals are usually herbivores and tend to be both dull and risk adverse. You never see big cats or monkeys behind electric fences, they tend to have thick bars and trenches instead.
Any thoughts about interferon alpha for preventing/treating COVID-19? The results from this study of Chinese medical personnel and this in vitro study look rather impressive, although the first study has some pretty obvious flaws.
A few weeks back, j1000000 asked about the best video game music of all time. The correct answer, now and forever, is the soundtrack to Streets of Rage 4, released yesterday on PC and all major platforms. Pay particular attention to Call the Cops, The Storm Boat, and An Exhibition.
Also, the game is phenomenal. 10/10. SoR was one of my favorite games on the Genesis as a kid, and one of the first games I played co-op with my son. He was five years old and called my wife into the room to tell her “mommy! I stabbed a guy! With a bottle! On the street!” I’ve never been so proud.
But when I heard they were doing Streets of Rage 4, I was excited, but nervous, because I didn’t want to get hyped up and then be disappointed. I did not want another Phantom Menace situation. But I watched every video the devs put out about what they were doing and how they were trying to get it right and capture the spirit of the originals, particularly the care they were taking with the music. And I got it yesterday at launch and it blew me away. It’s everything I could have ever wanted from Streets of Rage 4 and more. I kept stopping and putting the controller down just to marvel at the perfection that this game is.
If you liked Streets of Rage on the Genesis, if you like beat-em-ups, if you like couch co-op, if you like amazing video games, you owe it to yourself to check this one out. Whatever platform you’ve got; I’m playing on Switch and it’s a perfect 60fps, so platform doesn’t matter.
You may also enjoy this live concert remix of the Streets of Rage 1-3 soundtracks performed by original composers Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima, who the SoR4 devs got back to compose new music for the new game.
Tell me, did you like the video game?
‘s’ok.
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the video game?”
I never even knew this was coming, but I heard about it yesterday, and immediately moved it to the top of “co-op games my fiance might plausibly play with me” list.
If she likes beat-em-ups, also consider River City Girls. I assume everyone already owns Castle Crashers.
Oh, also, if you’re looking for a very fun and cute adventure game to play together, strongly, strongly consider Swords of Ditto. This game is excellent.
It’s a Zelda roguelite. Every 100 years, the evil witch Mormo comes back to terrorize the island of Ditto, and a hero, the Sword of Ditto, arises to challenge her. You pick your avatar, starting with just generic adventurers but you can unlock all sorts of different heroes (bunnies, foxes, frogs, puppies, etc) with different items and attributes and go about exploring, dungeoning and questing. Each iteration the game makes a whole new Zelda-esque map and series of dungeons to explore with randomized loot, puzzles and bosses. When you’re ready, you go face Mormo, and once you enter her castle you have one life* to defeat her. If you win, Ditto gets 100 years of peace and the next world is pretty, or if you lose, 100 years of tyranny and the next world is diseased. You carry over your levels and certain items you want to keep by spending a currency you acquire during the last adventure, then you do it again with a new hero and a new randomly generated map. The goal is to eventually figure out a way to defeat Mormo for good. And there’s a whole meta story about what’s really going on.
It’s very good, an awful lot of fun, and best of all it’s one or two players, so you get multiplayer zelda. I’ve been playing with my daughter, and in the last iteration she was a bunny and daddy was a froggy going on fun questing adventures. Highly recommend.
* I played through solo on hero mode, in which the one life thing applies to the entire adventure. If you die at any point your quest is over, the world is plunged into darkness, and 100 years later a new hero arises. Makes for great tension.
@ Matt M
Fiance? Weren’t you supposed to get married in April? Did you put it off?
The government made it illegal for us to have anything approximately similar to the wedding we wanted to have, so yes, it has been postponed.
I mentioned it here once before but a bunch of people jumped down my throat and told me I was being selfish and ridiculous for being upset over such a trivial thing, so…
I’m not getting married till everyone can. solidarity!
This is an excuse to post Going Nowhere Fast from Streets of Fire, one of the best pieces of movie music ever.
I was disillusioned to learn that Diane Lane had lip-synched that, actually. But the music was indeed glorious, and a perfect fit for the movie’s style. And a nod to Rick Moranis, in the one completely non-comedic role of his career, perfectly handled.
Really, a nod to the entire cast except for A: Diane Lane’s lack of a singing voice (which could be covered for) and B: everything about the wholly uncharismatic male lead (which could not).
The Fibonacci spiral is famous for being a mathematical concept that appears in nature and in art, thus connecting math, art and nature. Another basic famous mathematical figure is the sine wave.
Does the sine wave appear in nature? The easy answer is to say that everything that is periodic somewhat reflects a sine wave. But I don’t want something that reflects a sine wave. I want to look at something and say “Hey, that looks like a sine wave!”. One candidate is moving snakes. They seem to contort their bodies so that they look like sine waves. But is this a coincidence or is there a deeper relationship (like how it is for the Fibonacci spirals)? Another candidate is water waves (duh). I’d imagine that non-breaking water waves looks like a sine wave in cross section. But when I google it I can’t confirm this. Apparently wave dynamics is super complicated so I’m guessing they don’t.
What is the history of the idea of sine waves? What is the earliest recorded drawn sine wave? Do humans create art with sine waves even if they know nothing on trigonometry, since it’s a nice looking repeating pattern? Who did intentionally draw the first sine wave with knowledge of trigonometric? If I showed Archimedes a drawing of a sine wave, would he have a name for it? Would Newton?
Ocean swell (gravity waves) aren’t much like sine waves at all. They tend to be bulges of water with a pretty flat space in between that is much larger than the bulges themselves. But sound waves, EM waves (light), and springy resonators are all very good approximations of sine waves. So sine waves show up in nature all the time in situations where things are moving (they are sine waves in time) but I can’t think of too many where they appear in static things (sine waves in space).
I know very little about the history of mathematics, but I don’t think ancient peoples had the measuring tools to measure the way a resonator moves precisely enough to confirm that it is indeed a sine wave. Likely some ancient peoples has a good enough grasp of trigonometry to have some idea of how sine relates to triangles, but understanding that resonant motion is sinusoidal really requires calculus, so I am not sure that any ancient people would understand that, before the invention of calculus.
Wave theory disproved then. Sad. I like your time vs space distinction. And as you say, sine waves in space is what we are hunting. Maybe the issue is that sine waves are mainly (entirely?) a time-related phenomena?
On the top of my head, I think the ancients could have drawn a sine wave quite easily. Have a big wheel that leaks ink from two container oposite of each other. Rotate the wheel at constant speed. Drag a long piece of paper under the wheel at constant speed. (Could you use a leaky pendulum instead of the wheel?) But I can guess they didn’t see a reason to go trough that trouble.
I’m trying to think about way the ancients could appreciate sine waves. Maybe as an answer to questions like “How does my distance to the sun change when the Earth rotates?” and similar astronomical questions.
I don’t know how often a taut, plucked string type thing occurs in nature, but that would definitely have a sine wave, especially the second harmonic and higher where you can outright see the full sine shape in one go. This does have the issue of being hard to see since the string has to be moving pretty fast, but under the right lighting, you can see the envelope as a sine pretty well.
This counts! Good example. How come plucked strings are sinusoidal when water waves aren’t? They seem to be related at glance.
They are related, but the string is insanely more constrained than water. It’s taut, so it has nice, fixed boundary conditions, and it’s a solid, so all the bits that make up the string are following each other nice and tightly. That’s a fine recipe for nice, orderly, theory-matching behavior.
In contrast, the water is only being held together by its own cohesiveness and is also free to splay out in three dimensions instead of basically one, so much, much messier.
You can see physicists making things more orderly like this in thought experiments like the “spherical cow” – abstract away the messy bits and all that’s left is the underlying, simple-to-analyze model.
I believe water waves constrained in a canal can be similarly sinusoidal. Also, undersurface thermocline waves in long narrow glacial lakes like Loc Ness and Lake Champlain.
Shallow water waves in a canal tend to settle on nonlinear (or maybe dispersive?) soliton solutions.
@Lambert:
In a narrow closed channel, you can get a standing wave.
One theory for “lake monsters” is a standing wave underwater, in the denser layer of water, the boundary layer at the thermocline. The theory is that a log that has become just dense enough to no longer float in the warmer water will be floating on that denser layer, and then raised briefly to the surface by the standing wave.
I know the question is directed towards what things look like, but we have other senses to grasp the sinusoid. Have you ever heard a sine wave? It is a simple pure tone, just a single frequency with no other colour. It is also never heard in nature; I’m not sure if there was a way to create them earlier, but it’s possible that until electronic sound synthesis, they were never heard at all. The guitar string does LOOK a lot like a sine wave, but with your ears you can easily determine that it is far from being a pure one. The harmonic does produce something closer than an open or fretted string.
From a mathematical perspective, the sine wave is a little bit like the cyclical version of the exponential constant e, where the rate of change of e^x at any point x (i.e. the derivative) is equal to e^x. The rate of change of sin(x) at any point x is cos(x), which is just sin(x) shifted over a bit, and since it repeats you can shift it either direction to turn cosine into sine; anyway, this maybe helps explain why, even though we don’t see it so much, it’s so fundamental to our mathematical understanding of these cyclical things. It’s the simplest, smoothly changing, cyclical function.
Because multiple waves in the same space interfere creating more complex waveforms, mostly we don’t see simple sine waves anywhere; further, a wave represents the transfer of energy, generally not mass (for instance when ripples in a pond seem to move, it’s just bits of water next to each other bobbing up and down), and it’s almost better to understand them as existing in time rather than space, so “seeing” a sine wave as it affects matter just isn’t very likely.
Except immediately after it’s struck, the sound of a tuning fork hardly contains any higher harmonics.
While you might not hear a perfect sine wave in nature, you can produce something very close by whistling. The second harmonic of whistling is usually ~30x weaker than the first.
Sound waves. The seismic industry relies on the wave equation, and by extension so does the production side of the music industry.
But I can’t look at a sound wave so that doesn’t count.
You can here: https://images.app.goo.gl/VGCVXHWxkitaf1pb9
ceci n’est pas une onde
Funny of course because it actually is, just not one wave.
Yes, you can create that image by adding a bunch of sine waves at different phases together and then painting color on it.
It’s true that ocean waves aren’t much like sine waves, but there are some naturally occurring things that are approximately sine waves. Try image searches for “sand dune ripples”, “pond ripples” (these are circular, but are approximately sinusoidal radially), “undulatus asperatus clouds”.
Google “Ruben’s Tube”. That’s a nice little sine-ish wave the you can actually see. Also – “sand pendulum at the exploratorium”.
Physics textbooks are positively teeming with sine curves – there is an amusing quote by Michael Peskin –
“Physics is that subset of human experience which can be reduced to coupled harmonic oscillators”
and the wherever there’s a harmonic oscillator, there’s a sine curve.
But most of these can’t be directly observed as a sinusoidal curve because:
a) The quantity oscillating is only oscillating in time but not space
or
b) The quantity oscillating is sinusoidal in space as well as time (all simple waves) but the quantity is not measured in units of distance but is instead something like air pressure or the strength of the electric field
Sand pendulum works around a) by transalating time into space by means of a uniformly moving tape.
Ruben’s Tube works around b) by translating pressure into distance through the flames.
Great examples! Thanks!
Well, you ask an interesting question, you get interesting answers..
In a sense, everything is a sine wave: quantum wave functions for particles with constant momentum can be modeled as sine wave-like, although the exact wave function is more complex than just a sine wave.
The problem with waves is that of Fourier.
The solution to the kind of things where a sine wave crops up is often an infinite sum of harmonics, which can take on almost any shape. Look at a violin being bowed with a high speed camera. No pure sine wave there.
Also trig was developed in the Medieval Islamic world.
Archimedes invented trigonometry. Specifically, he proved the angle addition formula. What more is there? This is adequate to compile trig tables, but it is only later Greeks who are known to have compiled them. Did they graph them? I don’t know, but earlier Greeks used Cartesian coordinates, eg, thinking of the parabola as the graph of a quadratic function.
Evidence that I’m turning into a knee jerk American 😉
I have my doubts about the way this shelter-in-place is being handled, and some really serious doubts about the far too common idea of it continuing until there’s a vaccine. I’m also not looking forward to quite likely being ordered to be vaccinated – with a vaccine that’s been rushed through testing and is brand new. (No, I’m not an antivaxxer. I’m just a techie, all too familiar with first release problems.)
But this headline had me reacting with anger. And the image at the top of the page – in particular, the idea that ordering people not to spread their germs was unconstitutional – had me furious.
Without the Tea Party association, and without the “quarantine is unconstitutional” touch, I’d be sympathetic. With them, I’m merely furious.
While I understand your concern, I think it’s tactically the right move, in the sense that I think there are more “red tribers who will join protests so long as they think it’s a red tribe partisan requirement and won’t require any allying with the blue tribe” than there are “blue/grey tribers who would join protests if it weren’t for all the red tribe ick associated with them.”
Now whether that’s true probably depends a lot on location (California is probably the place where it’s least true) and it will probably change a lot over time (the longer this goes on, the more blue/grey is going to be open to resisting). But for now, in most places, I think it makes sense.
Why should the idea that “ordering people who do not have a disease be quarantined” is unconstitutional make you furious?
Well for starters, we don’t know who is actually infected. If we did, we wouldn’t need mass distancing measures to begin with.
That’s a bit like saying it should be unconstitutional for the TSA to screen anyone who isn’t a terrorist.
Once you’re OK with restricting people because you don’t have evidence they are innocent, you’ve pretty much flushed the Constitution down the toilet.
Why it should make one furious to believe this doesn’t change if “innocent” is replaced by “uninfected” is beyond me. Especially when such evidence could be obtained and no attempt is being made to do so.
I’ve developed a modified version of my Liberty Restoration Plan. It will do two things:
First, it will establish a set of symbols people can wear as badges. I’m thinking of three symbols, one for the immune, one for those working from home or not working and who live alone or with others who work from home or don’t work, and one for those working outside the home or living with someone working outside the home and who follow all social distancing regulations. It will be illegal to use the badges falsely or otherwise claim that you’re part of a group you aren’t part of.(e.g. “I’m immune but forgot my badge.”) This is no violation of liberty: there is no right to impersonate a police officer or infringe someone else’s copyright.
Second, individuals who want to be exempt from social distancing regulations will have the option to register and become exempt. You could do it online, with a name, SSN, and webcam video, or at your local police station. Once you do so, you can wear none of the badges. You gain your liberty back; in exchange, you must recognize everyone else’s liberty with respect to your behavior. So that means if a business considers you a danger to their customers, they have the right to exclude from their premises. If you object to the government confining you to your home, how can you demand the government forcibly open the doors of someone’s business to you? If they don’t want to hire you, don’t want to serve you, want to segregate you within, or restrict you to special hours, you’ll respect their right to do so. Likewise, the medical system will have the right to move you to the back of the line for any medical treatment. The insurance companies will be allowed to announce that they will not cover corona treatment for anyone who signs up to be exempt. (Now, if they say they will cover corona treatment and don’t do it, that’s still fraud.) Medicare/medicaid can refuse to pay for corona treatment as well. You may say it’s a violation of liberty to tax you and deny you the benefits of those taxes. Is it also a violation of liberty to deny welfare to drug users? I don’t see it that way, I see it as the government commonsensically directing aid to those who didn’t make choices that caused them to need the aid.
If you regret your decision there could be an “enhanced quarantine” procedure you can go through, say, 14 days completely alone, after which you can wear the badges again. And, of course, if you get it and become immune you can wear that badge.
No constitutional right is absolute. You can’t shout fire in a crowded theater. We don’t require people to be convicted of a crime before telling them to check their guns at the courthouse or the airport.
Outbreaks and quarantines were common even back in colonial times, so it’s not like this is even a matter of evolution. I’m too lazy to check, but I suspect you could find opinions of the framers on contemporary quarantines if you really wanted to.
@Alexander Turok
Yes, you’ve posted your “forbid it while technically not forbidding it” idea before, it didn’t fool anyone before and it’s not fooling anyone now. I’m not sure why you left the whole “make them wear a special symbol thing” in it, which kinda makes my point for me. I will further point out that outlawry was a _punishment_ and your proposal is a form of it.
@Loriot
Nor, according to the author of that statement, distribute a pamphlet denouncing the draft as unconstitutional. Fortunately Schenck v. US was overturned. It’s telling that your go-to analogy is one of the worst decisions in the history of Supreme Court First Amendment jurisprudence.
I removed that: no one’s being made to wear the symbols, they are prevented from usurping the symbols.
Outlawry allowed people’s liberty to be violated by private actors. What I’m saying is that private actors discriminating against you is not a violation of your liberty. Now, different people mean different things when they talk about liberty: many mean not just the right to make a decision but to be supported by others in making that decision. If other people are going to be forced to associate with you as you make a decision, you then lose the right to tell them “this is my business, leave me alone.”
@Alexander Turok
This is a false statement under the current interpretation of the Constitution.
That ship has sailed. If _in general_ these private actors are not allowed to discriminate against people (under public accommodation law), then making a specific exception to allow discrimination against some category of people is government action akin to outlawry.
Furthermore, it is quite clear in such a situation there would be official and unofficial pressure to require discrimination against such people; e.g. regulators would order grocery stores to refuse entry to such people.
My liberty was never yours to take, so you are not entitled to sell it back to me for a price, fair or otherwise.
Could private businesses enact requirements for, say, wearing a mask and having a fever check before being allowed to enter the premises, and maybe a requirement for one negative viral RNA test per week from each employee? (Imagining some far off day when we get our act together enough to have such tests available.)
I like the meme going around the “reopen” social media bubble that due to HIPAA regulations, you can avoid wearing a mask anywhere you damn well please, including private businesses, and if anyone hassles you, you just say “I have a medical condition that precludes mask wearing” and they aren’t allowed to ask you about it.
(And yes, I’ve also heard that this isn’t really quite how HIPAA works, but I do like the general theme of government regulations being foiled by other government regulations)
Pretty sure this is not a controversial statement, legally. Handwaving and putting up a smokescreen about some other reason why a decision where the statement was made was bad doesn’t change the fact that it’s settled law.
Matt M:
It’s a great way to own the
libssick old people who are scared of catching the virus, but not such a great way to reopen things. If the choice is continued lockdown or nobody can enforce any rules, even stuff like “customers must wear a mask and be checked for fever before entering,” that sounds like a pretty good argument for keeping the lockdown in place as long as possible. Further, if it turns out that the only way for a private business to be able to impose those restrictions is to have them imposed by the state, then I guess I’m in favor of having the state impose those rules–you work within the shitty system you have, not the good system you wish you lived under.@Cliff
Are you saying that “you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater” is obvious accepted fact in the USA?
(edited for confusing typing on my part)
@Matt M
Working in that field, you’re right, it isn’t how it works. But I share your schadenfreude if it were true. Recently my boss told me that HIPAA precludes telling me how many people in my office tested positive for the covid antibodies. Also not how it works, but I’m trying to figure a tactful way to explain that. I need data, dammit.
Maybe Covid lockowns are mistake but “large scale quarantine is never legal” seems to be a poor solution.
In a nation of free citizens, you want pre-emptive mass house arrest on the table?
It should be legal about as often as a military coup or drone strikes on your own citizens are. Rarely or never explicitly so, perhaps justified after the fact in extreme cases, and with the presumption strongly against it.
edit: This may not be a terribly well-considered opinion; tempted to delete but I’ll leave it up as a gut response on the statement.
@all The discussion of whether something is constitutional or unconstitutional should be separated from whether something is right or wrong (or, if we assign moral weight to the constitution, whether it would be right if it was constitutional or it would be wrong even if it wrong even if it was constitutional). Things become muddled if we mix drawing arguments from general principles and arguments from the constitution in the same debate.
@The Nybbler The laws that make discrimination by public accommodations illegal are securing a positive legal right, not a liberty right (in philosophical terminology; I’m not sure if it matches the terminology of constitutional jurisprudence). Making exceptions to it doesn’t violate your liberty.
I also happen to disagree with public accommodations law, on the grounds that it reduces the liberty of businesses. Making an exception (very slightly) increases the liberty of businesses.
@cliff
Its more of a colloquialism used by the uniformed. Legally its probable that the Supreme Court would not uphold an incitement conviction against someone who shouted fire in a crowded theater.
That is a violation of their contractual obligation for insurance currently in force.
I have no objection to your three badges, and no objection to stores being free to refuse service to someone on the basis of what badge he is or is not wearing, and similarly for employment. No registration required.
I agree.
And since that is your view, do you agree with me that essentially all current discrimination law is a violation of liberty and should be repealed?
Imagine in some alternative world, COVID-19A is spreading. It’s as contagious as COVID-19, but instead of something like 3-5/1000 dying from it, for COVID-19A, one person in ten dies. Would you still say that the state ought not to have the power to do lockdowns/stay and home orders?
If the lethality were 10%, I doubt the state would need to order a total lockdown. Things like closing the schools would still be appropriate, though.
Uh-uh. My rules > your rules enforced consistently >> your rules enforced inconsistently. For instance, if I’m a pure Goldwater libertarian and think there should be no law against discrimination according to race, the proposal to allow discrimination against MY race but not any others is worse than either allowing all racial discrimination or allowing none.
@Cliff
It’s not settled law; that specific example actually never was. The case about “shouting fire in a crowded theater” (actual words “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic”) is the very same case I referred to, Schenck v. US, which actually concerned pamphlets decrying the draft as unconstitutional. Justice Holmes felt it was self-evident that shouting fire was not protected, and ruled that pamphleting against the draft was analogous and therefore not protected. This case is no longer good law.
Lesson (applicable to the Michigan case): If a judge wants to rule in a certain way, nothing will stop him.
I agree that making a rule, and then enforcing it selectively is problematic. However, the rule that public accommodations must accept anyone wouldn’t be enforced selectively, instead the rule would be changed to that certain businesses may only discriminate based on badge status, but not other grounds.
I guess you’d say that that doesn’t count, it’s really just an inconsistent enforcement of the rule that public accommodations must accept everyone. But then how are we supposed to decide, in a consistent way, whether a particular rule really is the inconsistent enforcement of a broader rule, or a reasonable rule as it stands? (Say, the government makes a rule that you are only allowed to hunt a species in hunting season. Is that really selective enforcement of a rule that you may never hunt, and thus even worse than consistent enforcement of that rule? If not, what is your algorithm for deciding that?) What if the rule is changed so that businesses may discriminate among customers on any grounds with the exception of a specific list of characteristics (race, gender etc.), as is the case for employment?
That specific example I agree with, but on the basis that if the government allows discrimination against one race, but not another, then the government itself is engaging in racial discrimination, which is worse than either limiting the freedom of private entities to discriminate, or private entities engaging in discrimination.
@10240
Look, you can wordsmith it all you want, but it’s still blatantly obvious that the proposal is not really about restoring liberty, but about convincing anyone reading it that they shouldn’t have liberty. We had some form of liberty, the government took it all away because there exists coronavirus, and the proposal says we can trade for some of this liberty back in exchange in exchange for losing some of the protection of the law. Replace “be allowed to leave your home without a badge” with “speak out against the government” and it becomes quite clear.
Yea, I don’t really get the badge system either. Just, as like a system. It seems like an intermediate step that accomplishes none of its goals of reducing pandemics (on its own), while accomplishing almost all of the goals of a totalitarian who would otherwise want some sort of RFID microchip implanted in people.
Counterfeiting your badges is either easy, akin to how its easy to counterfeit library cards (except easier because everyone is wearing a mask) , or its hard like a passport, in which case the stores are scanning barcodes anyways. Plus, wearing an unscannable counterfeit is fine for me if I just waltz on the street instead, which is 90% of what people want to do, they fake it for the rest. Indeed, selective breaking of the rules would be incredibly common, and policing it would require Big Brother tactics.
In other words, your system is probably worse than a microchip system. To be effective it has to be more totalitarian, and even in that case its probably less effective.
The proposal is about allowing people to minimize their risk of catching the disease, without limiting liberty (except the liberty of having private actors associate with you, which is not a fundamental right).
IMO if a policy violates a fundamental right, it’s legitimate to try to modify it until it doesn’t violate fundamental rights anymore, while still achieving its goal. You can’t simply extend the concept of fundamental rights to make the modified policy a violation, just because you don’t like the policy.
I don’t get the “trade back” thing. The government would have had every right to remove that protection of the law without first removing the liberty unconditionally. The protection you are talking about (forcing businesses to serve you) has never been a fundamental right.
(Even people who support public accommodations law wouldn’t typically argue that unconditional service at public accommodations is a fundamental right, merely that it’s a fundamental right not to be discriminated against on the basis of unchangeable characteristics (such as race or sex, but not whether you make an attempt to minimize your risk of being infectious).)
It’s not. It’s the equivalent (with liberty) of stealing some item from someone and when they demand it back, stomping on it a few times and handing back the pieces saying “here’s your damned item, choke on it”.
Because it shows either a massive case of clue deficit disorder, or intentional falsehood for political effect. Also because it smells of the kind of Biblical literalism that finds nuances in a particular English translation, not present in the original, and declares them the Will of God.
The only way they could have been more effective at pushing my personal buttons, would have been to have tried to base their opposition to quarantines on religious grounds, particularly of the kind of sect that finds biblical requirements for modern customs that were like as not reversed in biblical times.
Arguments that work with me:
– this quarantine is being handled badly; these other measures would be more effective at less cost (cost need not be financial)
– the PTB aren’t explaining the reasons for their measures in any way that can be checked or falsified; if they won’t allow review then their decisions are suspect
– these particular measures impose much more of the costs on a subset of people, to the advantage of this other group – and here’s a way to make this fairer
Arguments that don’t work with me:
– One particular principle is sacrosanct, far more important than anything else.
– Anything resulting from politics or tradition was ever intended to be applied without customary exceptions, or without considering competing principles and claims.
– arguments about historical practices that presume some particular modern/local social structure, use of language, etc. applied at the relevant time and place.
Arguments that make me mad:
– ones that look like others I’ve frequently seen applied in bad faith, or by people who appeared to be out to get people like me, or similar.
– arguments that appear to be based on claims of fact, but there’s no data supporting the supposed “facts”
@DinoNerd
You don’t like slogans? You need to get with the times. I am kidding, and I agree in theory with all your points. But this is kind of like yelling against the wind; it’s just the way it is.
Is sloganeering like this less common in Canada? I know Canadians have the reputation of being reasonable people. But from what I’ve seen, the average person everywhere in the world (including Canada) is no more rational than the average American. Though Americans might be in your face about it more often.
I suspect that my distaste for slogans has a lot more with my ASD (autistic spectrum disorder, previously known as Asperger’s) than with my nationality.
It’s a fine position to take for an advocate of a living constitution. But it’s completely unviable for any sort of originalist.
It would have been as incomprehensible an argument to John Marshall as the idea that the constitution protects abortion.
One could make an argument that universal quarantine is tantamount to house arrest, and imprisonment of the innocent is pretty clearly forbade by the bill of rights.
Now, I wouldn’t make that argument, since I think continuing the quarantine until cases trend downwards is a good idea, but I don’t think it’s completely invalid.
Quarantine can mean a lot of things. The way it is being currently used (for basically the first time in history) has the default person in generic US state confined to their house except for limited exceptions often not based on clear laws. Massive exercises in governmental power by the executive with only the tacit support of the legislature and general authorization gives rise to some state or even county separation of powers issues. This varies from state to state massively in terms of how much an issue it is. This falls into the same issue as the president using a congressional authorization of force after 9-11 to do whatever he wants. Except the president has foreign policy inherently under his purview and custom has expanded his powers in that regard further. Some governors seem like if they were president they might use the congressional authorization of force to raise the income tax to pay for invading Iran. I am inclined to cut governors slack given the difficulty of legislating in this environment and because of my royalist sympathies.
Secondly, several constitutional rights have been de facto suspended. There is compelling state interest but policies that are clearly subject to strict scrutiny are not narrowly tailored and are not designed to be minimally restrictive to constitutional rights in many states.
I do not see clear reasons why quasi-house arrest for people who there is not even probable cause to think that they are contagious would be unconstitutional as it is not a punitive measure. But I could understand why people would be uncomfortable about it.
Constitutional rights are protected against all infringement, not just punitive infringement. It’s “Congress(*) shall pass no law abridging the right of the people to peaceably assemble”, not “Congress shall pass no law punishing people by abridging their right to peacably assemble”. If it looks like your law restricts the right of people to peaceably assemble, strict scrutiny applies no matter why you are doing it. And broad measures almost never survive strict scrutiny.
* Or, per the 14th amendment and subsequent jurisprudence, State governments.
Rather I am attempting to cash out an objection separate from the first amendment one.
It might go something along the lines of going to visit my friend at his house and have dinner with him is a fundamental right- the present situation of the default person in the US is roughly equivalent to a light form of house arrest.
Individuals may only constitutionally be deprived of fundamental rights if there is at least probable cause of them doing something wrong or at a minimum being a danger to the public. Even if a small minority are, this fails to create probable cause for the default person.
I do not think that an argument along these lines ultimately works, but I can see why people would feel this way.
Where by “confined to your house with limited exceptions” you mean you can go pretty much anywhere you want as long as you aren’t meeting up with other people or visiting a nonessential business.
I am pretty sure people have been arrested for visiting parks and playgrounds, which are neither meeting other people nor visiting a nonessential business.
So you can do whatever you want, as long as it isn’t anything you could possibly want to do?
My understanding is that quarantine is what you do to people who are known or suspected to be infectious. That’s not exactly right for the lockdowns, which seem to be applied to everyone, even the immune, despite the vast majority not being infectious.
If using the word accurately, then treating the bulk of the population more like confined prisoners would tend to ring alarm bells in the civil liberties department of Constitutional studies.
I do think the USSC would uphold most State’s rules as being permissible under the Constitution via their inherent police power in an emergency, but any rules which treat explicitly recognized Constitutional rights differently will be subject to strict scrutiny and need to be solidly justified as absolutely necessary, not just something a governor wanted to do just because.
For example, if it’s shown that the virus only lives for 90 seconds outdoors in warm sunlight, it becomes correspondingly more difficult to justify banning people from assembling on the beach under strict scrutiny.
If governors stuck to the most clearly justifiable restrictions and allowed people to use their own best judgement in other areas, people wouldn’t be as quick to protest their pronouncements and call them stupid. But as we’ve seen, some governors can’t resist micromanaging people’s lives when given the opportunity…
Freedom of assembly is a constitutional right, and that right is being restricted in unprecedented ways. Most case law deals with specific gatherings, saying that you can’t have a specific protest at a specific time and place, and even emergency lockdowns are limited to specific areas and last a few days at most. Having executive orders that restrict all gatherings, everywhere, for an indefinite duration is something that looks an awful lot like tyranny. While it may be the right thing to do in this case, it sets a dangerous precedent for governments to have that kind of power, especially if it can be exercised without the involvement of the legislature.
When reviewing restrictions on fundamental constitutional rights, courts apply a standard called strict scrutiny. There must be a compelling state interest, the restrictions must be narrowly tailored to achieve that interest, and the least restrictive means must be used. In this case, it is clear there is a compelling state interest, but the state could do a better job convincing the public that these restrictions are effective and necessary, and that lesser restrictions would be ineffective. Having an impartial judge make that determination would be a big step in bolstering public confidence in the government and preserving the system of checks and balances.
Michigan’s stay-at-home order was ruled constitutional by a conservative, current member of Federal Society, buddy of Governor Engler, judge.
You think it’s unprecedented, but it’s not. States can quarantine people who aren’t sick. States have pretty broad police powers.
(I think Michigan is probably too tight on their restrictions, but that’s a policy difference.)
Courts have made many decisions on what is and what is not constitutional, many of them contradictory. A judge in Michigan deciding the lockdown is constitutional does not mean SCOTUS will think the same.
I should have linked the judge’s order: https://www.michigan.gov/documents/ag/20200429_Opinion_and_Order_688921_7.pdf
The citations to Federal precedent (as opposed to State precedent) start on page 8.
If we’re going to allow special emergency powers, there needs to be a way to put them in force quickly without procedures that might be difficult in an emergency. Let’s say the Russians fire their nukes, and your governor either gets the call from Strategic Air Command or notices the explosions along with everyone else. If there’s ever a time for emergency powers, it’s now. But the legislature’s half-dead, and the other half presumably out of touch, so they can’t vote accordingly.
I think the better way is a variation of the 25th Amendment: the governor’s proclamation can be overridden by some other group, or in last resort by the legislature which can summon itself into being to vote on the subject. I would also add that if the governor’s emergency proclamation is deemed sufficiently frivolous, he should be subject to criminal prosecution for conspiracy to violate civil rights.
This is the judge who said
One of us has a very strange view of American History. I think it’s the one with the “Judge” in the title.
Even though I largely support the stay-at-home orders (possibly even if they are unconstitutional), I don’t see why you consider it obvious that they are constitutional. Many commenters (on both sides) seem to follow the logic that if they consider a policy right, or are ambivalent about it, then it is constitutional, and if they oppose it, then it’s unconstitutional. That’s not the case. Something may be arguably right but unconstitutional, or wrong but constitutional. I don’t know if the US has some form of state of emergency where constitutional rights can be suspended; if it doesn’t, then the orders may easily be unconstitutional.
I find it understandable that some people oppose the stay-at-home orders (and it seems to me that you find it understandable too); then I don’t see why you find it weird that they try to argue that they are unconstitutional. Of course many of the protesters, too, probably say that the orders are unconstitutional merely because they oppose them, but I also find it understandable that many people genuinely think (rightly or wrongly) that they are constitutional, based on principles such as habeas corpus.
It seems pretty clear to me[1] that local governments and health departments have the power to do stuff like close down all the swimming pools or gyms in the state due to an epidemic. That kind of thing has been done before. So I think they can say “no gatherings of more than N people, all these businesses and public places must close” and probably be within previously-understood limits of their powers.
I don’t know whether that extends to a “stay at home except for these reasons” order. That is, I’m pretty sure they can send the sheriff to close down your house party with 50 people in it, but I don’t really know if they can legitimately demand that you not visit a friend. In practice, of course, it would be almost impossible to prevent people visiting friends in small numbers.
[1] I don’t really know that much about the law, so add grains of salt to taste.
Maybe it’s because I’m not a lawyer, and don’t have much respect for the way lawyers seem to think, except as an intellectual challenge/game.
I recall a law student explaining that it was perfectly reasonable to argue a whole bunch of mutually contradictory positions at the same time , provided they all supported the goal (e.g. of successfully defending a client)
– he didn’t do it
– it was legal anyway
– lots of people do whatever and don’t get charged
– he was sick at the time/sleep walking/hypnotized/etc. and not responsible for his actions
– etc.
Except with positions even more contradictory than those. (With those, if you pick some random non-charge, like breathing, or snoring, they could all be true at once ;-( I just can’t think enough like a lawyer to come up with an example like the one I heard, decades ago.)
To me, if one or more of the defences proves bogus, they all become less credible, because the goal is clearly “get what I want” not “establish the truth”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_pleading
@DinoNerd:
> I recall a law student explaining that it was perfectly reasonable to argue a whole bunch of mutually contradictory positions at the same time
This is sometimes referred to as the “in the alternative” defense, and is classically illustrated by the example given by the now-deceased Texas lawyer Racehorse Haynes:
https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/richard_racehorse_haynes
Recovering former law student here, and to me it made sense as a procedural formality. You only get one chance to (let’s say) move to dismiss a case, and you’re supposed to present all of your possible arguments at once, your opponent presents all the counterarguments, and the court decides all of them then and there, as opposed to multiple rounds of back-and-forth on each possible reason for dismissal.
You get into the frame of mind the procedural rules dictate, and it makes sense. But absent that context it’s bizarre and unnatural.
Attorney here. You are describing something that happens, but only at the beginning of a case, not at the end. In other words, what you are describing is an initial blanket denial that covers everything. At a trial, for example, a defendant cannot argue that they did not commit the murder AND that it was self defense. Of course, your can have a self defense claim prepared, but the prosecution can’t even prove a homicide occurred, and you move for a dismissal before that, but that is rare.
But there are also multiple pleadings in civil cases, and these are rarely contradictory. In the event that they are, often they are based on the conclusion of part 1, contradicting part 2. I work in patent law, so I see this all the time. Argument 1 is: My product does not infringe the patent. Argument 2 is: If my product infringes the patent the patent is invalid because of prior art ABC. The order of operations is sometimes reversed. This is not invalid, and its much more common than your parade of defenses (most of which you’d only be allowed one at trial).
@The Nybbler
Is the comment searcher still online? If so, what’s the url?
I have it bookmarked as here: http://ssc-comment-search.nybbler.org/
It still seems to be up.
BTW, @The Nybbler, I think I forgot to say how neat this tool is. Thanks for making & hosting it.
+1
Not sure I know how to use it particularly well, but it is exudes splendidness
Interesting… when I attempt to access that link, Malwarebytes blocks it due to phishing. If I go to just nybbler.org, I get a parked domain message.
Matt Taibbi’s latest (on his public feed, anyway): https://taibbi.substack.com/p/temporary-coronavirus-censorship
I’ve always loved Taibbi, ever since the day, a few years after 9/11, when I found an article of his on the subway and discovered there was at least one journalist out there who will employ the phrase “preposterous horseshit.” Now he’s arguing strongly for allowing people to spout … preposterous horseshit.
Is that a bad thing? I like freedom of speech.
A Harvard Law professor say we need to censor the Internet for the common good. How about we censor Harvard for the common good?
I get Taibbi’s newsletter in my email (signed up from when he was writing that book on drugs), and I can’t tell if I’ve gotten better at at detecting bullshit, or if he’s jumped the shark. I suspect it’s the former. When I was younger and angrier I found him a righteous breath of fresh air; now I find him a self righteous blowhard. That article (and the rest of his writing I’ve seen of late) feels high on inflammatory remarks and low on falsifiable claims.
I got a couple page-lengths into that article, and it feels like he’s just quoting stuff in an indignant tone expecting me to be indignant, too. I don’t think being indignant is a good place to reason from. I now believe with 90% confidence that Matt Taibbi wants to bias me against liking the Atlantic. Okay. Beliefs updated.
I don’t know if I’d lump in anti-democratic and anti-free-speech positions together like the author does. After all, very undemocratic institutions (Supreme Court/Constitution) are why the US has the broad protections on speech that it has (compared with the much less sanguine view that the elected branches – and the general public – have).
I had better not read this, since I love free speech but hate Taibbi.
I’m so conflicted about so many things.
I’ve long considered Taibbi a hack. His Wall Street coverage was very bad, driven by a heroes-vs-villains framing, and convinced that market makers were stealing people’s money.
I appreciated it when he moved towards talking about how a lot of media is about driving people apart. I should strongly consider that he’s just speaking to my bias, though.
And when I read this I . . . well. Geeze.
When he talks about
Yeah, man, like you and subprime mortgages.
He wants to say that people shouldn’t be crushed for offering good-faith viewpoints even if they are wrong, stupid, or even dangerous. Explain why they are wrong. I agree with Taibbi here, completely. Explain why people are wrong. Is that hard? Yes. Do it anyway.
But his potshots at journalists being wrong about coronavirus seem poorly picked.
1. A Feb 1 article telling people to plan for the flu, instead. Here, look at this exceprt:
That seems downright prescient! Even if you complain about the headline, they put two very important qualifying words at the end: “Get a grippe, America. The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now.” And if you read the article, you can see about contemporaneous school closings in multiple states because of flu outbreaks.
2. “Coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier, more widespread”. That’s, again, from February 1st. “Deadlier” was wrong in the sense of IFR, wrong in the sense of deaths we’d get, not wrong in the sense of anticipated deaths. “More widespread” was right.
It repeats the Tennessee and Ohio stories. This is a nice excerpt:
It then compares coronavirus symptoms to flu symptoms. That is valuable information! And recommends getting a flu shot, which was the recommended way we had to prepare for coronavirus.
3. “Want to Protect Yourself From Coronavirus? Do the Same Things You Do Every Winter”. Fuck yes. This is from January 31. Second paragraph:
Please do that stuff! It also talks about getting a flu shot.
4. We Should Deescalate the War on the Coronavirus, January 29
Okay, this one sucks. It was written by a sociologist. It was updated on Feb 5 with new information about the risks but I don’t know what changed. It does have a video of a doctor with nice cleavage on the page, though. What were we talking about again?
Okay, I probably buried the lede here; what strikes me as significant here is that a publication as mainstream as the Atlantic is publishing calls for Chinese-style restrictions on internet speech. Taibbi is admittedly an inflammatory figure–though I like him anyway–and I should have just linked directly to the Atlantic article. Mea culpa.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid-revealed-about-internet/610549/
I think my response holds up!
@theredsheep: Well that’s terrifying.
Now I know how Nybbler feels about lockdowns, this is horrifying.
>Now I know how Nybbler feels about lockdowns, this is horrifying.
Very much agreed.
From the article:
“speech control” – oh, shit..
I completely distrust my rulers, governmental and corporate, with the power
to censor “harmful content”.
You thought that “We’re going to lock down your body indefinitely, but don’t worry because your mind will be free to roam and interact through the internet”, meant that they weren’t going to lock down the internet as soon as they could get away with it?
Plagues are an authoritarian ruler’s wet dream, even more so than criminals or terrorists. A much more credible excuse for a broader range of powers and with less accountability – you probably don’t even have to hold elections, if you think you’re going to lose.
We’ll see whether the American people will let them get away with it.
Is Trump in charge of “them”, or one of “them”?
Trump hasn’t figured out how to control the bureacracy effectively, which limits his ability to be in charge of anything. He is nominally in charge of the people who would be responsible for implementing internet speech restrictions, and no prizes for guessing whose speech he would prefer to restrict and how if he could figure it out. The more interesting questions are, what restrictions might the bureaucracy implement in place of Trump’s preferences, and what restrictions might they implement under a Biden presidency.
Fortunately, state governors don’t have much power over the internet.
Poland already started censorship of the internet. And blocking tax avoiding gambling was initial reason of all possible things and it somehow worked. And previous governments here had different opinions on many things, but sadly all were supporting internet censorship and trying to introduce it one way or another so my view of government here was poor already.
I was more horrified about article with completely insane support for, in the most extreme version, not supported by any real arguments.
As far as quarantine goes, I think that what was known then it was a good decision. But I am more and more dubious about whatever continuing them actually helps. I suspect that it will solely postpones infection spread.
But I am not opposed in principle to quarantines, and arguments seemed to be claiming that government should be never be able to introduce lockdowns/quarantines.
Quarantines and lockdowns are two different things. A quarantine is targeted at a group of people reasonably suspected of being infected, and lasts until it is no longer reasonable to suspect them of being infected (e.g. because the incubation period for the disease has passed and they aren’t showing symptoms). A lockdown is applied universally and indefinitely.
If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have said that quarantines were clearly within the reasonable authority of even a minarchist state, and probably laughed at myself if I’d suggested a slippery-slope argument from quarantine to lockdown.
Same goes for the difference between targeted closures of high-risk events like festivals, and sending everybody but “essential” workers home with orders to not come out until it’s over.
It occurs to me that whatever one might think of Trump, it might turn out to be a real blessing that the President is a controversial wild man for this disaster. If it had been FDR or Eisenhower or even Bill Clinton, who knows what bipartisan support there might have been for him to act as a “caretaker” government “for the duration of the emergency” rather than hold elections?
(Yes, I know the Constitution mandates elections. The Constitution mandates a lot of things.)
But it isn’t the President who is imposing the lockdowns. It’s the state governors, who are widely seen (at least among Blue tribe) as the Reasonable and Pragmatic Leaders standing up in the absence of strong Presidential leadership. And if (fortunately it is still an “if”) there’s broad internet censorship, that probably won’t come from Trump, but from a Biden administration saying “A hundred thousand Americans just died because WrongSpeech on the internet impeded the reasonable and pragmatic lockdowns; Never Again!
Sure. I wasn’t arguing with your point, or even really addressing it at all — just making an idle observation that your comment made me think of.
Hope it’s not bad form here to post a half-assed idea I plan on fleshing out later. I’ve had a lot of vodka but want to commit myself to exploring this more in sober hours.
I want to write an apology of the concept of coolness.
For the record, I love this forum & would even classify it as very cool ,even though much of the content is the opposite of cool.
My starting point is Scott’s review of On the Road. I’ve criticized that review here before, but I need to do a better job at it.
My argument is that the aesthetic of cool has a positive social value.
My argument is also that most people are driven by aesthetic values not moral values.
The main value of the cool aesthetic is that it is heroism within limits.
Representatives of the cool aesthetic are:
Miles Davis
Jack Keruoac
Humphrey Bogart
Bob Dylan
Steve McQueen
Bill Murray
This strikes me as potentially true and important, so please do keep exploring. Unfortunately, explicitly discussing coolness will make us all a lot less cool, at least over the short term 😉
I like aesthetics of thinking about interesting things more than coolness, so worth it:)
I’m not even that much a fan of Existential Comics, but this pretty much captures it:
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/170
I would add that the distinction between the aesthetic and the moral is not that clear-cut, on a gut level, and that no matter how much we protest about objective versus subjective truths, it is much more emotionally important to us that the moral/aesthetic truth be “really” true than that, say, the Earth revolves around the Sun.
In Vino Veritas. But I’ve never been cool so I’ll leave all that alone.
It seems pretty obvious to me that moral values are just a subset of aesthetic values, but apparently not everyone shares that intuition.
Presumably the moral is the most critical subset, the vital core of our aesthetic sense? We have a big map of “how things ought to be” and at the very edges you have things like reduced clutter on a bathroom counter while a just state and a good life are very close to the center? Something like that?
The trichotomy of the good, the beautiful, and the true goes back at least to Plato, although even if unconditionally accepted this idea could push you to believe either that morality is subjective or that beauty is objective.
>Presumably the moral is the most critical subset, the vital core of our aesthetic sense?
I assume that for you, it is.
For me, aesthetics is rather a mixed bag, but has nothing to do with
morals. For me, aesthetics includes at least two quite separate types
of considerations:
– mathematical or technological elegance
– erotic appeal
and neither of these has anything to do with morality.
I suppose we should distinguish between a narrow sense of aesthetics (“what do I find beautiful?”) and a broader one (“what do I find intuitively appealing?”). Intuitions about morality are very similar to intuitions about beauty, and both are subsets of the latter sense of aesthetics. Most arguments about one have very close analogies in arguments about the other.
FWIW, Robert Pirsig explored this idea a little too. His thesis was basically that we got our idea of cool from iconic images of American Indians: tall, stoic, quiet, at home in their environment and their own skin, etc. and that the John Wayne/Steve McQueen/Humphrey Bogart types copied this.
That said, by the end of high school I came to understand cool as basically being a proxy for bored. The more bored you were, the cooler you were. I was not cool.
I’ve never heard the idea that coolness is a measure of bored-ness before! Are we sure that it isn’t a measure of detachment or calm instead, though, which are superficially similar?
I read that Pirsig book and that specific idea is the main thing I remember from it. What I define as coolness has roots there but is also very influenced by black American culture.
In my experience, the quality that most closely correlates with cool is silence. The coolest guy in the room is always the one who says the least, and chooses his words carefully. He/she is also careful not to express too much emotion, but a well-placed smile or nod can work wonders.
Not sure about the inclusion of Bill Murray on that list…
Go right ahead, I find your postulate intriguing.
I’d probably be arguing against it having a positive social value, though it depends how you develop your points. Are you proposing aesthetic coolness as aspirational à la mode or as a model of virtue involving stoic values and temperance? (After all, to be cool is to be not moved by gusts of passion).
I’m uncool by definition, so biased against positive valuations of “coolness”. (Liking and being good at math are fatal to “coolness”, and it sometimes feels as if that should be extended to being competent – at anything except fashion sense.)
There’s an analogy to be made about cool/uncool and marketing/R&D, or engineering/pure science.
Cool is the filter/process by which various things are deemed/made useful to the the target audience, by the target audience.
@Uribe, your idea about coolness is cool! I would love to read what you have to say.
I think aesthetics might have the strongest grip on deontology, but I’m curious to see how aesthetics play out for other ethical systems as well.
Co-incidentally I just read a very good book called “The birth (and death) of the cool” by Ted Gioia. And yes Miles Davis is in there, and black American culture too. You might want to read it before writing your piece. My take is that it’s also an attitude. I also think it’s possible for someone to be both cool and not-cool at the same time – me for example. I can sing and dance and rock out on guitar – that’s pretty cool, but I’m also a math and computer wiz, that’s considered nerdy.
Basing one’s moral values on one’s aesthetic values sounds like a plausible idea to me.
Do you have thoughts on the idea that cool no longer exists? This was an idea thrown out by a guest Tyler Cowen was interviewing, that you no longer gain status being classically cool (slow to anger, silent, deliberate, detached, ect.) but rather by signaling how furious and invested you are. This was humorously high-lighted in the 21 jumpstreet reboot; the cool kids of the 90s try to fit in by not caring about school, while cool kids of the 2010’s are environmental activists all aspiring to get into berkley.
Moderation is still in, though. Caring is cool, but caring too much goes back to being nerdy. Cool is always about finding the Goldilocks zone.
Judah Benjamin was a Sephardi who was possibly* the first practicing Jew to win a seat in the United States Senate (Louisiana 1852). Like most federal officials from the South, he owned a slave plantation. Jefferson Davis appointed him to several Cabinet positions in the Confederate States of America, ending up as Secretary of State. In the days before and after Robert E. Lee’s surrender, he joined Davis’s hobo Cabinet from Richmond to Abbeville, SC before deciding “Screw this, I’m splitting.” While Davis was arrested by Union troops, he made it all the way to England and became a barrister.
This is why you always split the party when things get bad.
*Benjamin’s own Wikipedia page implies his second cousin, Florida Senator David Levy Yulee, was a convert to Christianity, but Yulee’s own entry is unclear.
The first practicing Jew to win a seat in the United States was David Yulee in 1845. He converted in 1846 but he won the election as a Jew and served as a Jew before his conversion. At the time converting to Episcopalianism was a fairly standard way to signal entry to the upper class, even for other Christians.
At the time converting to Episcopalianism was a fairly standard way to signal entry to the upper class, even for other Christians.
Even for Margaret Thatcher, who moved away from her Methodist roots; this article tries to argue that she was stilll strongly influenced by her original upbringing but at the very least admits that it was probably pragmatism rather than conviction:
The PM is still officially involved in choosing Church of England bishops, though in fact he (or she) simply forwards the church’s recommendation to the Queen. Thatcher did apparently block some of the recommendations sent to her…
Before 1976, apparently the PM could choose whoever he liked. This means that some bishops were chosen by Prime Ministers who weren’t Anglican- I think there was some controversy around one of Lloyd George’s appointments.
Prime Ministers who are Jewish or Catholic are specifically barred from advising the monarch on church appointments, but there is no such rule for other religions.
Thank you for being much clearer than La Wik!
It’s fascinating how long being an Episcopalian remained a marker of elite status in the US after seceding from the empire where it was the established Church. The Establishment Clause, which seems like an explicit repudiation of the Mother Country by the American elites of the time, did not make churches de facto equal.
Judah P. Benjamin shows up briefly in Stephen Vincent Binet’s verse novel John Brown’s Body.
I tried making popovers tonight, but they barely popped. They were basically just little egg muffin-cakes. I’m tempted to try adding baking powder next time, but I’m sure there’s a reason none of the recipes I’ve seen use it. Anyone know more about this?
Using baking powder is “cheating”, as it didn’t exist in 1790. If you don’t feel strongly about the implicit opinions of people who post recipes on the internet or aren’t submitting your pastries for peer review, feel free to add it; they’ll rise every time.
The modern formulations of baking powder may not have existed, but chemical leavening is thought to have been used as early as the 15th century in the Hanseatic city of Deventer.
It’s not cheating if you make your own pearlash from hardwood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaGnBm_o02k&list=PL4e4wpjna1vySZZLECS0Z7dABedvx2-pe&index=2
There is something that appears to be a chemical leavening in a 10th century Islamic cookbook. It’s called “baker’s borax,” but clearly is not what we call borax — “Buraq” seems to refer to a variety of different naturally occurring chemicals, including natron. My guess is that it was Potassium Carbonate, but that’s only a guess. What we know is that it was also used to make bread loaves shiny, which sodium bicarbonate doesn’t seem to do and potash does.
I looked at the youtube you linked to, and doesn’t provide any real evidence for the claim that potash was being used in Deventer. The person explaining doesn’t seem to realize that medieval gingerbrede, the stuff made with honey and breadcrumbs, isn’t baked, so adding potash to it wouldn’t leaven it. It also isn’t hard, more the texture of fudge.
I’m familiar with claims that hartshorn was used as a chemical leavening in the sixteenth century, but I don’t think they are supported by evidence. But I’m pretty sure it was used as such a little later.
Sounds like it lifted
Prophetsbread all the way to heaven.How hot was your oven?
I preheated the oven to 450 and baked at 450 for 20 minutes followed by 350 for another 20 minutes. One other potential factor is that I used an ordinary muffin tin rather than a specialized popover pan, but I know people can still make big popovers in a muffin tin so that can’t be the old explanation.
I’m pretty sure my dad made popovers (and Yorkshire pudding) in a standard muffin pan, and they were glorious poofy wads of fatty goodness.
I preheated the oven to 450 and baked at 450 for 20 minutes followed by 350 for another 20 minutes.
Yeah, that sounds like too long. 450°F = 230°C and 350°F =180°C by a conversion site I found; 180°C is too cold.
A muffin tin should be okay, I think probably what happened was you didn’t preheat the oiled tin at 230°C and then overcooked them. You can’t put the batter into cold oil, the oil/lard/dripping has to be hot hot hot before you put the batter in. Then once cooked, serve pretty much immediately; if you let them sit around, they will subside and go soggy.
Plain flour sifted so air gets in for the batter, literally smoking hot oil, and 20-25 minutes (for individual puddings, slightly longer if it’s all in one big roasting tin) max cooking at high temperature.
Baking powder rises differently–the texture won’t be the same.
I’d suggest looking at the serious eats guide to Yorkshire puddings to debug your recipe/technique (it’s the same batter and process).
Okay, I’ve looked up what “popovers” are and they’re similar to Yorkshire pudding.
So the question would be did you beat enough air into the batter, let the batter rest, and was the oil in the dishes hot enough? Whether using the roasting tin where you cooked the joint or a bun tin, you need the oil to be smoking hot. Otherwise, if the temperature is too low, they will come out soggy and stuck to the tin.
Here’s a basic Yorkshire pudding recipe from the BBC you can try again. Here’s a Delia recipe and as she says, these are the important bits:
Instructional video here.
I put the tin in the oven before pouring the batter in to ensure that it was hot. I greased the pan with butter (Incidentally this was pretty difficult with a hot pan! I think next time I’ll try greasing it before heating up the pan. Not sure if that works). At any rate, the popovers didn’t stick to the pan, so my greasing must have been sufficient.
I have no idea if I beat “enough” air into the batter, since I don’t know how much beating is enough or how effective my technique was at all.
I used regular all-purpose flour.
Yeah, butter is not good for really high heat cooking. If you’re not using the pan and the fat from roasting a joint of meat, then put the fat (lard, dripping or cooking oil) into the tin and heat them both in the oven before pouring in the batter. And just greasing the tin isn’t enough, you need plenty of oil so that the batter soaks into it.
All-purpose flour should be fine. I’m just wondering, you mentioned they were “eggy”, how many/what size of eggs are you using? Two large eggs is going to be different to two medium eggs.
Don’t despair, try again! It often takes a few attempts before you get your Yorkshire to work properly (I’ve had a few disasters with the batter sticking, burning, coming out greasy and horrible, etc.)
Jamie Oliver is a bit of a tosser, but the video here should help you see the technique. Personally, I’d have the temperature even higher than he uses here, but it all depends on your oven (if it cooks ‘hot’ or not).
The thermal mass of your oven might be too low. Try adding more stuff during the pre-heating stage; any glass or metal bakeware you might have.
Good point about the oven, broblawsky; different ovens behave differently, also it matters if your oven is a fan oven or not.
Some ovens run ‘hot’ so they cook faster, some are cooler; if your oven is a ‘cooler’ one then make sure to preheat it well, make sure the oil in the dishes is smoking hot, and make sure the temperature doesn’t fall too much in the oven while taking out the preheated tin and pouring in the batter.
Though I have heard and read the word “popovers” many times without thinking anything of it, it is only now, after reading your comment, that I realize I have never seen nor eaten a popover in my life. Are they tasty?
They’re pretty good. They’re sort of like fluffy eggy muffins. I think they’re best if eaten together with something else (traditionally they’re eaten with pot roast).
Also, apparently the brits call them Yorkshire Pudding, so you may have eaten them under that name.
The same batter, but a different preparation
For popovers, you have a muffin tin, preferably heavy cast iron, greased, and fill each recess about half full.
For Yorkshire pudding, you roast a slab of fatty meat, collecting the fat in a pan under it, then pour the batter into the pan.
Both good, but Yorkshire pudding is properly eaten with gravy, popovers with butter and jam.
Yes. Especially with butter and jam.
My Girlfriend made popovers the other day, they were strictly inferior to the pretzels I made. I suggest switching to pretzels.
Everytime someone mentions popovers to me in real life, I have this Seuss poem memorized and ready to go, which I’m sure makes me very annoying and/or a total gem, probably both.
Question for folks who live in California or other jurisdictions where waitstaff earn the full minimum wage (or more): Do you still tip?
Yes.
Most provinces in Canada have full minimum wage, or close to it, for waitstaff. Tipping is socially expected to be 15%-18% for standard service, and 20+% for excellent service.
I usually tip 15% post-tax.
I’m not sure what the appropriate etiquette is., but if I go to a traditional sit down restaurant, I tip 20%. If I just go to a cafe or get take out, I don’t tip at all.
From California, and yes, though I didn’t realize that tipped workers here got the minimum wage. I’ll probably be reducing my tips somewhat. Tips have been creeping up here from 15% in my childhood to often 20% now.
Never lived in California but I visit multiple times I year. I’ve been expected to tip.
Yep, when I first moved here, my aunt informed me that I would get dirty looks if I didn’t tip even at counter-serve places. Pretty much only fast food is exempt from tipping.
Given the rents, I don’t feel bad about it.
Depends what the minimum wage is. If it’s $15/hr+ (Seattle) then I don’t tip unless its exceptional service, and I take umbrage at anyone who suggests that I should.
Yes, but if I’m eating at a sit-down restaurant it’s usually one where I’d expect the waitstaff to have gross earnings >15% above minumum wage anyway. Where that’s not the case, I still tip because it’s still the custom but feel no qualms about rounding down from 15% (or less for sub-par service).
UK: tipping waiters in sit down restaurants 10-15% is expected; almost no other tipping is really common.
Denmark.
Wage for waitstaff is by agreement with the service union (this applies even if you personally are not union. But all waiters are union.) is a minimum of 18 dollars per hour, 20 dollars after 18.00, overtime +50% for the first two hours, +100% after that.
Nobody, excepting perhaps US tourists that did not get the memo, tips. It is not customary nor expected.
I’m very pessimistic about the economic recovery over the next 2 years and expect the S&P to be 10% lower than where it is today a year from now. (By expect I mean I think there’s a 50% chance it will be over/under that.)
The main source of my pessimism is the leisure industry which, if I’m reading the FRED chart right, employed 11% of the US workers before this started. How, specifically are restaurants and hotels going to bounce back? Even with official restrictions lifted soon, I suspect we lose 75% of current restaurants due to continued social distancing behavior. Their margins are too thin to survive at 50% capacity through summer.
Not to mention the oil and airline industries. (But I will mention state and local governments in passing.)
All those lost paychecks are going to result in many lost rent checks, triggering huge landlord losses. Total consumption drops significantly for a long time. Eventually Google and Facebook lose significant ad revenue.
What’s the case for greater optimism?
Man I wish I could be optimistic like this.
The stock market just isn’t down that much. VTSAX’s Year To Date went from ~$80 to ~$72, so a 10% fall, which isn’t great but it’s a long way from a real market crash, much less back in Feb/Mar when the market dropped like 30% in a month. I don’t know WHY the market is so optimistic but a bunch of really smart people with a lot of money on the line aren’t pessimistic and that’s decent evidence.
Personally, I’m finding this downturn really confusing. The numbers look apocalyptic, legitimately a 30% unemployment rate, and yet there’s no panic, no evictions, nobody’s losing everything. It’s like an invisible crash, like this should be catastrophic but nothings happening. I remember 2009; this should be worse but it’s nothing like that.
My best guess is, including talking to people who have lost their jobs, is that everyone’s riding off the CARES act. People can pay rent and businesses can prevent bankruptcy the CARES act flooded the market with money and loans. So it doesn’t feel like a crash, until the end of July when the money disappears. Then the +30% unemployment gets real.
Perhaps because the root cause is temporary. I see no reason why serious predictions could be drawn directly from raw figures like unemployment numbers. x% getting unemployed because their workplace had to temporarily suspend production is not the same as x% getting unemployed because their workplace was unprofitable, and can’t be expected to go back into business (under either the original or new owners).
The longer lockdown goes on, the less temporary it gets. I don’t mean that in the trivial sense, I mean that the longer it goes on the harder it gets to just re-hire people and start back up again.
Perhaps, but to what extent that’s the case is a non-trivial question to decide, and the stock market’s current prediction is “not too much”. It definitely holds that statistics from the current situation can’t be directly compared to a crisis of an entirely different etiology, and people make such comparisons too easily.
We’re not doing that whole “put everything on lockdown until we get a vaccine” thing. I imagine that the latest states will open up again, for most activities, will be in June.
The stock market is not a prediction market, never has been and never will be. It is not set up to be a prediction market and pretending it is effectively one is going to lead you down a blind road.
This seems like an odd belief. Of course the value of stocks depends on expectations of future earnings. The market implicitly predicts all kinds of things, like the path of inflation.
It does? 100% and no one has ever bought a stock for any other reason in history?
If I buy a put option on the SPY because I believe that the price of the S&P 500 is going to fall how does that impact the price of stocks in the S&P 500?
Don’t you have to buy a short position from a broker or bank, who charge a certain fee, one enough to cover expected losses? So wouldn’t the bank either charge high fees to reflect risk, refuse to short certain markets, or be out of business, since if you profit on a short the bank loses? And could savvy operators with billions on the line figure out what those rates or whatever are and price those into the market?
This sounds like a strong signal having some noise, so you throw out the whole signal.
If you’re a billionaire hedgefund manager, I reserve the right to retract this.
A put option doesn’t require any additional capital, but the seller of the put option does have to put up additional capital. However the calculations for these are backwards, not forwards, looking.
The option example is a specific one to show how a person can have forward looking expectations, and have take a position on them and that position won’t directly effect stock prices. This is very different from markets that actually function as prediction markets extremely well. Sports betting is almost entirely dominated by individual bets on the actual final outcome of the event, and these bets are what move the lines and provide the predictive strength.
The options market maker who sells you the put hedges by selling some SPY. SPY’s price goes down a little bit. ETF arbitrageurs then make a small profit by buying SPY and selling the underlying stocks. The underlying stocks go down a little bit.
“Perhaps because the root cause is temporary.”
That’s why I’m focused on restaurants. I don’t think most of their problems are temporary. Maybe in a year a lot of cash on the sidelines will want to invest in vacant buildings where restaurants used to be to create new restaurants, but that’s a year off and many of those restaurants will turn out to be bad ideas. It’s at least 2 years before we have as many restaurants as now.
Could leisure consumption move elsewhere in the meantime? I don’t see how, because where are all those laid off restaurant workers getting money for consumption? They are probably still living with relatives.
The restaurant buildings are not going anywhere, nor does their equipment. Why would it not be in the interest of whoever owns the buildings when the epidemic is over to have them reopen, with largely the same profile and employees?
It is in their interest, but what is the cost to the landlord to float those restaurants for a year?
Also, what are the landlords’ next best options?
Abandoning the buildings to the tax authorities and going on the dole.
What about the businesses that supply the restaurants?
And hotels, and airlines, and tourism businesses, etc.
And the banks which were financing most of the capital for these businesses, which will now be worthless (the capital).
That’s my belief, yes. Wile E. Coyote has already walked off the cliff and just hasn’t looked down yet.
I know I sound like a broken record here: economic wealth comes from production, not consumption.
But in our economy a drop in consumption results in a drop of production.
There is some truth in Keynesian economics.
Yeah, but unless Say’s Law holds true and production creates its own consumption, you can have a demand shortage that keeps you from hitting the production frontier, and it can persist for many years. Unless you want QE Infinity and Government Deficit Forever, and which I don’t think we can do, and which I am damn sure Europe can’t do.
The logical extension of this position is that the US government could buy all the pigs that are being slaughtered due to supply chain issues and slaughter them themselves and we wouldn’t be any poorer than if they had been sold and eaten.
Consumption requires production, but production requires consumption to be meaningful You can’t drop one which is why Keynesian economics is completely bunk.
Keynesian economics seems useful when (re)defined to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics
Aggregate demand is nonsense which is the major flaw with Keynesian economics.
This is the type of theory that only works post hoc. Oh look, we collected 30 years of data and spent years analyzing it, with perfect hindsight we can now say that in the year 20XX government spending should have been Y instead of Z.
Go through Keynesian predictions at the onset of a crisis, find people who put their models out there and said ‘if we spend X UE/GDP/inflation etc will be Y’ and then look to see how many of them were even close. Even if you grant AD as a useful concept (and I do not) Keynesians have never demonstrated their ability to wield it in real time, they are like architects showing up with plans 6 months after a custom house has been built, it doesn’t matter how good that plan would have been if they can’t get it to you in time.
The problem with macroeconomics is that the situation is complicated enough that everyone can draw their own conclusions in line with their pre-existing biases. Personally, I looked at the financial crisis and ensuing fallout and saw Keynesianism vindicated and the austerity movement discredited. It’s funny how you think the exact opposite.
Its funny how I haven’t stated an opinion on this one beyond ‘Keneysian economics is crap’ and you have decided that therefore you know my position.
If you think that Keynesians were vindicated what model being used in 2007, or prior to September 2008 ended up being accurate? What Keynesian economist looked at the ARR and then predicted what would happen to US unemployment and GDP accurately? For AD to be a useful tool that is what you have to be able to do, take actual real time data and real time spending promises and predict an outcome. If you can’t do that, you have nothing.
Has any economist anywhere ever been able to predict things with the level of rigor you’re demanding?
Anyway, back in the 2009, the main argument was between people who thought that stimulus was needed to get the economy back on track and people who thought that austerity would magically fix everything. The US passed a small stimulus package and suffered a comparatively mild recession (although it was forced into austerity a couple years later by the recalcitrant new Republicans in congress). Europe on the other hand went all-in on austerity to devastating results.
Keynesians make policy recommendations, if their models aren’t predictive doesn’t that suggest we should start ignoring them? Not do the opposite (that isn’t ignoring someone) just not pay attention to people who claim to have the right approach who can’t demonstrate that their models have any predictive power.
No this was not the debate- it was actually Keynesians like Paul Krugman who claimed that pain wasn’t necessary and stimulus would magically fix things. The specific charges leveled against the ‘austerity’* crowd were that they embraced unemployment when it wasn’t necessary. Claiming that they thought austerity would ‘magically’ fix things is not only condescending it is easily dis-proven as a statement.
*Not a cohesive school of thought, just anyone who disagreed about the effectiveness of stimulus.
As far as I know there is no existing economic model that passes this test.
So how is AD useful?
Economic theories may pass less strict tests. The may also provide explanation, prediction less accurate than you requested.
For example “Consumption requires production, but production requires consumption to be meaningful” would be something that is not providing any strict predictions, but has some explanatory power.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ is far away from promising 100% effective economy simulator but may be useful for explaining some things and providing some help/tools.
Are you aware about any economic model of anything that would pass your extremely strict test?
I didn’t specify stringent predictions, I asked for a model and I used language that would allow you to present evidence based on your assessment of what a good model would look like.
So I can’t contest that AD is useful and give you broad latitude for offering evidence? That is ‘stringent’?
That is just discussing a definition, which is used to refute (or improve on) a weaker definition. Aggregate Demand is a measurement, or at least it is supposed to be, and measurements need some level of precision to be useful.
Producing stuff no one wants to buy is not creating wealth; it’s creating garbage. You need both ends for wealth.
I am at least equally pessimistic about the economy, but that doesn’t necessarily imply much about the stock market, for brrrrr reasons.
What was the most overblown media panic of 2019?
Storm Area 51.
he said most overblown, not most hilarious.
Probably just me, but the other day I forgot that Trump had been impeached, and that even extended into 2020.
My mind is actually blown by this article. Can any doctors here comment on it? Apparently the metrics we use to calculate flu deaths are statistically sketchy and probably overinflated, which is why COVID, which by death count seems to be “a really bad flu season” is so visibly worse.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/
While I’m open to the idea that epidemiology is largely BS, that part of it probably isn’t entirely wrong. Forget estimates, consider the data based on measurements from death certificates (though these are pneumonia and influenza deaths, not confirmed flu infections). Note the bad 2017-2018 season (in which 61,000 people were estimated to have died) shows up nicely on this. The current peak is half again that height (and of course the width is yet to be determined), so “significantly worse than any recent flu season, but not an order of magnitude worse at least so far” seems reasonable.
In the article it says:
Since presumably their current estimates are good faith/best practices, it seems basically like asking the CDC to lie for politically expedient reasons.
I believe he is saying the opposite, that they are intentionally shooting for the upper bounds and lying for politically expedient reasons now, and that this has hurt their credibility in the present crisis and is asking them not to lie for politically expedient reasons.
Where do you get “intentionally shooting for the upper bounds” from that article?
The relevant section quoted in full:
IDK how you get from “complicated algorithms” and “CDC’s assumptions” to “intentionally shooting for the upper bounds and lying for politically expedient reasons”. Whose gains politically from inflating flu deaths historically? Big Flu Shot?
If Big Flu Shot was capable of bending the numbers, they’d at least bend them so that it looked like the flu shot worked.
Ok, but that seems like a serious accusation. He starts out surprised at the numbers, and very quickly comes to the conclusion that the CDC is effectively lying to encourage flu shots and handwashing, but offers no other sources to support this or testimony/defense from CDC epidemiologists. Instead he gets there by asking other doctors who shrug and say “Don’t think I’ve ever seen any flu deaths.” I’m personally assuming good faith on the CDC’s part.
Then, at the end, he says “We have to compare counted deaths to counted deaths, not counted deaths to wildly inflated statistical estimates.” But this doesn’t strike me as an apples-to-apples comparison at all. In normal times, do they give every sick old person (indeed, probably every sick person) a flu test like they’re currently doing with COVID-19, and err on the side of attributing a death to the flu if they test positive? I’m assuming if they did, it would certainly create a number far higher than the current counted one, and much closer to the CDC’s estimate.
He says his “lived reality” matches the idea that this is 10 to 44 times worse than a normal flu season. I get that he’s a doctor, and to be clear I am no re-open protester, but that does not match my lived reality.
The CDC does the estimating thing for other diseases too. That’s how they get “X# of people have HIV, but many of them don’t even know it” – Meaning there’s a black-box estimate being used to generate the numbers, for which I can’t immediately find the methodology.
Check out this graph of “The Tech Person Entering Healthcare”:
https://twitter.com/nikillinit/status/1255510194190258178
Scroll down for the “… Entering K-12 Education” and “… Entering Higher Education” versions.
Someone I know has carpal tunnel syndrome on top of keeping a strict quarantine, and is looking for a language learning program that doesn’t involve typing–he was using Duolingo, but it does require typing. Any suggestions? What he is aiming at is a reading knowledge of a language.
Not a program, but may be helpful: A good tool is watching movies in the new language with subtitles in that same language. Sound + spelling (not always identical text but that doesn’t matter much) + emotional involvement. Only keys to press are on the remote control now and then.
If your friend watches opera, they can read line-by-line translated librettos. So they hear the original language, see the romanizations, and see the one-to-one translations. This is best for older operas with those sing-talking sections between arias, as you still get clear enunciation of the words, but closer to dialogue rhythms, and also the older operas that have those are more likely to have free line-by-line libretto translations online.
Otherwise, yeah, I definitely agree. I haven’t formally studied a lick of Japanese, but their variety shows put captions on the screen all of the time to match their dead-horse-beating comedy, and I’ve osmosed a fair amount of the language that way.
(Also, listening to radio clips on youtube. I google translate the titles, to get a gist of what the clip is about, which also then primes me to listen for the words from the title.)
On that note, why not do what the natives do to learn their own language, and watch children’s educational programming? They must all have their own equivalents to Sesame Street.
This works if he wants to learn German, Italian or French… does anyone else have an opera canon worth mentioning?
Purcell. Hændel’s Oratorios aren’t a million miles form the operatic tradition.
China?
Russia, maybe?
A book? Anki (flashcards program) is much better than Duolingo but to get full value out of it you need to create the cards yourself which requires typing.
There are pre-built flashcards for all the popular languages.
Yes, but they can have issues with general quality and fit for the individual learner. Plus personally I think making the cards yourself is psychologically easier.
What do you mean by “psychologically easier?” When learning the kanji I was extremely glad somebody else did all the work of putting the Anki card set together.
@Conrad Honcho
I can imagine kanji being different, but for vocabulary and especially grammar I find it helpful to have made the cards myself, so that when you sit down to learn some you get a mixture of ones you already know, ones that look vaguely familiar and new ones, rather than a wall of completely new content.
I think that just depends on how you set up Anki. For my decks I have a certain number of new ones each day, and review questions always come first. So I get a bunch of review questions (already know or look familiar) and then once those are exhausted I get my wall of new ones.
Yes, I think that’s the normal setup. I mean that doing a block of 50 new cards that I don’t recognise at all is effortful, whereas doing a block of 50 new cards where some are vaguely familiar is less so, and therefore easier to pick up as a habit. Obviously you have to spend time to actually make the cards, but I think the tradeoff is worth it. This is kind of how Duolingo works IMO — you learn vocab at a painfully slow pace in comparison to something like Anki, but it doesn’t feel like hard work so people are more inclined to do it (I don’t think the tradeoff is worth it in that case though).
I make all my own flash cards, and include what I think will be useful. I much prefer that.
Also, of course, every “brand new” flash card I encounter is one I’ve actually seen before, since I typd it myself. So I rarely see “word about which I haven’t even the tiniest clue”, and that’s far less frustrating.
You can get Mango Languages through most libraries (and it’s actually free at the moment due to covid). No typing at all.
That said, I’m not completely happy with it and haven’t continued using it. It picks bizarre sets of words to teach you. I’m learning Mandarin and a ridiculous number of words are low-frequency use words like china (as in Porcelain). But also country names – not just a couple as examples, but Spain, France, Russia, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Australia, England, US and China all within one of the earliest lessons. It’s also highly conversationally oriented so not a perfect match with his goals. But it’s not bad, just has glaring imperfections.
[For beginner Mandarin, I do recommend that HelloChinese app. It’s surprisingly good. It involves typing a little, though.]
Could he get children’s books and their respective book on tapes in that language (as well as a copy in english)? Reading along would probably be helpful.
A jury-rigged language learning solution is to install a translation plugin that queries Google Translate or a similar service and can be set to automatically translate any highlighted piece of text. I use Simple Translate for Firefox. For Chrome there’s the official Google Translate plugin.
I’ve been using this set up and trying to spend 15 minutes per day deciphering random German Wikipedia articles. It’s the least tedious approach to learning a foreign language that I’ve ever tried (and that includes Duolingo which was fun until I got through about one third of the course and then became nightmarish).
Not sure if it actually works, though. I seem to be retaining knowledge, but I’ll only be able to tell for sure in couple of months.
I quite liked the Pimsleur audio books when I was learning Japanese because it really helped with my pronunciation. If money isn’t an issue, I’d recommend some combination of audio book plus textbook. Then once he gets the basics down, expand and start reading simple things such as children’s novels or news articles geared towards language learners.
I can really recommend Language Transfer on youtube. It’s the most fun I’ve had learning a language.
There are video series for:
French, Italian, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, German, Arabic and Greek.
Seconded for Spanish, I’m more hesitant to recommend for languages that the creator isn’t fluent in (from the bit of German I listened to, the accent wasn’t great).
75 years ago today, Hitler blew his brains out. Today, we regard him as an evil, crazy man, but to what extent were his choices as dictator those of a rational actor?
For example, people today think that Hitler’s decision to invade Poland was irrational since it led to a war with a collection of countries that Germany couldn’t possibly hope to defeat. However, in 1939, a rational actor in his position might have made the same choice. The window for Germany to take military action against its neighbors was closing because Britain, France, the USSR, and Poland were all rearming, and would soon become too strong for the Germans to be assured of conquering. Britain and France had also consistently caved to Hitler’s aggression and expansionism in the 1930s, so a rational actor might have assumed the same response to taking over Poland.
Secondly, which of Hitler’s choices were clearly irrational?
You could probably argue invading France was irrational, he just happened to hit the lottery on it.
Hitler’s choices are the same thing as Germany’s choices under Hitler. My very approximate understanding is that early in his reign, Hitler had good reason to worry that he might be deposed by the military if they decided he was running the country into the ground. He probably made a lot of decisions on the basis of keeping the military busy or happy with him, keeping other powers in the state happy with him, keeping his movement behind him, etc. Failing at any of those would have killed him a lot sooner than suicide ahead of advancing Allied troops did.
The thing that got him closest to being deposed by the military early in his reign, was invading Czechoslovakia in 1938. The German military was of the strong opinion that war with England and France (with Stalin watching on from the East) fell solidly into “running the country into the ground” territory and that they didn’t want to risk that unless and until they absolutely had to. I don’t think you can ascribe the 1939 invasion of Poland to “keeping the military happy with him”.
The rational choice was to not start war with slim to none chances of victory. But he was running country into ground anyway so…
Depends on what you consider as nonnegotiable goals. For Hitler one of primary nonnegotiable goals was subjugation, slavery and murder of other people. Making him evil. Fortunately it also made him ineffective.
Seriously, fighting against Stalinist USSR and getting considered as a bad guy takes being blatantly and stupidly evil.
Why do you think he had no chance? I’m no history buff, but I’ve read that America entering the war wasn’t a sure thing.
If he hadn’t lost big time in russia due to winter (an avoidable mistake) and USA started out, wouldn’t he have won?
Actually more due to fall mud and lack of logistics than winter… (sorry, pet peeve).
Seriously, the technical execution was terrible, but the concept of the war with Russia was solid. Russia had lost to Poland, had completely collapsed when fighting Germany last time, and was in the middle of purging their office corps. Believing that they would turn it around and become incredibly formidable seems reasonable in retrospect, but I can understand why the Germans didn’t believe it.
Except for all the recent Russian history?
Russians fumbling around until they become formidable is also how the Napoleonic invasion worked.
Seriously, the technical execution was terrible, but the concept of the war with Russia was solid.
Except for the tiny bit of betting that the Russians would gladly leave crops and infrastructure for the Germans to fuel a further expanding of the occupation. But someone came up with Scorched Earch, and that alone meant being overstretched killed Barbarossa. The Russians would have to be in worse shape for the Germans to win on that front.
@ana53294
Recent? The history where Poland shockingly kicked their asses in 1920, the Germans kicked their asses in 1916? Or the Crimean War where everyone lined up to kick their asses?
You had to go back over a hundred years to the last time that Russia won that way and Germany was much closer to Russia than France was and had just beaten them two decades ago.
The Germans had every reason to believe that a country that couldn’t win a war with newly independent Poland in 1920 couldn’t match the might of the Wehrmacht that had just crushed France.
@noyann
Again, the technical execution was an absolute nightmare. Completely botched.
Again, the technical execution was an absolute nightmare. Completely botched.
No disagreement there. Only to the solid concept.
It’s funny that, right? Seems like any time in history, Russia is a mess and their military is ready to fall apart, but invading them is just not a good idea. Probably good that they have nukes now so countries don’t keep getting bogged down fighting them.
You also forgot the war they had just won against Finland, for the vlaue of “won” where they botched everything they could but then drowned the Finns in corpses (then again, that is how they ended up winning against Germany, so maybe there was a lesson there.)
@Noah
Bit of a myth. Yes, superior manpower helped them survive the early catastrophe, but they won because they legitimately outmaneuvered the Germans. Had the Germans been well supplied and continued winning like they did in the early parts of Barbarossa, Soviet manpower wouldn’t have meant anything.
Soviet generals late war were GOOD and invented brilliant new doctrines.
@EchoChaos
a large part of why the late war russians were able to out-maneuver the germans was because (A) virtually the entire luftwaffe and a huge share of german artillery and ammunition production were dedicated to fighting the bombers, not shooting up russian columns and (B) the german fuel and vehicle situation would get progressively worse after 1941, meaning most of the army couldn’t maneuver like they did in the earlier years. And even then the germans were still usually inflicting more casualties than they were taking.
@cassander
I don’t disagree with that, but “they drowned the Germans in corpses” is incorrect and insulting to the brilliance of Soviet generals who really did know what they were doing and did it well.
@EchoChaos says:
I’d definitely agree that by the end the soviet generals knew what they were doing and were doing it well, but part of what they were doing was accepting a much higher rate of casualties than any other army in the conflict would have tolerated. Drowning in corpses is going to far, but we shouldn’t over compensate in the other direction.
Possible, but a long shot. The “chance” he was going for, was the chance that Britain and France would let him occupy Poland in 1939 without doing more than wining about it. Like they had done in 1936, 1937, and 1938, so not inherently irrational to expect the pattern to continue.
Didn’t Germany defeat France pretty quickly and easily, then dominate the British airforce and started bombing them repeatedly? Without the US and Russia, would Britain have had a half decent chance?
@Purplehermann Disclaimer: lots of people on this thread know more than I do and can probably correct me. My understanding is that by the time Barbarossa had rolled around, the British had ramped up war production and the relative strength of their airforce had improved. Between British air parity (at least) over the Channel and their naval superiority, an invasion wasn’t all that feasible. The strategy could have been “starve them out”, but by that time Germany had also largely lost the Battle of the Atlantic, in the sense that they were still sinking some ships, but not enough for that strategy. Could Britain have still decided it’s not worth it and signed a peace treaty? Sure.
In march of 1941, the US commited to virtually unlimited aid of hitler’s enemies through lend lease. In august of 1941, FDR signs the atlantic charter which, among other things, called for the final destruction of nazi tyranny. In September, the US Navy is ordered to shoot german ships on sight. From where Gitler was sitting, the US was already at war with him. The attack against the USSR was an attempt to seize enough land and resources to be able to stand up to the anglo-american coalition that he knew he didn’t have the resources to win.
As for winter, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that advancing 1000km across russia isn’t twice as hard as advancing 500km across, it’s several times as hard, because things get geometrically more difficult with distance. And for what it’s worth, he did make it 950km into russia, so his guess that he could make it 1000 wasn’t that far off, and most observers at the time thought that russia would likely fall.
Gitler is my new favorite nickname for him.
@echochaos.
I’m not gonna change it…
>things get geometrically more difficult with distance.
Especially if you kind of suck at logistics.
A Gitler is a little git. It fits.
@EchoChaos:
> Gitler is my new favorite nickname for him.
If you haven’t seen it, you might appreciate this, then: https://blog.plover.com/lang/etym/four.html
It’s a short article about a famous Russian anti-Nazi poster that takes advantage of the fact Hitler starts with “G” when spelled in Russian.
I’ve never bought the logic of that argument, or believed that America’s entry into the European theater of WWII was inevitable. It’s clear why Roosevelt’s actions enraged Hitler and made the war harder for Germany and Italy, but having the U.S. directly engaged in the fighting on all fronts and 100% involved is vastly worse than having the U.S. only engaged in some Atlantic sea battles and ~10% involved.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that Hitler and Mussolini made rational choices when they declared war on the U.S. It seems more likely that they caved to emotional impulses (long-running anger at Roosevelt and some mix of bravado and pride honoring their treaty with Japan).
America had already entered the European theater of WWII. The bit where some of the people shooting American guns and driving American tanks and flying American planes happened to be American citizens, is basically irrelevant. If we skip that part, OK, fine, we have to recast “Saving Private Ryan” with an Anglo-Canadian cast, or maybe some French or Poles or Indians or whatnot. There were more than enough people willing to punch Nazis; the only thing that mattered was the material to up their game from literal punching.
Once the US stepped up for that part, the Nazis were done for unless maybe they scored a quick win against Russia.
warning: also not a history buff
From what I understand invading UK was doomed to failure. So Germany needed UK to be neutered or believing that this time peace agreement would be honored. “this time you can trust us and we will not invade you at all, ignore Poland plz” – Churchill was rightly skeptical about that, but there were prominent politicians supporting peace with Germany after France collapsed.
USA must not join for this scenario have a serious chance.
Germany must win with USSR.
Then Germany must hold entire continent (except UK) and part of Asia and to keep insurgencies and resistance under control while enslaving & murdering large part of the population.
During that time UK, USA, Japan and others must not attack while Germany consolidates new empire.
After that happens and Hitler completed his genocide and demolished most of conquered territories… Still no serious attack comes for enough time to repopulate Lebensraum (two, three, four generations?).
I am not going to call it impossible, but…
And after that USA likely has nuclear weapons (murderempire in Europe would be an additional reason to get it) and Germany has nothing, because irritatingly Jewish Physics were more useful than Deutsche Physik (my favorite bit of historic irony is probably described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik ).
1. Could the UK legitimately have renewed war with Hitler? Without any backup, fighting an offensive war and winning seems unlikely to me.
I don’t know how Japan would have done against Hitler.
What others are there powerful enough that going after Hitler would look like a good idea? (Take Europe, Russia, USA, and Japan out of consideration.)
Being willing to just brutally massacre people would probably make insurgencies pretty rare
After he is bogged down in war with USSR? It is pure speculation, but it seems that cooperation with USSR would at least be reasonable idea.
After all, peace treaty with Hitler is looking even more worthless after he attacked his own ally.
And fighting in cooperation with USSR is better than later fighting alone.
Not going to guess, that is going into complete political fantasy.
Depends on many things. Is Japan still getting crushed by USA? Maybe they end fighting against USSR/China and later Germany? If we are wildly speculating – lend-lease for Japan from USA? After all, they were happy to send it to other murderous regime.
There was active resistance in Poland and in other countries and it was exactly in response to a brutal occupation. Hard to say how it would evolve, but even assuming ending USSR as a country German occupation would be likely stretched awfully thin.
Germans, as result of actually following and seriously believing Untermensch stuff lost support and willingness to cooperate. Many decided that communists are a better alternative of two evils. Even in cases where some still wanted to fight against Soviet Union it was ignored/sobotaged.
Insurgency alone, UK alone, USSR alone, Japan alone (after conquering USSR) may be survivable, but I would bet that this efforts would end combined, maybe outright coordinated.
Because he was Hitler. A more civilized German authoritarian government could probably have beaten the soviets – by arming the locals as it advanced. The soviet regime was very, very unpopular. The Nazis were blatantly planning to murder everybody, and given that alternative, everyone flocked to the banner of communism which, while it might kill you did not have that outcome as a terminal value.
He still got pretty close…
Indeed. In Ukraine, people welcomed Nazis as liberators from genocidal Stalin’s regime that already killed millions of them. But Nazis wasted this historical luck by… well, by being Nazis… and thus of course having more important priorities than defeating Russia.
(Compare with Lenin, years ago, who promised independence to every minority that joins him to defeat Tsar’s regime. Only after defeating the former regime and getting power, he turned against his former allies, one by one. This is the difference smart evil and stupid evil.)
Rationality is going to depend on your desired outcomes. If your goal is for Germany to dominate Europe militarily for 1000 years (or even 10) then an aggressive war is pretty much your only bet. However if you look at history it is hard to justify that as a realistic and rational goal.
Some people might think that, but it seems untrue to me. Invading Poland led to war with France which was fairly handily defeated and the UK which it seems to me could have been stalemated if the aggression had stopped there. Certainly the USSR didn’t have a problem with the invasion of Poland by Germany since it was done practically in cooperation reasonably close to aligning with the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact.
So, invade Poland, conquer France, secure some continental territories and then declare victory seems like a workable plan. If we can assume that the Soviets won’t betray Hitler eventually.
The problem was that Hitler believed (with good reason!) that the USSR was his real enemy. He wanted Poland for a lot of reasons, but a big one was to make it easier to attack the USSR later, as seemed inevitable. The unfortunate side effect of taking Poland was war with the UK and French, but after taking France Hitler really hoped that the UK would capitulate, sign a peace treaty with him, and thus let him get to the real work of fighting the USSR. He also believed he couldn’t wait any longer to attack the USSR because Stalin was frantically trying to rebuild the military after the officer purges because Stalin also knew that Hitler was the enemy: it seemed inevitable to both Hitler and Stalin that they would go to war, it was only a question of when. So if Hitler waits longer, the USSR only gets stronger. But the dang Brits just wouldn’t quit and make a peace treaty! So now he’s got to fight on two fronts.
At least, that’s how I understand it.
Speaking of which, is there any diplomacy worse than interwar Poland? It’s got to be up there, perhaps top 10 ever.
They antagonize both of their great power neighbors, threaten and annex parts of Lithuania, join with the Germans in invading Czechoslovakia, ruining Britain’s protest of the annexation, agree to a trade agreement with Hitler against Britain advice, and then rebuff Hitler and get into a two front war.
They were dealt a very hard hand in the form of two revanchist Great Power neighbors; I don’t see how they could’ve really avoided antagonizing them without becoming the puppet of one or another. But, you’re right they didn’t perform so well even granting that handicap.
Interwar UK is definitely worse. Sometimes it feels like like they were deliberately trying to drive the dominions and allies away.
At least this part have not made anything worse and at least not cooperating with neither Hitler not Stalin gives some kind of moral victory.
Not sure whatever this was avoidable at all, Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was probably avoidable only by getting colonized by either monster.
At that would be qualifying for worst diplomacy in history of the world.
While things went tragically I am unsure whatever even with the best diplomacy ever effect would be better.
Annexating Zaolzie was Falkland-level stupid but would it actually help to not do this?
I read a bit of his autobiography (don’t ask me much about it, I didn’t get very far plus it was a while ago) and this is the narrative that he gives of his own early life:
Child of a civil servant who, because of the stability and respectability of the career, pushes him into it; he resents this, and (he claims) does poorly in school on purpose, precluding him from such a career. He wants to pursue his passion for art. Later after not finding much success he is given the advice that he would be better suited to architectural painting and drafting, but having deliberately sabotaged his own grades he is in no position to pursue this as it requires some technical ability and background. He lives in Vienna painting small commissions and selling postcards, and also doing manual labor in construction, basically a day laborer. When these sites unionize, he refuses to join because he’s 17 and doesn’t know what that is, and the communists at the building site are rude to him when he asks; he then makes a hobby of picking fights with them by going to work at union building sites until someone recognizes him and he gets thrown off.
Remember, it’s his own version, and the whole thing about deliberately wrecking his grades only to need them later makes a very neat and compelling story so who knows how accurate it is, but the view he gives of himself is someone who is impulsive and vengeful, and constantly does irrational things. Also this was written from jail so that may colour the narrative. But he was the kind of guy who was able bodied and earning a living on his own in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, but still saw himself as down on his luck and racked up vendettas while he was his own worst enemy; although fair enough that after the Great War, Germany was laid pretty well low and under unfair terms, but I think things make sense when you see him as someone who just carries grudges forever and seeks power purely to carry them out; e.g. there is no universe in which he isn’t at least trying to conquer the USSR.
> does poorly in school
Same one as Wittgenstein.
I don’t see why the invasion of Poland could be seen as irrational when the Western Powers had already backed down so much. Munich is really a big deal. Czechoslovakia was pretty significant to French plans to resist Germany and had a major industrial base. I mean, I don’t know what the best Cold War analogy is: the US basically surrendering Turkey and then starting WWIII over Greece? If you were the USSR and the US already gave up Turkey, why do you think they would stand up for Greece?
The most irrational decision to me was trying to knock France out, because a few different decisions and chances on the Allied side prevents that from being a cake walk and puts Germany right back into a nightmare two front war.
The other irrational decision was Case Blue. At this point the US is definitively in the war, the USSR has resisted the strongest punch you can possibly throw, you KNOW you will soon be on the ropes, and your solution is to launch a massive operation against a non-key territory to try to get strategic resources you will not be able to tap because the Soviets can just sabotage the oil wells?
Kursk is probably another good example. You KNOW the Soviets over-extend themselves on every single offensive. Don’t try to pre-empt them. Just let them attack, let them over-extend, and THEN hit them with your strategic reserve. You can at the very least delay the Soviets an entire year of offensives…though you’re still screwed in the long-run.
Case blue has huge problems and was poorly implemented, but I’m not sure there was a better plan. If you’re planning for 1942, what’s your situation? Last summer you had the fuel and resources to launch 3 assaults, more or less. This year, you can only do one, and that 1 won’t be as strong as any of your 3 were last time around. So if you can only attack one thing, what thing do you take? There’s nothing worth taking in the north. You can’t take moscow, the russians have dug in around it. If you go for the oil, you might get it and if you don’t. at the very least you deny it to the russians. There’s at least hope for a good outcome there, and there isn’t anywhere else.
The real foolishness was the africa campaign. it was utterly pointless, and it consumed an enormous share of the three resources that were most precious to the germans, aircraft, fuel, and veterans (especially pilots).
If it’s me, I just wait for them to hit me, because I don’t think the chances of getting Baku are realistic and it does not knock the USSR out of the war anyways. At that point I am just trying to slow Soviet advances and maximize the number of dead Russians, not trying to lose entire armies at Stalingrad on something that won’t win the war anyways.
This is the german army we’re talking about, they’re going to attack somewhere, the question is where’s the best place to attack. Planning another 1000km advance is objectively crazy, but nothing else had even the hope of being decisive. About the only thing I can think of would be having the whole army group just push for the caspian, then maybe heading south. But that still means massively extending an already stretched front and giving up any hope of getting the wells for germany, so I can see why that was a much less attractive proposition.
The only thing that could have been decisive would have been encircling russian units on something near the scale seen during barbarossa, and I don’t think that was possible.
The lack of those big encirclements worried the Germans throughout 1942, as did the noticeable improvement in the Red Army’s units and tactics. Even though the Germans held their ground or pushed back the Soviets in every major battle that year, they knew that longer-term trends were against Germany on the Eastern Front.
Well, yeah, that’s the problem, if you want to attack somewhere no matter what the future dictates, you’re going to run into serious problems. I think that’s a major problem in 1940 that just turned out to be lucky, I think in 1941 it was at least reasonable to try to take Moscow and knock the USSR out, but by 1942 you’re pretty much beating a dead horse. By 1943 it’s insane, but sure enough you’re throwing your operational strength and best tanks into a meatgrinder, they all get lost, and the Soviets spend the next year throwing literally millions of troops and tanks at you as fast as the American 4x4s can support the offensive.
I don’t really see a realistic option other than slowly surrendering ground and hoping the Soviets over-extend themselves in 1942 and 1943 and trying to your encirclements that way. Because the Soviets do over-extend themselves a lot in that time.
@proyas
They were also taking a lot of losses, and losses that were irreplaceable confident veterans. It’s remarkable how consistent german casualties are during 41-43. Toss out stalingrad, and its a pretty steady average of 50,000 per month until kursk. The germans take more casualties in the first two months than the entire war up until that point. They knew that they couldn’t keep up that burn rate for long, but it was worth it if they were trading 10:1 like they did during barbarossa. Not so much when the numbers got closer.
The whole enterprise was silly; look at Germany today. It is what? The third or fourth biggest economy? And that’s after rebuilding. People here largelly agree that jews are more intelligent than average…and Hitler killed them? And after the war there was a further brain drain?
Maybe he could have conquered a little extra territory and be done with the war, armed himself to the teeth to defend it and that be it. Hell, I think the Weimar Republic was bigger than Germany today?
You are judging past decisions based on developments that couldn’t have been foreseen, IMO.
This was before globalism and during colonial times, when most people thought that the way to build a strong Western nation was either to have lots of resources within your territory (US & USSR, more or less), and/or to have colonies (UK, France, Netherlands, Belgium).
In large part, WW II was a war by countries that lacked resources and lost out on having solid colonies to exploit, against those who were happy with their access to resources.
It was not apparent at the time that colonialism could not be maintained (actually, in part because of WW II) & that the New World Order was going to be built on trade between reasonably free nations (at least, on this side of the Iron Curtain).
—
As for the Jews, Hitler never called them stupid, but considered them traitors (just like Stalin did, BTW).
If you think that a certain group is working against you, them being very intelligent makes them a greater threat, not a lesser one.
The plan was actually for the other nations to let him take Poland, whereupon he would have more resources to gear up for war (against Russia) in 1942 at the earliest.
However, during the Poland campaign, France already attacked Germany, although so incompetently, that almost no one remembers that.
Yeah, obviously this is with hindsight and the dubious proposition that Hitler could have cozied up to the jews and etc, etc. Point is that Germany turned out ok without the Lebensraum.
Honestly, if he still wanted a war, I’d have gone with going for Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Particularly Germany needed some resources from those countries, they took Denmark really easily, and would have been able to defend it with submarines very effectively. Let the Finnish deal with the Russians, and call it a day. I think Britain would have gone after them anyway but maybe they wouldn’t have gone all out without the whole invading France part and would have relented long before America has the chance to enter the war.
But it is still a risky proposition. Nazism is goddamn resilient and popular to this day, so maybe Hitler could have won a diplomatic conquest of most of Scandinavia without shooting a single bullet.
It’s probably easier to get the locals to go along with your racial ideology when they’re also members of your master race and get to become first class citizens. By contrast, when the locals are Slavs and your racial ideology leaves them a place somewhere between being a permanent subservient class and being mass-murdered, local allies are kinda hard to come by.
Well, the whole thing is nuts so you may as well adjust your racial ideology to include slavs. Hitler considered some asian races as equivalent to aryans so it’s not clear there’s a lot of wiggle room.
If you don’t want to modify the racial ideology, then maybe start conquering the areas that have the superior race in the first place, instead of the slav countries.
Hitler considered Jews to be traitors, but did he have any reason for thinking that about Jews in general?
From what I’ve learned reading the start of Wages of Destruction before the library shut down due to plague, ISTM that Hitler forced his own hand.
At no point was the third reich socially or economically stable. The best it could manage to do was to take over the world faster than it was imploding.
Of course, if you’re a nazi, you don’t believe economic and social stability will be possible anyway while the bolsheviks and other undesirables are still around.
I’ve also read that Nazi Germany was teetering on economic collapse in 1939, and war was the only way to avoid that. However, I’ve also read that Hitler had a very poor understanding of economics, which undermines the theory that he started WWII because was able to think three steps ahead about the German economy.
My understanding is that the plan was to gain land & resources from smaller nations nearby, like Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The war declarations in response to the latter were unexpected.
Hitler’s advisors had argued that the country would not be ready for a big war until 1942/1943 or so.
My recollection is the same, that Hitler somewhat reasonably expected Danzig to be returned and Poland to agree to be a German satellite state in exchange for protection from the USSR while Germany prepared for that war.
I think an awful lot of Hitler’s decisions look a bit like this. He made the same high risk choices that a rational actor in a bad situation might make (in Magic we’d call it playing to your outs) but he probably didn’t make them because he was thinking along those lines but because he was a loon who actually thought they were likely to work.
Hitler made a huge strategic mistake in not using chemical weapons against the Soviet Union. He had better weapons than anyone else, Stalin early on at least could not have hit German cities with chemical weapons, and likely the UK would not have attacked Germany with chemical weapons if Germany didn’t hit the UK with them.
what would using chemical weapons have accomplished?
Pound for pound they had a lot more killing power than the explosives the Nazis put in their bombers did.
killing marginally more russian civilians wouldn’t have done much to aid the war effort, and chemical weapon usage on a battlefield is always tricky.
The myth is that after being gassed, Hitler was loathe to use chemical weapons. Truth is that chemical weapons were never good weapons.
Well, chemical weapons are good terror weapons against civilians and may work decently against an unprepared immobile military.
Still not very useful on Eastern Front.
See https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/
Very useful against cities. They could have helped the Nazis take Moscow.
I am pretty sure that replacing weapons useful against military with useful tools for murdering civilians would not help in taking Moscow.
Germans had many problems on the eastern front, but “we need to murder more civilians” was not one of them.
Maybe it would be useful if your top priority is murdering as many people as possible but even that is dubious. The closest position was about 29 km from city center.
I fail to see how replacing more conventional weapons by chemical weapons in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Moscow would help.
Not so useful against cities you plan to occupy, and since the railroads all run through the cities, not occupying them means having your logistics stretched even further.
Also, using them before December 1941 means the United States just joins the war earlier (and maybe skips the war with Japan, if Tojo is smart about it). Using them after May 1941 means mustard gas raining down on German cities and factories without nerve gas attacks on British cities to compensate. And using them at any time means Russia retaliates in kind, with inferior chemical weapons but chemical weapons of any kind favor static warfare over maneuver, and that works against Germany.
There’s an argument for using chemical weapons when Germany is on the defensive, and desperate, and has V-weapons to take the chemical war back to Allied soil. It probably still results in Germany’s defeat, but if you’re one of the people who’s going to be hanged at Nuremberg anyway, maybe you’re OK with rolling those dice. As support for German attacks, not a good move.
Terror bombings against cities did not proof to be very successful in WW2, except, for fucking up your enemies logistics be driving refugees to the surrounding country side.
Even the ultimate terror bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki worked primarily by prooving to the Japanese Emporer that his High Commands idea of breaking the American fighting spirit in an bloody invasion battle was obsolete.
Reading Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich right now, Czechoslovakia could have held out against Hitler so his military was right to be afraid, but he was politically astute enough to know that the western powers would not fight.
That Hitler was deranged can be seen from his view of the Munich conference–he was furious that the annexation of Czechoslovakia occurred without spilling any blood because he wanted a military victory.
He explicitly designed his war against Poland such that a peaceful solution was not possible and a repeat of Munich/Czechoslovakia would not reoccur. (Although maybe he could’ve gotten Poland too without war, crazier things have happened.)
Rational actor is an interesting term to use. I feel its very much a deontological shortcut to consider that rationality is something that can just be imposed on a situation. Hitler was manifestly crazy to any impartial observer, but to say he was acting irrationally is a very different thing. A lot of this rests of ideology, world view and how twisted these became for many people over the course of 1930-1940s .
As I’m sure many are aware, Hitler’s political rise was premised on fixing all of Germany’s many pressing and manifest issues. He was going to get rid of all the parasites dragging down the economy, restore national pride, proclaim Germany superiority and secure the resources needed to ensure a thousand years of peace and prosperity. A more or less reasonable aim for a idealized reasonable politician (though we’d prefer a different word than parasites), however, Hitler came bundled with a particularly pernicious ideology. This ideology, in no small part Hitler’s brain child, would eventually be called Nazism and was based on an assumption that the German people mattered above all others, to the point of all other humans had negligible and even negative value. This is one of the key points which I always feel gets glossed over just because of how horrifying it was. Hitler’s plan always involved the death of millions. War was not diplomacy by other means to him. War was genocide by other means. Internal pogroms and persecution were the beginning of this process but the end goal was, to quote George Orwell “What he [Hitler] envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of ‘living room’ (i.e. stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts).”
And this really casts a different light on Hitler’s ‘rationality’ as a decision maker. From within the ideology Hitler could have made better decisions but never made any irrational decisions. The goal was always to end up in a knock down struggle for control of everything from Cork to the Urals and kill everyone on the way. By their own logic the failure to do so successfully was the error, even though us looking from without it was emphatically the embarking on the journey at all that was the issue.
You can really see this in the way the war ended. It would have been supremely rational to declare victory after Barbarossa failed and carve out a couple puppet states. It would have been rational to negotiate some kind of white peace after Stalingrad when the strategic tide turned. It would have been rational to surrender conditionally to the Allies after D-Day and at least escape with their skins. None of these happened because the Germany leadership had entered into a death ride attempting to complete the bloodiest elements of the Nazi platform before the inevitable defeat.
Which is probably the most terrifying conclusion of the German experience of WW2. Every decision felt rational. The war felt just. The cause felt righteous. The sacrifices justified. The horror necessary. Right up until the point Hitler put a bullet in his brain and then suddenly absolutely none of it felt rational. It had always been the bloody ravings of a man who’d never come back quite right from the trenches. Worse, many people had been yelling this all along but somehow they’d been branded the irrational ones.
So the answer to the question, could Hitler’s actions have been more rational, it’s both yes and no. His decisions were always reasonable and considered from within and always irrational and insane from without. If an alien space bat were to impose a perfectly rational Adolf Hitler upon the world he would have probably ended up an architect rather than a more competent leader. It’s debatable whether WW2 would have still happened in such a scenario.
I am perhaps an optimist in hoping that it wouldn’t and that Nazism was a perfect storm of character, charisma and circumstance that would never be replicated.
> all other humans had negligible and even negative value
He saw the world in zero-sum, malthusian terms. To him, non-Germans were just taking up valuable acreage.
Which wouldn’t have been an entirely wrong assessment of agrarian geopolitics. But Hitler lived in an industrial world where the Haber Process was a thing. ISTM that while Hitler used modern tools like the plane, the Autobahn and the concentration camp, his worldview was stuck solidly in the middle ages.
I have been looking at this R estimation site https://rt.live/
In the previous thread, there were some complaints about its model, but they’ve been updating it, and nobody suggesting anything better.
Now, to move into @Matt M ‘s camp, looking at the graphs for each state, I find it hard to notice that shelter orders are changing the Rt’s. Most Rt’s seem to be dropping prior to the orders, indicating voluntary measures and precautions were beginning to work. After the orders, they continue to drop, but it does not seem to be any faster or slower than before. (try eyeballing a state, and seeing if you can tell when the order was, then mouse over to see how close you were)
I have been having a very tough time making sense of all of the covid related data, so please, I am open to being told how much this does or does not make sense.
Even taking their Rt’s as true, would that really be evidence that the lockdowns weren’t effective? Lockdown would add onto an existing decrease in Rt’s due to hand-washing, voluntary work-from-home, etc. and just continue the decline. I guess it’s not a sudden drop right after the lockdown, but at least in my region there were several steps to the lockdowns and they first appeared in the hardest hit areas locally before the statewide lockdown. Most of the cases were in a handful of counties, with one locking down first, then the neighboring, then the state.
Thanks for the acknowledgement.
I’ve said from the start that this disease seems to be completely and totally mystifying and that the only thing we know about it is that we don’t know much about it. The effects it has had on different countries/regions/states/whatever have been wildly variable, and do not easily map to any of the commonly suggested variables (race, ethnicity, demographics, temperature, humidity, and yes – behavioral controls either formal or informal).
Clearly there’s something causing this to be a lot worse in Italy, New York, Spain than in Germany, Texas, Denmark and just assuming that it must be lockdowns is unsupported by the data. I don’t know what the something is, but if it’s not lockdowns, then that means locking down all the low-intensity areas is imposing an enormous economic cost for not much COVID-reduction benefit.
It’s weird. Most of time I read your COVID opinions, I find myself disagreeing strongly. However, I agree almost entirely with the above. Three quibbles:
I think you underrate the downside risk of the “this virus is very confusing and we don’t know much about it”. My view is that, because we’ve seen how ugly things can get, we should be caution about lifting restrictions.
I also think you overrate how much of a positive effect lifting restriction will have on the economy. Business owners and customers are still nervous. It’s not worth it economically for most employers to open up and only see 20% their normal fair, and we’ve yet to receive clear guidance on, e.g., how to run a restaurant when there’s low-rate community transmission. “Every little bit helps” is surely true, but it applies equally to limiting the damage done by COVID-19.
I think you underrate the value of extra time. We know tons more today than we did a month ago. While vaccines are still far out, we’ve gotten better at treating COVID-19. We know that invasive ventilation is generally a poor strategy and that we should watch out for complications due to clotting, especially among younger folks who have the disease. This means people who get treated in the future will fair better than folks who got COVID-19 in early April. We also more information about drug efficacy from trial-and-error, which has let us learn things like that remdesivir is probably effective and hydroxychloroquine probably isn’t. Even if we fail to get total COVID-19 levels down far enough and testing levels up enough to implement trace and track, people will still benefit from the additional time.
But I think we’re largely in agreement about where the country is right now with the disease and what our current state of knowledge about it is.
I think the focus on economics w.r.t. these restrictions is dodging the much larger disruption in quality of life for everyone, based on some insane assumption that everyone should be willing to throw away everything they enjoy in life for the sake of others health.
Physically locking people in their homes is abhorrent.
Telling people they can’t do anything that they enjoy or see their friends, is better, but still awful.
Saying that you can’t go to bars, concerts or movies and should be careful when you’re sick is much less miserable.
I personally think we should trade worse outcomes for better quality of life (as a society). We do this already for things like cars, alcohol and pain medication, but when it comes to this disease, I think public discussions see this tradeoff as a third rail.
Selfishly, I have been following my local “stay-at-home orders”, and haven’t seen anyone I know physically in about 7 weeks. I am not okay (in a general “how are you doing” way, not in a crisis way). I imagine there are many other people in a similar state.
We should be trying to improve quality of life in lockdown as much as is possible while remaining safe – both to increase compliance and for its own sake. It seems like many governments are trending this way, although slower then I would prefer, but the twitteratti remain unconscionably strict.
This reminds me of a story I was reading this morning about hairdressers in Georgia who considered the lockdown ending to be a disaster because they don’t have the PPE to operate safely, the reduced number of customers makes it uneconomical anyway, but now that the lockdown is lifted, they risk losing their customers to the ones who do open (which hurts them in the long term due to customer loyalty and habit formation), making it hard to stay shut. Also, the end of the official lockdown also apparently means an end to unemployment benefits.
Being forcefully closed also gave them some leverage.
I’d been on the side of “if people are going to mostly stay home anyway, might as well let many businesses open.” But the businesses might prefer being forcefully closed!
A report from someone who grew up in the industry:
https://twitter.com/ReLynnWrites/status/1255007228567814145
How is Sweden handling its small businesses? Massive coronabux influx? Letting them spasm and die?
I’d wager an awful lot of business owners (and workers) would prefer the “produce nothing of value, get whatever bailout funds it takes to tide us over until we can be fully and safely profitable” plan over the “muddle through the hard times as best we can” plan. That’s not a sufficient reason for the rest of us to favor Plan A, though. If times are hard and everyone is at risk, we should be helping people only to the extent necessary for them to then muddle through by their own efforts.
A few quick responses:
This logic would be sound… if the restrictions were low-cost and if we were confident in their effectiveness. I see it as similar to an experimental new drug. Should you take it to cure a disease? Yes, if the disease is very bad and if you are convinced there will be few dangerous side effects and if you are convinced the drug will work? So what are lockdowns? We all seem to agree they definitely have dangerous side effects. We seem to conceptually assume that they should work, but looking at the actual data, it doesn’t really seem that they obviously do. And economic shutdowns are one of those things where the effects will get worse the longer you put them in place. Each extra day doesn’t just do +1 unit of damage, it does more than that.
I think this is highly regional. I don’t doubt in New York this is true. Where I live, in South Texas, it does not appear to be true. In Michigan, where business owners and customers are literally taking up arms and storming the capital, it does not appear to be true. But even in places where it is, it’s not just about the economy, as ltowel points out. It is about basic freedom, dignity, social connection, psychological well-being, etc. Lockdowns infringe on all of those. Choosing to stay home all weekend is better than staying home all weekend because a guy is standing outside your door with a gun saying “I’ll shoot you if you come out.” In many ways.
This is probably the most aggravating one. As far as I can tell, we’ve done basically nothing with the “extra time” these lockdowns have bought us. Most jurisdictions seem to have no plan but “more lockdowns.” Track and trace systems are not even close to in place. While I don’t doubt that on-the-ground treatment has improved, we still can’t even agree on basic things like “does heat kill the virus?” “is surface transmission common?” “can people who already had it get re-infected?” “does it do permanent lung damage?” etc.
And the ventilator thing is a great example of the folly of government planning. Initially, we were told that one of the top priorities needed to be ventilator production. People were screaming at Trump to seize the means of ventilator production, to nationalize distribution, to disrupt entire industries, all to ensure that the assumed-to-be-vital ventilators could be available to certain-to-be-overwhelmed locations like New York (yes), SF (actually nope!) and Seattle (actually nope!)
Then it turned out they basically did more harm than good and killed a bunch of people. “whoops.” But I’m sure the next thing they tell us is vital will be right!
I completely agree that the way we’ve seemingly wasted the past four weeks is extremely frustrating. Our on-the-ground treatments may have gotten better, but it looks like the Federal plan is really, “States, come up with some plans,” and I think that’s insane. So I’m increasingly sympathetic to the argument that our current public officials aren’t competent to pull off a coherent response.
I saw Itowel mention something similar above, and I don’t get it. Is this literally the case anywhere in the US? I can leave my house whenever I want (Colorado). I’ve been able to do this throughout the “lockdown”. I don’t, but I can. There are no armed guards anywhere. How would this even be possible?
One last thing: Errors, in cases like this, aren’t symmetric. Because of exponential growth, being wrong on one side means things double where as being wrong on the other side means things are halved. I’m okay with the government making linear mistakes (order too many ventilators or shutting down a week early or opening up a week late) to preclude exponential errors.
@matthewravery
After very brief Googling, yes, men with guns in Colorado are in fact enforcing the state’s orders.
https://kdvr.com/news/man-arrested-in-front-of-daughter-at-brighton-park-for-allegedly-violating-social-distancing/
https://www.foxnews.com/us/colorado-arrests-coronavirus-stay-at-home-order-steamboat-springs
I am happy you haven’t been affected by this yet.
>In Michigan, where business owners and customers are literally taking up arms and storming the capital
You mean those 100 or so people… in a state of 10 million. Agree or disagree with the lockdown, it’s ridiculous to make a statement like this and pretend it means there’s overwhelming support amongst business owners and consumers for reopening the state. And I highly doubt those gun toters were business owners.
@gph
This is a really odd statement, as most of the business owners I know in fact own and carry guns.
Why do you think this?
I think the states doing it is not only not insane, it’s a much better option than having the feds do it. Do you want the federal government to make the same plan for every state? It doesn’t make sense that the plans for New York should be the same as the plans for Hawaii. And if the Feds are making a plan for each state, how are they in a better position to know what’s right for that state than the state itself? Also, skin in the game.
Why do you think the feds should be doing the response instead of the states?
The claim was that there was little overlap between the anti-lockdown protestors and the business community. The rate of gun ownership among business owners is completely irrelevant to that question.
At any rate, my understanding is that even if literally every protester was a business owner, they would still represent only a tiny fraction of business owners. (I could be wrong about this, I haven’t tried to run the numbers)
Sorry, I meant that as more of a hypothetical analogy.
The point is, choosing not to do something of your own free will is a much better outcome, psychologically, than choosing not to do something because some external force has suggested they will harm you if you do the thing.
Like, even if the economic effect of “I’m not getting a haircut because I don’t want to risk COVID” is the same as “I’m not getting a haircut because the state has said they’ll arrest my barber if they try and give me one,” the psychological effect is quite different.
Similarly, as an analogy, I’m a strong introvert. I stay inside the house most weekends. But that doesn’t mean that if a guy with a gun sat outside my house one weekend and said “come outside and I’ll shoot you” that I’d just shrug this off, not care, and be unaffected by it. I like having the option to leave my house, even though I frequently choose not to exercise it. Similarly, I like having the option to go to a dine-in restaurant, or see a movie in a theater, or get a haircut, even in cases where I choose not to exercise it (whether because of COVID-fear, introversion, cheapness, or whatever else)
@Loriet
No, I quoted the statement I was questioning, which was that the gun toters were not business owners. The gun ownership rate of business owners is indeed relevant to that.
Obviously any protest is a small slice of any state. Protests in the millions are exceptionally rare.
I agree. But the real issue here is that the states don’t seem to have any plan either.
As far as I can tell, every state governor’s plan is basically “lockdowns until such point as it’s politically harmful for me to keep having lockdowns.” We reach this point more quickly in Texas than in California, but the overall plan of “lockdown for as long as I think I can get away with it, and then nothing,” seems pretty much the same across the board.
Pretty much every jurisdiction has proven that they aren’t actually doing anything with the time we are buying them (at great cost). Therefore, buying them even more time seems to be a losing proposition.
In the comment you were responding to, “those gun toters” was referring specifically to the anti-lockdown protesters, not gun owners in general.
I frequently see assertions here that the states have no plan, but saying something over and over doesn’t actually make it true. In one of the previous threads, I mentioned how I Googled the question and read the very first article, and that article talked about stuff like how SF had already trained 250 new contact tracers, and that several states have already announced contact tracing plans. Then I got a response that those plans don’t count because reasons and the usual barrage of assertions that states “have no plan” continued unabated. This is getting extremely tiring.
Note that the original phrasing here was “business owners and customers.”
Basically every American is a business customer.
In any case, it doesn’t really matter if they’re a small minority. They’re a small, but committed minority. Most violent revolutions (not that I’m predicting this will lead to that) were successfully accomplished by small minorities.
What percentage of the people answering polls saying “I support continuing the lockdowns” do you suspect are willing to personally take up arms to enforce them?
Yes. In fact, I want the Federal government making this mistake. “We prepared too many supplies.” Sometime in January, the government should have decided that there was at least a few-percent risk of pandemic, and told domestic manufacturers of many kinds of things “make as much as you can, we promise to buy it up if there’s no market.” We would have made some wrong stuff and had to sell if off at a partial loss if there was no pandemic or it was the wrong stuff. Good. More of that, please.
I can’t speak for Matthew, but while each state should have decided its own policy, there was a shitload of duplicative work that 50 states had to do.
We had the Feds doing the worst of both worlds: letting the states fend for themselves in figuring out how global supply chains work . . . and the Feds then seizing the shipments. The Federal government should have been helping the states acquire the things they need. Get reps from the governors in a (virtual) room to talk about their shortages, figure out who can make or buy the stuff, and do that.
Except that…
a. Resources that are spent on producing and distributing ventilators are resources that are now unavailable to be spent on other things, some of which may actually be useful to COVID specifically (other kinds of PPE or treatment options), or even just “moar malaria nets.” How much did we spent on ventilators? How many malaria nets could that have bought? Why is nobody screaming “SO YOU WANT PEOPLE TO DIE” about the decision to have ventilators instead of malaria nets?
b. If it does in fact turn out that ventilators did more harm than good, and increased the fatality rate of critically ill patients, having more of them on hand was, in fact, a really bad thing. We’d have been better off with a massive shortage. So, like I said, if they got this one wrong, what makes us think they won’t get the next thing wrong too? If the “medical experts” couldn’t even be trusted to make the right call on the trade-offs of medical treatment, why should we trust that they’re making the right call on the trade-offs of society-wide economic shutdowns? They couldn’t even pick the best option within their specific domain of expertise. And we’re trusting them to do better outside of it?
Resources that are spent on producing and distributing ventilators are resources that are now unavailable to be spent on other things,
I don’t think you actually believe this.
Anyone preparing for an emergency is ALWAYS going to have a bunch of extra stuff that ends up not needed. Have you ever seen an ambulance or fire engine show up somewhere? They are full of stuff that’s not needed for the specific emergency they arrive at. But they don’t know that ahead of time.
Furthermore, machines that make ventilators cannot be used to make hydroxychloroquine or surgical gowns or test swabs. There is absolutely no crowding out, whatsoever. Even if it comes down to literally “how do we move things around” there are huge transportation networks in the United States. There is no imaginable circumstance where we would be unable to move N95 masks because we were moving ventilators instead.
even just “moar malaria nets.” How much did we spent on ventilators? How many malaria nets could that have bought? Why is nobody screaming “SO YOU WANT PEOPLE TO DIE” about the decision to have ventilators instead of malaria nets?
I’ve always been upfront about admitting we are trading lives and money back and forth. I’m fine talking about how many dead grandmas is worth a trip to Disneyland. Find someone who thinks that we can’t put a value on human life to make this asinine argument to.
If it does in fact turn out that ventilators did more harm than good, and increased the fatality rate of critically ill patients, having more of them on hand was, in fact, a really bad thing.
I don’t hold the Federal government responsible for predicting the future.
if they got this one wrong, what makes us think they won’t get the next thing wrong too? If the “medical experts” couldn’t even be trusted to make the right call on the trade-offs of medical treatment,
Fuck this entire argument. Fuck it right in the ear.
If the mindset is “well, our leaders aren’t going to get things perfectly right, so who cares if our leaders are incompetent, let’s all take hydroxycholoroquine, lol” it will explain a lot, though.
This is the novel coronavirus. We are always operating from a position of imperfect information. The best treatment ideas were going to assume this worked like previous similar coronaviruses, but the experts weren’t sure and they knew they weren’t sure.
“No plan survives contact with the enemy.” This doesn’t mean our military leaders just shrug and say “lol, it doesn’t matter if we plan!” You try to think out every option available to you, and you will never be able to think of all of them. You will be surprised by the future.
This “don’t even bother” attitude is a clown car full of incompetence. Setting the threshold for acceptable performance this low is pitifully sad.
why should we trust that they’re making the right call on the trade-offs of society-wide economic shutdowns?
Doctors aren’t making this call. It’s a trade-off made with input from doctors, epidemiologists, and economists. And it won’t be exactly right. We won’t know until years from now what the “best” path was for us right now. It doesn’t excuse a driver seeing an accident up ahead in the road, being not sure of the 100% best path, and so she just screams and covers her eyes. Hey, it might turn out that the car she rams into ends up killing baby Hitler!
Also, attacking people for over-preparing is hugely destructive in the long run. In 2009, the French government prepared aggressively for H1N1. When it turned out less bad than feared, they got pilloried by the public. Which resulted in them being unprepared when SARS-COV-2 came around and they actually needed it.
@Edward Scizorhands:
I want to put that on T-Shirt or something. Might be a little long, but I’m fat.
I am not suggesting that nobody, anywhere, should do any sort of planning to attempt to minimize COVID deaths.
What I am arguing is that the record for central planning, historically and in general, is spotty to poor, that it often makes things worse, and that looking at COVID specifically, there is far more failure to point to than success.
The right answer to Soviet Ministers in the 1950s of “how do we centrally plan grain production” was, in fact, “don’t even bother.” That doesn’t mean “nobody in the Soviet Union should bother producing grain.” It just means “central planning won’t make this situation any better and will probably make it worse.”
The government telling private suppliers “make stuff so we can build up our stockpile[1]” is nothing like seizing the means of production.
The Federal government seizing supplies of PPE purchased by the states whenever they find any might qualify.
[1] like Secretary Azar wanted to do on February 5th.
If I take Governor Newsom’s lockdown order literally, I think it is officially illegal for me to leave my house at any time other than the few occasions that I’ve been called in to the office to do classified work on projects that are considered essential under Federal law. Pragmatically, nobody is going to stop me from going to the grocery store claiming I’m purchasing essential supplies or walk around the block for essential exercise, neither of which are truly essential given what I already have in my house. But you get very little credit in my book for not enforcing your unjust, overbroad, unnecessary, and yes tyrannical laws.
I recall Washington state change their order from “you can’t go places except for X” to “you can’t leave your house except to do X” which is a weird change to make unless you really wanted to go after the delta.
For the moment I vaguely think the lockdowns are generally useful, but a lot of authoritarians are exploiting this.
But see e.g. our host on psychiatric medications in his practice, repeatedly. If the side effects are bad, you work to dial down the dose and swap in different drugs to find the combination with the best results at least harm to the patient; you don’t go with “X will help, so prescribe as much X as we can manage without killing the patient”.
It’s a good thing the government put out FAQs then, so you don’t have to worry about taking the strictest possible literal interpretation of the orders. Leaving the house for exercise, fresh air, etc. is explicitly allowed. The important part is to just stay six feet away from other people while outside.
So far I’ve twice been rousted by armed officers for violating the lockdown orders. It’s easy to pretend the orders aren’t being enforced by armed guards if you don’t go out and violate them.
I imagine that is something which is extremely location dependent.
@Loriot
Cute websites, even an official government website, won’t be an excuse for violating the literal letter of the law, if a prosecutor decides to make an issue of it. Because websites or the bureaucrats who write them don’t interpret laws; courts do.
Incidentally, this is where the complaints come from about how you can get hemmed up for doing your taxes wrong even if that’s how you were advised by the IRS–because the person giving you that advice can be overruled by a federal judge if the judge thinks a different interpretation is correct. (Nor are the IRS’s own lawyers prohibited from advocating for a different interpretation to the judge than what was told to our notional taxpayer; because in the fullness of time they may decide that a different interpretation is closer to correct.)
If the law is written so broadly that a literal reading means that you could be prosecuted for doing something, you’re absolutely liable for prosecution and conviction for doing that thing, unless a prosecutor doesn’t feel like making an issue of it.
Matt M:
I disagree with much of what you say (in details, mostly, but the details matter). But I agree completely with this:
Some of that is because science is hard and biology is messy, but a lot is, as best I can tell, because the people who should have been doing that preparation weren’t ready and didn’t have any clear idea what to do, or didn’t have the resources and personnel to do it.
Getting masks and testing widely available should have been a top priority, along with hiring a lot of contact tracers. That’s apparently happened to some extent in some states, but it doesn’t look like it’s happened in most places. Plenty of people still can’t get a COVID-19 test short of being sick enough to need immediate hospitalization. Lockdowns seem to have been the only thing most governments have done. (If not, I’d love to learn how I’m wrong here!).
Imagine a business that has to deal with a sudden change in local market conditions, so that it stops being profitable and faces huge losses in the future. It’s reasonable for that business to take out some loans to help it get through the crisis. But that only makes sense if the business uses the time bought by those loans to reorganize itself to be able to live in the world as it now is. If the business just spends the loans on keeping its current business just the same, then when no more credit is available, it’s going to be in bankruptcy soon.
The lockdowns are like taking out a loan so we can buy ourselves a couple months to get ahead of the problem. To the extent all we did was to buy ourselves a couple months until the virus goes back to exponential growth and soon infects most of the population, they were a dumb policy. If they are coupled with preparing to get ahead of the virus when we reopen, and working out how to reopen safely, then they were probably a pretty good policy. I sure wish I saw more evidence that we were preparing to get ahead of the virus and working out how to reopen safely, instead of just buying time while virtue-signaling by how many extra-strict, poorly-considered restrictions we can add and tsk-tsking outgroup states for reopening beaches, complete with deceptive photos of the beaches that make them look extremely crowded.
And for the record, this is exactly what I believe.
We aren’t solving anything, merely delaying the inevitable. But the delay imposes a huge cost.
If a kidnapper took one of my family members hostage, I might be willing to pay some high ransom to get them back. What I wouldn’t be willing to do is pay some high ransom for a promise that they won’t be killed today and tomorrow we’ll re-negotiate a new daily ransom, indefinitely… and even if I did pay it for a few days, after day 40, if the kidnapper is still doing nothing more than increasing their demands every day, I’m probably stopping, as painful as that may be.
This is what we’re doing with lockdowns. We’re paying a huge cost, per day, to avoid the virus going crazy on us. But we have no plan other than “keep paying every day” and we also don’t even pretend we have the resources to be able to do that literally forever…
@albatross11
I honestly try to limit my natural conspiracy thinking, but this progression of events only makes sense to me if everyone in power pretty much knows that the lockdowns were a mistake. It seems like they are trying to imitate Sweden now, but with a fig leaf of plausible deniability. We will for sure get another spike in Texas (I’ve gotten 3 calls to join friends at various bars today).
(Edit – 4 calls today. Speak of the devil, and such)
Are they doing anything special to reopen bars in a safe way? (Seating people 6 feet apart, letting the bar move its tables out to the sidewalk so everyone’s outdoors, having the bartenders wear masks?).
As best I can tell, this has become a CW issue. Our political and media elites aren’t all that bright even in the best of times, but CW issues make everyone even dumber. And this phenomenon has been biting us on the ass for the last couple decades, so it’s not a shock if it does the same thing here.
This seems like the reaction of a populace and media infrastructure that really cares about accurately reporting the science surrounding COVID-19.
It is prohibited in my state to leave the house except to get food or do socially distant exercise. Yet, when I go for a walk, I see picnics, pickup basketball games or people sitting outside having a smoke. (all of which I think are fine things to do). So why is this an order? The people who wouldn’t take it seriously as guidelines aren’t taking it seriously as a law.
This leaves me really unclear – Are these guidelines? Are they laws which are getting unjustly enforced and the police are ignoring my wealthy, white neighborhood? I don’t see the delta between ‘people who would do an activity when it’s banned but unenforced’ and ‘people who would do an activity when the public health leadership advises against it but it is allowed’ to be a serious health risk.
My preference is a more limited lockdown, much more strictly enforced. I would like to hear about arrests of those conducting funerals or large parties. If it is truly necessary for public health that business cannot be open, I’d like to see unemployment benefits paid for by heavy taxes on those who are working from home for the duration. Let people (legally) do the frivolous things that make life worth living: play tennis or have a picnic with their family or see their friends in a responsible manner.
I want to say the feds should provide useful guidance and act as a clearinghouse for good recommendations and maybe a Schelling point for what the states should do, but then I reflect on the fact that so much of the feds’ response to the virus so far has been bad….
That meme is a demonstration that there is nothing, not even a deadly plague, that can’t be made worse by social media.
I wish I could get a better idea of how true this was. It seems likely that many diseases manifest in varied ways, and that while this is frustrating, it’s not particularly unusual, especially given that it’s new. It may be that too many quick assumptions were made early on and gained traction, so now it seems like there are all these weird reversals.
Like, it was clear older people were vulnerable, but this rather dubiously got translated into it being harmless to younger people early on. Usually, a disease that is worse for older people is not exclusively confined to them. Now it is portrayed as shocking when young people die, but I never thought they were safe, just comparably much less vulnerable. But I think many got that impression.
Likewise, there was shock over asymptomatic transfer and the possibility of limited immunity. These is somewhat unusual, but not terribly so. It happens with many common diseases, but they usually just don’t pose enough of a threat for us to care.
And there’s a lot of focus on how people have wildly different degrees of symptoms and severity. But this also strikes me as fairly common. For example, sometimes I develop canker sores when a family member has a cold, or sometimes I just catch the cold. And when I get strep throat, for god knows what reason, I don’t get a sore throat! Which means I mistake it for a cold and I once developed scarlet fever.
There’s so much being said that I think a lot of this is just speculation or badly explained information. You hear about a million possible things going wrong in terms of symptoms, but it is likely misleading. It will probably turn out that there are a few related things that can go wrong and cause various systemic problems. Particularly if it turns out it causes a weird immune system response. So far, the long-term effects sound similar to those caused by other known diseases, scary but not unprecedented. Although the people who claim to have been running a fever for 6 weeks are freaking me out a bit.
I really think communication is just bad, and I don’t appreciate it. I think the press and government is very much mostly giving out information designed to suppress worry and hint at a quick fix. People I know who rely on mainstream knows are clueless about the big picture. It would be easy to keep some fundamentals front and center; not just going on about needing ventilators but explaining when they are effective and the strategies used to treat the illness before it gets to that point. They go on about triaging, never explaining that it’s not likely to be a workable option for a frail elderly person to begin with. Of course, if things were totally out of control, you could end up depriving people of ventilators when there could have been a real benefit. But that distinction should have been made much clearer.
Same with scaring the hell out of people so they didn’t go to hospitals when they had medical emergencies that well warranted the risk of catching COVID-19 (and I bet several of them thought the hospitals would be normal again in a few days and they could wait it out, since we keep doing this ‘just for two weeks’ thing and some people really think it is going to disappear any day). They just won’t explain basic practical tradeoffs and distinctions.
And I think a lot of the discrepancies in numbers have simple explanations that once again aren’t being put into context. You’re going to have deaths initially marked COVID that were other things because that will be the assumption. You’re going to have undercounting in other instances because people die at home or in a nursing home. A nursing home outbreak can make an area look out of control relative to others, while being easily explainable. You’re going to have some excess deaths from people not seeking medical treatment, suicide, etc. But also for some causes, probably fewer than usual: all infectious diseases are cut down by the lockdown, as are things like car accidents.
Demographics and luck matter. How many cases did you have early on? Were these people super spreaders, or engaged in a lot of close talking? Are people elderly? Do they live in multi-generational homes? Do you have a lot of essential workers or healthworkers bringing it back to families? Italy and New York probably had a lot of cases from international travel. New York is dense and many people take the subway. Many multi-generational households with older people with underlying conditions in both. Young beach partiers in Florida are not going to have the same problems, and are unlikely to mix a whole lot with people traveling from Europe or China on business, or with the elderly population. They weren’t there to visit grandparents. Being able to keep some distance and use common sense measures probably helps quite a bit in most places. In some communities, it unfortunately isn’t easy to do. NYC and Italy seem easy enough to explain–I assume London probably had quite a few international travelers around. Not sure what the deal was with Spain–perhaps the same thing?
I don’t recall the media ever pushing the idea that young people were immune. I’d be surprised if they did, since it goes against all their incentives. The only places I saw that idea being pushed was here, among the certain crowd that kept arguing “we should try deliberately infecting young people” and “why should we kill our economy when it’s only worthless old people dying anyway”.
@Loriot
If you’re referring to me then you’re being pretty uncharitable.
A death rate of less than one-twentieth a percent for young healthy people isn’t invulnerability in any way when you’re dealing with large numbers, but can justify infecting small numbers to try finding a solution.
With millions infected, 0.05% percent is hundred or thousands dead. And that’s just for the healthy young demographic.
With 500, none should die.
I don’t think the lives of elderly are unimportant (does anyone here??!).
I do think they are economically much less useful, so when evaluating the economic damage they should be considered accordingly. They may be an economic drain, and when looking at the economy that should be taken onto account when calculating the effects of deaths on the economy. This would make them “worthless” economically, but that isn’t the most important reason to save lives.
If there is anyone on SSC who wrote “it’s only worthless old people anyway”, or something that fits your framing, please link.
Uh, I wouldn’t put it in those exact terms, but if the choice is between “it’s only worthless old people” and “young people are just as much at risk as everyone else” then I think the former is far more closer to true than the latter.
The media has gone well out of its way to hammer us over the head with stories and anecdotes of young people dying, while doing everything it possibly can to avoid mentioning the actual data, which include spicy little nuggets like “the median age of COVID deaths is higher than the average life expectancy”
To young people, COVID is about the same scale of threat as being killed in an auto accident. It’s real, and some precaution is necessary (wear seat belt, drive speed limit, wear mask, avoid choir practice), but it’s not the “if you leave your house you are risking your life” danger the media is presenting it as.
I don’t recall who specifically was making those arguments. I was just talking about my general impression of the kinds of arguments I saw here week after week.
And I was of course paraphrasing. Noone ever literally called old people “worthless” (though there was at least one or two cases of people wondering about whether letting all the old people die would make the economy better off). Instead they said stuff like “we need to adjust for QALYS” and “wouldn’t all the victims have died in a couple years anyway”.
I wrote that it could be better for the economy. This was in context of the actual value of lives to the economy being calculated, there are people who are net economic negatives. This doesn’t by itself justify letting people die obviously (or it should be obvious…) but could change the cost benefit calculation.
It also makes sense to value 1 million young healthy people dying as worse than 1 million people who have a year left to live and are stuck in nursing homes. Again, should be taken into account. Again, not advocating letting them die.
[Added: I didn’t make this (QALY) point originally and not really interested in defending it, but it definitely wasn’t how you represented it above.]
You took threads that were about making more accurate estimates, and “paraphrased” it into something that made me recoil – would someone here actually think that, forget say it?! Then I realized what you were talking about. [Added: So could you not do that in the future? If you’re going to bad mouth, check again or something?]
@Loriot
This happened the most in January and February, when it was being portrayed as no big deal in most places. Not literally “young people are 100% immune,” but that it was harmless (no more than a cold) to all but a tiny number of young people with other conditions. Just like the flu, etc. Much of the Italy coverage gave this overall impression, even if it was qualified at times. Even in mid-March, young people were blasted with messages about risking the lives of those without their youth to bank on, with little appeal to their self-interest. Then there was a sudden shift in most of the press. The arguments you speak of being pushed here were the norm, just phrased less explicitly because we weren’t actually debating shutting down the economy at that time and didn’t need to make the cost-benefit analysis so blunt. “Don’t worry too much–unlike in 1918, when young people were very vulnerable, it will be easy to make minor adjustments to deal with this, as with the regular flu. The bulk of the workforce will be fine.” I would characterize its popularity at the time less as ageism or callousness and more as rationalization born of denial that the pandemic would happen and pose much of a threat to Americans of any age. It was also clear, from their remarks about the workforce, that a lot of pundits were having trouble considering people their own age as anything other than young.
I’m 30 and have floated the idea of variolation of people my age here. This is certainly not because I believe I am immune. If so, variolation wouldn’t work. And I know there are serious risks involved–not something I’d volunteer for lightly, to say the least. Definitely waiting for more information, especially on long-term side effects. But the reason I am willing to talk about the possibility is because, given the information I have now, I expect to get in my lifetime, and I’d like to get it as young as possible if that’s true and if lasting immunity is a thing. However high the risk, I am doubtful it can be eliminated, or that I’ll have the resources to shelter in place for 40-50 years if I wanted to. Even if we keep up extreme measures, someone will have to run the society, and 30 year olds (without specific health conditions) won’t be first in line for any kind of exemption. I may be wrong, but it’s not because I’m cavalier about the seriousness of the situation.
But lockdowns do pretty clearly seem to work. Here in Austria, we were relatively fast to lockdown, and even though we are right next to Italy, we are next to unharmed, as you can see e.g. in the mortality monitor at https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ In contrast to the much touted Sweden, we don’t have a very clear mortality spike. YOu can of course still argue that it is not worth the economic cost, but lockdowns seem to work very well.
Down comment, and in the latest post, there has been discussion of people believing allegations against Biden, and still planning on voting for him. The reasoning being something along the lines of it is just too dangerous to leave Trump in control of the nukes. Maybe *you* do not agree with this, but if you at least think someone else believes this, you can understand why this is their position. I for the most part feel the same way.
Except this reasoning is tearing at me a bit. For the last 3 years, we have been shouting how the theocrats have exposed themselves as insincere hypocrites for their unwavering support of a person very contrary to their code of ethics. But Clinton certainly wouldn’t have nominated pro-choice judges. So they seem to be using the exact same line of reasoning now being employed for Biden.
This is saddening because it seems like we are doomed to be in a ‘conflict theory’ world. But taking a step back, I think our 2 party system, and voting methods are playing a big part shoehorning us into this world. IMO, the only way out is voting reform.
Now, I do plan on voting Biden (it will be the first time in my life I vote Democratic), and probably would do so even if he shot someone on 5th Ave. But I am very uncertain if this is the right thing to do.
Did you never stop to ask them their reasons before now?
There are mutually exclusive views of what entails and just and happy society, yes.
This is the most explicit I’ve seen it expressed.
You just weren’t in the right bubble: Christians Face Clear Choice Between Party That’s A Hypocritical Mockery Of Their Faith And One That’s Openly Hostile To It
I’m glad someone finally said it. Not that it anyone was hiding it or dissimulating or anything, but after literally years of hearing that every conservative who voted for Trump was this irrevocable hypocrite who has no principles and maybe never did, and having to personally defend their decision five dozen times here, it is jarring in the extreme to hear progressive folks dispassionately explain it won’t change their vote, with lawyerly disinterest in the tension. But I know that’s the Conflict Theory homunculus in my head talking.
So is the wrong part that they won’t change their vote? Or was the wrong part leaning on the superficial character flaws in the past? Are they wrong now, or were they wrong then?
Now, I can see how character and personality traits could (and should) influence how much you trust someone to act rationally with say nukes. But that was absent in a lot of the rhetoric, and it was just ‘he does things you say is bad!’.. And lets not let *anyone* off the hook here. We know what the reaction to the superficial things Obama did was.
I’m not even saying they’re wrong; I’m sure given their priors and all they’re doing the calculus about a Biden vote correctly. I’m just saying, I sure wish I were hearing a little more, “Okay, in retrospect constantly calling conservatives hypocrites was shortsighted, even inaccurate.” Instead I’ve been seeing these very clinical, “Yes, I think I’ll be voting for Biden the probable rapist come November, and I have no qualms about this” takes, which come across to me as unselfaware or really ruthless or something.
Nearly everyone who calls someone else a hypocrite is also a hypocrite. A lot of the time it’s in the precisely dual way. I think that for rational political discussion, one should methodologically avoid the use of hypocrisy as a charge. Charge politicians substantively on their behavior, and not based on how their behavior on an issue meshes with your interpretation of their states views on that issue. (Otherwise you end up with a lot of homophobic denunciations of right-wing preachers for being gay.)
which come across to me as unselfaware or really ruthless or something.
It’s something. It’s the absolute conviction that Orange Man is Hitler, Stalin and the AntiChrist combined. One comment on here said something to the effect that Trump was the greatest danger to the human race.
My jaw is still unhinged after reading that. Guys, we’re four years into his term as President, the current global threat originated out of China, why are you all still certain that nope, one of these days he’s gonna push the big red button and kill us all?
Stupidity can achieve what malice cannot.
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
Is that in jest, or are you actually under the impression that Donald Trump is stupid?
AncientGeek, I am not labouring under the delusion that Trump is a secret genius, but I am sure I’ve read a metric ton of shrieking about “nuclear war with North Korea” which did not happen.
Unless you are asking us to presume Stupid Trump becomes Even Stupider Trump in his second term, and that the people in office are even more feckless and unable to rein him in, I see no reason to think we’re in greater (or lesser) danger of Big Red Button Pushing.
And the same metric applies to Biden; if he’s happy to brag about bossing the Ukraine around, why not assume if he gets offended by some other nation over something or other, he won’t be as likely to Big Red Button Push? He too is elderly, white, not in the greatest health, and nobody thinks he’s Top World Genius in intellect.
As an aside to all this, what do people think of Trump’s comment on the Reade allegations? I have to admit, I was hornswoggled he took this approach, I think it is genius 🙂
Holy smokes!
Yes – I am willing to say “this is brilliant 4D chess” on this one!
@EchoChaos
It is not an extraordinary claim.
@Deiseach
Definitely superior positioning on that one.
Some people can compartmentalize better than others. One commentator said that she would vote for the man who assaulted her (a then-prominent Democratic politician, now deceased) over Trump. The right wing finds this hilarious; I find it unsettling. But I’ve never been good at compartmentalizing.
You’re not wrong, but…I think the theocrat argument was about 20 years out of date. There was a strong and sincere belief that Bill Clinton should be voted against or removed from office because of his personal character, but I don’t recall similar arguments about why no one in good conscience could vote for Gore, Kerry, or Obama.
In hindsight, I think Clinton was a pretty decent President, and I longed for the days when he and Newt Gingrich could actually meet and do…things…that people seemed to want. So the MoveOn people, who said the President’s personal sex foibles don’t really matter, they won that argument in the 90s. They were right: Bill Clinton’s sex foibles didn’t make him a bad President, just a bad person, but we’re voting for “President” not “Pope.”
If the nukes are your actual objection, he hasn’t done it yet, why would you think he’ll do it in the future? Nukes are pretty much the last resort, President Trump has tools he prefers – twitter, sanctions veto. He’s the guy who makes deals and big cool monuments/America great in his mind.
[Added: If nukes are your issue, biden should worry you more, he looks like he is detoriating mentally occasionally]
You could have a model of “Trump is 1% likely to start nuclear war for no reason, each year in office”? That’s compatible with it not having happened and yet massively overwhelms any other consideration you might have in terms of expected deaths.
You could also have a model of 49%, and just shrug and say it’ll happen this time.
If there isn’t a good reason that President Trump is more likely a priori than others to use a nuke for no reason, not doing it for four years should be a mark in his favor, compared to someone not tested.
There are lots of models that you *could* have and most of them are stupid. A model where no nukes for four years causes you to significantly revise your estimate is stupid (because in any non-stupid model the probability of nukes within a four year period is very low).
I agree, but a lot of people seem to have strong priors about “nuke-willingness” (that there are many people identifiable in advance for which it is much higher than baseline) for some reason.
Of all the positive things I was told Trump would be by his supporters, one of the few that came true was that he really seems to not like all the wars America gets involved in.
He doesn’t always disentangle us nicely (see: Kurds). But it feels like a much-below-average number of new conflicts started.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that he takes policies that have the long-term result of reducing the chances of war. (Trade deals tend to discourage war.) But his intentions are the right intentions.
@thisheavenlyconjugation no and you’re missing the point.
@Christophe Biocca very strong priors at a low enough chance that it not happening yet doesn’t change your estimation, and the difference between him and biden (especially considering all the talk of his cognitive decline) still being high enough that it’s super important to vote Biden seems like just-so numbers to me
@Purplehermann
Show your work then: give plausible numbers for Trump nuking prior to his first term and after it, with an explanation of how you got from one to the other.
There’s only so many times I can listen to the sky is falling, walk outside, and not be hit on the head by shards of atmosphere. If you weren’t right the last 364 days, why would you be right today? Oh, and we’ve got yet another “giant asteroid is going to swing really close by Earth” story in the news, if anyone is really fearful that this time it’s going to be the time of the Sweet Meteor of Death.
“no, for sure, this time, he’s gonna do it!” Yes, and this week for sure my lottery numbers are going to come up, I just need to keep playing until they do.
If the nuclear war Trump is hypothetically going to start is one with North Korea, 1%/year puts it well below, um, actually, an average flu season in expected US deaths, and periodic drought in North Korean deaths. South Korea and Japan would have their own opinions on that subject, however.
Only if we’re thinking Trump is going to start a nuclear war with Russia, do we get into the dwarf-all-other-considerations territory. Given the overlap between people who claim to believe Trump is the greatest threat/menace ever, and the people who claim to believe Trump is a Russian agent, I find that one kind of amusing.
That is pretty funny
Honestly, I’ve been in the “Russiagate is dangerous because it increases the chance Trump will start a war with Russia to prove his innocence” camp for a few years!
Remember when he bombed some base in Syria that had Russians in it? That was scary as hell to me, until it was made known that he warned the Russians in advance and they all left (which the mainstream media was furious about)
Amash. Consider Amash, or another third party. Unless you live in a remarkably tight swing state, signal-boosting “none of the above” is probably a better use of your gas money than “I like the senile rapey guy with the more polite Twitter account. Not the other senile rapey guy, he’s terrible.”
Is he really in control of them? If he decided on a first strike attack on Russia or China an the top military people didn’t agree, do you think it would happen? My guess is not, but I don’t really know.
Before Trump’s election, we were told how those officers were solemnly sworn by law to follow the order and wouldn’t even think of doing otherwise, or the otherwise would be a just-as-bad military coup.
I think what really happens is that a high-ranking officer falls on his sword (like Crozier) and refuses to follow the order long enough for the 25th Amendment to be invoked.
My understanding is that nuclear release requires the President to order it and the Sec. Def to confirm it. Theoretically the President could fire the Sec. Def on the spot and have his deputy do it, maybe?
Practically, the Sec. Def actually holds a veto.
Only in the movies, alas.
@John Schilling
I saw your comment below. Thanks for the clarity.
And after the election, we got all the purring stories in the press about how Trump was effectively powerless, the sane people in the civil service simply ignored his orders or actively worked to frustrate them, so he was just left with demented ranting on Twitter.
Which is it, guys: relax, he has no power because the Loyal Remnants of the previous administration are blocking him, or he has the Big Red Button permanently in his grip?
The military could postpone it for about ten minutes. Maybe a day or so if everything lines up right. But if Trump backs up the order with anything that provides even a fig leaf of plausibility about it not being an outright war crime(*), it will happen. And don’t bet on anything more than the ten-minute delay while they slow-walk the “exactly which Nuke Moscow war plan did you want us to implement exactly?” process.
The US military is generally not in favor of stupid nuclear wars. But they are very, very, very much in favor of civilian control of the military and Not Mutinying Ever. Blocking a direct presidential order to nuke Moscow (or whatever) would be straight-up mutiny; there’s nothing in the system to make it anything less than that, and absolutely no requirement that anyone other than the President approve the order.
* For maximum chutzpah, make the casus belli “The national intelligence community has determined that Russia is meddling in the 2020 presidential election, which is a direct assault on our Constitutional government, and I think nothing less than a nuking will make them stop”.
Here’s an AP article about this issue:
‘How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?’
–Major Harold Hering, former Minuteman crewman.
Yeah, it’s dismal. As someone who tends blue team, I feel deeply unhappy about supporting Biden. But I guess it’s easy for me to take that position because I was unhappy about it prior to the Reade allegations.
I think there’s an important dimension where continuing to support Biden is not hypocritical. Biden is accused of digitally penetrating his subordinate without her consent. Trump is on tape bragging about digitally penetrating women without their consent, in addition to 17 various accusations of sexual misconduct. If we’re single issue voters, and that single issue is the moral fiber of the candidate, Biden still wins? Blue team’s candidate is now comparable to red team’s candidate. For the rank and file, there’s now no morally pure option, along that axis. And replacing Biden means… benefiting a rapist. It’s all pretty dismal.
Trump actually bragged that women always give their consent.
This is incorrect. Trump is on tape bragging about how women will consent to having their privates touched by him, and the various other accusations are not assault, but rejected attempts to initiate or escalate sexual situations.
While Trump is crude, crass, and a shameless womanizer, Trump supporters do not believe Trump is a rapist or sexual assaulter and are merely ignoring that and voting for him anyway. We disagree about the nature of the facts.
Decide whatever you want with regards to Biden, but there’s nothing hypocritical about saying one believes Biden is a sexual assaulter and Trump is not.
Oh, you’re right, I’m somewhat mischaracterizing the tape. Mea culpa.
Looking at the transcript, I don’t think you’re right either: he certainly implies he’s not seeking consent. There’s a very reasonable interpretation where he’s bragging about grabbing women by the pussy without their consent, but it could read it another way.
You’re incorrect that all of the other allegations are non-assaults. There is certainly at least one assault allegation against Trump: E Jean Carroll. I don’t have the stomach to go read the rest.
I was talking about the allegations that actually allege something, or are sort of credible.
E. Jean Carroll’s allegation was made just before she announced a book about how awful men are. And I’m not even sure what her allegation was. She claims she was sexual assaulted, but it wasn’t sexual, and it wasn’t rape. If it wasn’t sexual…I don’t know what a non-sexual sexual assault is. She’s so vague on details, I don’t think one can evaluate or categorize it. I think she’s just a fabulist promoting a book.
I strongly suspect that Trump believed he was acting with women’s consent, on account of women being so eager to offer it up to an alpha-plus male like himself, and I strongly suspect he was right about that only a fraction of the time and didn’t really care to do better. So, perhaps not deliberately nonconsensual, but recklessly so.
He’s still a boorish sexual harasser, but a step or two below Weinstein on that scale and probably not an actual rapist. But there’s enough fuzziness on that that I expect most Democrats to sincerely believe that he’s e.g. much much worse than Biden, and most Republicans to sincerely believe that he’s better than Biden. And to believe that the other tribe doesn’t really believe their position. Cue righteous indignation and accusations of hypocrisy on both sides, and this battle is unwinnable for either side post-Clinton, Kavanaugh, etc.
I don’t have a strong opinion on Biden’s accusation and haven’t looked that closely at the details surrounding the accusation. I wasn’t going to vote for him before the allegations and am not going to vote for him after the allegations, so whatever opinion I have on the matter is meaningless.
I just object to the justification that, well, Trump supporters are voting for someone they know to be a rapist, so it’s not so bad for Biden supporters to vote for someone they know to be a rapist. No, Trump supporters do not think Trump is a rapist.
I think people who vote for Biden have two options:
1) Look at the evidence and decide Reade is lying, and Biden is not a rapist. This is entirely reasonable, but please no more “#BelieveWomen” and “women don’t lie about rape” rhetoric next time a Kavanaugh situation happens. The reality is, sometimes women do lie about rape, and lots of people lie about politics.
2) Look at the evidence and decide Reade is telling the truth, but it’s either not so bad, or not as bad as Trump, or that Trump is so bad it’s okay to vote for someone you believe to be a rapist.
I just don’t want Biden supporters claiming that option 2 is what Trump supporters are doing. It’s not. Trump supporters are not voting for someone they believe is a rapist. They looked at the evidence and accusations and decided that the things he was accused of were either not rape or that the accusers were not credible. They went with option 1.
I agree with you here. But if you claim that this is, what people who write
argue, I strongly disagree. Even if that is what those people WANT to argue, they simply don’t.
I am pro-Trump and I agree with this.
If the only thing we were voting on was “Who seems to be the better human being?” Well, they still both suck, but Biden wins that one, and it’s not particularly close IMO.
And replacing Biden means… benefiting a rapist.
It’s a miserable choice if all these various allegations are true. Do you, as a matter of interest, believe the “Trump raped a 12 year old sex slave” story that was floating around (and even went as far as the courts in two different juridisctions before it fizzled out)?
Otherwise, we’ve got “he only raped one woman” as the new bar, and me personally, even if it meant our side lost, I’d much prefer that we picked “didn’t rape any men, women or children that we know of” candidate who loses to “possibly raped one woman, has a lot of jokey videos about inappropriate sniffing of kids online” candidate who might still lose anyway.
This is part of what had me so incandescent with anger over the sex abuse scandals in my church; yes, you’re worried that this will affect the good name and reputation of the church. That is no reason for coverups. Scandal is going to come anyway, face it and where wrong admit it (where there are general vague “some now-dead priests molested me thirty years ago, no there is only my unsupported word for it, my lawyers want $30 million in damages” cases, then yes defend them).
If the Democratic Party, which went all-in on the War On Women, is now going to propose “we can’t change our nominee so our candidate will be a one-time only rapist”, then to hell with them. If Trump is ever credibly accused and charged with rape (not with having affairs where a paid-off mistress now wants to squeeze more juice out of the orange) then arrest him, convict him and bang him up in jail. But do not u-turn on “well, okay, we said rape culture was a thing and even pin-up calendars were violence, but hey, our guy only maybe raped one woman, that’s better than the other guy did, vote for us the Party of Protecting Women’N’Minorities!”
Yeah, I totally don’t think the democratic party is self consistent here. Also, I think you’re taking a fractious whole and making individual parts responsible for other individual parts. There’s certainly a strain of blue team that thinks pinup calendars are violence against women. There’s also a strain that thinks that strain is oppressive of women’s right to choose bodily autonomy.
I think that’s also problem with criticisms of the religious right, as embodied by e.g. Mike Pence. There’s reporting about how he got really upset about the grab ’em by the pussy stuff, and went and sequestered for days. It seems like the most plausible story is that he finds trump deeply problematic (if red team is allowed to find things problematic, I haven’t read the handbook), but that it’s a compromise he’s willing to make cuz it lets him Do Good in the World, as he sees it.
Likewise, having dems in power can be on average better for women and minorities than the alternative, even without substantial ethical purity. Some people want to go on pogrom all of the time against impure people. Some people want marginal improvements through better policy. They’re all trapped under one tent together.
Incidentally I thought E Jean Carroll’s assault accusation seemed credible enough. I’m not familiar with the specific claims about Trump raping a 12 year old, and don’t have the stomach to google it at the moment. If it’s the Epstein tie in, I’m… I’m not gung ho about convicting people without evidence. It’s certainly plausible that Epstein was pimping girls out to his rich male acquaintances – I think Prince Harry probably slept with that teenage girl. Trump… why not? But sans evidence, it’s not something I believe, it’s just something I’m perfectly willing to believe.
And… yeah, the church stuff also seemed self sabatoging to me as well. The behavior of various catholic dioceses in the US shifts my base assumptions from “This is an organization with a lot of child rapists in it” to “This is an organization that is committed to protecting child rapists.”
And so I used to think orgs like the catholic church were bad and enabled rapists, but my perspective is even more negative now. From what I hear, it’s even worse with the decentralized church movements. I road tripped with some “exvangelicals”, and they said that in the fundamentalist crowd, when there’s a sex scandal the men just pack up and move on, no accountability, no paper trial. At least the Catholic church kept records, even if they were misleading.
And certainly, there’s no reason to believe it’s limited to Christians (or conservative organizations, e.g. the boy scouts). They just create better paper trails. Maybe there’s just some baseline level of sexual misconduct, and the organization whose watch it happens under is just kind of incidental. I don’t know. Dismal.
I find it telling that the NYT article about Biden made sure to mention Stormy.
If I were someone who couldn’t stand Trump, I would have no issue voting for Biden. We don’t know whether the charges were true, or the charges against Trump. I could believe either, none, or both happened. Of course, no one wants to be in a position where they vote for someone they suspect may have done something like that, but really this is only a true dilemma because of the push to make the issue of possible sexual misconduct towards women more or less dispositive.
Most people who don’t like Trump really don’t like him–they think he does real damage, at the very least by being extremely divisive, untrustworthy, and incompetent. Why would voting unenthusiastically for Biden be questionable in such a circumstance? It’s not like the issue is relevant to his platform, such that you’d have to endorse the behavior. (Of course, it could be that having no tolerance for the issue of sexual misconduct towards women is personally very important to you as a matter of principle, and you’d rather do a protest vote than ever vote for someone who has behaved that way. I get that. But since you say you are uncertain, you seem to be looking to a broader context).
As you note, it’s the insincerity and hypocrisy, or at least the appearance of it, that is the problem. But the error isn’t in voting for Biden now, even though the reversal lays the party open to criticism. The error made by the Democrats was in becoming so open to criticism in the first place, by taking such an extreme position there, one they weren’t willing to maintain when it became inconvenient. I don’t object to the main ideas behind the #MeToo movement, but they should never have made it seem dispositive, especially given their beliefs about Trump–there were other serious considerations in play. Or at least, they shouldn’t have so stridently pushed the idea that all accusations had to be treated as true–that was asking for trouble.
Absent having taken these absurd positions, it is quite easy to make the case that is okay for most people horrified by Trump to vote for Biden, even though it’s an unfortunate situation to be in. From their perspective, Trump is the far greater evil. The real problem isn’t deviating from the absurd standard, but from ever having adopted it. (The hypocrisy is also a problem and a really bad look, but not a bigger problem than a Trump victory, as far as Dems are concerned). Some people aren’t okay with the lesser of two evils thing, and it would also be okay for them to abstain or write someone else’s name in.
Yes. By all means, if people like Biden then vote for Biden, but please understand the next time the Dems/media try to Kavanaugh somebody, the Republicans are just going to say “Biden” and ignore them.
Oh you beautiful naïve charmer. We said that when Clarence Thomas led to Bill Clinton and it wasn’t true then. It won’t be true now.
Yeah, there won’t be any real moral reckoning among Democratic leadership. But I do think they’ll be less eager to jump on accusations against Republicans, simply to avoid this being thrown in their faces. The real question isn’t whether Republicans have a good comeback (logic isn’t going to win the day), but whether this undermines their authority among the members of the general public who aren’t totally cynical and identified exclusively with one party (the exhausted majority, or whatever). Essentially, whether it creates more distrust of establishment politicians, ideological litmus tests, and media hype in the long run. For good reason, a loss in Democratic credibility doesn’t mean a proportional increase in Republican credibility among people who aren’t motivated to root for a side. Also, this demoralizes the Democrats who are sincere about this issue, and that matters even if they aren’t going to defect to the Republicans.
To be honest, I feel like the Northam affair already settled the whole “wokeness attacks are pretty much just political tools” question, though admittedly, the accusations there were very different in nature.
I can understand “I think rape is bad, I don’t think Biden raped anyone, I’ll vote for him”. I can understand “I don’t think this was rape, I think it was unwanted advances which are not great either but not as bad as rape, I’ll vote for Biden”.
I cannot understand “I think rape is bad, I think Biden may have done it, I’ll vote for Biden because the other guy is worse”. If you think slavery is bad, is it okay if John Jones only has one slave while Thomas Tucker has five? Would that have been an acceptable compromise to avoid the American Civil War – “okay, the southern states can keep the slaves they have now, but they can’t get any new ones to replace the old ones when they die”? (Maybe it would have been!) What about murder? “Well, sure Harry murdered his rich uncle to get his money, but Bob murdered three people!”
I can understand, but not accept, “I only said rape was bad when it was the other side accused of it because it was a handy political bludgeon, why would I care if one of our guys did or didn’t rape someone when it comes time to vote? Consistency? Principle? Parity of treatment? Ha ha, you naive fool!”
Totally tangential, but this was actually a real compromise! It’s in the Constitution that the slave trade is banned after 1807.
Obviously, no, it did not work.
I was just thinking that as well. The northern states built this into the constitution thinking it would cause slavery to die out, but clearly underestimated the ability for slaveowners to “breed their own stock” as it were…
My understanding is that in the early US, slavery was on it’s way out. Then the cotton gin happened, making it much more profitable again.
No, but I would vote for “lets keep slavery” if sole alternative is voting for “lets keep slavery, make legal to enslave more people and start war against our neighbor to enslave their citizens”.
What you would do?
Voting for Trump out of spite makes even less sense if you think that Trump is worse both in this aspect and also overall in other aspects taken together
Not voting means voting for winner, chosen by others. (Either Biden or Trump)
Third party? Many equate it also with voting for a winner, chosen by others (correctly or not).
Protest, deliberately invalid vote?
It’s a false equivalence when the option to support a ‘no slavery, no how, no way’ position.
If I could not in good conscience vote for either of the two main candidates, I would vote third party.
If there were not a third party candidate, I would not vote.
What am I prepared to do? What principles do I hold? What will I give up in exchange for what?
If I thought “X is a rapist, or very probably a rapist, or highly probably a rapist, but I don’t like Y any better and think Y is worse”, would I vote ‘lesser of two evils’?
Well, I can’t ask the rest of the nation to keep my conscience, I can only do that myself. If I really thought “X and Y have both been credibly accused of sexual assault”, I would not vote for either of them.
What, in your opinion, would be a matching action in the upcoming elections?
I am curious, D, have you ever voted for the lesser of two evils? In my entire life (I am 63), I have never voted for anyone not the lesser of two evils. There is no one I have ever voted for that I positively wanted to be running the government. Voting is always a trade-off, one needs to vote for the better person, whether they are both good or both bad.
I guess there have been times when I couldn’t make up my mind who was the worse candidate, so then I voted third party or not at all. Is that the case here for you (in your theoretical)? If confronted with two candidates that both raped, or they both murdered, or they both abused their children, would you always vote for neither? I would try to decide which was better, even if both terrible. If Hitler ran against Mussolini, I would vote for Mussolini.
The usual choice is which person you plan to elect to preside over blowing up a few thousand helpless peasants in some third world country for no discernable reason.
My view is that voting isn’t an act of moral performance or personal expression, it’s a vote for which of the viable candidates would do the job best, and to the best of my recollection every vote I’ve cast has followed that logic. I definitely guessed wrong about who was viable with a few primary votes, but you get the idea.
In November the viable candidates will be Donald Trump and whoever the Democrat is, and barring something extremely unexpected I will believe that the Democrat would do the job best and will vote for them.
Similarly for me, but in case of low quality candidates without massive differences between them I am also OK with a protest vote (deliberately invalid or for person/group with no winning chance).
Hmmm. Are the babies American?
So, if they bomb the babies instead of rape them, or enable them to be aborted instead of rape them, then I think maybe it reduces to an already-solved problem….
I will believe that the Democrat would do the job best and will vote for them
Fair enough. And if the Democrat doesn’t do the job better?
Prosecute this person, imprison. And hire to write policies and/or elect him/her to be a member of parliament/president/whatever while in a prison? Just keep him away from legalizing cannibalism (even on a small scale).
+1
What was that quote? “If we’re voting on two different rapists, why not vote for the rapist with the better policies?”
It’s a straightforward utilitarian argument. Which makes sense, because I either read or assumed you’re not a utilitarian?
Argument as follows: Rape is bad because it hurts people. We should discourage rape by punishing rapists. This makes the world a better place.
Having a good president with good policies makes the world a better place. We should encourage having that president by voting.
Having a good president is worth 1 million utils. Having a morally compromised president with bad policies negative 1 million utils. Having a morally compromised rapist president with tolerable policies is zero utils.
Ergo, Biden over Trump is net positive 1 million utils.
You can certainly put different numbers into our equation, or have some moral rules that void the calculation. But that’s the calculus I’m doing, give or take.
Incidentally, I strongly encourage Democrats to make their official public position “Yes, of course Joe Biden is a rapist, but please vote for him anyway because Trump.”
I’m all for it, as long as the Republicans reciprocate for Trump. 100% culture war transparency.
@roflc0ptic
I don’t believe Trump is a rapist, so that would be dishonest of me to say.
Having a good president with good policies makes the world a better place.
Having a morally compromised rapist president with tolerable policies is zero utils.
What makes his policies good? I think this is a viable argument, to be fair, but it’s the argument for “if Trump is an adulterer, why did all those Christians vote for him?” that was not considered to be anything but hypocritical and partisan when the Evangelicals allegedly did it.
That they evaluated Clinton as the negative 1 million utils choice was never put forward in exculpation from the other side. What if I think or they think or other voters think Biden is the negative 1 million utils choice this time round?
From your last paragraph, I infer that your point was probably that you can’t accept this line of reasoning from somebody who previously said that voting for a possible rapist was completely unacceptable in any context, and that this principle trumps everything else. I agree. It isn’t supportable on those terms. But I don’t think that is the position of most Democrats, even people who are passionate about MeToo related issues. That’s the rhetoric of the loudest, most extreme position, which I believe is almost solely political posturing, because almost nobody really believes that the mere existence of such accusations trump literally every other concern in an election against someone they oppose so vehemently. But the widespread promotion of this sort of rhetoric certainly does make belief in the good faith of the Democratic establishment unacceptable to most people. It does real damage. But it probably wouldn’t be much better if they decided to let Trump win out of consistency on this point. They put themselves in an unbelievably foolish position. Politics isn’t neat and you have to save your absolutes for extreme cases.
Just to make it clear, I’m not saying there is no one sincere about taking a principled position here, or about the MeToo movement’s main principles. But I don’t think most people literally subscribe to “Believe All Women.” Even most who use the phrase probably mean something along the lines of “Don’t continue the pattern of dismissing such allegations, especially based on motivated political reasoning.”
Others have already explained that this was the compromise, but I think in that case you were probably talking about abolitionist hardliners who took extreme moral stances, like Garrison. They definitely weren’t making that kind of argument, but they were an unusual minority. Many Republicans made such arguments, but they didn’t see the moral issues as being controlling in political decisions; they acknowledged them but emphasized practical considerations as well. While a small number of abolitionists became Republicans who continued to advocate disregarding practical considerations, they were loud but anomalous. Garrison wasn’t associated with a party and didn’t vote because he wanted the U.S. government abolished–the Constitution was a compromise with slaveholders he was unwilling to make. But it certainly wasn’t just posturing. After Lincoln freed the slaves, Garrison endorsed and voted for him in the 1864 campaign.
Are people really using nukes as their primary reason? Most leftists are more about the Supreme Court. RBG is not going to last another 4 years.
Some people are definitely claiming nukes are their primary reason. Scott, and Megan McArdle, come immediately to mind, and I don’t think they are alone in that. I also don’t think they are lying.
Have people who used that as their primary reason in 2016 updated based on four (~3.5, I guess) nuke free years, or do they think that hasn’t changed?
Most of them fairly explicitly believed that a Trumpian nuclear war was highly unlikely but apocalyptic, so three and a half years in which the few-percent-per-year thing didn’t happen shouldn’t change their priors very much.
3.5 year of extremely rare event not happening is not changing much.
And behavior around Iran, lack of brain-to-mouth filter (injecting disinfectant) impulsive behavior is strengthening this position rather than weakening.
Nobody reasonable claimed that immediately after getting elected Trump will order US military to use nukes. To explode in pattern forming text “TRUMP” across China, India and Russia.
It was rather fear that there is say 1/1000 chance that in next 4 years Trump will trigger WW III that would be avoided with Clinton in office.
Kind of convenient for them to pick an unfalsifiable argument, isn’t it?
I think these are entirely different sorts of objections/concerns. One is explicitly partisan, and the other is explicitly non-partisan.
Basically everyone opposes nuclear war. Roughly half of America thinks “replace RBG with someone much more conservative” is a giant benefit.
“Don’t vote for Trump because nukes” is an argument intended to appeal to everyone. “Don’t vote for Trump because of Roe v Wade” is an argument that will appeal to partisan leftists exclusively.
Yeah. I think in one case, the objection to Trump is “I think he will competently pursue an agenda I oppose,” and in the other, it’s “I think he will screw up and inadvertently lead us to disaster.” Presumably nobody actually thought Trump wanted a nuclear war, but many people could plausibly imagine him screwing up diplomacy in ways that led us into a nuclear war. And indeed, I think in the response to COVID-19, Trump could have done a lot better. That’s not because he wanted the bad outcomes we’ve had, but rather because he wasn’t really the right man for the job of, say, pre-emptively reforming the CDC and FDA to be more flexible and proactive w.r.t. pandemic starting in 2016.
The context of the discussion is whether people who were going to vote for Biden should change their minds based on the sexual assault allegations. So we’re already talking about the partisan group.
Rgeardless of whether Biden is a rapist, or for that matter a classical creepy boss who won’t keep his hands to himself, what we have is an establishment politician running against a post-Truth populist lunatic. Both are used to the perqs of power – in terms of not following normal rules, including in sexual behaviour, and mostly not being expected to do so.
It’s not a great choice, and it’s essentially the same not-so-great choice the US had 4 years ago, except that the expected perqs of power for females don’t generally include sexual access to lesser mortals en masse.
I’m happy in many ways that as a non-citizen, I don’t have to choose between them, if only because if I did I’d feel obliged to research the pair of them, which would probably feel like diving into a sewer.
I’ve seen the contention here a lot lately that folks need to follow laws they regard as unjust, because if everyone started not doing that, bad things would happen. I’m sure people don’t mean it quite as strictly as they are putting it, so I’m interested in what conditions you consider for regarding a law as not binding you: that is, at what point would you consider civil disobedience of the sort MLK famously engaged in just, even binding on your own conscience, as opposed to what the law prescribes?
Observably, I consider a law not binding to me if it is morally neutral, I won’t get caught, and it has a slight impact on my commute.
So I can’t really be said to have much respect for the majesty of the law, grateful as I am to Moses and Hammurabi and George Washington.
I don’t believe that law qua law is binding on me. Some laws are rules that are morally binding, and would be even if the law did not exist, such as the law against murder. Some laws affect the meaning of actions, defining a vocabulary other people understand, which can have morally binding effects on me, such as a law defining what makes an agreement a binding contract. And obviously it is sometimes prudent to obey the law.
But I concluded a very long time ago that right and wrong are not made by act of Congress, and have seen no reason since to change that conclusion.
Let he who did not inhale before legalization raise the first stone… The bar is pretty low when disobeying is in our interest. Much much lower than in abstract conversation on the internet.
I spoke here for extra care before breaking laws and I stand by it: we do it a bit too easy when it suits us. But that’s all I’m speaking for: a bit of extra consideration.
When it comes to stuff like civil disobedience… well, there’s a lot more holding us. There’s the fear of consequences, fear to stick out, to become ridiculous, peer pressure and so on.
If a law gets broken in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
I’m interested in what conditions you consider for regarding a law as not binding you
Here you go.
The correct answer, natch, but I got the impression the people espousing the views I was describing do not subscribe, and I want to know how they think about it.
Prediction: In this our time of TP famine, the bidet will be a near future marker in the tribal culture war.
Here is the one we got. We got the stainless steel version. It works well.
My dad got one a few years ago and almost everyone mocked him endlessly for it.
He’s feeling pretty vindicated right around now!
I’m not sure about that. This may be the one and only thing you and I agree on. We put the Bio Bidet BB-600 Ultimate in the master bath when we built our new house and it’s like having your butt wiped by angels. Highly recommend.
Agree with Conrad… have we stumbled upon an anti-scissor?
This is it. The thing that all tribes, red, blue, gray can all come together on.
Bidet globalism.
See Matt M’s comment about his father.
Almost no one on SSC is actually full on red tribe. Mocking arugula is red tribe. Doubt we’d get that much here.
ETA: but … my original statement was more humorous than consequential
I don’t think my family situation is really tribal at all. My dad, and most of the people mocking him, are fairly blue tribe.
I think it’s just standard “hey look at the individual doing something the crowd isn’t doing! make fun of!” playground dynamics or whatever.
Mocking arugula is red tribe.
It’s not arugula, it’s rocket. Just because some snooty American food writer in the 60s decided to show off by using an obscure Italian dialect does not bind the rest of the world! 🙂
Dialects of Italian are as American as apple pie. You probably don’t even know what gabagool is.
Which side do you predict it will favor? Because I’ve seen some impressively Bubba’ed bidets.
In my experience, “family has at least one toilet with a bidet” correlated with “family lived for several years in Europe”. Amusingly, it’s been anti-correlated with “adults in family are supportive of liberal social causes”… which isn’t what I expect from reading about bidets on the Internet.
The sample size is small, though; I only know one family with a bidet in any toilet in their house.
I think it’s a lot like how “family has a stack of surgical masks at home” correlated with “family lived for several years in East Asia”. But that correlation will largely disappear by next year.
Does a bidet really eliminate the need for TP though? I thought it just helps the TP do its job more thoroughly.
It reduces the needed quantity substantially.
If you get a fancy bidet like mine it will have a dryer, too. A full-on after-grog bog will clean up with a spray, a blow dry, and two squares just for peace of mind.
Man why not just take a shower after every time you use the toilet?
You need waaaayyy less, at the median, depending on various factors.
Plus, single-ply is fine, as patting is basically enough.
Maybe we’ll hire a plumber an electrician to go for a deluxe model like Honcho’s at some point, like when winter comes. But for now $45 and easily DIY installed wins the day.
The one we have was trivial to install. It’s just a replacement for the toilet seat, and a pass-thru valve for the toilet water connection. However, it does need power, and when we built the house we had them put an outlet in the toilet closet just for that. If you don’t have an outlet near your toilet, you might want an electrician to come and install one.
there is a downside to having a bidet though. it’s that you will dread having to use a public bathroom.
When the kiddies were young, we had a diaper sprayer. Probably still attached. Does that count?
That’s sort of a disturbing statement, when you think about it.
And it counts of if you use it.
This is the most invasive shiboleth I’ve heard of. But I’ll fake it if I need to.
It attaches to the toilet, hooked into the same water line. I think it might have started leaking at some point.
It’s the fact that you don’t know whether it’s there or not. The old “if it was a snake, it would’ve bit me”.
I try to be honest here. When the revolution is lining people up against the wall, my memory will be crystal clear. 😉
“Those who deny the truth of the bidet will be deemed unwashed, and shall be seated upon the throne, so that they may be cleansed”
This entire discussion is reminding me of that chapter of “Gargantua and Pantagruel” 🙂
Speaking of, there is such a thing as moist toilet paper. You can find it pretty much everywhere if you know to look for it: looks just like wet wipes (but it’s not, better not mix them). And yeah, I got an “ultimate thingy” like Conrad’s on my shopping list, just never got round to it. Plus don’t feel the need as much since I found about the wet tp.
I’ve been singing the praises of bidets ever since my first trip to Japan four years ago. I convinced my husband to buy one and it’s nice… though still nowhere near as amazing as its Japanese brethren. (Our bidet, alas, cannot warm or dry your butt. It also only has one setting for water pressure, which came as a shock the first time I used it.)
At the risk of TMI, a detachable, movable shower head is all I’ve ever needed.
I mean, Asian style home bathrooms are built such that this is definitely a viable practice. (Drain outside of the tub, if there even is a tub, such that you can use the shower head anywhere in it.)
Either you’re confused or I am. My experience is that one uses the shower head while seated on the toilet and that there is no need for a drain other than the one internal to the toilet (and that using any other drain for this purpose would seem somewhat icky).
My impression of a standard movable showerhead seems to be a lot larger than yours.
Never have the words of Forty Nights in the Wildebeest, an old radio sketch comedy been more relevant.
To the tune of That’s Amore:
When you’re in a tiz ’cause you don’t know what it is,
That’s a bidet.
It’s a matter of class it’s for washing…
Fin
One of my coworkers is from Egypt. She informs us that the Arabic word for bidet is something that sounds an awful lot like “shit-off-a.” True story.
I was in an Egyptian Hotel once. They had something like HBCs shower head bidet, a stack of small towels (two per bed) on an stand beside the toilet, a special bin for them and changed them daily even if unused. (they also had toilet paper, and we prefered that)
So I guess there are alternatives if you use soap and water.
Why do people keep insisting that Rt of .7 isn’t good enough?
Let’s look at Santa Clara county. According to https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx we have had 2134 known cases since the epidemic started, and inadequate testing to know how many cases we have actually had. We have 25 new cases in the time period covered, which isn’t clearly specified, and 164 currently hospitalized. No information on how many are currently knnown to be ill but not hospitalized.
First comment: these numbers are tiny. Google says the total population of Santa Clara county is 1,933,383 – so as a first approximation, 1 in 1000 people in the county have been diagnosed with CV 19. OTOH, with “community transmission” and inadequate testing, the real numbers could be whatever scary number you care to pick.
Second comment: no point starting with ‘real’ numbers; I can’t get any because of the testing situation.
So let’s look at a nice round number: 1000. And an Rt of .7 And follow it through time. (After all, there’s some portion of the Bay Area which had exactly 1000 cases at the start of the lockdown, probably smaller than Santa Clara county, but maybe not.)
Let’s look at the numbers, and get a feel for exponential decline.
Interval 1 – 1000
Interval 2 – 700
Interval 3 – 490
Interval 4 – 343
—–
Interval 5 – 240
Interval 6 – 168
Interval 7 – 118
Interval 8 – 82
If we assume each interval lasts 14 days, which is a rough guess of time from infection to no longer being infectious, we’re late in interval 4 now, given when SCC really started to shut down. If we assume that, on average, each case infects the new one at the middle of its infectious period, we’re nearing the end of Interval 8.
If we instead assume that more infections happen early in the illness, before symptoms appear, average intervals are shorter, and we’re even farther along this curve.
Bottom line .7 looks plenty good enough for me. Of course .35 would get the totals down in half the time, and .18 would do it in 1/4 the time.
But why do some SSC contributors say things that lead me to conclude that they believe that .7 is terrible, verging on useless, etc.?
If we assume each interval lasts 14 days
I’ve had this assumption in the past, but I’m not sure it’s right. An interval might last 5-6 days (with a substantial tail for people to get sick and die/recover) because most people are communicable for that long. Once they get symptoms they shelter in place.
Even for asymptomatic people, they’ll spread their infections out over day 1 through day 14, meaning 7 days is a good average.
Maybe. I don’t really know. It’s an issue I haven’t been able to see good discussion on.
1. It doesn’t make much of a difference, but the actual number of cases is probably higher than 1000.
2. Let’s follow that progression a little further. With an Rt of .7, it takes about 12 more intervals to get down from 82 cases to 1 case. Using your numbers, that’s about half a year – half a year of strict lockdown measures that will greatly damage the economy and personal well-being. Obviously we have the option of stopping sooner, but unless we can identify a high percentage of the remaining cases and quarantine their contacts, R will increase again and there will be another wave.
3. Suppose that we extinguish the epidemic completely in Santa Clara county. What happens then? In order to avoid another wave, do we have to quarantine anyone who comes in from other parts of the country and the world?
According to https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-how-to-do-testing-and-contact-tracing-bde85b64072e you can do contact-tracing at a level sufficient to contain outbreaks if you have 33 times more daily tests than you have new daily cases. I dunno the exact number but some governments suggest 15x is enough.
There are a lot of steps between “quarantine all incomers” and “do nothing.” If your own region is down to < 10 cases, but things persist in different regions, you might be able to get away with (1) restrictions on just the most dangerous activities, like indoor gatherings over 500 people (2) the "cost-free" social distancing of masks, no handshakes, and frequent handwashings and (3) testing random people in places like grocery stores and transportation hubs.
I don’t think these models are correctly figuring how tail events happen. When I got married we had ~120 people at our wedding, and a week later we went to a similarly sized wedding for one of my wife’s first cousins. Our guests came primarily from 3 states and 95% of them from 5 or maybe 6 total states with roughly a 30-40% overlap in guests between the weddings. If a single asymptomatic super spreader showed up to both weddings you are a week or two away from an outbreak of dozens of people, and two to three weeks away from hundreds if your R0 isn’t below 1. Test and trace is very difficult to use in this situation with a high rate of asymptomatic people, a long lag between infection and symptoms and a long period of being contagious.
How does South Korea handle this?
If you are starting with a low number of cases and the ability to do a decent number of tests, the failure mode of test-and-trace is not “everybody in the region needs to go back into lockdown for a month.” It’s “we missed an outbreak at Local Public School / Piggy’s Meat Fun Factory. Those students / workers all need to go home for a week while we test everyone.”
@Edward Scizorhands the failure mode in Singapore was indeed “everybody has to go into lockdown.” And frankly, the government of Singapore is much more competent than the government of the US.
Suggests that a reasonable response is not “only ban events above 500” but rather “ban all events with more than 100 people, or with more than 10 people if any out-of-staters are involved”.
If this is true we don’t need lockdown at all, if the outbreak is tied back to Piggy’s meat fun factory and one of those people hopped on public transit you are either saying that you can’t transmit on public transit or you are praying that it didn’t and you don’t have hotspot outbreak #2 coming, along with possible hot spot #3-X.
With an R of 3 if you get one asymptomatic super spreader that infects 20 at a particular event then you have 40-60 more people infected by the time you have figured out where the event was and who you have to lock down. So you have to lock down everyone who was at Piggy’s, and test everyone that they came within contact with while contagious, before those who were infected become contagious, and you are 10 days behind to start.
What also isn’t mentioned in these models is to actually catch all the cases of Covid-19 you have to test every person who comes in with some kind of symptom at a minimum. Easy in July, not so easy when flu season comes back around. Estimates for this past year are 18-26 million medical visits for the flu and 39 to 56 million cases in the US, so you need 33 tests for every person you catch with Covid plus another 20-60 million tests on top of that.
By being early on the train and being fairly lucky. Something like 60% of their 10,000 cases came from one religious sect/cult which meant that they had a hard starting point for the test and trace program, and they also have a much smaller country both population and geographically and much easier borders to secure.
The US added 26,000 new cases yesterday, with an R of 0.7 to get that down to the 900 a day that was S Korea’s peak you need 9 cycles, or 18 weeks, 4+ months, then you try your test and trace mechanism which took SK 5400 tests per million people. So the US has 330 million people, and don’t have the advantage of an obvious point of origin for the country like SK so you need a bare minimum of 20 million tests.
But then again 4.5 months from now is mid- September and we aren’t nationally at an R of 0.7 yet, if we are getting down to ~1,000 new cases in November because it takes us another 2 months to get down to an R of 0.7 then your test and trace is starting up right at next years flu season.
If this is true we don’t need lockdown at all
You need to get cases down to a level where you have enough tests to do contact tracing. It’s taken a long time (far too long) to get testing capabilities up to speed.
the failure mode in Singapore was indeed “everybody has to go into lockdown.”
Well fuck.
The context here is you can only do test and trace if things like getting on a bus or a subway don’t have high transmission rates. If that is true then you don’t need a full lock down to get cases down to that level you just need to start cutting out the fat tail events and R will crater.
It has to do with what happens to the R rate when you lift lock downs. If you lift lockdowns and the R goes back up to 3, and it takes 2 intervals for you to lockdown again you end up with a 4 month lockdown (what are we in week 6 for most places and you want 16 weeks to get down to 80 active cases?) then a month of opening then another 2-3 month lockdown, then a month of opening- and this is assuming a total of zero new infections from outside the county coming in, and no super spreader events that make R0 way higher for a short period.
Under such a scenario what are lock downs gaining you?
It seems to me that two months of lockdown for every month of opening is preferable to four months of lockdown for every month of opening, and is also preferable to any period at which 30+% of the population is currently infected. Having an R of 0.7 during lockdown and of 2 during opening gets you the former; having an R of 0.85 during lockdown and 2 during opening gets you the intermediate; having no lockdown gets you the latter. Sure, it would be better to have an R of 0.3 during lockdown, so that you could have one month of lockdown for every month and a half of opening. But I’ll take the two months for every month over the other options.
My wife and I are bird lovers, and have multiple feeders. Recently, I’ve started to notice two cats stalking them and what looks like blood on the ground. They don’t have collars, but they don’t look feral either. I don’t know who they belong to, but I have a strong suspicion these are pets that are allowed to roam free. I’ve tried spraying them with the hose, but they haven’t gotten the message yet. I love animals and like cats just fine, but I have a pretty dim view of the whole “outdoor cat” thing and I’d prefer to keep the little murder-machines out of my yard. Anyone have any *humane* tips for this? I have access to a live trap, and I’ve even considered trapping them and turning them over to the local shelter, which apparently is legal here. Yes, that means I would potentially be disappearing someone’s beloved Fluffy. Is it morally justified? Is it cruel? I would prefer to not be that neighbor, so short of the nuclear option, does anyone know other solution that actually works?
There are a few things that the owner could then do, such as putting a collar with bells on the cat, which make it a less stealthy predator (looks like it reduces their killing by half).
I think it would be cruel if you resorted to a trap before knocking on your neighbor’s door and asking them to do that. Even if you have to knock on a few doors or put up a sign, that would beat disappearing some kid’s pet. And even if you’re right that outdoor cats are the enemy, that opinion is the very small minority, so (in my opinion) you’d be on shaky moral ground that they deserve it without warning.
I absolutely believe that having a friendly conversation is the right way to try and resolve any potential disagreement between neighbors, but in this case I don’t know who the owner may or may not be. My backyard abuts a stretch of forest from which the cats often approach, and there are at least several dozen houses in the immediate area. Short of canvassing them all, talking isn’t really an option.
Here in NZ, where cats killing native birds is considered a very big deal, many people use large, colorful collars (for their cats) like these: https://www.birdsbesafe.com/
There are certain smells cats don’t like but which are agreeable or neutral to humans and birds. I can’t remember what, but I’m sure you could look them up and cause those smells to become abundant around your yard/birdfeeder.
Motion-activated sprinklers could work. I have no real experience though.
No real help here, but solidarity. I hate my neighbors’ outdoor cats with the fire of a thousand suns. They treat my garden (and sometimes the area under the swing set) as a litter box, stalk the birds that come to my feeder, and get into loud cat arguments at night. Then people expect me to feel bad about daydreaming about BB guns. If you let your cat be an outdoor cat in town, then you risk raccoons and you risk me. If you don’t want little fluffy dead, then keep your stupid cat inside.
Unfortunately, despite my blustering, I don’t actually have the stomach to kill a cat (I can’t decide if that’s good or bad). Plus I’d feel obligated to talk to the neighbors first, and I don’t know who owns every cat.
I’ve solved the garden problem a few ways, but the most effective is putting sections of that cattle fencing that comes on a roll over any sections in the garden that don’t have full-grown plants at the moment. I use extra tomato cages or sometimes add plastic forks pointy-side up in smaller areas. Chili powder works but it wears off too quickly. My next move was a motion-detector water-sprayer, but this is working for now.
For the feeders, ours are hung away from bushes and fences, which helps, and I have early-rising children trained to consistently pound on the sliding door and run outside brandishing sticks at any cats who come in the yard.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology might have some tips. Outdoor cats are actually a significant cause of wild bird deaths.
Ouroborobot mentioned using a hose. Perhaps use a watergun with pepper water instead? That sticks to the fur/senses until it dries, for a strong negative reinforcement.
Oh my, scrolling through “new posts” only, I thought I was still in the bidet conversation and had to read this twice.
Where is that chuckle vote when you need it?
I’m definitely *not* buying Ouroborobot’s bidet, no matter how long the toilet paper shortage continues!
Trapping a cat and dropping off a cat at a shelter is ethical if the trap has a low risk of harming the cat (including whatever predators might come by to attack a trapped cat) and a cat at a shelter has a high chance of being returned to its owner (so not rapidly killed or adopted out or transferred elsewhere; and that the shelter rapidly responds to requests for lost animals and reads microchips).
If you want to “get away with it,” this might be harder. Shelters may not let you drop off the cat with no questions asked. And if your neighbor comes knocking and asks “hey, have you seen my cat?” you need to be able to convincingly pretend to have no knowledge
of the Jews in the basementof where their cat went, while also being able to suggest “try shelters in the area” in order to ethically help with the issues raised in my previous paragraph.Definitely not looking to do anything sneaky. If I knew who the owner was, I’d first ask them to keep their cat(s) indoors, and failing that, I’d go knock and say, “Hi, I trapped your cat, please come collect it; next time I’ll have no choice but to call animal control”.
Your local humane society may have some humane traps you can use.
Why involve the shelter at all? Trap the cat and put up some “found” posters around the neighborhood. The neighbor then comes to you and you get to have your polite conversation about not letting his cats out to kill the birds in your yard.
By letting their owners outside, cats are exposing them to substantial risk of death/mutilation by car.
That is the cats’ plan.
This is clearly one big difference between rural and city folk.
Just because you let a cat in a farm do its work (cats are work animals in a farm, they’re supposed to catch rats and mice) doesn’t mean you don’t care about the cat, or that you won’t consider the neighbour who goes around shooting cats as a psycho.
Our cats have been killed by foxes and cars, that doesn’t mean we don’t care about them. They’re just not pets.
I think it might also be an American vs European thing. My impression is that indoor cats/”indoor cats are the only ethical cats” are much more common over there.
I’m not sure if I’m consistent in this, but I view outdoor cats similarly to wild animals. Caring about harm they do to other animals is a weird EA thing, and the fact that they might come to harm is not really relevant — it’s *natural* for them to be outside.
Meaning Americans think of cats as indoor animals?
Don’t they use cats in farms?
And I do consider outside cats having a risk of dying by car or fox, or getting disfigured in a fight with another cat (we had a male cat with one eye, he lived for years with some antibiotics) as normal and natural.
But then, if my neighbour starts shooting my cats, he’ll get the general opprobium of the whole town. Just put the bird feeding station on top of a bigger tree, man.
American farmers probably do use cats, but they’re outnumbered by urban/suburban population who think of cats as companion pets.
The vast majority of Americans have never spent more than a few hours at or near a farm.
@ana54294
I think Americans who have cats as household pets are more prone to, I assume they do still have farmcats.
Which is why I was talking about it as a rural/city divide, where city=suburbs, apparently.
Rural here means enough land for a cat to go around catching mice, rats and birds without going into the neighbours backyard.
My experience of European cat owners in cities is also that they think outdoors is the more normal thing.
American farmers most certainly do use cats, at least in Iowa.
I figure that cats are ferocious and voracious hunters, like tigers or jaguars but theoretically containable, and that it’s unreasonable to expect them not to devour every warm fleshy thing small enough for their
talonsclaws in sight. I mean, the things are about the third-most successful hunting species on the planet, and #1 and 2 aren’t obligate carnivores. Hitching a ride with humans a few thousand years back was a great move.Could it be that Europeans, unlike Americans, have been on farms?
@MPG
Of course they are, which is why they’re so useful in a farm. Some of the rats our cat brought were 75% its size.
Possibly a difference is the prevalence of wild predators. America has coyotes which will hunt and eat domestic cats. In most of Europe, carnivores that big are either extinct or very rare except in extremely remote areas. There are a lot of foxes which could kill cats, but AFAIK don’t very often.
According to the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, predation by domestic cats isn’t a major threat to songbird numbers. They do kill a lot of birds, but mostly sick/weak/injured ones that are unlikely to survive to breed again anyway. The bird species in decline aren’t the ones which cats tend to kill.
Of course, this could be different outside Europe where cats aren’t a native species…
Try to explain the concept of a boundary to a cat.
European farming villages tend to be much smaller than American ones, and we still have neighbours, you know. But yes, usually cats have enough land to roam in a farm, with plenty of fat rats, mice, and all the birds eating the berries and fruits.
But nobody really gets annoyed at cats that go around their garden. But farm cats tend to stay like a 10+ m radius away from other people’s homes. At least, our cats stayed away from other people’s homes, maybe because everybody else has their own cats or dogs, and cats don’t want to share their humans.
A dog will be trained to recognize and protect its flock, if it’s a sheperd dog, or its house, if it’s a guard dog. Dogs that go around attacking other people’s animals or escaping from their boundaries are either trained out of it or put down.
With a cat, the only reason to justifiably kill it is if it’s feral and is attacking children, or maybe if it stole the neigbour’s chicken. Never had that happen to us, though.
And, I don’t know, but at least in the Basque Country, private property doesn’t mean you can keep people out of it.
There are many rights that others may have, even if the land is yours. For example, other people have the right to go through your field if there’s a church on the other side and there’s no road (there’s been a very long legal process in my town around that). People also have the right to access water fountains, even if they are in the middle of your property. If a plot of land is surrounded by another plot of land, the owner has to let the other owner go through their land to access the surrounded land. There are rights to go through certain places with flocks of sheep.
In the UK, historical sites, like menhirs or whatever, remain accessible even if they are in the middle of somebody’s farm. I once went around the countryside, checking out prehistoric sites. A lot of them were right in the middle of somebody’s field, right next to somebody’s farm, in what was obviously private property, but I still had the legal right to go see that thing.
Christian snake handling and the secular guy. Same link I posted above, but different emphasis this time.
The video is by a man who’s fascinated by poisonous snakes. He has a bunch of them. He’s very distressed when one of the handlers stands on a snake and the snakes aren’t handled gently.
An accommodation is reached– apparently, you don’t hurt a snake by standing on it– but the difference it attitude towards animals is striking.
Bonus: A couple of species of shrews with ridiculously over-engineered spines Unfortunately, they only exist in a region that’s too dangerous for researchers, so no one is checking on a previous claim that you can stand on them without hurting them.
@Zephalinda
Cats are property, yes, in the rural environment, like any other animal.
Just because a cow comes into your field and trumples all over your tomatos, doesn’t mean you get to kill it. Or even catch it and send it to an animal shelter. You’re supposed to fence your tomato field so random cows will not trumple all over your tomatos. And the fence is supposed to be strong enough to withstand a cow.
You may be able to get your neighbour to economically compensate you, if you prove you took all the reasonable precautions (having a fence, for starters) to avoid the situation.
It’s the same principle for a cat; somebody took trouble to vaccinate and feed the cat, it’s somebody else’s property, you don’t get to kill it just because it came to your land. You don’t get to do it for a cow, you don’t get to do it for a cat.
If you do it, you’ll get away with it legally, but in a small rural environment, being known as the psycho who goes around killing other people’s cows/dogs/cats will mean people will stop talking to you and you’ll become an outcast.
Ethically, I don’t particularly approve of keeping indoor cats. I know they seem like the perfect apartment pet, but they are very much built to roam. The mirror of your argument would be: why not keep the birds in a cage? So I’d just accept that there is a legitimate conflict of interests even if nobody’s inherently right.
On the constructive side… a quick google suggest there’s a rich market in cat repellents. Apparently most of it affiliated 😀 I don’t envy you trying to find a decent review. Amazon score is usually pretty decent here, maybe with an eye on verified purchase reviews.
I can’t say I strongly disagree, but that seems like an argument against having a cat at all. If a fox or a hawk kills a bird in our yard, well, so be it, circle of life. In an urban or suburban environment, having an outdoor cat strikes me as something more akin to introducing an invasive species than pet ownership – a species that happens to be an exceptionally prolific surplus killer.
But what about rats?
Birds, OK, I grant you, they’re cute. But rats are a public health hazard, come with sewers, and they are smart enough not to eat poison.
Not all cats know how to kill rats, but the ones who do, can keep the rat situation down. In my farm, we definitely notice the amount of rats when we have one vs three cats.
Yeah, I mean cats were domesticated because this was seen as a feature, not a bug. They mostly kill pests that people mostly don’t want to have around.
Most people don’t really want a fully functional ecosystem where they live/work, so they’re pretty okay with the tradeoffs involved. An urban or suburban environment is not intended to be a circle of life. The cats are there to make it more like the environment we want it to be.
A rerun of the fence in/fence out debates, with cats instead of cattle, and birds instead of plants?
Which raises the question of whether you could put the bird feeders somewhere that birds can get to and cats, lacking wings, cannot.
Seconded. Try to place the bird feeder to a place where birds that you want to feed can access it but cats and sparrows can’t.
There are people in America who keep cats exclusively indoor? That sounds weird. And cruel. I didn’t know they did that.
It makes more sense considering that there’s predators that actively eat cats there.
Also American houses tend to be larger than European equivalents, and can plausibly serve as a suitable territory for one or two cats. An indoor cat in a small apartment would almost certainly be miserable, but a four-bedroom house with lots of furniture, etc, seems to work OK – one of my cats has almost no desire to go outside, the other just wants to roll around in the dirt every once in a while.
We have predators that eat cats in Europe too (mostly foxes). And then there are cars.
At one point in the distant past, we went to the local humane society with the objective of getting a kitten. During the interview process, it was made clear to us that we ought not to let the cat go outside.
We didn’t end up getting a kitten there. I tell the story in Chapter 13 of Law’s Order. Search for “feline”.
We have had a number of cats over the years, none of which were permitted outside. I think that is more common than the inside/outside pattern, which also exists. I expect that for most people the worry is less predators than cars. Perhaps also fleas.
If you want any more justifications for your cat-xenophobia, numerous studies now seem to be finding that cats readily get infected with covid 19, while dogs don’t. I haven’t yet seen anything showing cats spread it to humans, though they do seem to spread it to other cats.
I wouldn’t be too sure (nothing really can be yet with covid).
North Carolina Pet Believed to Be First Dog in the U.S. to Test Positive for Virus That Causes COVID-19 in Humans
Could be a false positive, though.
Keep an eye on how they get in, and block off those routes.
There’s ways of making the tops of fences impossible to stand on.
Move the feeders higher. We have both cats and bird feeders in our garden.
Assuming you can get the cats to come to you and be petted (less likely if you are using a hose on them), buy a couple of cat collars, attach a small tag to them and write on the tag “is this your cat? call (your number)”. The owners, if any, will notice the collar and presumably call you. Or just attach bells to those collars yourself.
We did this when we were deciding to take in a cat which decided to adopt us, it being friendly enough that we found it hard to believe it was feral, and we didn’t want to take someone else’s cat. But no one got in touch.
I was about to suggest this. Might want to wear thick gloves when attempting to put the collars on.
You could build a moat around your home or parts of your property.
When my roommates moved in, I insisted that their formerly-outdoor cats stay indoors all of the reasons discussed in this thread. The cats are not thrilled about this and have tried marking a few places. I’m not sure how well it would work in an outdoor environment, but we’ve had great success with this inside the house. Just a harmless puff of air, but the sound is not unlike a cat hissing and it seems to deter them very effectively.
Good luck!
Conrad (and others),
Do you have any comments on stories like this? (note this is just the one that I have a link to handy, I’ve seen numerous other examples in other jurisdictions cited as well)
Is it possible that part of the cause here is that the deaths are being changed by “public health officials” who are not in the employ of any specific hospital, and are therefore not really committing medicare fraud as such?
I don’t think this is related to the argument we’ve been having, if that’s what this is about. We were arguing about whether or not hospitals would lie and say they had COVID-19 patients for more money, and this is a story about a nursing facility claiming residents who could have plausibly died from COVID-19 did not have it, and the government overruling them. If anything this is counter your contention: the nursing home could have claimed these patients had COVID-19 and did not.
The unacknowledged value of schools taking care of kids
Argues that schools were doing a lot of useful work just making sure parents didn’t have to do full-time child care, the value of that work is now sort of visible, but the emphasis is mostly framed as parents not doing as much as they should. I’m not sure that last is well-supported, but it may well be.
A reason I posted the link is that I posted about the history of home-schooling, and back when I was reading it, I don’t think there was much talk about parents who don’t have the resources to home school. Anyone know what the home-schooling culture is like these days?
I haven’t read the link, and I can’t speak to the question at the end of the OP, but it makes me think about how teachers bristle at the notion that the service they provide is, to any extent, babysitting. I think this lockdown experience has proven definitively that the service they provide is to at least some extent exactly that!
For many weeks now I’ve watched my daughter complete all her daily schoolwork at home in 2 hours. Granted, the hastily revised “curriculum” is no doubt pared down from what she’d be getting in the classroom, but I doubt it’s been reduced by two thirds or more. And if it has been, then that also speaks to how essential the rest of it really was that the teachers and administrators felt OK cutting it out permanently.
To be fair, babysitting is more important than the term usually connotes, particularly when the babysat are also learning to be socialized, to follow directions, etc. So even if teachers are called “glorified babysitters” I don’t think it’s anything they should be ashamed of. The actual babysitters who work in daycares are, in my experience, highly skilled and valuable. I think I’d have an easier time retraining to become a doctor or lawyer than becoming a (good) daycare worker — and I love kids and feel very natural interacting with them.
I was a high school teacher. I’d say 2/5 of what I did was babysitting. That is, I had two classes teaching science to people who were only there because required and wouldn’t use it again even if I were a better teacher. Most of those periods were basically babysitting, or I suppose one could say mentoring if they squinted very hard.
Some element of the other three periods was as well.
Pre-lockdown lots of teacher I know would post memes about how IF they only were babysitters making $15/hour a kid or something of that nature they would make a million dollars a year (or something like that).
Nobody’s going to pay a babysitter $15/hr/kid for a large group babysitting session, though. Also I hope these weren’t math teachers, because by my accounting (183 days, 6.5 hours per day, 30 kids in a class, $15/hr) they make only half a million a year that way.
Indeed. Even supposing you paid $15/hr for babysitting one kid, it doesn’t follow you would pay $30/hr for two or $45/hr for three.
Most teachers are not math teachers.
Most math teachers still arent that good at math.
Clutzy says:
I’ll go further:
Most ‘math’ teachers only teach arithmetic, and don’t teach or know very much ‘math’ at all.
Many (most?) arithmetic teachers still aren’t very good at arithmetic, either.
This topic reminds me of the annual Mother’s Day articles (watch your feeds, it’s almost here!) about how unpaid mothers should, in a just world, get an ungodly sum that’s calculated by adding the full-time salaries of a maid, a personal assistant, a chauffeur, a chef, a nurse, and so on.
Compared to whom?
The middle school and high school math teachers my kids had/have had so far seem to know their material passably well. They’re not anywhere up to the average among my coworkers, but that’s fine–they don’t need to be to teach 12 year olds algebra or 16 year olds precalc
I mean, there may be someplace where it would make sense to hire people capable of getting graduate degrees in math or physics to teach 12 year olds math, but that would be some kind of school for mathematical prodigies or something.
Compared to their above average students. I think I had 1 from grades 6-12 who would have scored in the top 10 on a final for the class that was written by another teacher.
I saw that meme to and got into it on facebook for a while. It was being forwarded around by people without kids (in my circle) who apparently had never hired a babysitter, seriously you think I am spending $135 on babysitting for my 3 kids to go out for 3 hours?
Or baby sat in high school or had friends who did. I was not in that market much but if the pay was half that, I would have been babysiting like crazy.
Have you been helping your daughter with her schoolwork at all? That would indicate that most kids would have such increased educational productivity if the teacher-to-student ratio was much higher. The other implication is that productivity is strong decreased by socializing with peers. On the other hand, there are the studies that white collar productivity for most people is capped (at much less than 8 hours a day), and they pad out the time with socializing on the clock.
Granted, the hastily revised “curriculum” is no doubt pared down from what she’d be getting in the classroom
I really wouldn’t be too sure of that. Very little learning happens in school, and an hour or two is the traditional value people who home-school have found when matching school curriculums.
Maybe it’s the case that most kids really can’t absorb more information per day. Or maybe it’s that schools have to do so much to stop all the little psychos from killing each other and/or vandalizing the neighborhood.
Advice purporting to be from homeschooling parents went around parent facebook when all this hit, with a variety of advice. Keeping the school time to one or two hours was on most of those lists.
Anyone here who homeschools able to confirm or refute this possibly-myth?
We home unschooled, so “hours of school time” wasn’t a relevant concept.
Is the time I spend reading and commenting on this blog school time? It’s educational. Was the time our kids spent reading How to Lie with Statistics school time? The Lord of the Rings? A biography of Talleyrand? None of those were assigned, all were educational — and fun to read.
I home-schooled for a few years. It was 100% true that matching the school curriculum took less than 2 hours a day.
Typical school day is about 7 hours (7:45-2:45 often, perhaps longer in some places). Take out lunch, PE, passing periods or recess as appropriate, you’re down to about five hours. That’ll be no more than 50% direct instruction, with the rest being practice, getting kids on task, grading homework, passing papers around, answering questions, etc.
Then take out all the instructional time that an individual student doesn’t need because they get it or doesn’t get but doesn’t say so which you can catch for an individual but not everyone in a group of 30, you can see why 2 hours makes sense.
You’ll probably want to have some of the kid’s other time during the day be something educational, like reading, or even, say, cooking and the like, of course.
I was homeschooled, and I spent far more than two hours a day doing schoolwork. But, then, I was going far beyond the public school curriculum.
One issue with the babysitting function of schools is that it’s not really clear that teachers need college degrees in education, and often graduate degrees, in order to babysit kids. If the function is babysitting, we can do that with people we don’t have to pay nearly so well.
I mean, if your job is to teach small children to read, I can see where maybe you need some specialized training for that to know how to help the kids having difficulties. But if your job is just to keep a roomful of small children from poking themselves in the eye with scissors or something, the specialized training seems less important.
So what I’m hearing is you need the person with the ECE master’s degree to turn a room of 30 kids from illiterate goobers into 30 studious little readers, but they can do that in 2 hours per day and the rest of the time a lower-paid babysitter could tag team in to make sure nobody pees on the floor or gets bitten.
If the kids spend most their hours only being managed by someone who stops them from killing each other, they probably won’t settle down when the Real Teacher shows up.
Also, it probably takes a good skillset to keep order in a room of little maniacs.
See, that’s my feeling as well, and is why I think teachers should own the “glorified babysitter” thing.
Honestly, you probably need no training at all to teach most of those kids to read, but some are likely to have problems, and for them, you might need some specialized training. OTOH, everything I have read and heard says that education degrees don’t actually help future teachers in their actual jobs much–that’s conversation with teachers and statistics on how teaching credentials correlate with student performance. I wonder how much worse education would be if K-8 education mostly just required any 4-year college degree, or even a 2-year degree, or a test of basic knowledge sufficient to show you could teach elementary and middle school subjects. Maybe it wouldn’t suffer at all.
Education degrees may function as a test of commitment or dedication. And they include a period of internship which should help transition into the job or weed out those entirely unsuited. But if they were strictly required for the average student to learn, homeschooling would be at a severe disadvantage, which we don’t see.
Unless the advantage conferred was entirely in the classroom management area. There’s a little to that, but honestly I’m not sure how practical it was.
Education degrees are supposed to be for studying the best way to teach a subject or the best way to write a textbook.
It’s like studying how to build better MRI machines in order to be a doctor or even an X-ray tech. They are different skillsets.
Just to be clear, as I think I made this mistake above, Teachers (in California) are required to have a post-bachelors training of 1 or 2 years, then pass subject matter tests. This is a credential.
Teachers are encouraged/rewarded for taking a couple extra years to get a masters of education degree.
I have done the former, my wife has also done the latter. She wrote a paper on implementing routines, so the masters can at least be applicable to direct classroom teaching.
But whether either of these imparts a great deal of skill beyond what would quickly be picked up on the job, I don’t know. Probably for some, probably others find it impractical and abandon the techniques.
I think none of you are quite aware of the sheer amount of regulations covering education and childcare provision.
Here’s something from my own experience in Ireland; we’ve got two programmes for children aged from birth to six years.
Here’s what one of these programmes has to say:
And here’s something from the other:
Imagine having to implement 12 Principles, 16 Standards and 75 Components for kids aged from 6 months up to 5 years (have a read of the linked manual). ‘Cos we have to!
Then you get into primary school and real learning, and imagine what the curriculum and other regulations are like on top of that. If it were only as easy as “a lower-paid babysitter could tag team in to make sure nobody pees on the floor or gets bitten”, it would be great, but that ain’t how it works. (We have to have a Policy on Biting, for example. Oh, yes.)
For what it’s worth, the communications we’ve received from Seattle Public Schools explicitly acknowledge that most time at school is not instructional/academic and that parents should not try and spend the same hours on schooling at home that the kids would be in school. The recommended times are:
Pre- K 30 min
K-1 45 min
2-3 60 min
4-5 90 min
6-8 20 min per subject (2.5 hrs.)
9-12 30 min per class (3 hrs.)
The communications from my particular school are even more focused on the “anything can be learning… don’t worry about it” message, since our school population is more low income and they are worried more about making sure kids have resources at all and doing meal distribution and such. I know other schools in the district have lots of parents demanding more instructional material, etc… and those school communications tend to reflect those concerns more.
I am deeply impressed by their honesty and willingness to put the good of their students and family above their own interests and own self and other image. I give three cheers for Seattle Public Schools.
Yeah, this is an almost shocking level of honesty and transparency from a government organization.
Kudos to them!
Why is Seattle doing so well at everything these days? The only coastal city to get its housing prices to stabilize, keeping up with the Texas cities in population growth, turning from first-known-spread to best-case in coronavirus, honest school system?
I’m not sure one year of slowdown after years of having the first or second highest rate of increase in housing prices in the nation is anything to be impressed with. Before COVID-19 hit it seemed like things might be back to big increases again this year.
As someone who teaches music to children, given that I’m not there any longer than I have to be and get a great hourly rate to interact with a kid one on one, let me say from the economic perspective: school teaching is babysitting. And as someone homeschooled for all but the earliest few grades, from my recollection of how I filled my time I can repeat the same assertion. As you note, being good at babysitting is certainly not trivial. I suspect that we could have much better systems in many ways if we admitted all this.
So what you’re saying is that teachers are insufficiently glorified babysitters?
Home schooling culture is pretty broad around here. If you are a 1 family income on the mainline in somewhere like Wayne then homeschooling is pretty close to private tutoring for high level college tracks. For the typical middle class 2 income families who might have bought in an area like Havertown area tend to move one or two townships over to a place with lower prices/lower taxes/worse school system if they decide to homeschool. In the greater Philly area there are places where you can drop ~$10,000 a year in expenses between lower taxes and lower home prices fairly easily (and some places where you can put that in the $15+ range) by moving to a less desirable school district*. If you want really cheap living you move out further toward Lancaster county and you can start doing some serious at home production as well as having low housing and tax costs.
The basic strategies I see for people who need to work around the resource issue are
1. Work from home. Providing childcare for infants/pre school aged kids is a common one, the other is part time remote work for people whose kids are older and can be set to some schoolwork tasks without constant surveillance.
2. At home production. Large gardens, home cooking, canning, sewing etc. Lots of these are folded into the ‘curriculum’, with teaching kids to sew/cook/grow.
3. Counter-intuitively homeschoolers are often more willing to live in small homes for a complex combination of reasons. This dovetails into the lower general housing cost portion with lower taxes, lower home costs, less desire to be near entertainment hubs allows a lower cost of living with a similar (though shifted) standard of living.
On the more extreme front there are families who post about having 8+ kids and raising/homeschooling them on $30,000 a year or less with rural lifestyles.
As well, homeschooling families don’t always do all the teaching work themselves—sometimes there are local groups that put together activities or lessons. This takes some of the load off of individual parents, and it’s also a way homeschooling kids socialize. (Another way, of course, is sports.)
Co-ops are another one, but they also tend to add in some expenses (travel, renting the space) and typically are a little hostile to drop and go parents (to varying degrees). 2-4 hours for a co-op class seems about typical from my outside perspective, 1-2 days a week, though some probably do multiple co-ops.
Back when we were home unschooling there was a group that met one day a week in a local park for socializing.
I’ve seen a fair amount about how difficult it is to work from home if the kids are demanding.
Head of homeschooled family here. The following are my personal impressions of the Phoenix-area homeschool culture. For context, I’m fairly conservative and unbelievably protestant so what I see and how I see it are both influenced by those worldviews:
1.
There isn’t any, or much, “doesn’t have the resources to homeschool” in a financial sense for two-parent families. We did it successfully on a single <30k income for some years; we've never made more than 50k. What you are talking about would be dual incomes where people are unwilling to make any sacrifice for it, for the most part. Or single parent households, I guess.
2.
Homeschool kids in the metropolitan Phoenix area are mostly good looking, well dressed little things who have their own mostly-nicer mostly-smarter mostly-better-people entirely-better-behaved social circles. They have a fair amount of fun, are generally more comfortable doing things they want to do but otherwise might not do for social reasons – for example, the stage drama education group my wife helps run has more than enough boys, which isn't typical. They are able to converse well with adults.
There is a mild tendency to exclude non-homeschooled kids from these groups; when you do see a non-homeschooled kid pulled into the circle, he or she is usually exceptional in some way. This doesn't seem to be a "whoa they move too fast for us" thing so much as a subtle condescension and a wish to avoid needless trouble.
3.
In the 5-10 years my wife has been teaching teenaged homeschool kids, there have been no unplanned pregnancies or drug problems she's aware of.
4.
Formerly homeschooled men who do not homeschool/have kids that I'm aware of trend towards middle class, tend to drink, and tend to cuss a lot. They have an above-average interest in nerd card games and spectator sports. They are usually nice enough. I'm not aware of a single male homeschooler from my childhood or my wife's teenagers (some of which are now adults) who is openly gay, has been outed, or who has rumors of homosexuality associated with him.
Formerly homeschooled women who do not homeschool/have kids I'm aware of are usually more likely to be outwardly religious than the men; bible/christian college of some sort is very common. Careers or career goals focused on some kind of caretaking are common (lots of teachers/nurses). I am aware of one homosexual formerly homeschooled woman from my childhood or my wife's teenage students (she's from the latter).
Both groups trend towards marriage and kids in their twenties. It is not super common to find unmarried reasonably physically attractive homeschoolers at 25.
5.
Parents who do homeschool who are significantly older than me(35) and who are religious tend to be nice enough, middle class, mildly spectrum and white. This last is changing – in my wife's drama class, for instance, there are now enough black kids that they are statistically represented in relation to population. They are overwhelmingly attends-church-weekly types.
6.
Parents who homeschool, who are religious and who are significantly younger than me tend to be less spectrum, less white (statistically) and dress better/more fashionably. They are more socially skilled as a whole and would be unrecognizable as unusual walking down a street.
7.
I do not know any non-religious homeschoolers who are older than me and have never met one. The exception to this are parents of the severely disabled who are another thing entirely; they don't follow patterns much.
8.
Non religious homeschooling parents younger than me tend to have job titles similar to "photographer" and fashionable tattoos. They dress younger than their ages. They are unusually concerned about what kind of plastic water bottles are made out of and always, always have certain kinds of foods they decline to eat (anti-GMO, organic, vegan, keto). They are in good physical shape. Once they get bored of homeschooling they usually stop doing it, typically a few years in.
You have at least met one online.
If we are counting online, I’ve probably known a few. I’m semi-specifically talking here about the Phoenix market as I’ve been able to observe it in person; I’d bet there’s a fair smattering of non-religious older homeschoolers, I just have never known one in person so my ability to talk about them is nil.
One funny thing about this is that if I was to include online communities and then describe in literal terms every non-religious homeschooler older than me that I can recall significant details about, it would look like this:
Since we are speaking about it, I’m not sure how much I know about your motivations for homeschooling – I’m assuming you could have probably swung the cost of pretty good private school(I couldn’t, which affected the decision-making process somewhat) so I do wonder what the decision looked like for you.
Not sure if David saw this, so I will answer (I’m his wife.) David went to the private school attached to the University of Chicago. I went through a good suburban public school system. Both of us spent most of our time being bored. We figured there had to be a better way, and that we didn’t have to do a perfect job, just be significantly better than the alternative, and we didn’t think that was a very high bar.
We could have afforded a good private school, and there is a very good one a mile or so from us, although of course no guarantee our kids could have gotten in. It’s possible that it would have been better than the University of Chicago Laboratory School that I went to, but I wouldn’t assume so.
Betty has given part of the answer (I missed your query and she just pointed it out to me).
But another part of the reason is the distinction between schooling and unschooling. I don’t think the standard model of K-12 schooling, public and private, makes a lot of sense. It consists of selecting from the enormous range of human knowledge a pretty arbitrary subset that everyone is supposed to pretend to learn, designed to just about fill K-12. Very little of it is knowledge that everyone will use — how many people ever use trigonometry, for instance, or even algebra? And there are lots of things not taught that for some people would be more valuable than what is in the curriculum.
A second problem is that the model consists of sitting a bunch of kids down in a room and teaching them using two authorities, the teacher and the textbook. That doesn’t strike me as a very good model — certainly not how I learn things now.
A third is that kids are being taught something not because they want to learn it but because an adult has told them that it will be valuable to them at some point in the distant future. In my experience both kids and adults learn better when they are learning something they actually want to learn.
I like to describe unschooling as throwing books at kids and seeing which ones stick. That means telling them about interesting things and helping them learn about whichever ones they find interesting.
I’ve written more about this on my blog.
@Betty Cook
Your reasoning is very close to mine, although our alternatives would have been not-great public schools and not-great-on-average public school districts. It’s a bit comforting to know that people with the option of nice private schools still find them relatively underwhelming – it makes me feel like I compromised less for them.
Our eldest boy taught himself to read when he was two, and taught his brother to read when his brother was three or four. When we were checking to see what would be done with a boy who read and spelled at the level of a better-than-average junior high student (in terms of ability to read out loud, if not comprehend) before entering kindergarten, they didn’t have any great options for him; advancing him was mostly putting him in with older kids, and I decided it would be bad for him to have to be the smallest and weakest kid his entire school career.
@DavidFriedman
One interesting distinction between us is that we teach a much more formal curriculum than your unschooling. This results in them doing a lot of stuff they don’t really need/like, but the advantage of a homeschool learning day being relatively short means they aren’t doing it for very long. I find they still supplement a lot of what they want to know with other things – Youtube is actually a better source for the level they are on than I originally would have thought.
But I’m still a little bit a slave to more traditional curriculum than you are. My eventual solution to that is that my eldest is, if he maintains pace, going to be college ready at about 14. I’m going to let him do online classes of his choice at that point to accumulate credit, maybe a college quarter or half load, and no more than that unless he wants them. Hopefully that will let him diversify in a way he wants a bit.
@GearRatio:
I was intellectually precocious, socially retarded, and went to college at 16. It was probably the right choice for me. I didn’t fit socially, did very little dating, but I’m not sure that would have been different at 18 and it meant I was interacting with people more nearly my intellectual peers.
That would be less of an argument now, because the internet makes it much easier for a precocious kid to interact with intellectual peers, possibly but not necessarily older. Also to take classes online.
And, of course, there is (and was) the alternative of educating himself outside of classes via books.
@DavidFriedberg
I think I am/was somewhat closer to your platonic ideal of homeschooling than Jack is/will probably be.
I was eternally socially elite by nature, I think, of being socially retarded as you mentioned – I was bizarre in a loud, friendly way that made me OK to be around and, having had older brothers, would physically hit people who attempted to bully me in any way. The flip side of that is I outpaced how fast my mom could teach me when I was 14, was cut loose to teach myself, and almost entirely taught myself things I was interested in from that point. I did community college at 16 and picked up a mish-mash of classes that interested me.
Highschool was great for me. The downside of this in a lot of ways was that I hit my 20’s and found out the world is very eager to award middle-class status on people who conformed to the highschool/college with desired focus/job at 22 pipeline, but actively punishes people who want desk jobs and didn’t do that. There are exceptions to this, but if you take a 10% better me without a degree and compare him to a 10% worse me with a degree, the latter will get the job every time.
Thus the desire for a little bit of color-inside-the-lines structure for him – I’m a bit afraid he will end up like I have, rather than having options. So I’ll pay the extra to get him non-free college credit knowledge as opposed to superior free book knowledge for that reason.
I am intrigued by the phrase “unbelievably protestant.” I have not seen strong ties to protestantism as such as opposed to either broader or more specific religious communities recently. Does this turn of phrase actually indicate that?
I guess I mean two things by this:
1. I’m in what I consider to be an extremely middle-of-the-road protestant sect as judged by the beliefs of other US protestant churches near me. It’s not anywhere as strict as some of the stricter baptist sects with their extra-biblical rules, and it’s not anywhere near as liberal/relaxed as your more liberal/relaxed Methodists/Episcopals/Trendy metropolitan churches named “mosiac”/what-have-you.
I’m also most of the things you’d associate with a mainline US protestant in a categorical political sense – anti-abortion, fiscal conservative, white, pro-gun, etc.
2. If that’s what I am, I’m then VERY that thing; some church related thing 2-3 times a week, my support structure is all there, my friends all come from there. I’m running organizational bit of the Zoom meetings for our small group while we are still unable to meet up. My kids are growing up there and a great deal of their friends are from there; me and my wife met and got married there. If somebody attempted to attack my church with a gun I’d probably be willing to try and defend it with a pocket-knife; it’s important to me and a big part of my life is built around it.
Reading these things you should bear in mind that while I think that I’m pretty typical and middle of the road, I might not be – there’s a fair amount of bias leaking around the seals of this part of my brain.
Interesting, that strikes me as generally pious but relatively normal.
” I’m not aware of a single male homeschooler from my childhood or my wife’s teenagers (some of which are now adults) who is openly gay, has been outed, or who has rumors of homosexuality associated with him.”
How many homeschoolers do you know?
Probably a couple hundred to five hundred, if we count in a broad way that includes people I don’t know but would likely hear about through the grapevine. Thinking on it, I think one thing that’s important to keep in mind here is that my selection bias works in a complex way on this one.
Of all the homeschoolers I knew during high school or college, I’m not aware of any who are Bi/Gay but it’s certainly possible some are that I didn’t keep track of well; I’ve certainly done a lot of facebook where-are-they-now browsing but I can’t pretend at 100% coverage.
Of the homeschoolers I know now, we’d expect that pretty much all the parents I know wouldn’t be LGBTQ just by default. We wouldn’t expect 100% of the high school kids to be out if they were gay, or necessarily to be openly out after they graduate.
So there’s definitely room there for hidden homosexuality or just homosexuality that I’m not aware of, I’m just not aware of any in my sample besides the one woman mentioned. She’s enough of an outlier that I’m very aware of her and her preference despite never having met her; It’s unusual enough that it gets mentioned.
I’ve been thinking recently about Neo-confederate thought in the US, and pondering why it’s so difficult for many to accept that the Confederates were on the wrong side in the American Civil War. I wonder if part of the reason is that the US Civil War, like WWII, breaks our normal intuition about who is “right” in a war. In most wars, our intuition is that wars are terrible and messy, that there are heroes and villains on both sides, and that there are arguments for and against both causes. The US Civil War and WWII don’t seem to follow this pattern. They appear to genuinely have a “good guys” and a “bad guys” side.
Some possibilities here:
1. WWII and the US Civil War are exceptions to the general truth that most wars aren’t (morally) one sided.
2. WWII and the US Civil War are not nearly as clear-cut cases of good versus evil as they seem (but this seems like you’d have to say that the Holocaust and slavery were not that bad).
3. Actually, the intuition is wrong and most wars are good guys versus bad guys after all.
Any of these three seem really weird.
The sad thing about politically refighting the Civil War is that the United States came to an acceptable resolution to how to treat it in history for a hundred years, and then people whose ancestors mostly didn’t fight in it got mad about that resolution because it empowered some of the “wrong” people to feel proud about their ancestors.
The Civil War was a case of both sides having some morally right points (The Confederates were right that they didn’t sign up for a massive Federal government running roughshod over them, the Union was right that slavery was very bad) and both stumbling into a conflict because of very bad diplomacy, very bad foresight and general stupidity.
Acceptable according to white people, maybe.
You underestimate its acceptability among Southern Blacks in the mid century.
Hooo boy.
You mean when the Klan was terrorizing people who advocated for change?
@broblawsky
Are you under the impression that the Klan likes the accepted narrative?
The Klan approves of slavery and oppression of blacks. The accepted narrative that the South was motivated by states rights and freedom is the opposite of what the Klan believes, which is that oppressing blacks is a positive good and is what their ancestors really fought for.
That is completely untrue. The books and movies that lead to the rebirth of the Klan in the 1910s/1920s (Birth of a Nation, for example) were full of Lost Cause mythology. The Lost Cause mythology is directly supported by, and helped support the legitimacy of, the Klan. You can’t create some kind of division between the Klan and Lost Cause mythology, it’s total fantasy.
@broblawsky
The midcentury Klan and the 1920 Klan are different organizations, as everyone agrees.
Edit: Which is completely unrelated to whether or not blacks were okay with the history.
The Civil Rights era focused on giving blacks rights, not refighting the Civil War. That came much later.
That’s a dodge. Let me ask you a couple of questions:
1) Do you believe that the Klan, from its origins in the 1860s to today, supports at least some elements of Lost Cause mythology, defined here as:
a) The primary ideological conflict of the American Civil War was over states’ rights, not slavery,
b) The goal of the Confederacy was to defend itself from Northern tyranny.
2) Do you believe that the Klan and allied civilians, through that time period, used violence to prevent African Americans in the South from speaking out about their views regarding the American Civil War?
@broblawsky
1) Yes
2) No, I am not aware of any violence against blacks based on their views of the Civil War. If you have counter-evidence, please share it.
So you’re not aware of the threats and harassment against W.E.B. Du Bois, author of Black Reconstruction in America?
@broblawsky
W.E.B. Du Bois despite those views was never subjected to any violence for them and lived in Atlanta most of his life.
I searched his Wiki page and Google and found no serious threats against him either. If you know of them, they’re not common knowledge.
Great evidence for my assertion that such an outspoken voice against the consensus lived in the South without fear.
Yes, Du Bois lived so without fear that he taught his daughter, Yolande, to “dress in black and hide in the closet at the first sign of danger”. Definitely the action of a man who lives without fear.
@broblawsky
Unfortunately, your link doesn’t get me that quote. I will see if I can track it down.
There was undoubtedly no violence against him, though. Can we agree on that?
My question here is genuine. I have read Du Bois and knew the rough outline of his life, but I haven’t read any autobiographies.
No, and I’m increasingly thinking this is one of those situations where you’re not actually being honest in this discussion, as you’ve previously admitted.
@broblawsky
I said there was no violence suppressing people who disagreed with the Lost Cause narrative. You said there were threats against W.E.B. Du Bois, a person who disagreed with the Lost Cause narrative. I asked for evidence, given that an internet search did not find any (I have never read a biography of Du Bois, but know the broad arc of his life).
You cited a quote that your link did not support and then accused me of bad faith when I asked for agreement that there was no violence against him, which you have never claimed.
It’s on page 739/740 of the paper I linked. It’s sourced to Mary White Ovington‘s history of the NAACP, The Walls Came Tumbling Down. All you had to do was do a text search for ‘Yolande’. Do I have to screen shot it? Is that what it’ll take?
@broblawsky
Yes, because as I said, your link does not allow me to read it.
Actually, what you said was:
An ambiguous statement, and not as straightforward as saying “I can’t access that paper”. I’m not sure why you didn’t just admit that you couldn’t get to it.
The thing is, you could’ve just said something along the lines of, “Du Bois was a self-admitted radical, and we shouldn’t be surprised that he would feel threatened by the Klan and other white supremacist organizations in the South. However, my understanding is that a lot of black people in the South before the Civil Rights movement agreed with the majoritarian view of the Civil War, and that the revisionist movement is something that gained mass appeal only recently.” A hedged position like that would’ve been pretty hard for me to argue with, frankly; absolute claims like “Du Bois never felt threatened in the South” are trivial to shoot down. Instead, you hewed to your ahistorical position and accused me of misquoting a source. I’m disappointed in your conduct in this discussion, although not particularly surprised by it.
@broblawsky
My position is very similar to the first one, which I believe was clear. I never said the latter and you know it. My direct statement was: “No, I am not aware of any violence against blacks based on their views of the Civil War. If you have counter-evidence, please share it.”
Du Bois never had violence against him for his view of the Civil War (or any other views) that I know of. You then expanded it to threats against him. I noted that I couldn’t find any on my cursory review of his Wikipedia page and asked for a source. You gave a one-line quote without context from a source I couldn’t access. I don’t know if he was afraid specifically of the KKK, generally of a limited time situation like the Atlanta race riots, or of something else. Unless that quote is directly because of his views on the Civil War, I doubt it supports your point.
And also note that the side that politicized the history of the War for Southern Independence, after it was pretty much a non-issue that everyone could live with, were very overlapping with the group that argued strenuously in every other context against colonialism based on “but their society treats at least some people worse than we would.”
That is a very eloquent way of putting it
What I find funny about the whole thing is that the talking points used by each side have flipped to almost exactly the opposite of what contemporary records at the time stated. The South was really, really keen on slavery and didn’t want it be forced to get rid of it. And the North (Lincoln specifically) was willing to overlook slavery to “preserve the Union”, which means in-effect neutering the 10th Amendment.
So why did the war happen? Southern states didn’t want to lose power?
Yes, and Lincoln was particularly bad at negotiation.
Honestly, the big reason was that everybody knew that the current situation couldn’t last.
Several compromises were proposed by Virginia, all of which gave more power to the South than the North was comfortable with and neither side really believed that a massive war was about to start without them.
In hindsight, both sides would’ve negotiated very differently.
The best possible conclusion was the one being pushed by the ACS, which was to do what the British had done, buy every single slave in the country and free them.
It wasn’t politically viable, unfortunately because the North didn’t want to pay the South that much money and the South didn’t want to lose the population advantage that slaves gave them in the House.
Because the south was run by colossal assholes who had lost all touch with reality thanks to years and years of censorship and propaganda.
Slavery was Evil, but it was impossible to say this in the south, so pretty much everyone in the south vastly overestimated how likely they were to get foreign assistance.
The north had all the industry, and a huge advantage in manpower, but to the south was a macho culture that honestly believed they were worth five northerners in a fight. Which. No.
So they picked a fight they were essentially certain to loose because they had gotten high on their own propaganda.
@Thomas Jorgensen
Oh, and thank you for reminding me of the martial valor myth too. The South had produced lots of America’s best soldiers for a long time, so they assumed they were unbeatable in the field, which was incredibly stupid to believe.
Note that the South actually did outperform pretty surprisingly, but nowhere near what we needed to win.
@ThomasJorgensen (or anyone really)
Honest question: I’m not familiar with formal censorship of anti-slavery positions in the south–any links or terms I can look up on that? I’ve passing familiarity with the propaganda, just not the censorship side. Thanks.
Basically, three things: Southern state didn’t want to lose power, did not expect the North to attack them if they did leave, and expected that if attacked Great Britain would ally with them at least enough to keep trade routes open. The third point was critical: if Great Britain had broken the Union blockade (which would have been trivially easy for them) the South could have bought the manufactured goods they needed to fight effectively.
Incredibly stupid in hindsight, but no more than moderately stupid in 1861. That was very early in the history of industrial war, and military history prior to that point offered much more support to the Southern position. Some people in the South got it, e.g. Sam Houston, so it wasn’t unforeseeable, but neither was it incredibly stupid.
@SamChevre
Ironically, I’ve heard that the South’s early success hurt them in that way. Had the initial battles of the war been stalemates instead of major Southern victories, the British might have gotten involved right away.
But while it looked like the South could win on their own, the British preferred to keep their hands clean. By the time it was clear the South couldn’t win after Gettysburg, it was too late to get involved from a PR perspective.
Edit:
@John Schilling
Fair. Consider that amended to “fairly stupid and definitely mistaken”
@2181425
Censorship of antislavery opinion in the antebellum South mostly relied on the threat of murdering antislavery speakers.
In 1835 abolitionists briefly introduced the tactic of mass-mailing antislavery pamphlets into the South. This resulted in a giant debate over whether the pamphlets could be censored, and whether by the Feds or the local authorities. In the end the local postmasters opened and destroyed a lot of the pamphlets and the tactic was abandoned.
Now I wonder what it would have taken to avoid the war _and_ end slavery.
Probably some compromise on not ending slavery immediately, but to end the whole partus sequitur ventrem. Then a generation later slavery is largely over. Maybe a law freeing v old slaves which the owners would not want to keep. Not very fair to the slaves that get to end their lives as slaves, but maybe the South would have taken that deal, sweetened with some more money, but probably less than buying every slave.
Probably not enough of a good deal back then.
@JPNunez
Something like the British did in buying them out. Definitely at a high price above market value.
Probably also shipping them to Liberia given the thoughts of the Americans about them.
In hindsight, the best chance would probably have been to let the original six-state CSA secede, phase out slavery in the rest of the USA by compensated emancipation over a generation or so, and point and laugh when the CSA sees what happens to their economy when Egyptian and Indian cotton come on the market and the Europeans find that boycotting “slave cotton” doesn’t really cost them that much.
After a generation or so of that, start peeling away basket-case Confederate states with an offer of a minimal bailout and access to Union markets in exchange for abolition.
Still expensive, and tricky to negotiate, and likely to turn into war anyway if the CSA decides the way to improve its economy is to conquer Mexico and Cuba.
@John Schilling, Lincoln proposed a generation-long compensated emancipation plan during the war. All the slave states still in the Union rejected it (though West Virginia had already adopted a faster plan). I don’t see why Virginia or North Carolina would’ve adopted it if they’d still been in the Union, and any pressure would probably have spurred them to join the Confederacy anyway.
@JPNunez:
This is, very roughly, the compromise that caused the war.
The South seceded merely because new states weren’t slave states, preventing the South from selling their highly valuable product to new markets, but more importantly, diminishing relative power for the slave states and presaging an eventual end to slavery.
They weren’t even willing to accept the possibility that slavery would end at some uncertain point in the future. It’s seems highly doubtful they could have been persuaded to accept a certain end to slavery.
I suppose if you make the compensation high enough anything can happen, but I doubt that an acceptable price for the South was a tenable one for the North.
@HeelBearCub
The ACS had been buying and freeing slaves to Liberia at something like double market price. At that price I recall it would’ve been less than half the economic cost of the first year of the Civil War, so it clearly was tenable in the technical sense.
But that would’ve enriched the plutocrats in the South and would have been politically completely unacceptable.
What was needed was for slavery to become so uneconomical that freeing them made the most sense and started to be requested rather than forced, which was what happened in Brazil.
@Echo Chaos:
That’s circular.
Reducing the future value of slaves is a huge chunk of why the South objected to new states being non-slave. It’s all well and good to show that slavery can die out when it stops being profitable, but that won’t help you achieve that end without the slave states seceding.
As to buying slaves at double market value, would the prospect of selling your car to the government at double market value entice you to accept a system of bikes and mass transit that was car free? Slavery was a cultural institution.
I agree that even that would have been hard to sell, I just don’t think it was even on the table.
@HeelBearCub
I think you’re conflating slave states losing political power with them losing economic power. Certainly they are related to some degree, but there was already a solid abolition movement in Virginia, for instance, so much so that half the state left to stay in the Union. Five-ten more years of extending the compromise and the former slave states don’t have the critical mass to secede.
It’s more a selling all cars back and now allowing only leasing thing. If you offered that to Americans, I won’t say 100% would support it, but you could probably muster a strong majority.
I am aware of the social causes underlying the Civil War, but it is the only time in the entire West that war was necessary to free slaves, with the partial exception of Haiti, which was weirder because they freed the slaves and then immediately reenslaved them in all but name.
Everywhere else the state bought out the slaveowners, the slaves went free, got hired instead of owned and everyone moved on with life. And it was just as much a social institution in Brazil or the British Caribbean and that worked there.
It wasn’t viable in 1860 and both sides handled extending until it was viable in the ABSOLUTE WORST WAY POSSIBLE. Note that I am not even slightly absolving the South here. Their diplomacy was terrible too.
But like the tariff crisis earlier, extending it would’ve allowed everyone to get over it. The tariff crisis was resolved when the North’s economy grew enough that it took up enough of the South’s raw goods to no longer make it a union-ending issue.
@EchoChaos
Obviously buying all the slaves was among the best propositions to the south, but the proposal needs to be something that the North would _believably_ propose and uphold.
@HeelBearCub
Well, fuck.
@JPNunez
I don’t think it’s that unbelievable as a compromise position. It’s what the British had already done and what the Brazilians would eventually do.
In a better world, the idea that someone would’ve gone to war over it would seem as silly as the idea that we would’ve had a civil war over tariffs.
@ Echo Chaos:
Why would Britain want to get involved in the first place? They had no love for slavery, and British policy during this period was to maintain good relations with the US. Unless the Union does something very stupid, Britain isn’t going to be interested in bailing out the South.
@The original Mr. X
Askin questions to somebody who is banned is a bit rude, since they can’t answer.
Since EC isn’t here, I’ll have a go at this for him. British foreign policy for the past five hundred years has been to cock up any attempt by anyone not British to establish political unity on any scale that could conceivably threaten Britain’s global imperial ambitions. That’s the only way for a small island off the European coast to maintain itself as a, possibly the, global superpower. Which particularly in the 19th century, was a massively profitable gig for the British.
The United States of America, had the obvious and predictable potential for replacing the British Empire in that role, and of course ultimately did. A bunch of conspicuously Disunited States of America, much less so. The British did like the Yankees, and they disliked slavery, but they also liked cheap cotton and disliked sharing the oceans with the United States Navy, and this is politics and diplomacy – some likes and dislikes count far more than others.
If siding with the Confederacy was a cheap way to cock up the nascent American Empire, they’d have used e.g. the Trent affair as an excuse to do it. But not if it looks like they can get the same benefit without direct military intervention, and not if it looks like it intervention will be a prolonged and expensive affair. That leaves a narrow band in which British intervention is plausible, and the Confederacy skipped through that part too quickly.
U.S. tariffs at the time protected northern industry from British and French imports, and also restricted exports of cotton and tobacco to Britain and France. Britain and France didn’t get involved because it would look bad to go to war for slavery, but they did want the Confederacy to win.
Going to school in the South I was taught that these tariffs were a bigger reason for the war than slavery, but after reading South Carolina’s declaration of secession I don’t believe it.
@ Anna:
I’m sorry, I didn’t realise he was banned. Regardless, though, it was more a rhetorical question than anything else.
@ John Schilling:
Britain’s goals were to prevent any power gaining hegemony over *Europe*, out of fear that such a power would be able to conquer Britain. There’s no evidence that the UK ever sought to disunite the US, in the 1860s or at any other time.
@ Bullseye:
Tariffs or not, trade with the US was still very lucrative for Britain. “They didn’t want to fight for slavery” is an inadequate explanation, because (a) Union war goals, especially in the early stages of the war, were all about quashing secession, not about ending slavery. Whilst with hindsight we know that the Union victory led to abolition, this outcome wasn’t the most obvious one at the start of the war. From a foreign perspective, the war was one slave-owning country trying to secede from another slave-owning country. (b) The British had a non-slavery-related casus belli during the Trent affair, when (nota bene) international opinion was firmly on the British side of the dispute and any British declaration of war would have been seen as a justifiable assertion of the freedom of the seas. If Britain had really wanted to go to war, they could simply have sent a much more unreasonable ultimatum and then used the inevitable Union rejection as an excuse for fighting. That they didn’t indicates that they had no desire to fight the Union.
Eh, everybody knew the real stakes.
Virginia made offers to Lincoln to stay in the Union that would’ve preserved slavery long-term and they were rejected because they were strong enough to actually preserve slavery long-term.
And Virginia leaving is what guaranteed war. Without Virginia leaving, North Carolina wouldn’t have left, leaving the Confederacy a useless rump state that would’ve crawled back to the USA.
What proposal are you talking about that was rejected on that basis?
@Evan Þ
The Virginia Convention Proposal of 1861:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_in_the_American_Civil_War#Secession
Note that Virginia didn’t actually leave until shooting war had already started.
My understanding is that Virginia intended to remain in the union, but refused to accept federal troops marching through Virginia for the purposes of invading the already-seceded states.
Their position was that Lincoln needed their permission to march the federal army into their state, and that absent said permission (which they would not give), it was an invasion.
What Matt M said. The Virginia convention’s proposals went far beyond protecting slavery. In your quote, they demanded peace with the seceded states and acknowledging the right to secession; further in the Wikipedia article, they also demanded Lincoln evacuate Fort Sumter. Unsurprisingly, Lincoln refused those demands.
@Evan Þ
I didn’t say they were reasonable. As I said, everyone knew the real stakes. Virginia’s proposal would’ve resulted in the Confederacy coming back into the Union. And probably a large part of the Northeast seceding immediately afterwards.
@EchoChaos, I’m fairly sure that wasn’t the case, and I’m sure Lincoln didn’t consider that to be the case. Without Virginia (and North Carolina), the Confederacy would have extremely little industry and be economically handicapped in the long run. But with Lincoln promising not to go to war, and the political classes of their new nation filled with secessionist zeal, what would bring them back in the Union? How would lack of industry bite them in the short run any worse than it’d already been doing for decades before secession? Unless you assume the Union would’ve imposed punitive tariffs to drive them to repeal secession – which I don’t think anyone was proposing, I’m not sure would’ve worked, and I think would drive Virginia out of the Union after all.
@Evan Þ
Same thing that brought Texas in. Being a tiny pawn of great powers sucks, but having a seat at the table rocks.
The rump Confederacy would never be anything but a pawn of the USA. And Virginia wouldn’t have minded tariffs, probably, since they would make Virginia and North Carolina cotton more desirable and Deep South cotton less, although they likely wouldn’t have been too punitive.
This is wildly hypothetical since both sides seemed to believe that diplomacy consisted of who could wave their dick at the other most offensively, of course.
Maybe they would have gotten a better deal if they weren’t so intent on keeping slavery going on.
Many states got rid of slavery before the civil war. Honestly, the southern slavers got a light punishment. The right thing was to jail the previous slave owners.
The state they joined specifically legalized slavery. Forcing someone into a permanent union and changing the rules is tyranny.
The USA bans punishing people for doing things that were legal at the time.
People who think it’s OK to own other people as chattel have zero moral standing to complain about tyranny.
Guess we better get rid of that Declaration and resubmit to Britain then.
@A Definite Beta Guy
I was actually thinking the biggest moral imperative right now by that metric is helping Taiwan reconquer the mainland.
I accept your surrender.
Please wait while we hand out gearsticks, scones and the letter ‘u’.
Being a bit more cautious with the Tea this time?
> I was actually thinking the biggest moral imperative right now by that metric is helping Taiwan reconquer the mainland.
I agree!
+1
So what? Putting lead on your brand of wine was legal back then but nobody flies flags of the confederate states of leaded wine.
Do you want slavery to be legal forever?
The answer is simply no. America decided to call on those states and ask them nicely to end slavery. Which was not only the moral option, but the rational one too, after all the non-slaver states managed to defeat the slaver ones, probably due to their economic power. Which means that if the south had let go of their slaves, they would have saved themselves a war, would not have had their states destroyed, their people killed, and their economy would have grown instead of having to recover from a war.
Honestly, it’s hard to argue that it would have been quite a sweet deal.
Instead those states decided treason and civil war was preferable and got what they deserved, just not distributed equally. The people who died were not necessarily the slave owners.
I am not listing a punishment that could have been legally obtained.
I am listing what was real justice. The law and justice are correlated but not really 1:1. The holocaust was largely legal, for example, but it was still prosecuted, and I am p ok with this.
Now, yes, it is v reasonable that if I go back in time and somehow convince Lincoln to propose to the pre-confederate states to jail their slave owners at the same time they free their slaves, that…wouldn’t have flied well. But that’s not what I am saying either.
Yeah, I’ll bite that bullet: the American Revolution was probably unjustified and this is one of the reasons why (a New England-specific Revolution would have been much more justified, as would William Lloyd Garrison’s proposal that Massachusetts secede rather than enforce the Fugitive Slave laws). Bryan Caplan has been good on this.
A New England-specific revolution would have failed for the same reason a Western Allies vs Hitler-specific WWII would have failed. Is there a consistent moral standard where it is OK for the Western Allies team up with the Soviet Union but not for New England to team up with the South?
There are at least two morally relevant differences between WWII and the American Revolution: the level of evil of the enemy and the price of the expedient alliance. If Hitler had been no more evil than George III, and a Soviet-dominated postwar political system was the price to be paid for the expedient alliance, would the Western Allies still have been justified in allying with the Soviets?
The Alliance was never really justified in WWII once the Malotov pact was broken. After that the only moral plan would have been to let them tire each other out until you could sweep both regimes into the sea.
Not if you believe that if the Soviets don’t have any help the Nazis will win without major losses.
Titrating economic support was always an option. FDR was a stooge.
No that’s horrible. Jailing people for owning possessions legally, or doing anything else legally is really wrong (unless you’re a king I guess)
Some statements are so silly that that reductio ad hitlarum is appropriate, and this is one of them.
When it comes to something like slavery, people should know better than the law. ETA: Meh, see below.
@Nick: Morally, sure. It is a poor thing for one man to own another.
But the state should never say “hey, that thing you have been doing that we said was legal? You’re going to jail for it.”
@Edward Scizorhands
I might have overreached, yes; sorry about that. Ex post facto laws are no good. I just rankle at the implication that slaveowners didn’t know better. They should have been terrified of the day the law caught up with them.
It’s kind of weird how that came about, isn’t it? It’s one thing to say, “but slavery was practiced all of the world and throughout history!” But (and I’m no expert on the subject) to my knowledge it was practiced nowhere in Europe since…pretty much the fall of the Roman Empire, right? So when Europeans kicked off the slave trade in the ~1500s or so, no Europeans had been doing that for 1,000 years.
@Nick, in the words of Thomas Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”
Note that serfdom may be getting quite close to it.
Serfdom was nothing like chattel slavery.
Things that are like chattel slavery are hard to impose on your next-door neighbors, because they’ll just skedaddle off home as soon as you turn your back on them and their neighbors will say “who? haven’t seen him” if you try to chase them down. State-run punitive slavery and the like can sometimes work because the state can run at a loss to make them work, but a private businessman will just throw up his hands and hire cheap “wage slaves”. Or buy land that comes with serfs.
If you’ve got a reasonable volume of long-distance trade going on, it’s a fair bit easier to do chattel slavery. And I seem to recall that there was some of that going on along the Viking trade routes in what is now Russia.
Does anyone here actually think punishing people for doing something explicitly legal (within both intent and letter of the law) is ok, smart, or something you want to condone in your country?
Actuall, Russian serfs were emancipated in March 1861, the same year the Civil War started, but in February. So not before the Civil War; in the beginning of the Civil War.
Slavery (not just serfdom) was practiced in Europe throughout the middle ages and early modern period, albeit decreasing in importance between the 11th century and the rise of the African slave trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_medieval_Europe
@Purpleherman
Obviously yes. If my original comment wasn’t clear enough, Adolf Eichmann was prosecuted under the 1950 Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law which did not exist in 1945.
The inherent problem with the Nazi model is that is suffers from the “you should have known” problem. You should have known that what you were doing was wrong. Fine. But by whose values? Because, by that argument, the local police who enforcing any drug possession laws “should have known” that what they were doing is unethical and deserve to be shot.
Or else we accept “just following orders” as an acceptable response.
The only conclusion I can draw is: might makes right. Whatever the victors think is right is what will be determined to have been the right thing to do.
Also, “serfdom” meant various things at various times and places. In 18th to mid 19th century Russia, it was significantly closer to chattel slavery (e.g. you could sell serfs without land).
@thisheavenlyconjugation
There are some different expectations of those making the laws compared to normal citizens, and we act differently towards conquered/enemy peoples (especially the conquered/enemy rulers), compared to citizens of your own country.
This should be obvious to you
I am totally fine with punishing people for stuff that was done legally if the law is awful. But they have to be pretty uncontroversially awful. That clearly wasn’t the case post Civil War since the victorious side still practiced slavery.
“Slaveowners should be jailed” would have been a pretty big minority position even in the North. Most northerners were ambivalent on southern slavery and were definitely not hardcore abolitionists.
@John:
Do you believe this means that ancient mines could only run at a loss if the slave miners weren’t foreigners shipped by long-distance trade?
I’m not sure on the economic implications of precious metal mining here, but ISTM that mining copper, tin, and later iron would always be productive even if the miners were punished locals. This was stuff that let you chop down trees and plow soil with greater productivity, the very basis of the economy even if you ignore the political economy angle of “this is how we make arms.”
@Garrett:
Yes, the strong man makes the values that are enforced. Secular ethics are logically Nietzschean.
@Purplehermann
Onus is on you to explain why those differences are morally relevant. I think the reverse actually makes more sense: how can Israel — a country that didn’t even exist during WWII — have greater a right to punish someone who never did anything resembling recognising its authority than the US over its own citizens?
Not to mention, slave owners were “conquered/enemy peoples” — you know, the whole Civil War thing?
Of course, you can argue that being a Nazi is bad while slavery is good, in which case we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I’d want David Friedman to dig into his inexhaustable stacks of arcane historical economic data to be sure, but I expect most of those mines would have been profitable even if you had to, gasp, pay people to work in them. But if you’ve got an outgroup that you really hate (and who doesn’t?), you can also afford to pay for guards to keep slaves reliably in place so you can glory in their torment. And if you hate the outgroup enough, it doesn’t matter which approach is more profitable.
Mining does have the “advantage” that the perimeter you have to guard is smaller than for farming, at least.
There’s a moral question and a practical one:
Morally, I’d say slavery was a terrible evil, and keeping slaves was a terrible thing to do.
As a practical matter, imposing that kind of penalty on slaveowners in the South would have looked exactly like the conquering power unjustly mistreating people in the conquered territory because they could. I expect there would have been bad blood for additional decades as a result.
Also, there’s this weird thing going on. Slavery was widely accepted over thousands of years and large areas of the planet. Then in a few decades, it went from “this is just how things are, people do this and it’s fine” to “this is unthinkably awful and evil.” Punishing ex-slaveholders in 1866 would basically be punishing people who were doing something a great majority of Americans thought was morally acceptable one generation earlier.
It would be like if we banned abortion and then sent everyone who’d worked in an abortion clinic or gotten an abortion to jail a few years later. Or if we banned eating meat and a few years later sent everyone who’d ever worked anywhere in the meat industry or gone hunting to prison.
@thisheavenlyconjugation if there being a difference in treatment to people making bad laws and those acting perfectly legally, including using those laws you morally detest isn’t at all intuitive to you, there isn’t much to explain.
As for a country’s citizens versus conquered enemy countries, it mostly boils down to the relationship in each case.
I’m not going to bother trying to educate you on why punishing people for actions specifically allowed in the law in a country is bad.
For a country who lost a war, the relationship is basically that the victor gets to impose their values.
As for the south being a conquered people, I guess you could try making a case for it, but the laws of the whole USA allowed slavery explicitly until after the war started and the south had practiced it legally as part of the Union. The North would also be treating this South like a conquered country, which they didn’t want to do.
@EchoChaos I’d still be wary, but if the Schelling point was “it’s only because that was obviously super horrible to esentially everyone” it wouldn’t make me start considering which country I could move to that was sane.
It’s still dangerous, and I’d much rather let them be, focus on getting rid of laws that explicitly (word and intent) permit things we think are horrible.
Is there some benefit from punishing law abiding people legally?
Edit: already mostly said.
@10240:
FTFY
That is a viable defense for ancient Romans.
But in USA, after Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery? And they founded a separate state primarily to keep slavery legal?
I agree that punishing people for actions specifically allowed in the law in a country is bad but I am perfectly fine with doing this anyway in cases like slavery, murder, rape and other especially vile and clearly evil things.
My problem with Nuremberg trials is not that punished people for things that were legal in their country, my problem is that real punishment were really limited to small part of all murderers.
Yes. If my country went stupid and legalized murder, slavery and rape I would be still perfectly fine with punishing people for murder, slaveowning and rape.
That means merely that slavery was a controversial issue at the point, not that it was generally accepted to be wrong. Things don’t go from generally accepted to be OK to universally accepted to be wrong in a short time, so it’s natural that there are going to be plenty of people who consider it OK at the same time as many other people consider it wrong.
Our difference may be that you work from a moral realist approach, where there is an objective, universal moral truth, people are expected (in a normative sense) to proactively try to figure out what that correct morality is, partly from cues such as the views and arguments of people in other parts of their country and the World. I work from somewhere between a nihilist and a relativist approach, where people can be expected (in a descriptive sense) to largely pick up the values of their upbringing and environment.
Yes, that is a good description of what I believe. With bonus of moral grandstanding of my situation where I can sneer at slaveowners with zero cost to me.
Note that (European involvement in) the African slave trade predated Columbus. Portugal imported Africans slaves to grow sugar in the newly discovered Atlantic islands, following Crusader practice in Cyprus.
How about the view that using the legal system to punish such people is bad, but that private individuals are morally entitled to do it themselves?
That feels intuitively right to me. Of course, if you kill someone who you consider guilty of (legal) murder, you risk being caught and punished yourself.
@DavidFriedman
While I don’t think this is necessarily wrong, I think it’s unusually important to mentally test it by applying it to extreme imaginary scenarios.
Some anti-abortion people consider women who receive abortions to have commited infanticide and abortion doctors to be mass murders; under this “private citizens are morally justified doing things they consider moral to people they consider immoral” system killing the doctors, killing women who had abortions, and imprisoning women who are planning to get abortions until they come to term are all acceptable. If you think execution is always wrong, downgrade to the harshest punishment you think murders should get for the scenario.
If you are pro-abortion and the “private citizens doing bad things to people they think bad” doesn’t stop you from vibing with that concept, fine. But if it does, there’s now a moral need for this not to happen, because you can’t have people kill slaveholders/racists/unwoke YA authors while keeping the abortionists safe.
You could say, well, we will just figure out a way to aim it at the right folks, but that’s either A. Just government enforced law with extra steps or B. Something that’s very likely to be an ever-escalating violent war between private citizens.
If I kill an abortion doctor because he’s a murderer in my perception, then his son can kill me because I’m now a murderer in his. I can be violently sprung from the hold of arresting officers because from their viewpoint they are justifiably liberating a neat, moral guy.
I think the super-quick summary of all this is that I think the “you have a moral right to work outside the law” is a nice idea, but only if you disregard all the ways it could go wrong. Once you have people shooting abortionists or kidnapping kids from the grasp of abusive spankers, I don’t think it’s a sustainable system anymore.
@Purplehermann
I can’t parse this. Who is in those two groups?
“It’s not my job to educate you!” isn’t something I ever expected to hear in the SSC comments, but they do always manage to surprise me!
This is just an assertion about the way things are, not an argument about the way thing should be.
@thisheavenlyconjugation never thought I’d be using it ironically either. If you get this a lot here that should probably tell you something.
Forget the unparseable paragraph.
War is different, war has different moralities. It inherently involves minimum two groups of people trying to kill eachother, take their stuff and/or women. Not a good example for treatment towards other citizens.
If society wants to function, people generally need to be able to know that they can’t get killed for doing perfectly legally (as in with both letter and intent of the law).
See other posts in the sub-thread for discussion about possible exceptions, and issues with the “obviously wrong/evil” idea.
I don’t know what justice would have looked like w.r.t. Germany, but given that Germany started two successive world wars in the first part of the century, and has now become a place that’s wealthy and strong but doesn’t go around starting wars or occupying countries, it seems like our policies were practically pretty good. It’s not at all clear to me that by, say, hanging 10x as many people for being Nazi party members or something, we’d have ended up in anything like as good a place as we are in now.
@Purplehermann
So you’re making an empirical claim (“a society with ex post facto laws must be chaotic”) not the moral one I originally took you to be (“No that’s horrible”)?
That’s not even right even you reduce Europe to “the Christian states in central Europe”.
The main reason slave trade colapesed in central Europe was, that slaves (like all capital) needs cash, and the post-Roman and Germanic states were massily cash-striped. Al’Andalus absoultely held (non-Muslim) slaves. And the early HRE was in the buisiness of selling the non-Christian Slavs for that purpose.
@albotoss11 was abortion considered acceptable for thousands of years?
infanticide was.
Ah, before christianity did its work
Everything you just wrote is wrong. The confederacy did not give two shits about federal overreach, they solely objected to federal power that did not serve the slave power – see the fugitive slave acts, and the way the confederate constitution gave the states no authority on the question of slavery.
As for the narrative being acceptable.. No. The narrative was written by the losers of the war, in defiance of the proverb, and not only was it a pack of immoral lies, it also enabled and encouraged domestic terrorism and a southern system of power that kept the south backwards and poor for many, many decades after the end of the war.
That’s literally what I wrote. “The Federal government running roughshod over THEM.” Had the North left over the Fugitive Slave Acts they would’ve been just as justified.
You’re doing the exact refighting I am talking about. The narrative was acceptable in that it kept peace in the USA rather than stirring up old animosities.
Did your ancestors fight in the war?
I’m pretty solidly in agreement with Thomas, but I really want to know where you’re going with this. Because if it’s the obvious and you double down on it, the punchline is going to be hilarious.
@Dan L
My statement at the start was “then people whose ancestors mostly didn’t fight in it got mad about that resolution because it empowered some of the “wrong” people to feel proud about their ancestors.”
I am guessing that I predicted Thomas correctly.
Weird construction for a prediction, in that it takes as assumption facts that are themselves in contention. More than a little bit of Bulverism going on, though until someone deigns to produce a timeline all the weapons lack beauty.
But never mind that, let’s force it into a proper Bayesian framework – given base rates, you should expect your prediction to be correct most of the time. As a point of mathematical consistency then, it would be devastating if it decisively failed, yes?
@Dan L
Specifically what facts that are under contention does it take as an assumption?
I am not sure what you’re asserting here. Given the base rate of what?
Yes, if the majority of Americans descended from Northern and Southern Civil War soldiers in fact disliked the way history was taught then it would be devastating to that assertion.
Do you have evidence that it is the case?
If you are proceeding to test P(ancestors didn’t fight | mad about the resolution), you are glossing over the very large assumption that the “resolution” as you understand it was a coherent thing, both relatively stable and widely accepted since its inception. I’m not going to contest that myself though, not because I think it’s justified (it isn’t) but because there are other errors of epistemology here I’d rather focus on.
What is your estimate of P(ancestors didn’t fight | you’re asking the question)?
That’s a retreat to the motte. Speaking of Thomas specifically when on the offense but demanding statistics on the defense breaks the Bayesian symmetry, allowing reinforcement of beliefs against evidence.
If memory serves, Mr. Jorgensen is one of those non-moralizing Europeans we’ve been hearing about in recent OTs.
@Dan L
Fair, although “historical consensus” is always tough to define, can we agree that what was largely taught through at least the 60s was something like this:
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2017/09/06/flashback-fdr-unveiled-robert-e-lee-statue-without-controversy-in-1936/
When the President shows up to commemorate it with no controversy, it’s pretty established.
Depends on the context. On the order of 95%, I would say. Almost all non-Americans and recent immigrants would be in that camp. Probably about 70% of long-term Americans have at least one ancestor that fought on one side or another. Many have ancestors who fought on both.
Since my initial statement was “most”, it would remain predictive against single evidence either way. If Thomas is descended from a Civil War veteran, that would cause an adjustment of my beliefs, obviously, although not full abandonment of them.
@scoop the culture war discussions seem to me often about the effects of the culture war, not just who is technically right
@ EchoChaos:
No. The dramatic uptick in dedication of public monuments in the early 20th century is representative of the second wave of revisionism, including a distinct pivot from a focus on the honoring of Confederate dead to a focus on specific individuals and what virtues they purportedly exemplified. You’ve heard of the Jim Crow era? Same time frame, distinguishable both from Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era.
Not the line of disagreement I care to continue though. Anyway:
“Reinforcement of beliefs against evidence” means that a failure of consistency when evaluating your predictions allows you to take true evidence that ought to lower your confidence and misapply it badly enough that it increases your confidence instead.
I want to make it excruciatingly clear here that this can happen even if you update in the right direction every time, if you fail to update strongly enough to rare evidence. That’s why the base rates matter.
And presumably this goes for those in ideological agreement with him, yes?
@ Scoop:
I to focus worth nailing down the fundamental epistemology before proceeding to historical (re?)interpretation. It’s what I’m more interested in anyway TBH.
@Dan L
No question about that.
Yes. But if you refer to a public figure making a statement that I’ve already heard of, you’re not going to get an adjustment from me.
Have you heard of the Archmage of the South?
@Dan L
I haven’t. I assume you’re referring to yourself, though.
Either I’ve been running a very dubious con for the better part of a decade, or my Confederate-veteran-descent credentials are about as strong as physically possible.
(On the patrilineal side, at least. The other is solid Irish-American Catholics, but that’s identity politics for another time.)
Given baseline SSC attention decay rates, there are maybe 20 people looking this deep in the thread, double that at the comment depth limit. Given your 95% base rate prediction, we can expect 1 commenter to meet it at this depth, 2 at the depth limit root. What signal is this sending, and how strongly?
@Dan L
I already knew much of the Lee family was against the compromise.
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544817830/robert-e-lee-s-descendant-on-confederate-statues
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/us/lee-family-confederate-monuments-legacy.html
That another scion is doesn’t cause a large adjustment, given that families tend to have similar views.
@Dan L
By the way, I appreciate you diving so deep with me, and I do want to say one other thing (for some reason I can’t edit).
The performative anger about the Civil War in the “they were as bad as the Nazis and Nuremburg trials should’ve been run on the Confederates” sense is something that frustrates me deeply.
I think it’s a weird sort of statement to say “I wish someone else’s ancestors had treated someone else’s ancestors really poorly”, and it rubs me quite the wrong way.
I would find myself unable to have similarly strong opinions on for example how the Yemeni treated the different sides of their civil war.
I don’t defend slavery, and I really do think seceding was a mistake, but that’s not worth performative anger about either way.
The basest, most naive intuition (and propaganda) is that “we” are the Good Guys and “they” are the Bad Guys.
Civil war breaks this intuition, both sides were us, both sides are us.
Add in that America is all about freedom, the Revolutionary war is considered a good thing, and waging war on half of the states for wanting to break away, so you can control them doesn’t sound so heroic.
I don’t understand why you brought WW2 into this, I’m pretty sure that Nazism isn’t a widely defended view.
As for slavery, Americans seem to hate the idea regardless of how bad it is or isn’t, so it isn’t that slavery is not considered bad.
Worth mentioning, I think: there might be > insignificant numbers of people for whom it is not a foregone conclusion that the American Civil War and WWII genuinely had “good guys” and “bad guys”, or even that they did but not the same ones everyone else agrees on.
I personally think “good guys” and “bad guys” is too broad a brush, and I recoil at phrases that hint on being on the “right side” or “wrong side” of some historical event as if it is a clear-cut, empirical thing. I’m undoubtedly glad the North and the Allies won, but your description of our normal intuition is closer to my own than your description of how we all supposedly feel about those two wars.
All wars have heroes and villains on both sides, perhaps even in some areas of leadership but almost certainly among the people on the ground. Both sides usually also have at least one worthwhile, important grievance or argument against the other, to where it’s understandable why an average reasonable informed person would see his own side as worth fighting for. That should be enough to disqualify any war from being goodies vs. baddies in real life.
The Nazis did us the favor of being one of the most evil ideologies in history executed in almost comically evil manner, which has encouraged applying this more broadly.
I’ll bite: I’m not sure that in the largest conflict in the Western theater in WW2, one side could be reasonably described as “the good guys”; Hitler and Stalin were the embodiments of two murderously inhumane ideologies.
I think Russia is looked at as a third group that the West worked with, the west is the good guy/side
Except for the whole lend-lease thing.
And not having to care about the Eastern front.
Is that true even imagining we and the UK hadn’t been at war with Germany, blockading their ports, and providing the USSR with lots of aid? For that matter, is that true in an alternative world where no German troops are needed to fight the Allies in North Africa or Italy and similarly none are needed to resist an invasion of Western Europe from the sea? Because there were some pretty substantial losses of German soldiers and equipment (notably including planes) there.
In addition to some action on the Western front/North Africa (which did have some effect on the chances of the USSR winning), there was lend-lease (which was a much bigger effect), and Allied bombing (somewhere in between probably).
Was Chiang a good guy, either? Vs. imperial Japan (or Mao of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, for that matter), sure. But I don’t think Americans see the Kuomintang as the embodiment of justice; I think they typically just don’t know (“don’t care” suggests active indifference, which I doubt). Witness how often one hears it said that chemical and biological weapons weren’t used in World War 2. They weren’t used against anyone who could hit back in kind, but that’s not at all the same thing.
The “heroes and villains” model pretty much addresses the behavior of soldiers, but not whether the war was a good idea.
And note that this is one reason that the “Confederate flag” everyone is familiar with is actually not the flag of the Confederate States of America, but the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia.
The main reason, though, is that all the official CSA flags were terribly designed and Lee’s battle flag is awesome.
+1 to @The Nybbler. Note that the Confederate congress eventually wised up and included the Army of Northern Virginia battle flag in their new national flag… but then they ruined it by putting it against a white field that looks much too much like a flag of truce.
@Evan Þ
The Confederate Congress was lousy at everything, why shouldn’t they be lousy at vexillology.
I’ll bite on the WW2 one, sort of.
WWII was mostly a war of two insane and murderous ideologies, with one side largely financed and supported by the Allies through logistics and intelligence. The war resulted in dozens of millions of innocent humans intentionally murdered by the real victor of the war, Communism.
If the Great Leap Forward, Stalinism, the gulag system, the Cultural Revolution, North Korea’s ongoing nationwide prison camp experiment, and decades of mass murder and chaos in Latin America and Africa is what the Allies winning looks like, I’d hate to see what losing looks like.
Also, the British and French empires were ultimately doomed by the war. The UK is theoretically one of the winners of WW2, but the result of their victory is they lost their empire within a few years, and suffered under crushing economic burdens for a generation or so afterwards. Maybe losing their empire was inevitable, but that’s not so clear to me.
And the British didn’t achieve their casus belli, which was a free and sovereign Poland.
A better outcome was Unthinkable.
Let’s take another example–the invasion of Iraq by the US under GWB. Unless I’ve been terribly mislead by propaganda on this point (and as always I’d appreciate the correction), Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant, as were his sons and probably successors. The United States was a morally superior government on a number of metrics (such as not torturing dissidents and not trying to conquer its neighbors), though not by any means perfect.
There were clear good guys and bad guys. And yet, consensus now seems to be that the war was a mistake and a stain on America. Why? Several reasons. Either Selfish ulterior motives or foolish naivette as evidenced by the flimsy case that Saddam had WMDs that threatened the USA. Lack of authority for the war. And most of all, the high collateral damage inflicted in the war and occupation, despite ostensible attempts to keep this low.
So, from this I see that wars with good guys and bad guys can still be unclear about who was in the wrong or if anyone was in the right.
The US Civil war had high casualties. I’m not sure about collateral human damage, but the destruction of livelihoods was high. And the authority of the federal government to use deadly force to keep states in the union was established only by its ability to do so. As to the motives of the Union, Lincoln denied that it was about the humanitarian cause and was instead about preserving the authority of the federal government over the renegade states, ie, preserving the union. But of course slavery was the main driver of tensions between them, so it was hardly irrelevant.
I’m not saying for sure the Civil War was right or wrong. But it sure would have been worth a lot to accomplish abolition without it.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars would have a much better reputation is the US had successfully reconstructed those two nations. Instead, the US did what they’ve been doing in Central and South America (only there’s been no official war on Central and South America), deliberately muddling things to maximize exploitation by everyone involved. It’s weird, does the US resent that Japan became successful or something?
So, not wrong, just badly done? There’s something to that, but I don’t think it’s mainstream opinion.
Is your claim that the reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan was intentionally botched for Great Game/geopolitical reasons? I’d like to see some evidence for that–it certainly has been botched, but it’s sure looked like that was an unintentional outcome instead of an intentional one.
I think social mores regarding war have changed such that the sort of re-construction that worked in Japan/Germany… where we waltzed in and basically said “We defeated you. We come here as conquerors. We are going to stay and install a military dictatorship now. It’s going to set up your country with the sort of institutions we think are best. We don’t really care if you like them or not. And anyone who tries to stop us will be quickly jailed or shot. Once you seem to have accepted this and have convinced us you’re going to leave things the way we set them up, we’ll leave,” is no longer politically tenable.
Instead, we have to operate under the assumption that Iraq and Afghanistan really deep down want to have the sort of institutions we think are best (spoilers, they don’t) and we aren’t allowed to directly force them to have them (and if we try, the resistance is more than we are willing to forcibly put down). So long as we have to pretend to care even a little bit about what the Iraqi and Afghani people actually want, we can’t treat them the same way we treated Japan/Germany.
Military reconstruction in the south, similarly, started under the Japan/Germany model (we don’t care what you think, this is how it’s going to be), but once you actually started giving the southern states their elections and congressmen back, that also became untenable, because you couldn’t just simply not care what 1/2 of the union wanted anymore.
@Matt M, We did enforce our institutions in Iraq. Did the whole deal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification
We could have “won” in Iraq and Afghanistan by threatening that any city where our rules were not enforced would go up in a heap of ashes like we did to the cities of Germany and Japan. Every city in Iraq and Afghanistan would tell the world it’s part of the “democratic” government, though facts on the ground would be quite different.
Better just not bother.
@albatross11
Middle East reconstruction was not necessarily botched by the USFG as a single entity. Many individuals, both government and corporate, were incentivized to maximize their piece of exploitation, which added up to a complete botch job.
However, there is an element of botching for Great Game reasons (“we want their economy weaker than us and our allies”), given that that’s what the US did to Iran, and to various South American nations.
This isn’t even remotely true. And surely one of the more bizarre conspiracy theories I’ve seen on the GWOT.
Imagine how many individual actors would have to be deliberately sabotaging and lying for decades at a time, in full contrast to their mission and values, all for an amorphous ill defined goal of “exploitation.”
Not a conspiracy theory, just regular ol’ Moloch. It’s well known that all sorts of foreign companies wanted a piece of the Iraq pie, and that would mean preventing Iraq from building its own competing institutions.
Iraq is doing ok for a country of its level of wealth and remains the most democratic arab country. The trouble was that it ended up taking longer and costing more than was initially thought. things looked very grim in 2006-7, and that is the image of the war that stuck, much like the popular view of vietnam is what it looked like in 1968, not 1972.
Not this again. Iraq is doing OK relative to Costa Rica? Funny, I seem to see rather more ads for tourism to the latter. Maybe not having a Do Not Travel advisory due to “terrorism, kidnapping, armed conflict” helps!
The situation in Iraq being classed as an insurgency rather than an actual civil war is technical rather than substantive — it had about as many deaths from conflict last year as Somalia. It is a complete shithole, and the only worse shitholes in the Arab world are the countries with current full-blown civil wars. If you disagree, give a counterexample.
@thisheavenlyconjugation
costa rica has more than twice the GDP per capita than iraq. Guatamala would be a fairer comparison. there were 2,400 violent deaths in iraq in 2019. Mexico, which has 3 times the population, had 32,000.
@cassander
I was using PPP-adjusted figures. Why would nominal make more sense? But even granting that it does, the next country down on the list for that I have is Paraguay, which Wikipedia informs me ‘has topped the “world’s happiest place” charts’.
Yes, Mexico is also terribly violent (and in case you were about to bring it up, there are several other Latin American countries with extremely high homicide rates that you could also claim to be more violent than Iraq, to the extent that comparisons between very different kinds of conflicts make sense). But as I have said several times before, Mexico is not “in the Arab world” so I’m not sure why you think it is relevant in any way.
Which *Arab* country (that does not have an ongoing civil war) is Iraq doing better than? By my count you have about 18 to choose from. If your claim is that Iraq is actually doing better than all of them it shouldn’t be hard!
@thisheavenlyconjugation
To defend @cassander, I believe he made two seperate statements.
Statement one was that Iraq was doing ok in violence compared to countries of similar GDP.
Statement two was that it is the most democratic Arab country.
The fact that authoritarian Arab countries are doing better in GDP than democratic ones doesn’t make either of those statements false.
@EchoChaos
That’s not my point at all. In fact, Iraq has a significantly higher GDP per capita (both nominal and PPP) than several Arab countries — actually higher than all the ones that aren’t petrorich — but is nevertheless vastly worse than them as a place to live.
@thisheavenlyconjugation
Touché. That’ll teach me to stick my nose in an unrelated conversation.
Thanks for clarifying.
There was a vocal and seemingly committed anti-Iraq war movement even before it started, and my memory may be wrong or coloured, but I believe that it was largely predicated on the perception that the reasons for the war were lies, or at least that the evidence was suspect; and now this is essentially known, and the only question is amongst those pushing for war, whose motives were panic and credulousness, and who lied about their motives (whether good or bad). I don’t think it’s only obvious in hindsight that there were much better targets amongst nations whose policies or simple inability/unwillingness to combat radicalization led to support for terrorism. To be honest, I don’t think I know why the 2003 Iraq war was started, in the sense of tracing it back to anyone who has a coherent motive whether practical or philosophical, who then creates and pushes the official narrative. Anyway, it’s a big strike against the war, but I agree, if all was well that had ended well, we’d be inclined to impute good motives to those who lied to us.
There may not be a coherent “why.” Individuals can be intellectually coherent; large amorphous groups like political movements, governments, or nations usually aren’t.
There are still people who think we should get out of Japan, but in the mainstream, it seems to be a success story. Similarly, people still contrast Bush Jr. against his father’s much shorter engagements in the Middle East, which implies that length of time is the thing.
The Americans did not have to live cheek-by-jowl with Germans after the Second World War. They did have to live with the Americans on the other side after the Civil War. It’s easier to have “heroes and villains” when the “villains” are not your brothers, cousins, neighbours, or those of your own culture, race and background.
The civil war, IMO, is best looked upon as the most amoral time in US history. Both sides were pursuing incredibly evil goals (slavery and total dominion) and the victorious side has engaged in a now-successful propaganda campaign to pretend it actually cared about slaves.
that said, it was also a fairly civil war, with a minimum of massacres and war crimes. this is especially unusual in that civil wars are usually more vicious than conventional wars, not less.
It’s a very unusual Civil War because it really wasn’t one.
Recognizing it as a war of conquest between two different nations makes it make a lot more sense.
The borders of the two nations were very clear and not terribly controversial, and neither side had a substantial force of natives that really preferred to be on the other side.
The Missouri State Guard and a passel of Jayhawkers would like to have a word with you.
@MPG
I said substantial for a reason, but yes, in the West it was closer to genuine civil war.
Sure. But I think we have to qualify that as something like, “Neither side had a substantial native opposition within its industrial/population/political heartland.” The clear borders thing is much less obvious.
I can think of a pretty large population of people in the South who probably preferred to be on the other side.
@Matt are you refereing to non citizens? I’d say they don’t count towards it being a civil war..
@Purlehermann
“Noncitizens” is a legal category and so not generally applicable. It does matter, and it can reflect a sense of belonging as well as a right to participate in the governance of a land or community, but it’s not in itself enough to rule someone not part of a community. And what is a civil war except war splitting a community? (Or a state, which isn’t quite the same thing.) But the real issue is that slaves did not form a substantial military or political power-bloc at any point in the war. The Cherokee, who were not citizens, either, though they had substantial rights, came closer (Stand Watie being, I believe, the last Confederate general standing).
@Matt
I can’t answer for EchoChaos, but that’s why I would prefer to say “opposition.” There were, AFAIK, no substantial slave-revolts even when Sherman was carving his way through Georgia.
I see your claim and raise you the US Colored Troops.
The reason there weren’t slave revolts is that, by the time they enlist and put on uniforms, it isn’t called a “revolt” anymore.
Re WW2 having a clear set of good guys vs bad guys: Are you talking about the war in which we allied with Joseph Stalin and ended the war by ceding half of Europe to a totalitarian dictatorship for a generation? That’s the one where there are clear good guys and clear bad guys? Do you suppose the war looked like a fight between good and evil for the Finns and Ukranians?
I mean, if you’re comparing the US and Nazi Germany, sure, there’s a clear moral difference. But that’s not remotely the whole war.
As best I can tell, the Confederates had one major issue on which they were genuinely evil: slavery. It was so fundamental a part of their economy and society that eliminating it seemed unthinkable, even to many Southerners who thought it was morally pretty bad. Otherwise, I think the Confederates weren’t morally much different from the Union.
World War II is the war where we had the good guys, the bad guys, and the other bad guys. The good guys allied with the more distant bad guys to defeat the closer bad guys, because that was less bad than having the bad guys and the other bad guys knock out the good guys and arguing amongst themselves about who got to rule which parts of the (old) world.
This is, incidentally, a serious problem with trying to wargame WWII at the grand-strategy level. Everybody gets that you want the Western Allies, the Axis, and the Russians played by separate players if you possibly can, but then you either hamfistedly railroad the Russians into joining the Allies eventually, or you wind up with half of your wars going completely off the rails and turning into something completely unlike the historical WWII that everybody wants to play/simulate.
And that’s what makes HOI4 so absolutely fantastic.
Winston Churchill specifically called the Second Big One “the most avoidable of wars” in his WWII memoirs. The number of times the German General Staff thought their country was about to get smashed (possibly by Britain & France in alliance with Fascist Italy!) was ridiculous. Everything had to go just so for Hitler to build a vast empire and then the West to team up with Stalin to annihilate it.
There’s a difference between Good Guys and Bad Guys and morally superior/morally inferior. The South was fighting for a bad cause, but that does not make them Bad Guys. The North was fighting for a better cause and was overall morally superior, but that’s doesn’t excuse everything they did and doesn’t mean that we should moralize the North as “fighting to free the slaves” when they only stumbled into that after a few years of “fighting to save the union.”
In 1861, it’s two slave-holding nations fighting each other to see whether Washington DC or Richmond gets final sovereignty over a bunch of poor Southern farmers, even poorer Southern slaves, a small number of rich slaveholders, and the invaluable port of New Orleans. If the Union had thrashed the Confederacy in 1861, there wouldn’t have been an Emancipation Proclamation or a 13th Amendment, and slavery would have continued for some time.
Most wars probably don’t have a morally superior or morally inferior side in the sense that we would recognize, because most wars were fought before the modern era and their morals might be alien to ours.
Do we know that? Or rather, can we quantify “for some time”? I’m an ancient historian, not a 19th-century historian, but I find it hard to think that everything would just have gone on like it had before, not after intense pro-slavery rhetoric (even in bills of secession, as of Texas) and the major abolitionist successes in the North (not least the rise of the single-issue Republican party). It really wasn’t “two slaveholding nations” squaring up, after all. It was one ardently slaveholding confederacy of partially sovereign states and one increasingly centralized union (that’s the political tendency, or the rhetoric, at least) of partially sovereign states, most of which had forbidden slavery. And one side is now firmly and obviously victorious.
Do you see slavery enduring much past the mid-1860s if the Union had won and won resoundingly? Past the end of the real-timeline Reconstruction?
When do you start getting 2/3 of states willing to vote for abolition? 1877, after Colorado is admitted and the border states have already abolished?
Your only other option is to overthrow the Southern governments, which is how it actually got passed in the first place. But who is going to sign up for that war if the South fought one battle and then decided it didn’t want to fight anymore? Does Lincoln win re-election in 1864 if the South puts down weapons in 1861 and then Lincoln says “actually, I want to free the slaves: war’s back on!”
Well, sure, if they lost at Bull Run, shook hands with the Northern officers, and said, “Whew! That was weird. Must have been something in the water.” But a quick Union victory must end the Confederacy as a political entity, probably via a lightning campaign to take Richmond. You would have to have a string of successful battles without any meaningful reversals, probably accompanied by successes at sea (e.g., an early capture of New Orleans to show how hopeless the Confederacy was on every front?) The overwhelming might of the North would not be in doubt, nor the sheer incompetence of the Confederate government.
Do you think, after the obvious failure of the Southern politicians to prepare for their rebellion, their disbarment, like as not, from law and politics as traitors, and the absolute collapse of their case, that the Southern states would just continue as they always had? I find that very hard to imagine. Seeing slavery end later than it did is probable; you must, however, take your date of 1877 as an upper bound, not a date before which not.
@MPG
Additionally, slavery was already uneconomical in the North (which is why they had banned it) and was becoming so in the South. Brazil, which was basically the perfected Confederacy (they even took in Confederates who couldn’t live without slavery after the war), would only preserve slavery through 1888 despite a more powerful slave-owning class and weaker free rural class than the South had.
I think between 1865 and 1877 makes sense for when “peaceful emancipation” would’ve happened.
Brazil, at the time, was a literal empire. I don’t know what the US would’ve looked like if we had a dynasty of Washington or Lincoln, and it sure sounds interesting, but the two really aren’t equivalent.
@EchoChaos, wait, why would continued slavery have been so uneconomical that the South would’ve quickly given it up, when sharecropping persisted long after 1877 in real history? Keep in mind how the South was culturally committed to slavery, AFAIK much more so than Brazil.
@Evan Þ
Sharecropping is exactly the capitalist replacement of slavery that you would expect to occur naturally and replaced it in Brazil too.
Culturally committing the way the mid-1800s South did is only necessary when you’re trying to hold on to a dying institution.
Free cotton in Texas was already outcompeting slave cotton there by the Civil War.
I call bullcrap on the assertion that Brazil had a more powerful slave holding class than the South.
in 1864 Brazil encouraged slave owners to free slaves to fight in their war with Paraguay. In contrast, General Cleburne’s proposal to free slaves so they will fight for the South was shot down.
Given the critical situation of the South in 1864, if there was a states right more important than slavery, they would freed slaves to fight. There wasn’t any so they didn’t.
Brazil was an empire and the Emperor can do what he likes as long as he has enough backing. Plus manumission was huge, most mulattos were already free, and everyone else of note had already banned slavery.
It’s just not the same in the US. The federal government is weak and the state governments are quite obviously strong enough to fight the federal government if they so choose. There are going to be hold-outs on slavery (hello South Carolina!) if for nothing else than spite, and that will continue to be the case even if it is economically damaging. Jim Crow was damaging and it still took sending in the US Army in several cases to enforce desegregation.
If you want to end slavery in the South, you are sending in troops. The issue is irreconcilable and there are going to be holdouts. The only question is whether you are doing it before an amendment bans slavery or after. The Union in 1861 did not have an amendment banning slavery, and the only reason you got an amendment banning slavery in 1865 was because the Union pulled in 2 million men to burn the crap out of the South and overthrow all the Southern governments. Without that, you don’t get Louisiana and Tennessee voting to end slavery.
Also, even if you do get an amendment, again, you’re probably still marching troops into Charleston and Birmingham to free the slaves, even if you don’t have to march them into Houston or Richmond.
@A Definite Beta Guy says:
That, or the bankers. If slavery became unprofitable (and there’s evidence that was beginning to happen), it would substantially disappear soon after, which would make abolishing it far easier.
Was Jim Crow ever profitable? The racial integrity act?
@Lambert says:
(A) the southern economy didn’t depend on jim crow the way it depended on slavery. (B) under jim crow, something like half of the southern black population moved away, largely to northern industry.
3a. Most wars are good guys vs. bad guys after all, but expecting the bad guys to be happy citizens of the good-guy nation once they are defeated is naively unrealistic and most likely just prolongs the hard feelings.
Is it, or is it just the case for wars we don’t care about. I can’t help but notice that in the three emotionally resonant wars (Revolutionary, Civil, and WWII) that the US is pretty much an unmitigated force for good against evil or an obvious injustice. Everyone’s objective about other people’s wars, are you confident they’re objective about the ones with emotional/mythological importance?
Why do you have to argue that the Holocaust or slavery wasn’t that bad? Morality isn’t a zero-sum thing, the Holocaust can still be supremely bad without excusing the bombing of Dresden or negating the heroism of John Rabe. Things aren’t black-and-white OR gray, they can be black with a bit of gray or white with a lot of gray.
Much moreso as you approach present day. Holocaust was much worse than slavery was much worse than “taxation without representation”.
I have a ton of respect for the American founders, but the sins of the government they were fighting–or at least the ones they were protesting against–pale to those that came after in the world.
Agreed. In an alternative history where the revolutionary war never happened,
I’d expect that the US would have followed a path much like Canada.
Not what I’d consider an awful fate…
> 2. WWII and the US Civil War are not nearly as clear-cut cases of good versus evil as they seem (but this seems like you’d have to say that the Holocaust and slavery were not that bad).
Why isn’t it:
2′. WWII and the US Civil War are not nearly as clear-cut cases of good versus evil as they seem (because the Union and the Allies committed many atrocities whose badness we tend to gloss over).
In WWII we already have the clear seeds of this, between Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Manzanar, Stalin, etc.
I don’t know nearly as much about the Union side of the Civil War.
Sherman’s march to the sea was unapologetically a “total war” strategy designed to inflict pain, suffering, and starvation on the civilian population of the American south, ostensibly as a military tactic to convince the confederate government to surrender, but almost certainly also as punishment and retribution (at least according to Sherman himself)
There was a study* looking for transmissions from children (of Covid, not radiowaves), which failed to find any. Anyone know of anything to gainsay this?
Common sense and past experience predict children to be little germ magnets, but it would be nice if this case defied that assumption.
*I don’t have any familiarity with that publication.
Very good news if true; would be nice to have a link to the actual paper (presumably there’s at least a preprint on line?). The obvious question is, what’s the denominator? With zero confirmed cases of transmission from children to adults, how many children did they test? There’s one favorable anecdote, but “zero cases of transmission among X children observed, of whom Y tested coronavirus-positive and Z were in a school environment” would be much more informative.
Science mag just published a study attributing 40% of reduction in contagions by closing schools.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2020/04/28/science.abb8001.full.pdf
I have strong doubts on children not transmitting covid19.
Alright, well, I don’t think the staff is enough to explain that.
Closing schools also played a strong role in signalling to parents and others “hey take this seriously”, as well as more-or-less forcing a lot of parents to work/parent from home.
Yeah, there are confounders here. Not only keeping children from spreading the disease among themselves and thus between families, but also keeping parents home from work and keeping large crowds of parents from showing up in crowded gyms for basketball games or crowded auditoriums for band concerts or school plays.
That doesn’t match up with the Imperial College paper which predicted only about a 2% reduction in deaths from closing schools.
I’ve wondered about that, but in my country the first measure was to close schools and then restaurants, and the infection rate went down a lot.
I think the imperial college paper was wrong on this. Probably in general.
Imp college paper was wrong about just about everything so…
I know there have been other simulations that showed a large decrease in transmission from closing schools. But AFAICT as a non-expert, these all turn on a bunch of estimated parameters fed into the model, each of which has a very wide error bar.
Predictions, simulations, and estimations don’t seem like they’d have much bearing on the question. Let’s look at the data they were built on and what we’ve learned since.
@Randy M, unfortunately for research, there’re a lot of counfounding factors because a lot of other things changed around the same time as schools closed. Maybe we’ll get cleaner data soon if some schools reopen.
Why hasn’t someone serious either written a follow-up paper, or a solid critique of the underlying methodology of the Imperial College paper?
Complete speculation:
The super-spreader analysis highlighted loud conditions with people talking close to each other. Children are at a disadvantage for spreading to adults as they have to transmit the virus up and forward, while adults are transmitting either laterally or down and forward. Children also often have habits like turning away from the person they are talking to more regularly than adults, being willing to yell across a distance rather than walk up to people to talk and a whole host of play styles that are in effect social distancing. Additionally children clearly have much smaller lung capacity and I would expect that both the volume and velocity of contagious particles is lower than for adults.
Kids get sick alot because they have lesser developed immune systems and they typically get sick less often as they get older and the range of immunities they hold are much larger.
What I know is that every year, it was the parents of kids who got sick during flu season, vaccinated or not.
The mechanism of schools being super-spreaders is not children-to-teachers, but parent-to-child-to-all-of-child’s-peers-to-all-of-peers’-parents. Parents usually end up face-to-face, speaking directly with their children at least once a day.
Yeah, every year there are bugs that go around school, and those definitely spread among families. A couple or three times a year, I’ll hear about how there’s a nasty cough or a stomach bug going around the school, and sometimes it will come home and sometimes not. (We make our daughter sanitize her hands when we pick her up from school, in hopes of bringing home less, but I’m not sure how much it helps.)
We don’t know how well COVID-19 spreads between kids, but we know very well that respiratory viruses do spread between kids and in schools.
As homeschoolers it happens to us without the school. My wife brings home illnesses from work, afaict that is the primary vector for our household illnesses (not counting the annual trips her sister makes to visit via a 3 day train ride).
If things like the flu were transmitted from kid to kid in schools then there would be days with 1/2 of a class missing on a regular basis.
And also have worse hygiene, play close with and touch friends often, and put random junk in their mouths.
Also, literally grubbing in the dirt.The illnesses associated with hygiene are different from respiratory illnesses, things like lice and pinkeye come to mind that kids get and spread but adults don’t.
Compared to adults and their proximity due to work/intimate relationships etc? I would say that kids spend a lot of time 3 ft+ away from other kids and the close play comes from more intimate friendships, and not like standing next to your coworker at their computer discussing something on screen or sitting in a meeting room with a dozen other people.
Almost no illnesses are transmitted this way.
Not in every applicable way, or hand sanitizer wouldn’t be sold out.
Yes to the first, no the second. Obviously if you are promiscuous you are also a little germ magnet, no offense.
As a kid I was grabbing, tackling, rolling around in the dirt, colliding with, etc. other kids in ways I’d never do in adult life. Young kids will sit side by side with one another handing toys back and forth in between picking their nose.
Can’t a guy get in a rhetorical flourish around here? No? Alright, then, retracted.
Dirt-grubbing doesn’t transmit communicable diseases, but a Domain Expert ™ once told me that it is the reason why you can’t build in-house child care centers on corporate campuses which are located on Superfund sites (which many Silicon Valley tech campuses are): the remediated soil is safe for adults to walk around on but not for kids to play on and eat.
That seems like it would be heavily outweighed by simple paths such as children wiping their nose then grabbing their parent’s hand. If we’re talking young-ish children you can expect a lot of picking them up, cuddling, helping them get dressed, tucking them in to bed, sitting next to them at the table, etc. I don’t have children but I did work as nanny throughout college, and I think most children are both pretty handsy and have high incidences of mysteriously sticky hands.
Regarding shouting, kids have undeveloped volume-control and are more likely to yell at any distance from the other person. So it’s not a case of “they are willing to yell -> thus they don’t stand as close to people.” They just yell more at both close and far ranges.
The idea that children are super-spreaders for the regular flu is fairly accepted, right? So speculation on how they might not be super-spreaders for COVID should focus on how COVID is different from the flu, since the children’s behavior is the same in both cases.
No potential for super spreading here though, in a 2 parent household you have an R0 max of 2 for this behavior for an only child if they aren’t in regular contact with other close relatives. If one of the parents is the initial vector you have an effective R0 for an only child of 0.5 through this mechanism, and if you have 3 kids the average R0 through this mechanism is 0.17.
Looking at the data I have seen so far it doesn’t appear that this is a major transmission mechanism. Its technically possible, but surface transmission rates seem to be very low while face to face transmission rates seem to have a high potential.
I am not familiar with the literature, so I am going out on a limb here with some quick blurbs I find through google. It appears the major concern is holiday travel to visit older relatives. Specifically people who are going to be more intimate and parent like that the typical adult in a child’s life, this is certainly something to keep in mind for next winter’s potential outbreak.
As far as children being super spreaders of the flu in general this seems unlikely, or schools would have near empty classrooms for several days on a regular basis during flu season. One kid coming into school contagious would cause logarithmic growth and you would expect it to approach 100% of every school in every flu season.
a. There are indeed times when a large chunk of the class is out sick. My kids mention them to me at times. However, remember that many kids will be asymptomatic, others will be immune because of previous exposure, and still others will have mild cases that don’t keep them from coming to school.
b. When you first put your kids in school, you start getting sick a lot more often. This is an effect lots of people have noted and commented on, and I’m definitely one–I was working as a consultant, flying and eating at restaurants and staying at hotels and going to meetings and international academic conferences, and very rarely got sick. Then we put our child in preschool, and in the next few years, we got sick *way* more often than we had in the preceding years.
Just to raise one confounder: how well were you sleeping/exercising when you had young kids in the house? I could see toddlers impacting your immune system even aside from what they give you. I guess that applies less to school-aged kids, though?
To qualify as a super spreader for something with an R0 of 3 you would need to be infecting 6+ people. For ‘kids’ as a category to be superspreaders you would go from 1 case of the flu to 1,300 in 4 cycles, and actual superspreaders can infect tens to hundreds of people in a day or two, not 6. At some point HALF of the entire school would be sick simultaneously before it burnt out, and this would happen for every variant of the flu that the school was exposed to every year. This does not happen.
Of course they do, if you put your kid in a class of 20 there are 19 other kids getting random illnesses and potentially giving them to your kid*. Your kid could catch 3-4 colds a year with each of them having a very low R0 within the school. Superspreaders are not just ‘some people got sick’, they are specifically about the rapid spread of illnesses.
*Also schools bring kids together from different illness pockets and at first introduction kids antibodies are low.
This is true for the first years of school, but eventually kids grow and catch up in height to their parents, normally well before the last year of school.
Also maybe this protects the teacher but every kid that gets home will speak with their parents at face level at some point of the day, or week worst case.
Not if they’re locked down.
It was hard to tell from the article but I don’t believe the studies mentioned were restricted to cases post lockdown.
And the knowledge of how the disease spreads through the sub-population is important in determining what measures to lift and what to keep.
I’ve heard years ago that closing schools to stop kids from being supervectors was the conventional wisdom for how to stop flu outbreaks.
I presume that it was studied and modeled over decades by researchers who had the benefit of a pandemic not breathing down their necks. But there may have been some hidden assumptions in there like those that led to the “don’t wear masks” recommendation.
Right, I’d naively find that a perfectly justifiable measure.
I’m just (also naively) hoping Covid is different in some way and kids don’t actually spread it. Still, seems to good to be true, so I brought it up here for the disconfirmation.
Paper on live years lost in Italy due to covid. Not yet peer reviewed.
* years of life lost
** long-term conditions
At first blush, I think this a methodology problem – they’re using mean YLL, when they should be using median QAYLL (quality-adjusted ~). Looking at their Figure 5, it seems to me there’s a small number of healthy-per-their-LTC-definition youngish patients throwing off the average, compared with a very large number of older, sicker patients. And they don’t address short-term complications, which I think are probably more relevant to actual prognosis – if you’re already fighting off pneumonia or a subclinical flu, say. And using raw YLL in any Western medical environment is just silly, at this point; we can keep patients alive way past most plausible cost/benefit analyses if we care to, so stressing the medical system will disproportionately affect the raw measure over the one that cares about whether you’re conscious, mobile, or able to eat on your own.
EDIT: No, sorry, ignore me about the figure – I missed that double stratification on age +/- 80; I blame a small screen. The rest stands.
Tangentially related: Figure out whether China is not doing one already. A brief research did not give any hints that China is even considering it; why that is honestly confuses me to no end , as I would expect them to already be half-way done with multiple trials.
I tried three times. Incoherent all three times. I suppose there’s an “AI produces non-sequitur, how cute” angle but beyond that I think the 12 year-olds who create memes are not in danger of losing their jobs.The comment I was responding to seems to have been deleted.
Dutch fixed expressions are like beliefs of you political opponents, mostly seeming rather ridiculous, while your own seem sensible
‘heetgebakerd’ = hotly swaddled
Having a temper. The abovementioned ‘diapers’ for swaddling would be warmed up and if they were warmed up too much, the baby would get upset. This resulted in people asking/joking whether upset babies were hotly swaddled. So this inversion of meaning resulted in hotly swaddled meaning that the child was quick-tempered. Then this was applied to adults as well.
‘Bakermat’ = Swaddling mat
Birthplace (of …). My English translations have strongly favored using contemporary Dutch, to illustrate how these expressions appear to Dutch people who don’t take them for granted, but try to dissect them, but without research into ancient Dutch. However, this is an example where that is very deceptive. The verb ‘bakeren’ (swaddling) derives from a ‘baker,’ a woman without formal training who would care for the mother and child from a few days before birth to a period afterwards. This has become popular again in the last decade or so, under the name ‘doula.’
These women would bring their own basket which would be used by the mother and child to sit in, by the fireplace, which we would now call a ‘mand’ in Dutch, but back then they used the word ‘mat’ for baskets as well. So a bakermat is the basket that babies would lie in, from birth until the ‘baker’/doula left.
The nonsense that these ‘bakers’ (and modern doula’s) tend to believe in, also resulted in the word: ‘bakerpraatje’ = doula tale, for a nonsensical claim involving conception, pregnancy and birth, although it is also used for a nonsensical claim in general.
Once the immediate COVID-19 crisis is over, we will want to figure out what happened, and part of this will be determining what portion of the population actually got infected. But getting a really accurate estimate for this strikes me as hard. To begin with, how do you get a representative sample of the entire national population? And even if you had a representative sample, how would you get enough of them to participate to keep your error bars from being really wide?
Anyone know how these problems will be solved in practice?
I’ll dare say that a number like “23% of population was infected” is useless for decision making, no matter how much we’d want to know. I’d really want to know it, out of burning curiosity, but it doesn’t make it useful.
Just like the actual growth curve is a sum of exponentials, what we need (not want) is an image of various scenarios and how each of them ended up. They’ll naturally gravitate towards a small number of patterns, but we don’t know in advance how many or what they are.
While we’re concerned about a ‘2nd wave’, that number seems important.
People who do public opinion surveys?
This won’t help if a large number of cases end up being asymptomatic or barely symptomatic.
I’d suggest having all routine blood work drawn over the next year draw an extra tube to perform antibody tests on, but I have no idea on how we might mandate that legally.
Just incentivize it? Make sure you’re paying more than the incremental cost of doing the test. It won’t be 100% but it’ll get you close.
Mandate testing by employers as a requirement for reopening.
>Mandate testing by employers as a requirement for reopening.
With some mandated fractional coverage? I’m guessing 100% isn’t going to be feasible…
Are there any groups that object to blood tests e.g. on religious grounds?
A representative sample of 1000 people gets you error bars of +-3%, as we know from the basic calculations that go into ordinary political opinion polls.
If you can’t get a representative sample of 1000 people, then get representative samples of 1000 people from various subpopulations, and then weight those samples based on the non-representative ways those subpopulations were drawn (geographically, racially, income, age, etc.)
As we know from follow political polling, you should expect the truth to differ in some systematic way from the polling average, but the overall error will be within a few percentage points total, if we have a bunch of different groups using different sampling and weighting techniques. I think we could easily get an estimate that’s as accurate as the ones we got for Clinton-Trump or Remain-Leave – those were only off by about 5%, and people only cared about those errors because they led to a difference in who won or lost, whereas with covid there is no “winning” if we keep the infection rate just barely below 50% while we “lose” if it gets just above 50%.
Here’s some oil futures for 2021. If you have the correct trading account, you can buy some of these and get paid based on the price of oul in Februari 2021. Isn’t this utterly fascinating? Who knows what have happened in 2021? Wars, elections and natural disasters may change the tide of history. Still, I can interact with it!
On to my real question: What is the furthest future you can financially interact with? I can buy a oil future for 2021. Can I buy one for 2025? 2120? I guess there are bonds that pay out for very long period, even perpetuities, but they are just abstract money taps. I want to buy something that makes me a profit or a loss based on some observable fact about the real world (such as the price of oil) as far in the future as possible. (And that fact should be more than “Institution X exist”, as to avoid the boring answers.)
Any ideas? I’ll start: This site shows crude oil futures up to February 2031. $54.32 per barrel (I think? They don’t write the units.) seems pretty expensive IMO. Won’t we have cheap solar by 2031?
Current leader: February 2031!
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1255611679855034369
Nate Silver thread on Sweden. How can they have 30% of their population have been exposed to the coronavirus and never overwhelm their ICUs? Because they only had around 3% of their population with the virus at any one time. They started the (nearly all informal) social distancing before the shit hit the fan.
It’s not necessarily a good idea, because they are getting death rates 3x to 7x their neighbors. But you can let the virus run through your population and never overwhelm your hospital system.
What I question most in this analysis is his guesswork how *partial herd immunity* causes the case number to fall. It doesn’t seem in line with what epidemiologists say. Carl Bergstrom is worried about hitting herd immunity and then overshooting it, because during an epidemic it’s most likely to hit herd immunity near peak infection, meaning people currently infected will still infect many more.
Edit: An obvious math mistake Silver makes is showing Generation 6 of new infections as less than Generation 5 with R > 1. The definition of R >1 is that more people are infected in the next generation.
that definition is only for the first few generations, since later generations will be amongst a population that has many already infected
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
That’s R_{0}, not R
oh, thanks.
is R constant for each generation? do you think silver made a big math error, or a typo?
He should have distinguished between R and R0.
He’s assuming a constant R0=1.3
Which is reasonable if the amount of distancing/lockdown doesn’t change much over time.
R=R0*S, where S is the proportion of the population which is susceptible (neither already infected nor recovered). It decreases as time goes by.
new infections in generation n+1 = R * new infections in generation n
By generation 5, S has reached below 0.76 (24% of people have or have had the virus) so
R=R0*S
=1.3*0.76
=0.988
<1
and you get the beginnings of herd immunity.
Nicely explained.
Silver was explicitly saying that the number starts to drop off because your target population is building up immunity:
If I understand this right, a rate of 1.3 means that 10 people infect 13, but if some of your 13 are already infected, you can’t infect them again.[1] This factor can be ignored at the start of the curve but becomes significant later on.
So if you have 1000 people and 25 infected, those 25 infect 32.5 people in G1.
In a purer naive form, without considering the already infected, you get growth like this:
Gen_____Current_New_____Cumulative
0_______X_______25.0____25.0
1_______25.0____32.5____57.5
2_______32.5____42.3____99.8
3_______42.3____54.9____154.7
4_______54.9____71.4____226.1
5_______71.4____92.8____318.9
6_______92.8____120.7___439.6
But if you assume the 1.3 rate is the first pass and then multiply that by (100 – percentage already infected), you get something like this:
Gen_____Current_Pct_Vln_New_____Cumulative
0_______X_______100.0___25.0____25.0
1_______25.0____97.5____31.7____56.7
2_______31.7____94.3____38.9____95.5
3_______38.9____90.4____45.7____141.2
4_______45.7____85.9____51.0____192.2
5_______51.0____80.8____53.6____245.8
6_______53.6____75.4____52.5____298.3
Huh. Those aren’t his numbers. I’m not sure what his model is. But you can see that the numbers start dropping at G6.
[1] This is the big assumption, that people can’t catch it more than once. The assumption is probably true, but there is reason to worry it isn’t.
[2] Is there a better way to get constant width spaces to show up in tables?
For beginners like me interested in a more thorough explanation of R vs R0 (and a critique of why R0 is often not the right number to focus on) here is an easy to follow short paper from 2019:
Complexity of the Basic Reproduction Number (R0)
Paul L. Delamater, Erica J. Street, Timothy F. Leslie, Y. Tony Yang, and Kathryn H. Jacobsen
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/25/1/17-1901_article.
Quoting from it liberally to summarize (paragraph breaks have ellipses):
I don’t think there has been time for 10 cycles of the virus in Stockholm.
I don’t get what he means by “flow” given that the time spent very ill is something like a week or more. He seems to be assuming that people get better in 3 days.
I don’t think the average symptomatic person is ‘very ill’ for a week or more, source?
I’m talking about people who end up in a hospital. That’s the flow that matters for his argument. Not all symptomatic people.
I don’t have a cite, just an impression. I thought Boris Johnson’s case was typical of those who end up hospitalized.
Boris Johnson was in the hospital for 7 days, but ICU for 3 days as far as I can tell.
I’m not sure this parses well for me. With the ICU units not being overwhelmed, wouldn’t this just be them getting the deaths “early” that everyone is eventually going to get(unless a vaccine is available much faster than I’m thinking?).
Well, Italy and Spain got their ICUs overwhelmed and they certainly got more deaths than Sweden. So I don’t think frontloading per se is attached to ICUs not getting overwhelmed.
One important thing to keep in mind is that ICU capacity in Stockholm (the Corona epicenter in Sweden) has quadrupled. That is one of the many failings of the now-infamous Imperial paper, as it didn’t foresee such a rapid ICU expansion (and hence a lot more people would die since ICUs wouldn’t be able to treat people).
I think I need to clarify – I’m not saying that Sweden didn’t have to expand ICU capacity or talking about projections being wrong/lies or anything like that.
I’m specifically talking about where Edward Scizorhands said that having 3x-7x times the deaths in a negative and makes Sweden’s choice a bad idea. If the ICU isn’t overrun, then this doesn’t seem to be a case of something the quarantine would have prevented in the long run. It’s not a case of preventable deaths not being prevented; it’s a case of unpreventable deaths occurring at a different pace.
The entire narrative of the quarantine has been that everyone will get Coronavirus eventually, unless a vaccine comes along and provides immunity. If that’s the case AND Sweden is able to provide adequate care to Covid patients similar to what other first world countries provide, then the “extra” deaths Sweden is seeing are deaths that everyone will eventually see; Sweden is just seeing theirs early.
It’s very possible I’m wrong about this, but if I am there has to be an explanation besides “more of those who will for sure get it eventually are getting it now” as to why Sweden’s death rate is so much higher despite their medical system apparently providing care comparable or better than what a patient in a full-panic quarantine country receives.
Treatment options is the other obvious one. Not a miracle cure, but small incremental progress – like oxygenation before intubation. Frontloading, even with ICU not overwhelmed, gives standard pneumonia treatment. Backloading or flattening gives specific Covid treatment options.
Plus yeah, in a while we may actually have drugs. Remdesivir is apparently expensive and not that efficient, but it’s better than nothing.
Even if no treatment is discovered, you couldn’t have known it a priori, so delaying the peak was still the correct choice.
I’m specifically talking about where Edward Scizorhands said that having 3x-7x times the deaths in a negative and makes Sweden’s choice a bad idea
I said it’s “not necessarily a good idea.” I don’t know if it’s good or bad.
So the IHME models for Sweden have been updated again (to account for the fact the government did not in fact decide to do a lockdown, which was the previous model’s assumption) and are saying Sweden’s peak is yet to come: http://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden
That can’t be true, at least not with the predicted 2.5x increase in daily deaths, if 30% of people have already had it. We’ll see what happens.
Related:
bppblog.com/2020/04/23/the-swedish-exception/
about why Sweden actually have a “lax” response to Covid-19. It’s not an experiment, it’s how the Swedish system works.
Didn’t the prime minister of Japan basically say something like “We can’t have a lockdown, our constitution doesn’t allow it because it’s a violation of personal freedom.” or something like that?
Well Scoop, you convinced me. I just signed up on the link Edward attached.
If you are interested in flaming trainwrecks and want to feel better about your government then I recommend watching for news about presidential election in Poland.
Current plan is to do countrywide postal election without adequate planning. Everything points to an upcoming embarrassment on a massive scale.
If you look at polling, the opposition candidates do terribly. Their histrionics is more about covering up the fact that they do pathetically badly. The whole postal vote “scandal” is a non-issue.
I’m not sure we can trust polling numbers at this point.
The way electoral polling has always worked in Poland is that you only get asked who you’d vote for if you say you’re actually intending to vote. Given that a sizeable portion of the opposition electorate is declaring they want to boycott the elections (initially, because of infection concerns; currently – because of infection concerns, privacy concerns and the perception that the vote counts will be falsified), it shouldn’t surprise us that opposition candidates aren’t doing terribly well in the polls.
Elections were/are supposed to be on 10th May, from what I checked law changing election method is not yet passed.
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Polish_presidential_election#Email_requests_by_Poczta_Polska_for_private_data part is ridiculous.
Has anyone tried Direct Primary Care? Is it better than traditional primary care?
I want to try it, but there’s not too many choices around me from some cursory google searching (in the SF Bay Area).
It looks like the early returns on whether universities (at least in the US) are going to be online or in person this fall are starting to break toward “in person”.
I’ve been trying to figure out what the long term worst case COVID-19 scenario looks like. Supposing
* We never figure out treatments which reduce mortality below its current levels, or more efficient ways of lowering R0 and
* vaccines are no more effective than against flu (or even worse, the common cold)
what does society look like in 10 years?
Since the vast majority of victims are beyond reproductive age, this probably doesn’t change population growth much. But the demographic profile of society, and its customs, will be very different. How?
We get two flu shots every year instead of one.
But this is assuming another “worst case”, namely that there are new strains that show up every year for which previous exposure confers no resistance. I don’t think we have evidence yet that this is a concern.
There’s good reason to be skeptical of the flu vaccine’s real-world efficacy.
Worst case: the virus produces no lasting immunity, has a dormant phase in which it is undetectable, and becomes more lethal over time/repeated infection. It continues circulating regardless of human action and eventually wipes out the species. This isn’t very likely, but it does demonstrate that worst-case isn’t worth worrying about (because by definition you can’t do anything about it).
Are there known diseases that get more deadly with repeated infections?
Yes.
Yes. The one that immediately jumps to mind is dengue fever:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement#In_dengue_virus_infection
Dengue fever and probably zika virus do it. Both are flaviviruses. Virologists would know how likely it is for that property to arise in a coronavirus, but I have no idea.
It’s been claimed that SARS had antibody-dependent enhancement:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006291X14013321
True technically, but not constructive. It’s pretty useful too keep wondering about reasonable worst case scenario, but to omit the “reasonable” while doing the search part of the brainstorming.
And if it ever was a moment to try and force your brain out of settled ways to think, this is it.
There are some reports that it can cause infertility in males. I don’t think it has been quantified yet, but worst cause scenario is that it causes infertility even in men who had asymptomatic infection, and that infection doesn’t result in immunity, meaning that herd immunity can’t be achieved and the virus can potentially infect ~100% of the human population.
We’d be facing a Children of Men scenario, with the Sentinelese left to repopulate earth after everybody else dies off, assuming that we do not manage to infect or nuke them somehow in our death throes. Fun times ahead.
I think we already know roughly how to make somatic cells into sperm.
Hopefully the bioethicists would shut up once we get to a ‘Game Players of Titan’ scenario.
Or maybe we work out how to make viable embryos via parthenogenesis, and the 2nd wave radfems win.
A fate worse than extinction 😛
No long term immunity, virus mutates to be more virulent and lethal.
Option A: treat it like the flu.
People don’t last long if they’re unhealthy unless they are shut ins.
People over the age of 60 become rare to see, 75+ only exist in safe communities.
So overall a younger, healthier population. Because if you get old or unhealthy you die quickly.
Option b: treat it like the zombie apocalypse.
Coming into the country requires 2 week quarantine plus multiple tests, tourism suffers badly.
Other economic effects, and pleasure trips are only taken for longer periods
Spanish flu was more deadly for younger people in the second wave only, so that’s a risk, too.
Read Bill Gates recently quoted saying “We still don’t know why the flu is seasonal.”
The usual explanations are the flu virus does better in colder, drier conditions. But this never seems satisfactory to explain why, say flu season in warm humid East Texas is so much worse in December than cold, dry Calgary in March. You can say that in general the weather is more conducive to flu transmission in the winter than summer, yet location for location the seasonal severity seems more than it should be.
Now maybe the answer is network effects, but the reason I started with that quote from Bill Gates is if network effects explained it to a satisfactory degree, the quote shouldn’t exist.
I’m sure I’m not the first to have this question, but could something as genetically simple as the flu virus be inherently seasonal due to an internal calendar that equates to becoming more active in winter while going relatively dormant the other 9 months?
The evolutionary logic could be: mammals have weaker immune systems in winter and therefore an attack then is more likely to succeed whereas an attack during summer,when mammals have stronger immune systems, results in more increased immunity.
But then there is the problem of how a simple virus knows what month it is. Migratory birds and deciduous trees – much more complex organisms — seem to determine the season based on sensory data about temperature and sunlight. Seems unlikely a virus could measure ambient temperature and sunlight levels.
This is where I get way out of my depth , but is there a way a heap of proteins could put together what season it is by using magnetic or gyroscopic data? Could you design a device to determine what month it is without using temperature or sunlight data?
Do mammals have weaker immune systems in winter? If that is true then you already have your answer, and it would explain why “hot” winters in Texas and “cold” winters in Calgary have the same flue season.
I don’t know. I suppose that is the folk wisdom. Your mom telling you to put on a jacket or you’ll catch pneumonia.
Since that fold wisdom seems to be rejected as *the cause* of cold and flu seasonality, I was looking for a feedback loop which might explain more: more genetic success within host organism this time of year-> more contagious, and vice versa.
I believe that vitamin D deficiencies are strongly tied to weaker immune systems, and we produce vitamin D through exposure to sunlight.
But here again, an Arizona winter probably provides more sunlight than a summer in some place with cloudy summers.
I saw it suggested recently that it could be due vitamin D deficiency weakening immune systems. That presumably could be checked by seeing whether it varies by latitude and skin colour (to partially control for the actual temperature).
It’s a very old idea. Latest update I know of on the subject is that apparently there’s something special to actually staying in the sun, as opposed to just taking supplementation. I take it seriously enough to make an effort – large-ish doses of vitamin D, and sunbathing in the summer. (never both at the same time!).
If vitamin D deficiency makes you more vulnerable, that would help explain higher death rates among blacks, since dark skin produces less vitamin D for a given amount of sunlight. Also, African Americans are apparently much more likely to be lactose intolerant, and vitamin D in milk is the usual non-sunlight source.
Tangentially: I’ve been taking Vitamin D supplements ever since you mentioned it on SSC.
Perpetuating the tangent: I’ve been taking them too since a little after David mentioned them.
This might also explain why African Americans are doing so much worse than Africans.
@DavidFriedman: I could swear we had an OT thread here in the past speculating on less vitamin D synthesis + lactose intolerance as a partial* biological explanation for black American dysfunction.
*Lead being the other part, which can actually be blamed on racism or it wouldn’t stand out against poor whites.
Has it been found to affect black people more, after correcting for urbanisation and SES?
I know there’s enquiries into disproportionate rates of COVID-19 in ethnic minorities in the UK and London*, but they tend to live in the sort of urban area where we expect diseases to spread most rapidly. Sources have said they’re looking into the issue, but they just don’t know yet whether ethnicity is a causal factor.
*mostly composed of about 6% S. Asian and 3% African/Afro-Carribean in the UK, IIRC
It can’t be seasonality of the virus’s internal clock, because in the southern hemisphere, flu season is during their winter, and IIRC we often get the same strains as they did half a year ago.
It can if the clock can reset and measures the season by the actual season. That’s why I was thinking about gyroscopic data.
I might be wrong about this, but I think this is the kind of group selection that organisms generally can’t do.
If you are a virus particle in summer, you’re probably not going to let yourself die out (which is the effective meaning of not spreading to new hosts) just because that will benefit some other virus particle of the same species in winter.
Good point. Hadn’t thought of that.
Do we know that cold and flu viruses can’t stay alive in our bodies for months in an inactive state? Some other viruses can, like chickenpox. If that could happen it wouldn’t be a case of group selection. It would be more like cicadas sleeping until it’s their season to arise.
Group selection is difficult, but it happens. The existence of multicellular organisms is an example of group selection. Multicellular organisms, and especially germ cells are a mechanism for enforcing group selection. A colony of parasites infecting a single host can be seen as multicellular organism, with conflicting selection pressures from reproduction in the host vs transmission across hosts. But they don’t have germ cells, so it’s hard to enforce.
Here’s an example of group selection in parasites: vivax malaria is not as deadly as falciparum malaria. Falciparum is deadly because it can afford to kill human hosts as it quickly transitions to mosquitoes. But vivax lives farther from the equator where mosquitoes cannot be active all year, but must hibernate in eggs. Malaria is not transmitted to the eggs, but instead survives, dormant, in humans. Thus it must have a complicated facility for dormancy, but also must not kill the human when active.
I wouldn’t count mere dormancy, as seen in chickenpox and Epstein-Barr, as group selection.
The virus is not really an organism, just a ball tightly packed with DNA or RNA. So it doesn’t really have the mechanism to implement anything complicated (before it hijacks a cell).
Isn’t this sufficient, if true? The virus is not virulent enough to overcome stronger (vitamin-D boosted) immune systems, and thus it blooms in winter.
You’re ascribing too much agency to the virus. A virus doesn’t actually know the season, it merely responds to its environment. If its environment changes, then it will respond to that environmental change. Another way to say it : we (the hosts) tell the virus when to be active. Our behaviors as physical systems are inputs into the virus’s algorithm.
But we don’t know how we’re instructing viruses – could it be hormonal, cytokine, circadian, nutritional, social, something else, etc? And that’s because no one studies the mechanisms of disease seasonality. A good disease seasonality study takes 2-3 years, and it could completely fail. That’s too much for a lab / a post-doc to gamble on. So nobody studies it, and we know very little about those mechanisms.
It seems flu seasonality isn’t much of a thing the closer you get to the equator. [1]
With that being the case, and the fact that temperatures in non-equatorial locales can differ so much with some being quite warm in the winter, I’d surmise it isn’t the temperature\climate but the changing amount of sunlight that causes the seasonality. This might be because the virus itself is vulnerable to sunlight/UV or because humans will have weaker immune systems (less Vitamin D, more SAD-related depression, etc.) or some combination therein.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160427164125.htm
I’ve heard many people say some variation of “California went on lockdown three days before New York and look how much worse the latter is”. But we know that the Coronavirus was circulating throughout the US in February. I suspect that the differences between places has much less to do with lockdowns in general than with how widely it was circulating before general social distancing went in to effect in mid March.
I think we all know that’s not plausible. Florida and Texas went into lockdown WAY later than New York and are doing fine (Texas better than California, Florida slightly worse).
I suspect urbanization, lifestyle and climate are more important at a minimum.
There’s too much noise to know if Florida, Texas, or California is doing better or if they’re all doing terribly.
NYC obviously did worse though.
NY had some particularly disastrous policies that are unique to them. They ventilated patients early and often which appears to have driven their ICU death rate higher than anywhere else in the US. It also might have increased in-hospital spread. They also sent C19 patients back to nursing homes which put their infection rates of that extremely vulnerable population very high as well.
Yeah, that policy might end up costing Cuomo the Democratic nomination in 2024 (and any chance of a draft in 2020 if Biden becomes unacceptable). On the “bright” side, it means NYS has already infected a disproportionate amount of its most vulnerable populations, making a large second wave less likely.
Wow, I did not know they sent C19 patients back to nursing homes.
Diagnosed ones?
Yes, diagnosed C19 patients who were supposedly recovered… but were not confirmed as non-contagious.
Yea, its basically exactly as bad as you could imagine. Its like he managed to combine the over-eagerness of Leslie Knope with the incompetence of Michael Scott and added a hint of the malevolence of Francis Urquhart.
Didn’t just send them back, forced nursing homes to accept them.
I imagine that the rule that nursing facilities had to readmit people diagnosed with C19 was intended to prevent the problem of such people being put on the street. Who was going to care for asymptomatic, or mildly ill, old people, many of whom had no family, no money, etc.? Megan McArdle’s suggestion was that special facilities should have been created to house people who were (are) positive for the virus. But whichever government agency or department was trying to stop these people from ending up on the street was very unlikely to have been in a position to simply bring such facilities into being. 20/20 hindsight tells us that some level of government should have moved heaven and earth to make this happen. Is it happening even now? I don’t think it is.
The rule requiring readmission is not as insane as it first appears. And I think getting clear about how it came about would help us figure out how to solve the problem.
Literally putting them out on the street would likely have resulted in less death. Keeping them in the hospital (not intensive care) until there’s reasonable certainty they aren’t contagious would be the expedient; dedicated quarantine wards would be the usual solution, I believe.
The agency was the New York Department of Health. I won’t say they had literally “one job”, but infectious disease control is certainly one of the big ones.
@The Nybbler
Do they have condemnation (i.e., can exercise eminent domain) and construction authority? It’d seem weird to me for them to have it.
I don’t know who dropped the ball for not requesting this as part of the emergency hospital construction, but that would have been the time.
Given that schools were shut down, it would have also been practical to convert some of them into temporary quarantine wards until confirmed as non-contagious. By definition, patients in assisted living/”skilled” nursing facilities, extended care facilities/whatever *don’t* require hospital-level treatment. Most such facilities don’t even have oxygen plumbed into the rooms, relying on portable oxygen concentrators for low-level long-term demand, or transport to the hospital for acute exacerbations.
So there’d certainly be some complications in getting everything to work. But using some school buildings as nursing homes for such patients for a few weeks should be minimally difficult, especially if you’re willing to throw additional staffing at the problem to work around some of the facility problems such as not having bathrooms in every classroom.
No, it really is as (or more) insane than it first appears. No other states besides NY and NJ used this plan. Because of lockdowns there are vast swathes of unused real estate to use as leper colonies. Hotels, schools, Macys, BED Bath and Beyond, literal mattress stores, etc.
I think it is both true that (1) CA is better off for having gone into “lockdown” 3 days earlier than NY and (2) there are numerous other factors that also effected it.
As for how much those three days matter? Well, ask me in two weeks.
Here in the SF Bay Area, large groups were beginning social distancing well before the official California lockdown, or even the 2 day earlier area-wide one. The California lockdown started March 19. My bridge club (many older members, moving from table to table and passing possibly contaminated cards) was told by city authorities to shut down on March 4. Some tech companies (e.g. Google) had already told their employees to WFH by that time.
This looks a lot more like 2 weeks than 3 days to me. It also explains why LA is doing so much worse than the SF Bay area, or for that matter the rest of California – they were only 2 or 3 days before NYC.
Yeah. The week or two before the lockdown order, my dance group’s turnout dropped, with at least one older dancer specifically saying he was staying home because of Covid; another dancer said she’d decided to keep dancing and drop all other social activities (we’re a small group, maybe 9-12 people on average? The information on dancing being high-risk, or most of the analysis of why it would be, hadn’t come out yet, wouldn’t for a few weeks). An event held February 29th had half its usual attendance, and analyzing who did show up it looked as if we’d lost almost everyone for whom it was just an ordinary event as opposed to one of their top 1-3 in the year, plus at least two of our core people who had developed cold-like symptoms and hence couldn’t come.
I live in Santa Clara County.
(My organization was having “So should we cancel all upcoming events?” conversations before the county-wide lockdown went into effect, but I don’t remember how much before – just that it was after February 29th, because “all the Bay Area ones already happened” was one of the responses.)
I don’t know how many communities outside the Bay Area were thinking that way – obviously if people in NYC were canceling parties or having only half their guests show up, they would have had the same lead; any idea if they were, especially from anyone who lives there/knows people? I don’t, so genuinely no idea. But informal social distancing/avoiding events was definitely happening here well in advance.
(It was just more “OK, I was planning to do six things, I’m going to do one” instead of “guess I’m staying home all day every day now.”)
Many articles have pointed out London Breed recommending people stay home on the same day Bill de Blasio was tweeting for people to go to Broadway shows (March 5). I think there have been some major differences in informal responses in different places and populations. (And likely in late February and early March, the relevant population was educated high-income people who had close contact with travelers.)
I’m not advocating the hypothesis, but some fair number of hospitalizations would be lost in the noise of ordinary hospitalizations for seasonal influenza or pneumonia.
Probably because, like most diseases, it spread in schools and playgrounds, etc aka children mostly. When you look at the populations that actually die from such C-19 they are naturally attenuated from places that spread a lot unless they are on or going to a cruise (an overwhelmingly old person activity). If you consider how the initial spread likely happened it looks like this:
1) International businessman/student comes back.
2) Infects children or fellow students, and those of working age on transit and at work.
3) Infects more children and students.
These 3 initial steps hit the super vulnerable very rarely. The death rates only get bad when healthcare people start getting sick and spreading it to the vulnerable. In addition, children seem to have such low viral loads that unless they infect their parents first, they are unlikely to infect grandparents at a family gathering. And the virus probably burns out before then.
Remember, just because 14 days is the recommended time period to self quarantine, that doesn’t mean much for most people. Asymptomatic carriers probably have vastly divergent time periods where they are contagious. Some people for 14 days, some for 2 days. Disease progression is massively variable. Some people are probably infected for a long time, while others only a few days. Many probably beat it without ever developing antibodies (Neutrophils win at the early stages consistently).
The elderly are just generally less connected to the places that are international transmission centers, so C19 deaths will lag. This isn’t confusing, look at places like South America and Africa. Sure, some of their immunity is youth, and it might be genetics, but also its because their old people cant afford to fly.
In addition, there were a lot of anecdotes of people who said they thought they had it but of course the FDA wasn’t letting people get tested unless they had been to China. Those of who were watching closing were outraged by this and some people tried to draw attention to the issue, but few took it seriously.
Possibly related:
Some prisons started doing random testing and came up with crazy high (70%- ish of inmates) infection rates.
Of those, it looks like almost all of them (96% according to this article) are asymptomatic.
That percentage could be off for various reasons. There may be some oddity about how they’re collecting numbers, and possibly some of those people are just pre-symptomatic. Even so, it seems significant.
The idea that we would find that the majority of inmates in a prison are infected is not crazy on its face. Inmates, by definition, cannot go anywhere. If you haven’t put everyone in solitary confinement, it takes but one case to infect the majority, unless you do intensive screening to prevent that.
The fact that the majority of cases are a- or pre-symptomatic isn’t that surprising either: if they were symptomatic, we would already know the prisons have a problem.
The interesting question is: what happens next? How many actually do develop symptoms? How many severe cases? What’s the mortality going to be like?
Prediction: Lots of prisoners will die. The public won’t care.
Apparently, thinking shoplifting shouldn’t be a capital offense is being ‘soft on crime’.
But why haven’t they yet?
I predicted this back in February. I thought this disease was going to devastate two populations specifically – prisoners and the homeless. As far as I can tell, that hasn’t happened. Why?
I don’t know about prisoners, but with the homeless you’re dealing with a population that has survived severe malnutrition, drug and alcohol abuse, exposure, extremely poor hygiene, and numerous infections of various sorts. This may well carry over into tolerance of viral infections. The homeless lifestyle would kill the weak.
Is that really how it works?
I would have assumed the opposite. They’re already so ravaged, and they all have so many comorbidities, they should be more vulnerable to one more thing.
The prison population is far younger than the general population. Ohio’s prison population is almost entirely under 50, with, by eyeballing the bar graph, about ~9% over 50.
Someone debating me said this same hysterical thing. Getting C19 isn’t a death sentence. And almost no shoplifters are in prison (those that are are not likely to be in the C19 death range. Indeed, most prisoners are violent felons.
Also, crime is already up. Wearing masks is now socially acceptable. And you want to empty the prisons why?
In Houston, we solved this problem by having our mayor give a press conference in which he politely asked the criminal population to refrain from committing crimes until the COVID situation has been resolved.
Yes, seriously.
Why aren’t there more deaths?
a. The infections haven’t had time to become lethal yet–most people are pre-symptomatic, and you generally die after a week or two of what feels like a bad flu followed by increasing shortness of breath. If most infections happened in the last 2-3 weeks (plausible in the close quarters of a prison), then the serious / lethal illnesses will be starting in another week or two.
b. The inmates mostly don’t have a lot of risk factors–they tend to be young, relatively healthy, not overweight or diabetic, etc. So maybe they’ve had enough time to die but most of them haven’t–a few people have gotten sick and died, but nobody paid much attention or cared much. You couldn’t have mass deaths without anyone noticing, but a few extra people dropping dead after complaining they were very ill and dying for a week before and being ignored by the guards might not be publicized.
I’m not sure that’s right. Looking at the Highlights section of this DOJ report, prisoner health doesn’t seem to be great.
In 2011–12, an estimated 40% of state and federal prisoners
and jail inmates reported having a current chronic medical
condition while about half reported ever having a chronic
medical condition.
Twenty-one percent of prisoners and 14% of jail inmates
reported ever having tuberculosis, hepatitis B or C, or other
STDs (excluding HIV or AIDS).
Both prisoners and jail inmates were more likely than
the general population to report ever having a chronic
condition or infectious disease. The same finding held true
for each specific condition or infectious disease.
Among prisoners and jail inmates, females were more likely
than males to report ever having a chronic condition.
High blood pressure was the most common chronic
condition reported by prisoners (30%) and jail inmates (26%).
The majority of prisoners (74%) and jail inmates (62%) were
overweight, obese, or morbidly obese.
We know that someone who died on February 6th of the Coronavirus in California was originally missed. She had also not been out of the country recently. If there was community spread in California in January, then it was certainly spreading throughout the whole country in February.
Yep. It seems pretty clear that under most conditions, the virus doesn’t spread all that quickly or effectively.
Compared to what? Measles? I guess.
SARS? Ebola? It’s a far more effective spreader than those.
It’s effective enough to spread geometrically with a fairly short doubling time once community spread gets going (absent extreme measures).
Longtime political organizer, usually post in this space under a different handle, posting by name so you know I’m real.
EDIT best link ninja’d by Edward Scizorhands.
Longer reply: Not having money or a fanbase is no obstacle at all to *doing what good you can do.* You aren’t Mozart or Jesus (I assume) so it seems reasonable there are some decently nonzero fraction of people who are kinda like you, and who think kinda similarly to the way you think, so let’s plan your strategy on the assumption that a lot of people (almost certainly >10,000 in the U.S., maybe > 1,000,000) totally agree, and have about as much time/money/effort to spend on this as you do, and some have more or even a lot more.
Assuming lots of other people do agree, it’s possible–probable!–someone is already working on this, so your first step is to try and find someone(s) already working on this, and ask them what the best way for you to help them is. Failing that, you want to find other people like you who think this way, and try thinking carefully, together. (I guess that’s what we’re doing now.) And find people who do have big platforms, and ask them to attract more attention for you.
Some folks with platforms who seem to think this is important: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/27/21231717/coronavirus-vaccine-development
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/the-decline-of-the-innovation-state-is-killing-us.html
You could email the NYTimes journalists who wrote this, and ask for help finding the way to help: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/health/coronavirus-vaccines.html
also this journalist: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/25/coronavirus-would-you-volunteer-to-be-exposed-these-stanford-grads-did/
Parting thoughts… be opportunistic, at least to start with. Don’t call *your* congressman, call the one in the state who is most likely to already support your idea, and ask for ideas for who you can connect up with to help support the idea. Ask the Dr. you know from college/high school what they think, connect them w/ the others or the org you’ve found that is organizing folks.
Lastly, don’t close off your ability to hear counter-arguments or admit when someone makes a point that cuts against your proposed plan of action. Nothing shuts down your ability to persuade–or locks others into their status quo views–so quickly as proving that you aren’t amenable to persuasion.
Good point re: calling the folks who already support, thanks– I’ll call Foster and Shalala and see what their offices have to say.
So that couple that took
fish tank cleanermedicine irresponsibly touted by Trump as a possible COVID cure? The wife is now under investigation for homicide. Apparently the wife is a Democrat donor and has a previous domestic assault charge against her husband. The husband himself was a “very intelligent man” (retired mechanical engineer) according to friends. Something smells fishy.Twist!
A few weeks ago, the wife was identified and interviewed, and it immediately raised eyebrows among some of the people who read it, including me. The initial report was published by the politically conservative Free Beacon, in what I thought was an effectively understated way, sympathetic instead of doubting in tone. You can’t rashly go after an allegedly grieving widow in the hope of turning a political issue your way, but given the media lately, I was surprised at the restraint. While I thought it was suspicious, I also thought it was possible she was just kind of wacky and fixated on Trump, with a desire to appear “in the know” about science, and that might explain why she connected Trump’s comments to the ingredients and thought she had a clever idea. Too much cable news and COVID-19 anxiety, maybe. But now it’s not looking good for her at all. But look how long it took for this to come out as a major story (and it’s not even making many headlines–not that it deserves to on its own, but given the endless headlines Trump’s comment made, this is ridiculous.) Meanwhile, the medication at issue is still a major political point, and the media just repeated this approach with the “injecting disinfectant” thing.
I am appalled by the media (by which I mean the corporate, mainstream, infotainment media), and the trust it still enjoys. Even in this situation, they can’t do anything but double down on this type of divisive distraction and make communication impossible. Trump could ramble about dangerous alleged cures all day long and it wouldn’t do half the damage that the media does by making a coordinated effort to turn the risk of a couple drinking fish tank cleaner into the biggest threat we’re facing. This also creates an environment in which people suspect that bad actors take advantage of opportunity to stoke outrage without scrutiny, further destroying trust. And the anti-Trump crowd keeps setting its own traps by blowing up these incidents beyond all reason and setting standards of culpability they can’t maintain, like what’s going on with Biden now. Which leads the other side to also obsess over this stuff to expose the ridiculous double standards. And while we’re arguing over Trump’s moral responsibility for his followers making stupid choices like drinking fish cleaner (in a thousand thinkpieces!), it turns out this was never the problem! It was never even a real issue! It’s like the universe is trying to teach us a lesson about courting absurdity.
I believe that @BBA surmised that Trump had the cheat codes to reality.
I don’t know if I’m interpreting this correctly, but it seems to me that Trump probably does have what could be called “cheat codes.” It may not be 4D chess or whatever, but he has an appreciation for life’s ridiculousness and how to exploit it. That’s why the media’s response is driving me so crazy. They play into his hands over and over again, repeatedly running the same plays to take him out, never reassessing. I believe that most of the damage Trump does is a result of their reaction to his provocations, and the reason he spends so much time doing that is an effort to fight them off. I’m not arguing “they started it!” or anything like that–a president shouldn’t spend his time engaged in tit-for-tat no matter what. But that isn’t really what this is. It’s not a side issue. The only way for him to survive in this media environment, and the only way he was able to win to begin with, is to keep control of the news cycles and disrupt the narrative. Absurdity is the only thing that can get through the industrial-strength narrative, which gave us, among other things, the “masks don’t work” debacle. We’re not in a good place, and it goes beyond Trump. And if this doesn’t get us to focus, what can?
The Free Beacon (a partisan source, as you note, FWIW) posted a later article with further information about the couple and it doesn’t sound good. Definitely sounds like it was an abusive relationship – in addition to the domestic assault charge (she allegedly swung a bird house at him), which was apparently very credible until the husband refused to testify against the wife, the wife also smashed his laptop and several of his RC planes, and was verbally belittling him in public.
Dammit 2020.
Oh boy, truth is stranger than fiction, huh?
I didn’t think we’d get a murder mystery where partner A decides to bump off partner B by using a method they claim will be the fault of the President whom they trustingly believed (or rather partner B anyway) to be accurately informing them to take a drug, which drug they took in the form of fish tank cleaner.
This is one of those Golden Age mysteries where the killer tries “oops, she must have got poisoned from spraying the roses!” when they dose the victim with nicotine.
Have I earned an “I told you so?” I think in this specific case I’ve earned a minor “I told you so.”
I told you so.
https://www.theonion.com/it-sounded-fancy-so-i-ate-it-1819583392
Are there any research efforts going on specifically to study the transmission impact of various protective measures or efforts to lift certain parts of lockdown? I’m thinking stuff like this:
– Say that a month or so from now, everyone is wearing masks. How much does this impact R?
– Take the previous question, but everyone is wearing full-on N95 or equivalent respirators and maybe even face shields. How much does this help?
– Take various opening up scenarios for different businesses, and simulate how much spread would come from each of them. Ex: (probably a silly idea, but to illustrate) say restaurants are allowed to reopen, but tables are 6 feet apart and only outdoors. Set up a situation like this, and get a bunch of volunteers with mild or asymptomatic cases of COVID to walk around, talk, and eat in the “restaurant”, with life sized dummies in the seats to simulate potential victims. Afterwards, check how much the dummies’ faces were exposed to the virus.
– Testing other weird, long shot ideas at containing the spread without restricting the economy just to see if one works surprisingly well.
The short answer is, “Yes”, but the quality and long-run utility of these efforts is questionable. Many of these efforts are indirect and look at parts of the problem. Questions like, “How does SARS-CoV-2 transmit through air particles in different types of environments?” and “How long can the virus live on various surfaces in various conditions (such as outside)?” Others are looking at macro-level versions of these questions like, “How much of an effect did Policy Intervention X have on COVID-19 cases in various states/countries?”
IDK about the long-shot stuff, but at this point, my working assumption is that if someone has a question about COVID-19, there’s a researcher somewhere trying to answer it.
Scott linked this a while ago: https://www.thecovidchallenge.org/
Sign up, and ask them how you can help.
Call your representative in Congress.
Specifically, I’ve been asking my reps to either sign on to Bill Foster and Donna Shalala’s letter to the FDA urging discretionary approval for human challenge trials:
https://foster.house.gov/media/press-releases/foster-urges-hhs-and-fda-to-speed-up-approval-process-for-covid-19-vaccine
or introduce legislation directing the FDA to allow human challenge trials, or both. I’ve left a bunch of messages but finally got a human being in my House rep’s office who took care to make sure she was getting the details of the message right and said she’d pass it on.
It strikes me that there are three main logical approaches to dealing with covid to most countries that are not stopped by our unwillingness to do slightly ethically questionable research .
1 Open up as much as possible while ensuring that hospitals no not get overwhelmed and minimizing spread to the elderly. Given how ventilators are much less useful than oxygen in most cases, this should be relatively easy. The exact strategy getting to herd immunity might vary but this is the destination. This approach simply accept the deaths.
2 Stay the course and wait for much improved treatments or a wide scale vaccine. Lift only the most ineffective parts of the lockdown and strengthen the more effective parts. Keep R0 at .98 or lower. Accept the damage to civilization and the economy for lockdown for an indefinite lengthy time and some deaths as covid spreads still spreads. One can do contact tracing on the margins, but with a million asymptomatic cases, contact tracing is hard.
3 Extreme lockdown to get R0 down to .5 or so for months on end. Then mass test and contact trace. This minimizes deaths but at truly massive short term cost that possibly includes welding apartment doors closed with their inhabitants inside. Get R0 far below 1 is not something that I think has been accomplished outside of extreme situations or in a draconian manner. And two months into draconian lockdown, when there are few cases, it will take a lot of coercive power to maintain it. Once active cases are less than a twenty thousand or so contact tracing will still require mass testing every week or two but can really get effective. However once we get to that point lockdown can be largely lifted. This requires really tight immigration controls and that all the states in the US are forced to do this. Accept massive short term costs and that one has given massive coercive powers to the central government and have basically blocked international travel.
A middle option between 2 and 3 makes some sense. A middle option between 1 and 2 does not.
If R0 is 1.2 we are still probably getting most people infected before a vaccine and we are doing massive economic and social damage through partial lockdown measures. Maybe this gives us improved treatment options, who knows, but it definitely comes with a huge price. Yet it seems most places are going for this dysfunctional middle ground.
If politically we can do neither approach 1 nor 2 nor 2.5 nor 3 then we should aim for as close to 1 as possible even if the other options are better.
This is approximately how I see it, also. The indefinite draconian border control aspect (which could technically be done on a state-by-state basis) isn’t getting enough attention. Something tells me that eventually much of the public will come to the realization that halfway measures may not be worthwhile, in part due to political and logistical feasibility, and quietly resign themselves to #1. And the authorities will follow their lead. In other words, a quick and dramatic psychological shift that will be hard to imagine until it occurs.
The US is actually in a pretty good place to do 2.5 in many areas. Outside of major outbreak areas, we’re really only limited by lack of tests and lack of track-and-trace infrastructure. (People, training, etc.)
The lack of clear messaging on the overall plan has, I think, made folks generally less willing to tolerate 2.5, which has in turn muted how far below 1.0 we’ve actually been able to get.
How far have we? I do not know enough about different areas in the US to understand this question well. My local area which I know best should be slightly above average in capacity to lower and has done a strong lockdown and seems to have been able to get R0 to .8 or so. Though for decent time periods during lockdown has been 1.3 or so. Indeed my guess is that the average R0 during lockdown has been over 1. We certainly have more new cases than when lockdown started. There are definitely areas where we have gotten R0 much lower, but that takes strong public buy(see NYC) in or strong coercion. Getting more buy in than my area while having few cases seems very hard.
Here are two links. They both estimate that most (or all) states in the US are below 1 but above .7. (Well, Rt.live says Michigan is at .68 but w/e.)
https://covid19-projections.com/infections-tracker/
https://rt.live/
I have read expert commentary on rt.live and am satisfied it is garbage
Cliff, can you elaborate? I’ve replicated their approach (or at least the original one, before they began accounting for test quantities as well as outcomes), and it’s perfectly reasonable. It’s a fairly basic back-of-the-napkin kinda thing, but it seems absolutely fine for what it is.
I wouldn’t base public policy off it, but for citizens who just want to get an idea about what local conditions are like? Totally fine.
https://covidtracking.com/about-data/faq is the source.
GIGO? Don’t produce enough test kits and R looks negative.
>Indeed my guess is that the average R0 during lockdown has been over 1.
Agreed. I keep watching the number of active cases in the US rise on
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
If R ( R(t)? ) was actually below 1, shouldn’t that count be falling?
The US active case numbers do not reflect growth in active cases; mostly they reflect artifacts of testing, because US testing capacity is far below the number of active cases.
US deaths were falling, though they’ve come back up a bit; whether that is significant is uncertain.
In New Jersey, based on hospitalization numbers, the epidemic appears to have moved from the north of the state (peaking in mid April) to the south (peaking in late April) with no concern for the lockdown, but hospitalization numbers are now falling throughout the state.
@The Nybbler
Good point! The difficulties in disentangling testing artifacts from
the actual dynamics of this epidemic are very frustrating.
How exactly do we ensure this?
Expanded testing. Probably need at least an order of magnitude more than we have. Technologically possible but logistically very challenging at this point.
The idea is you knock the new case number down to what your locality can handle and, through aggressive testing and track-and-trace, keep R(t) below 1. At this point, we have a pretty good idea about things like how long new infections take to show up, how many positive tests require hospitalization, and how long folks need beds once hospitalized. You can build reasonable models to show how much your system can take, including uncertainty estimates, and plan accordingly.
I’d definitely be in favor of this if I thought we had nearly enough tests. Has that changed recently, or are we still short of what we’d need by an order of magnitude?
Last week we saw the number of tests go up, but the change was incremental and not nearly like what we’d need (an order of magnitude, as note).
There is at least one more: Start mass producing easy to use reusable respirators with N 95 or better N 99 filters now.
Something like this: https://www.3mdeutschland.de/3M/de_DE/unternehmen-de/produkte/~/3M-Wiederverwendbare-Halbmasken-Serie-6500/?N=5002385+3291100191&rt=rud
To do so we can use all the underutilized injection molding lines which normally would supply car manufacturers and so on.
Muddle through for a few month until there are enough respirators for most people. Then make it compulsory to wear them when near other people for a few months. R falls by an order of magnitude or two and after two or three months we can continue with testing and tracking.
I wrote about this at length here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yKYg6D7HNxLuJDcLS/hammer-and-mask-wide-spread-use-of-reusable-particle.
Summer is coming. It’s probably an underrated aspect, but as temperatures rise I’m pretty worried we won’t even see surgical masks that much, especially in hot, humid indoors. They are pretty uncomfortable. Already commercial workers around here tend to stop covering the nose. And imagining how it is to keep wearing it for 9 hours, I kinda understand them.
Yeah. I’m wondering how many excess cases of heat stroke we’re going to have, between the masks, the inability to rehydrate (drink) while wearing a mask, and lines outside essential businesses often being placed in full sun.
Good people of SSC (and the rest of you),
I come seeking suggestions. My family’s mid-summer vacation to Quebec and Montreal is cancelled due to Covid-related issues. We were looking forward to Montreal’s circus festival, which is off, and in general we plan on avoiding the sort of major, crowded attractions we usually frequent on these sorts of vacations.
So, barring a change in the news for the worse, we’re planning an roadtrip to a more outdoors-focused destination or set of destinations in early August. We’ll have about two weeks, and we plan to drive. We live in St. Louis, and I would like to keep the driving time around where it would have been, which means something in the twenty hour range. We like the outdoors but not camping, so hotels or at least pre-constructed glamping sites are necessary. It’s me, my wife, and our three kids, who will be nine, eight and almost four in August. (For hiking, the big kids are pretty game and I can still carry my little long distances in the Ergo.)
I have a few ideas but nothing at all solid. If this is the sort of thing you like thinking/talking about, I’d love ideas.
You can get just about anywhere in the continental US East of the Rockies in ~20 hours each way, starting from St. Louis, in my experience. Do you want to spend the whole time hiking? It would be pretty straightforward to connect up most of the national parks between, say, here and the Grand Canyon, or here and Shenandoah, or here and South Dakota, spend a few days at each, then head home more directly.
Personally, I feel like that could get kinda repetitive – I’d go do the VA national parks (plenty of hotels, as pretty as anywhere), then up to D.C. for the museums (should be open in August), then home pretty directly, with maybe a stop off in Louisville on the way home for baseball (kids) and bourbon (adults), but that’s just me. If you have family about that far away you could take that as one endpoint and connect up all the parks and neat historical stuff along the way to and from, also.
Hiking, or other outdoor stuff, with the wife and I splitting time with the little one. That way the big ones can do stuff like horses and ziplines. And yeah, it might get to be a bit much on a long vacation. Usually we go to more urban destinations, and work in a couple of days of outdoor stuff in the region. But, for this summer, in order for her to relax I have to keep my wife out of cities and away from big crowds. VA and DC is lovely idea (I’ve never seen the Smithsonian), but I’ll have to save it for another year. The historical stuff might be better when the kids are older anyway, though they did enjoy our stop through Corinth, Mississippi last year. Thanks for the suggestion.
ETA – The kids like historical stuff in the general sense of interesting old stuff, but don’t know much about the Civil War, which is what I thought of when you mentioned it. A vacation that *I* would like to take one of these days is a tour of the great Civil War battlefields, but something like that should wait until their older. If you meant general historical stuff like Monticello or Williamsburg, that’d be right up there alley.
Yellowstone is overcrowded* but it is truly amazing. Plus, there are quite nice places to stay within the park. Usually one has to book >6 months in advance. I don’t know how it is now.
* I don’t mind the people, the traffic is what gets to me.
Yeah, Yellowstone was just about my first thought, but I’m looking to avoid big crowds. Definitely have to get up there one of these years before the kids get too big. Thanks.
The first thing I’d think about is temperatures: outdoors-focused, in August, means you want to be either on a beach or quite far north. New England (where I live) is beautiful and pleasant in August, as is upstate New York. Virginia is hot and humid (I think fairly similar to St Louis)–I love Virginia (lived there for a decade-plus) and Tennessee (grew up there), but not for outdoor-focused stuff in August.
There are a lot of options in upstate New York and New England–they’re long-settled, so there’s historical stuff; they were industrial centers, so there’s museums relating to local industries; and if you pick the right area, there is plenty of hiking in beautiful areas.
If you are interested in Western Massachusetts specifically, I can give suggestions for specific sorts of things if I know what sorts of things are of interest.
I am, indeed, worried about heat. But we did a few days in the Georgia/North Carolina mountains last year after Orlando and found the temperatures reasonable. It seems like if there’s either elevation or tree cover then the temperatures are more livable than in the cities. Of course, that was also mid-June rather than early August.
Somehow or another I never realize just how far up there Massachusetts is. If you don’t mind spending the time I’d be very glad for suggestions.
Things we enjoy. I love hiking, and mountains, both of which I’ve managed to pass on to my older kids. My kids have also been asking for a canoe or kayak day for a while, and really liked the trail ride we did last year. They also love zipline and climbing courses, though I might put that off given how close you have to press in to other people, at least based on the one we did last year. Old industrial history sites would be great. We did Lawrence and the Bread and Roses strike a few years ago. My wife, who works as a labor activist really enjoyed that, and the kids engaged with it as well. It was also the right level of crowd for what I’m looking for. The morning we were there there was only one other family in the place. If there are any touristy farms (see how we raise cows and buy artisanal cheese!), we eat that stuff up.
OK, I can imagine western Massachusetts working well for you. I’ll assume you are staying somewhere between Holyoke and Amherst.
Hiking: the Holyoke Range series of parks (Mt Tom, Skinner, Mt Holyoke Range – very doable with children, pretty views. If you wanted to spend one night elsewhere, Mt Washington is 4 hours away. Mt Greylock is also a fun hike.
Canoe/zip line, agriculture: there are lots of options, but it’s not something I do so no recommendations.
Industrial history: the Holyoke canals and Holyoke Heritage Park (fabric), the Springfield Museums (things made in Springfield–from guns to airplanes to gas pumps), the Springfield Armory (National park – Shay’s Rebellion). It seems like every town has a small museum of its history, and most of that history is somewhat industrial. Lowell would be a feasible day trip, Saugus Iron Works would be a bit far for a day trip but doable.
Also feel free to email me–this username at gmail
Thanks Sam!
As an off-the-cuff thought…you could probably drive a highway towards Chicago, and see the touristy-parts of Chicago. Then you could try to follow the Lake Michigan Circle Tour, hitting touristy and/or outdoors things along that route.
Chicago would be the big-city on that route, and there are lots of small and medium-sized cities along the lakeshore. (This categorization depends slightly on whether Green Bay, WI counts as a major city, also…)
I haven’t hit the entire route myself, but I have enjoyed the towns along it that I’ve visited.
I’m probably avoiding cities, but I didn’t know about the circle tours. That’s really helpful. Thanks!
Trading onion futures is illegal in the US. Is this a net positive?
This makes no sense to me:
If the loss of onion futures is an existential threat, why don’t you appeal it?! What do you have to lose?!
Time and money you could spend rotating to other commodities?
The unquoted part of the paragraph says that’s what they did, but only with new leadership. It’s pretty embarrassing if your old leadership’s like, “Nah, we won’t pursue the case any further” but also doesn’t have a plan for what to pivot to.
Why did you cut out the rest of the second paragraph? It explains what happened next.
Worth noting that today, the CME is the world’s biggest options and futures exchange. So they did bounce back.
As I said above, that’s something new leadership did; as written it make it sound like old leadership was going to sit around waiting to go bellyup. I suppose I should have quoted the whole thing, anyway, but I try not to make quotes too long.
Anyone else hear Don Ameche (or Ralph Bellamy) in their head when reading “pork bellies” and “frozen orange juice?”
I love how the article explaining this describes in detail the Chicago onion futures drama but ignores the law illogically connecting onions to box office receipts.
Well, they’re both things you could create futures contracts for. My assumption would be that Hollywood lobbyists and Midwestern agribusiness lobbyists teamed up.
Normally, I’d make a joke about how sausage is made, but that phrase kind of spooks me now.
But why did they team up to ban futures trading onions and movie box office, but not in potatoes and music sales?
I’ll just repost this link from my comment elsewhere in this thread…
I mean, this is kind of an obvious no, right? The law was made due to some problematic trading that happened in the onion futures market, and instead of targeting the particular type of problematic trading (which might make sense), they focused on the fact that it happened in onion futures, even though it could happen in basically any sort of similar futures market.
But the reason I’m commenting is because since other commenters have brought up the movie tickets thing, here’s a good article exploring the history of the movie ticket futures ban (H/T Gwern). (And here’s Robin Hanson commenting on it back when it happened. 🙂 )
What I want to know is what kind of bribery, corruption, violence and intimidation happened to make speculating on onion crops so bad they needed to ban it?
Rival gangs going out burning down fields of onions? Someone having warehouses stuffed full of onions they were holding onto to manipulate the price? Shadowy godfathers of onion cultivation???
It was that one, yes!
They bought all the onions, and then they told the onion growers that they would flood the market unless the growers bought onions from them, and then they shorted the onion future market heavily, then they sent their huge supplies of onions out of town to be cleaned (due to rotting onions) and then they made sure that their onions were seen coming back into town on huge trucks which spooked the future market, sending it down, and then they flooded the market with their onions sending it to the bottom while they made a killing on their onion future shorts. Eventually onions in the Chicago area were worth less than the bags they were held in, onion growers went broke, and the rest of the country had a mild onion shortage.
I’m not even mad. I’m just impressed.
This is like a boring James Bond villain plot.
See, stuff like this is why I can’t honestly imagine prediction markets being any good at all as mass movement. If you get a lot of people using them, of course someone is going to try manipulating them for personal profit.
Imagine having your laws and political policy decisions made by the Chicago Onion Mafia 🙂
It’d have its upsides.
One crop duster full of fusarium spores and they’d be in your pocket.
What the fuck.
Just straight up ruining it for everyone.
I’m just surprised that “Trading Places” was a documentary.
😉 Love that movie. I wonder if its on netflix
Apparently actual traders claim that “Trading Places” has one of the best depictions of commodity trading in the media. However, whether they say this because it is true or because it’s fun to claim, I have no idea.
That’s a low bar, but I think that’s true. FWIW I trade equities not commodities, and I’ve only spent a summer on a trading floor.
What makes this even funnier to me is that, on 4chan, “onions” is a minced oath (automated replacement) for “soy”, which the board has censored as right-wing hate speech.* When users aren’t aware of this, you’ll see nonsensical phrases like “onions-guzzling”.
*But there’s no script auto-replacing the N-word: go figure.
isn’t soy something that describes products that contain a certain kind of legume? (as in “soy milk”, “soy bean”, etc.)
how did this end up hate speech and what is it supposed to mean?
(I’d like to know, partially because I am curious and partially, because if I offend someone, I want it to be on purpose and not by accident. This seems like the kind of thing that could lead to some very weird or unfortunate misunderstanding.)
“soyboy” is a slur often used in right-wing circles targeted at effeminate left-wing men
related to the theory that excessive soy consumption decreases testosterone
and it kind of works on two levels because substituting soy products for meat/dairy is seen as a common left-wing behavior as well
Does it actually affect testosterone?
Because I kind of want to try making my own miso and shoyu.
Though the Noma restaurant has had good results fermenting dried peas instead of soybeans.
I haven’t looked into it in depth. I think the right answer is something like “Yes, but only if you consume a great deal of it on like a daily basis.”
There is a difference in the level of phytoestrogens in fermented vs non-fermented soy. Miso is fermented; soy milk isn’t.
The initial problem was largely discovered with soy based protein powders that people trying to add muscle would use.
So, like 1-2 servings of a lot of soy a day.
@Matt M
Thanks for clearing that up!
I’ve heard of menopausal women deliberately eating lots of soy products instead of taking hormones to ameliorate problematic symptoms (I heard about it from a documentary, I think? I’ve definitely encountered women who do this, they’re usually alternative medicine/homeopathy types of people, in Germany, that often also means fairly left, politically).
Is there any solid data on this? I went looking just now, but I didn’t have a lot of time to look, so not finding anything might just be bad googling.
Wait, studies have shown that Asian men really have lower testosterone levels? (And specifically, do men from tofu/miso/shoyu/edamame/soy milk family businesses have even lower levels than that?)
As ana mentioned, fermented soy products have different phytoestrogen content. Fermenting also destroys the phytic acid (an acid that keeps you from absorbing iron, zinc, calcium, manganese, and magnesium) and agglutinin (a lectin/damaging protein that impairs blood flow and tears holes in your gut lining).
Shoyu and other soy sauces, miso, natto, and most other traditional Japanese soy foods are fermented with the exceptions of tofu and edamame.
For men specifically, tofu, edamame, soy protein powder and modern Western soy foods such as soy milk are believed to start having a negative effect on sperm count at half a serving a day. There’s also a 2011 peer-reviewed case study of one 19-year-old who developed gynecomastia, disinterest in sex and erectile dysfuction by changing his diet to include multiple liters of soy milk a day (!).
Several studies have proposed that isoflavones and their metabolites act as a mixed agonist/antagonist for estrogen.
The plot thickens.
Soya products are supposed to have a lot of oestrogen/promote oestrogen; I know they’re recommended as a kind of folk remedy for menopausal women who don’t want to go on HRT (often accompanied by “Japanese women have lower levels of breast cancer, they consume a lot of soya, see this is SCIENCE!”).
My understanding, therefore, is that men who consume soya products are considered to be at risk of effeminacy due to promotion of female hormones by their diet, hence “soy-boy” being an insult connoting lack of Red-Blooded Manliness.
Apparently “soy makes people more feminine” is such a mainstream theory, I actually noticed there was a joke about it in a rerun of the Big Bang Theory I was watching last night…
Penny: You know how Leonard is, he’s sensitive and emotional.
Sheldon: That’s just because he drinks so much soy milk.
So we should still see a significant effect on Asian men, given that tofu, edamame, and soy milk are staples of the diet.
4chan(nel) didn’t censor “soy” because it was hate-speech, they censored it because it was being overused, and in the spirit of chaotic meddling they automated it’s replacement to Onions without really announcing it and without it being part of any kind of policy.
Does anyone have strong feelings about litigation reform in the US? What would reform look like, exactly? I find that this is a rarely discussed issue outside of maybe malpractice lawsuits. More recently I was fascinated by Conan O’Brien settling a lawsuit from a guy who claimed he stole joke his joke off of Twitter? And apparently O’Brien found it easier & cheaper to settle than to go to court over such a ridiculous thing. It’s difficult for me to understand why a judge can’t simply dismiss the lawsuit early in the process on the grounds of being absurd.
The big difference between the US & the rest of the developed world is the latter does ‘loser pays attorney’s fees’, correct? So I (a total non-lawyer) would imagine changing to that, along with making discovery far less invasive, would be the biggest reforms. (The discovery system seems nuts- drags on for months, the plaintiffs can seemingly request every business document or e-mail under the sun, in a high-profile case stuff gets leaked to the press, etc.) Of course, we’d see significant pushback from Big Law….
Anything else for litigation reform? Does this touch on common law vs. civil law at all? (I.e. is Britain, another common law country, as litigious as the US?) Feel like this is the Biggest Mostly Undiscussed Societal Issue in the US
Oftentimes in public cases that involve celebrities or corporations, there’s a strong preference towards settling rather than going to court, strictly to keep the details out of the public eye. Settlements typically include agreements to not discuss what was agreed to, whether or not anyone ever admitted guilt, and how much money changed hands.
In the extreme case, it can be taken as a form of bribery in exchange for silence. Which is sort of how Harvey Weinstein “got away with it” for so long (by paying his accusers to shut up).
I’m an attorney, although I do almost no litigation, but the litigation I do engage with is very expensive because damages are pretty high in most patent cases so in my area I think most of the problems in patents are simply related to that. One place that certainly needs reform is consumer class actions. The consumers are never made whole and the entire CCA economy is geared towards enriching biglaw and their hobbyhorse “charities”.
The class action vehicle is really only well suited to instances where employers are mass-shortchanging employees, or companies bilking suppliers. Someone could probably think of some other cases, but those are the only 2 areas I have seen it work well.
Some fee shifting should certainly be done ASAP. Judges should have wide discretion to do it when plaintiffs or defendants file superfluous motions that demand response by opposing parties. Motions to reconsider are a perfect example being useless 99% of the time.
Discovery reform is probably needed, but I can’t really figure out a good system to do that right now. Never have been able to crack that.
The latest class-action headline I saw was something along the lines of “$3 mil out of $9 mil settlement goes to plantiffs’ lawyers; debate over how to distribute remaining $6 mil between the 10 million class members” (exact figures to the best of my recollection, lmk if they’re way off).
That number would usually be a little high for the attorneys. And the class members in that situation usually get nothing, it gets donated to some consumer advocacy group.
Equifax was nice.
Out of 380 million setlement
31 million $ to over 140 million victims (their personal data was bought by Equifax and leaked)
78 million $ paid to lawyers
remaining 271 million $ Equifax paid to Equifax[sic!], what a terrible penalty
Equifax had 587 million $ profit in 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/22/open-thread-152-25/#comment-886062
There was also 275$ million fine penalty paid to a government (less than 2$ per person).
Ah, that’s the one I was thinking of!
So, how exactly does Equifax pay the vast majority of the settlement to…itself? That isn’t making a whole lot of sense to me, and whatever article I skimmed didn’t clear it up.
The $271 million was the value of the free credit monitoring service Equifax offered victims. Since it used its in-house credit monitoring service, this didn’t involve any cash payment. But it’s still a cost to Equifax — they have to bear the real costs of more monitoring clients, without any offsetting revenue. But the $271 million is arguably an overestimate of the incremental costs to Equifax[1] (many of the real costs of credit monitoring are partially fixed, and don’t increase very rapidly as you add customers), which allowed the plaintiff lawyers to inflate the value of the settlement for the purpose of determining whether their fee was reasonable.
[1] Actually, the incremental cost to Equifax is not what’s relevant to determining fees. Fees are supposed to be calculated based on the value of the settlement to the plaintiffs, which is likely more than the incremental costs. But since these were people who had not already signed up for credit monitoring, we might suspect that their valuation of the service is less than the market price.
There are two changes that I have suggested in various of my writing. One is what I refer to as the Athenian rule — a losing tort plaintiff owes the defendant a sum based on the amount the plaintiff claimed the defendant owed him (one sixth in Periclean Athens). The argument is that, since courts make mistakes, an innocent defendant may be found guilty, hence someone who sues an innocent defendant is imposing a probabilistic cost in addition to the legal costs. The tort system treats someone for whom the probability of guilt is more than .5 as if he were guilty with certainty, so should treat someone for whom it is less than .5 as innocent with certainty, in which case the plaintiff has committed the tort of suing an innocent party.
It’s a somewhat odd rule, because the damage is done when an innocent party loses the case, but we only know he is innocent when he wins. But that’s analogous to punishing attempted murder, even though shooting at someone and missing does no harm.
I have mostly suggested that rule as a solution to the patent troll problem. For a more detailed explanation, see my Legal Systems Very Different from Ours.
My other suggestion is to make tort claims, including inchoate tort claims, marketable. I discuss that in Law’s Order. Among other things, it provides a better substitute for a class action, since a law firm can simply buy up lots of small claims, possibly through middlemen, and then sue on its own behalf. It’s inspired by the fact that tort claims were transferable in saga period Iceland, although not, so far as I know, inchoate ones.
My overall theory of legal reform is that the process shouldn’t be part of the punishment. If you are sued or charged in any court, and vindicated, you should not be worse off than if you had been left alone.
So not merely reimbursement of legal costs–but restrictions on circulating the materials found in discovery.
One of my proposed reforms is that in criminal cases, the proportional difference between the guideline sentence for all crimes charged, and the final sentence, should be payable by the prosecutor to the defendant. This is designed to reduce what I consider an abuse of plea bargaining–which is charging very aggressively to extract a plea bargain, since pleading to something that gets you a year’s probation beats risking a decade in jail even if you are innocent.
I agree with much of this, but I think it’s pretty tough to make someone whole after beating a criminal case. You really can’t reverse the publicity in the Information Age, not to mention any trauma they suffered from actually being in jail even for a bit.
I like that last paragraph a lot, but how would the payment be structured? X amount of money per charge?
Sorry–I left out a phrase: the prosecution would pay the proportion of defense costs proportional to the difference between charged and actual sentencing.
I have strong feelings about litigation reform, strengthened at the moment by just having seen Tickled, a documentary about competitive endurance tickling. Threats of lawsuits are used in the most obnoxious and bullying fashion.
To go into more detail would probably be a spoiler. That much alone might be a spoiler.
I’m not sure what needs to be done, but you asked about feelings.
However, it’s possible that those who propose solutions should describe ways the solutions could go wrong.
The big three are:
Class-action lawsuits, as already discussed above. The concept is theoretically viable, the present implementation is just absurd.
Punitive damages. Punishment is not a proper function for a civil court, juries do a poor job of setting fines, and the potential windfall incentivizes no end of misbehavior.
Loser pays. Making a winning defendant in particular pay their own legal fees and expenses, all too often makes the process into the punishment without regard for guilt or innocence. So, loser pays the winner’s expenses, all of them, including wasted time and lost business – but capped at maybe 15% of the damages claimed by the plaintiff, because that’s a reasonable figure of what one might pay to defend against a lawsuit whereas 150% is just some jerkass trying to turn the “loser pays” part of the process into a punishment.
Claims that this will make it impossible for poor people to sue rich people because they can’t afford to pay rich-people legal fees, can be countered by not claiming exaggerated damages in hopes of a windfall and by insuring the lawsuit. Possibly self-insurance by the law firm in question, which I think is a better deal for them than the current norm of contingency fees for any any lawsuit with p(victory)>0.50
Agreed. Don’t judges handle punitive damages in some (not all) jurisdictions? Which would be the better method. The whole US federalism system is a mess on multiple levels including the judiciary (judges shouldn’t be elected as they are in some but not all places, prosecutors shouldn’t be elected as they are in some places, etc. etc.)
I’d love to read a piece on how litigation is different in ‘loser pays’ countries
John, I’d like your further thoughts on class actions, if any.
The big problem with class-action suits is that the balance of power between the plaintiffs and their attorney is fundamentally broken. In a single-plaintiff suit, if the lawyer says “When we win I get $megabucks and you get a coupon!”, the plaintiff fires the lawyer and gets a more reasonable one. Lawyers can claim 30-40% of a settlement in contingency and fees fairly easily, and sometimes an actual majority, but the actual plaintiff still gets a reasonably fair deal.
I don’t have a good way to fix this, unfortunately, though maybe a clever mediocre one. If we postulate someone willing to file a single-plaintiff version of the suit, I can imagine a legal system that substantially abbreviates subsequent suits by treating facts established in trial #1 as already proven for trials #2-10,000. Coupled with “loser pays”, that gives the 9,999 subsequent plaintiffs a solid position to write in and say “Look, we both know I’lll win if we take this piddling $100 case to small-claims court and you’ll wind up paying me $2100 in damages and legal fees, so just give me $80 now and we’ll call it even”. And multiple law firms could compete to file the paperwork for that en masse for say $20/plaintiff, so everyone still gets sixty cents on the dollar rather than a stupid coupon or whatever.
But that doesn’t solve the problem of financing the first lawsuit that settles the facts, because it’s still only a $100 claim and now maybe $100,000 in legal fees so unless you’re 99.9+% certain to win it’s a losing move.
So the clever mediocre idea is, finance the leading suit in a “class action” by kickstarter. Promise your $20 if you’re in the affected class (or a passionate fan of justice for the little guy), if we get to $100K we go to trial, and if we win everybody who contributed gets a professionally assembled package of documentation for their own subsequent claim and a form letter to send to the defeated defendant for “look just pay the $80 to make this go away”. Probably lots of problems that I haven’t thought of, but it’s all I have.
The latter case adjudication thing is true. Its called res judicata. The problem is that you can fish with each plaintiff suit until you finally win, and then use res judicata over and over against that defendant.
One would think that res judicata, reasonably applied, would stop the fishing expedition after the first few defeats for the plaintiff. Maybe we need to work on that part.
Res Judicata only attaches to parties in the case, so plaintiff fishing is possible.
I mostly agree, but I have a concern with the “capped at 15% of claimed damages.” One of the reasonably common abuses of the legal system is to make lots of small-ish claims and litigate aggressively when defendants don’t settle–the “it’s cheaper to pay me $2000 to go away than to go to court” strategy; the cap being a proportion of the damages would seem to encourage that approach.
Good point. You’d need an absolute minimum for the defendant’s fees to cover the fixed costs of showing up in court with a credible defense. Well, two minimums, one for things that can be settled in small-claims court, another for stuff you’re planning to take to a jury. This also helps with “The law does not concern itself with trifles, or at least it shouldn’t.” If you’re planning to go to sue over some stupid little thing, you’d best be really sure you’re going to win or you’ll be stuck with the defendant’s non-trifling legal fees.
Let’s consider the yet-unproved hypothetical where O’Brian indeed saw the joke on Twitter and decided to use it. Should the author not be entitled to compensation?
Under US and International Law, creative works are given copyright protection upon creation without having to go through a formal registration process, though registration does make some things easier. Jokes have some value, after all joke books are available for commercial sale and have had demonstrable value going back thousands of years. That this particular joke was worthy of planned time on a major media broadcast at least illustrates that it’s the “cream of the crop” of such material. And O’Brian values such material well enough that he has a full-time staff of paid writers (perhaps a dozen people?) showing that there’s a demand for new material. A quick search shows that ad spots on his television program were selling for about $30k. Or about $1k/second.
In this hypothetical case, this was used intentionally with knowledge up-front. (That is, this wasn’t a morning TV segment with windows at street level and he spontaneously read a sign in the crowd).
Now you need to prove this to a court. If you figure that about 5% of the time the court is going to get something wrong, you’d need to have, what, at least 20x the value of the opposing council’s costs in order to break even. This means that it would be very difficult to hold organizations with significant legal resources to account as long as the individual actions they take are small.
In the case, the fair-market value of a single O’Brian-worthy joke might be $100. You don’t have rights if you can’t enforce them. Should someone be able to get away with continual violations as long as they are small?
I got a settlement (buyback + punitive damages) from Volkswagen because I bought a TDI Jetta in 2011. For those unaware, the reason Volkswagen was sued was because they cheated on EPA emissions tests. They legitimately scammed the testers by purpose-building their hardware and software to change the fuel-air mixture in the simulated conditions in the testing lab vs. the actual highway conditions, where the car would produce more pollutants.
The purchase price I paid them in 2011 minus the settlement I eventually received was approximately $8000 for a car that I owned for a little longer than 7 years. That is, owning the car from new to 7 years old cost me around $1000 per year, after I was reimbursed by the settlement. This seems… excessively harsh to VW, even considering they lied to me. I mean, I did get the performance they promised, and my area of the country doesn’t exactly have a smog problem. Oh, well.
Then there’s this problem, which seems like an enormous waste. (Mine is one of the dark blue ones, I’m sure)
Is there a way to use the current situation to reform education?
I know that quite a few commenters here think education could be done much better, what would you change that would be easier to now?
Is there a way for you or I to use the current situation to reform the nation’s education system? No.
Would it be possible for a motivated principal or school board to reform their school/districts policies in response to this crisis? Probably.
Could you or I convince our local school board to make changes? From previous dealings with my local school board, I suspect not.
Could a motivated group of congressmen pass some sort of reform? Possibly.
Would any reform that passes on any level overturn the foundational mechanics of the current system? I doubt it.
Apologies for the cynicism; please carry on with hypothetical improvements you’d make! I’m just not feeling it right now.
You’re probably right.
I’ve been spending a lot more time with young family members, and they’re getting smarter really quickly and learning more since this has started.
This makes it really obvious that education could be done better.
Making learning a fun thing to do is definitely one part, making it cool and social are also probably factors.
It’ll be something of a shame when school starts again
I’m feeling very slightly less cynical today, let me give it a shot:
Math education reform: In the spirit of “A Mathematician’s Lament”, math classes become more focused on creative problem-solving and pattern-finding, and far less focused on memorization, especially in the 3rd- to 7th-grade range. Go from counting to addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, but don’t waste time on multiplication tables and long division when everyone carries a calculator in their pocket nowadays. (Perhaps they can be part of the middle school curriculum, once students have already developed somewhat of an intuitive sense for calculations.) Area formulas can be the result of a process of discovery, and can be reused on other interesting problems, but a page of mechanically calculating the areas of various triangles and parallelograms is a waste of everyone’s time.
Aight, how about English? My main grievance is at the high school level, where for some reason it was decided that the vast majority of writing should be “analyzing” whatever classic book you’re reading. I’ll let Paul Graham do the talking about the problems with that, and what a real essay should look like.
I disagree with your denegration of multiplication tables, and I disagree with Lockhart’s Lament. To effectively gain a feel for higher math, students need to know multiplication tables. To work through higher math, students need to be able to crank through the many lower-level operations involved in them in seconds. Math classes shouldn’t be limited to mechanical drill operations, but they need to be present.
I do agree with you about English.
@Evan Þ
I’ll walk back on multiplication tables; on reflection those are actually pretty useful. But I’m pretty sure I haven’t added, subtracted, multiplied, or *shudder* divided numbers longer than 2 digits by hand in years. Calculators were invented for a reason.
I think students should learn about the distributive property a lot earlier, definitely before the multi-digit multiplication algorithm that’s based on it. That would build intuition for the kind of operations that need to be cranked through in higher-level math.
I think we need to talk about Tara Reade.
Tara Reade accused Biden of digitally raping her (if that is the correct term, I’m not an expert) in 1993. Since that time three people have come forward claiming that Tara Reade told them about the incident at the time, and that what she told them then matches her current story. One is Tara Reade’s brother. The second is her former next door neighbor, Lynda LaCasse, who says that in 1995 or 1996 she shared a conversation with Reade where they both shared stories about violent experiences in their past. She’s quoted as saying “This happened, and I know it did because I remember talking about it…I remember her saying, here was this person that she was working for and she idolised him…I remember the skirt. I remember the fingers, I remember she was devastated.”
The third person is Lorraine Sanchez who worked with Tara Reade under a California legislator from 1994-1996. She says that Reade told her that “she had been sexually harassed by her former boss while she was in DC” shortly after Reade stopped working for Biden and moved to California.
Tara Reade also claims that her mother called Larry King in 1993, an on-air phone call where she said that her daughter had to leave a job working for a “prominent senator” because of harassment. The episode in question does have a phone call with a woman with that content, but we don’t know for sure if it was Reade’s mother as her mother passed away in 2016.
So far, as far as I can tell, this mean’s that Tara Reade’s accusation against Biden is far stronger and more corroborated than Ford’s famous accusation against Brett Kavanaugh. Her accusation lists a specific time and place that the alleged assault occurred. She has three corroborating sources who say that Reade told them of the incident within a few years of it occurring, and who say that the story she told then matches the story she’s telling now. It is well established that she did work for Biden, and thus Biden had opportunity. In contrast Ford had no clear time or place where the incident occurred, no contemporary collaborating sources (and several contemporary sources who said the incident never occurred) and had no proof that she ever met Kavanaugh, while Kavanaugh has evidence (his calendar) that he was not at a party during the time in question. Four witnesses that Ford named all claimed they had no recollection of the incident. Several sources did come forward saying that Ford had told them about the incident, but all say she told them after 2013, decades after the alleged assault took place.
The accusation has had only a smattering of mainstream coverage. This is arguably because COVID is taking all the air out of the room. But given how Reade’s case is much stronger than Fords, will this blow up into a major scandal as we get closer to the election?
That depends on how easily the Democrats can replace Biden.
The media is (mostly) anti-Trump, and right now Biden is basically the only way to get Trump out before 2024.
If Biden could be replaced, then they would love to run this to show how non-hypocritical they are, but they will minimize this to the maximum possible degree because to them beating Trump is far more important than being consistent on sexual assault.
I expect the standard media narrative to be “Republicans pounce”.
That does seem likely: it is telling that Lynda LaCasse, the neighbor who has come forward to corroborate her story and says she believes and supports Reade also has said that she still plans on voting for Biden.
What do you make of that?
Are you implying she’s lying?
No, I think she’s telling the truth. I also think that for a lot of people, as Uribe said below, Trump is worse than Biden even if Biden really did assault this woman. From LaCasse’s point of view, maybe she believes that Biden did a bad thing but that Trump is a rapist. Or maybe she’s really sad that Biden is the nominee but thinks it’s so important to vote out Trump that she’s willing to vote for a molester. In the kind of two party system we have, you often hold your nose and vote for the least of two evils. I certainly know a lot of Christians who hated Trump’s character but voted for him anyway.
How could a real leftie hold their nose on rape? These are the people whose main issues stem from unfair power dynamics being abused.
I can’t even think of a right wing example of such a betrayal to the core tenets
Well at least one of them is (the woman in question). But for most of them I imagine they will dismiss the allegation as unsubstantiated and ignore it, because the alternative is Trump.
I’m not a lefty, but if I lived in a swing state, I would certainly vote for Biden. “Probable rapist who will screw some things up badly but basically uphold civilized norms and institutions” vs “probable rapist who has done everything he can to undermine civilized norms and institutions and constitutes a major threat to the future of the human species” is not a hard call.
I am a lefty, and I live in a swing state, and I’ve voting for Biden for exactly this reason.
Wow, I totally missed the narrative here.
Here the narrative is “Sure Biden assaulted a woman, but Trump did it too”.
Hint: If it wasn’t major news between 2016 and now, Trump didn’t do it. The media is not covering up a sexual assault by Trump for him.
I’m (probably) a “real leftie”. Furthermore, I’ve disliked Biden for many years, and I believe Reade’s story and am horrified for her.
I would vote for Biden in a heartbeat if I lived in a swing state and if I had the chance (I won’t, as I’m not American), even if he was running against a run of the mill Republican. And given that he’s running against Trump, it makes the decision even easier.
There are accusations of various forms of sexual misconduct against Trump, though admittedly none as serious, specific, and credible as this particular one against Biden. Remember “grab ’em by the p***”?
E. Jean Carroll’s allegations against Trump were major news between 2016 and now. Moreover, I don’t think the media is covering up the earlier credible allegations; I just think they got tired of reporting on them when it became clear that nobody not already persuaded was persuadable. A similar thing happened with Juanita Broaddrick (who I also find credible).
@salvorhardin
I find neither E. Jean Carroll nor Juanita Broderick credible for the same reason, which is that Trump and Clinton had plenty of willing women around and actual rape doesn’t fit either of their personalities, which are quite similar.
A story like the one Biden is accused I could believe about Trump, incidentally, but there aren’t any of any serious credibility other than his own assertion that women were willing to accept such advances from him, which is different from Biden in that respect.
The idea that the media would ignore a credible story of rape by Trump because of partisans strains belief. A story about sexual dalliances destroyed the Senate campaign of a Republican in the most Republican state in the Union, who would rather elect a Democrat.
If Alabama would vote for a Democrat because of plausible sexual misconduct, the idea that it wouldn’t torpedo Trump is not one you can convince me of.
I strongly disagree that “he’s just not that kind of person” is ever a good reason to disbelieve a sexual assault allegation against a powerful politician. Libido dominandi is a hell of a drug.
And if all that Roy Moore had wrong with him as a candidate was the sexual misconduct allegations, he’d probably be sitting in the Senate today.
Thanks for sharing, @FLWAB. I wasn’t aware of this.
For whatever my fertilizer-fueled mumblings are worth, I’ll give it an 80% chance that a high-profile TV media outlet brings this up by the end of August.
(EDIT – but I didn’t take into account the “replaceable Biden” factor @EchoChaos brought up. Hmm.)
Question. Does high-profile include Fox? Because I’m sort of surprised Fox isn’t making a big deal out of this already. I’d be amazed if we get to election season and they don’t. On the other hand, everyone else is likely to become extremely interested in Bulgarian Folk Dancing or something at about the same time, in a reverse of the pattern we’ve become accustomed to in recent years.
Political calculation? If Fox kicks off the story, it’s easier for the left to dismiss as a “right-wing hit job”, but if the NYT kicks it off they can’t.
More that with Covid eating all of the air in the room, it’s better to wait for a return to relative normalcy to really play this up. The closer to election day, the better.
I feel like comparing this to Kavanaugh/Ford at all is almost insulting, in the sense that as far as I know, there is still absolutely zero evidence (and no person willing to publicly testify) that Kavanaugh and Ford ever even met.
To say that there is like “10x more evidence for this than there was for Ford/Kavanaugh” wouldn’t even be mathematically valid, because how do you assign a multiplier to “some evidence” versus “zero evidence?”
It also seems relevant that Ford accused Kavanaugh of lying on top of her while fully clothed, while Reade is accusing Biden of digitally penetrating her.
Right. Even if you 100% believe Ford, what Kavanaugh is accused of is far closer to “unwanted kissing that maybe might have led to rape if it wasn’t interrupted” rather than rape itself.
Yeah, I found it impossible to assess what was going on with the Kavanaugh case. Of course, when dealing with sexual assault allegations from so long ago, this is to be expected. That’s the unfortunate and frustrating nature of these situations. The evidence often won’t be there, but we can’t just guess at what’s missing. The Larry King tape doesn’t prove anything, but it makes a world of difference. Something happened, and it predated the current political context.
Bonus: CNN deleted the Larry King episode where her mom called in.
Right-Twitter has been following the Reade story closely, with a special eye towards how left-media tries to downplay and silence it.
I had heard of that but decided not to mention it because it is a bit…well…conspiracy theorish. Maybe that episode was removed, but there are a lot of missing episodes and it really could be a coincidence or misunderstanding. I wouldn’t feel comfortable making an accusation without some harder evidence.
This is probably peak whatever-it-is:
From https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-have-womens-groups-gone-dead-silent-on-biden-assault-accusation
As someone who is probably going to vote for Biden, I am feeling really smug about not wanting to throw Kavanaugh in the trash over an accusation.
It’s also interesting to note that while the Biden campaign has denied the accusations, Biden himself has not said anything about them. Why? Because so far he has “not been asked about them in any of the several television interviews he has done since Reade’s accusations gained significant public attention.” I wonder who will be the first to ask.
My guess is at some point, someone will ask something like “There’s been a lot of talk about an alleged incident that took place in your past, do you have any comments on that?” and Biden will say something like “Over the last few years, we’ve seen an increasing media spotlight on behaviors that used to be acceptable but are now considered inappropriate. I think we’ve all learned a lot from that and it’s important that we respect courageous young women willing to tell their stories. As for this specific incident, I think anyone who knows me would tell you that I’m not the sort of guy who would do something like that.”
At which point the interviewer will immediately pivot to a new topic, and everyone involved in the media will consider the matter to have been properly addressed and officially resolved.
I mean, how many of those same groups do you think worked extensively with and for Teddy Kennedy back in the day, over Mary Jo Kopechne’s dead body? Same phenomenon. People will performatively care about this stuff when it comes at essentially no cost to (or a fortiori helps) the political causes they care about, and only then.
But there is a big cost, though. The Kavanaugh hearings cost a lot of time, a lot of attention, a lot of aggravation, a lot of stress and strained relationships. It would have been nice if we could have avoided that by not having the performance.
Edit: and in terms of “cost to the political cause they care about,” the Kavanaugh debacle burned all of #MeToo’s social capital. It was extremely expensive to #MeToo.
Conrad:
In particular, going all in on the unsubstantiated accusations from the past against Kavenaugh, but then treating unsubstantiated accusations from the past against Biden in a totally different way, will burn the credibility of a lot of #MeToo supporters by making a pretty convincing case that many of them were just using it as a hammer to bash the other side.
Now, in terms of what’s good for the nation or the world, surely having some information sources that are widely seen as reliable by everyone, rather than as in the tank for one side, would be helpful. And having everyone come to some kind of sensible way of thinking about sexual assault, sexual harassment, and accusations from the distant past would also probably be useful. But that’s not any of what’s in the short-term interests of partisans trying to win the next election, or media sources trying to get enough clicks or subscriptions to stay afloat, so we will probably continue to burn those things down and ensure that there’s no source of information most Americans don’t expect to lie on partisan or CW issues.
@Jaskologist
Not exactly. Those episodes were listed by google though they don’t have the license. It was never actually available from that platform, and CNN has nothing to do with it. And the description on the video didn’t mention anything about it either. Someone deleted it, probably not realizing that it wasn’t actually available.
This will not blow up into a major scandal. It will get plenty of air-time eventually, but it will be compared with accusations against Trump, which will seem way more credible to anyone predisposed to voting against Trump.
The accusation could have maybe created a major scandal before Biden was the presumptive nominee but not now.
Agree. The people who really look bad from this are the Bernie Sanders oppo research team. Where the hell were they? This could have made a legit difference a month or two ago!
I heard that Bernie was totally unwilling to start dragging other Ds’ laundry into the race
That’s how you know Bernie wasn’t serious as a candidate. He also didn’t need to go to the media with it – a few discreet conversations with DNC officials and key supporters and it just looks like Biden fizzled out for unknown reasons and someone else steps up.
What’s the probability that Bernie could have gotten that reaction from the Democratic establishment in any way that would have helped him? They hate and fear him about as much as the Republican establishment hated and feared Donald Trump.
@albatross11 I think if his competitor was being called an offender he’d have had a more than decent shot.
My impression of this is that Tara is a Bernie partisan who timed her release to do maximum benefit to Bernie and damage to Biden when it was a two man race.
Bernie and the Dem establishment realized that this wouldn’t actually stop Biden, just cripple him in the general, so they pulled the eject lever rather than fight it.
Except in hindsight she completely failed at this, since the podcast came out 3 weeks after Super Tuesday by which point Biden has locked down the nomination. Even with the information available at the time, anyone paying attention would’ve realised that things looked dire for Bernie shortly after Super Tuesday.
This is the understanding that I had. The Putin stuff is just the same kind of weirdness you can find all over the place in online radicalism, it’s more of a character witness than I sign of a Russian agent. However, looking at Reede drip fed ‘something is coming’ hints over the course of February while she searched for a publisher (which she eventually found in The Intercept), combined with her extensive postings in support of Bernie, it’s fairly obvious she was looking to booster for her favored candidate.
If that’s true, she miscalculated. The time to drop this story would have been before it was a two-man race, after the first few primaries when Bernie was doing well and Biden hadn’t yet solidified his broad support.
Bernie and the Dem establishment realized that this wouldn’t actually stop Biden, just cripple him in the general, so they pulled the eject lever rather than fight it.
I don’t know, I was willing to give Senator Feinstein the benefit of the doubt back at the start of the entire mess when her office sat on Ford’s accusations and never believed the conspiracy theorising about timing the release for whenever. I still think Feinstein thought there was nothing solid there, but somebody in her office or somebody from Ford’s side got impatient when nothing seemed to be happening and leaked to the media, which forced Feinstein and the rest of them to get on board with the circus.
Same way here, I think if Sanders’ campaign knew anything about this, they probably decided this would be a whole mess all over again and the Dems hadn’t helped themselves with the way the Kavanaugh investigations went on. They may have thought that there wasn’t enough there to make a solid case. I don’t think there needs to be any thing else going on there as to why Sanders didn’t try using this.
Apparently the national organizing director Bernie Sander’s campaign, Claire Sandberg has tweeted that “There is simply no moral justification for Biden to continue as the presumptive nominee. Out of respect for survivors and for the good of the country, he should withdraw from the race.”
@thisheavenlyconjugation / @The Pachyderminator
Being bad at something doesn’t make one less of a partisan. People miscalculate effects ALL THE TIME.
If she had gotten a national response and the Democrats had genuinely turned on Biden when the podcast came out, it’s totally possible for Bernie to have still won in the technical sense, and with everyone else suspended, she might have believed that would in fact be the consequence. After all, the Democrats had indeed spiked the career of a promising Senator over allegations less severe.
@Deiseach
I don’t think Sanders knew about this ahead of time. There isn’t any evidence that I know of, and Sanders really wants Trump to lose above all, just as the Dem Establishment does.
@FLWAB
That’s interesting. I doubt he will this late in the game, but interesting.
Apparently the national organizing director Bernie Sander’s campaign
Sanders’ campaign was staffed by rogues who hate the Democratic Party. The fact that they’re trying to burn Biden to the ground doesn’t mean much.
It’s still plausible if we imagine her to be a private Bernie partisan who really doesn’t want her past humiliation dragged through the front pages for the next six months. As long as it’s possible that Bernie can win without her help, she sits back with fingers crossed or maybe privately approaches the Bernie campaign with some dirt they can use if they really need it. Once Biden has the nomination locked up and the only hope is for him to drop out so Bernie can unsuspend his campaign, she comes forward in hopes that her accusation will be enough to force Biden to drop out because clearly nothing else will.
And this won’t do it either, but if she didn’t get her political calculus right it is still plausible behavior on her part.
@Deiseach
But then if it wasn’t timing, how do you explain the sudden onset of fear of flying from Ford? It seems obvious that that was intended to draw it out even further. I guess she could’ve started out honest and pivoted later, but I don’t think it as likely as both being about timing.
Being grilled by a Senate committee on national TV is a prospect that might give many of us cold feet. I like to think that I’d have told the truth about my reason for not wanting to appear after all, or at least come up with a more convincing excuse, but you never really know until you’re put to the test.
That’s the rub, isn’t it? Between the flying and the second door, she shot her credibility all to hell with anyone who was (a)paying attention and (b)not already decided for political purposes.
When every action one side takes results in a delay, and a delay could be incredibly politically advantageous to that side, when does Occam’s razor begin to apply? Remember, the delay was all about the possibility of taking back the senate and stonewalling the nomination(s), and a fallback of at least delaying him long enough to keep him off a gun case and an abortion case that were coming up (and probably more as well).
Are we pretending that Pelosi doesn’t play legislative games? She’s one of the best!
But then if it wasn’t timing, how do you explain the sudden onset of fear of flying from Ford?
I disliked Feinstein’s comments about Coney Barrett’s Catholicism, but I do really give her the benefit of the doubt on this. Ford’s allegations were weak and I think Feinstein is experienced enough politically to recognise when a dog won’t hunt, but then that lack of immediate “this is a scandal!” from Feinstein meant that Ford/a Ford sympathiser either in Feinstein’s office or elsewhere then deliberately leaked to the media to force Feinstein’s hand.
The fear of flying (that then was shown to be bobbins as Ford had no problem being flown out to visit lawyers provided by the Democrats to chat about the case) and other things meant that although I considered Ford’s accusation to be plausible (it was indeed possible that as a teenager she hung out with older teens and attended a party where the boys got drunk), I did not consider it to be credible enough to warrant more than the FBI investigation (and subsequent clearing) that Kavanaugh got. That the Democrats and the Elevator Screamers turned it into a three-ring circus for political advantage was all partisan politics and yeah, I do think Ford was sufficiently on the left/Blue Tribe side and held the Correct Opinions and was convinced by all the huffing and puffing about “abortion rights!” that she used this to try and save the nation from a conservative anti-abortion rights monster getting a Supreme Court seat and forcing women back to the back-alley abortion days.
The whole situation has really revealed what massive partisan hypocrites everyone can be. Decided whether an accusation is ‘credible’ entirely based on whether they want it to harm the person or party its truth would harm, on the scantest of evidence in the real world. Ford’s accusation was thin, absolutely impossible to prove or disprove, loaded down with circumstantial evidence and ‘corroboration’ from others barely amounting to better than hearsay. Reede’s accusation is the same way. But the two groups that went to the mat over Kavanaugh have just switched sides and talking points for Biden.
Really all the whole thing has done for me is make me feel really jaded about the future of politics. Things like Trump are going to just keep happening because people are just going to continue hating each other more and more and become more and more willing to do and say anything to defeat enemies, including ones whose main shortcoming is the narcissism of small differences.
I recall at the time of the Kavanaugh hearings that a lot of conservative commentators were comparing Kavanaugh to Bill Clinton and pointing out how the left had supported him despite several accusations of rape, etc. I also saw many progressive commentators argue back that the 1990s were a different time and Bill Clinton’s accusers would have been treated differently if it had happened today. Now just a couple years later we have an excellent case study and can see how things will really lie.
Meh, I feel pretty nonpartisan on this issue. I thought Ford’s accusation was implausible, and initially thought this one was too. My initial impression on this one has been significantly eroded since. This is I suppose the opposite of what happened in the Kavanaugh case where my initial impression was strengthened as it played out, but I don’t think that is partisanship, its the drip of contemporaneous corroboration in the Biden case that makes it seem more likely.
This
You said it. Basically everyone to the left of Mitt Romney, other than a handful of Sanders cultists, has proclaimed Reade “not credible” based solely on the fact that admitting her credibility is tantamount to forfeiting the election to Trump then and there.
Nobody actually cares about any of this, and I’m mad at myself for ever having cared.
But it’s not. With Ford, she didn’t know the time or place and there was no evidence she and Kavanaugh had ever met.
Reade names the specific time and place of the occurrence and it’s beyond question that they knew each other and were alone together.
To say the only difference between these two cases is whose ox is getting gored does not seem reasonable. I think a non-partisan person could tell that Reade’s accusation is more credible than Ford’s.
She does not name a specific time or place, AFAIK.
IMO it’s entirely rational and understandable. People care about what policy a politician makes. (Not the fine details, but at least what ideology governs the policy-making.) Whether the politician is a rapist gives little information about what policy he’ll make, especially given all other information we know. As such, a scandal is highly unlikely to make a partisan voter switch to voting for the opposing party’s candidate. In fact it would be much more irrational to switch one’s vote based on personal scandals to a candidate one has major ideological or policy disagreements with.
At the same time, in public, there is a general understanding that we don’t want to elect a rapist, and some undecided voters may actually care, so it’s always in a partisan voter’s interest to argue that his candidate is innocent (or that the opponent is guilty), even though he doesn’t actually care. No one has an incentive to publicly admit that we don’t care, as you would give up the ability to pile on candidates you oppose when they have a scandal, and you can always just argue that your candidate is innocent.
But given how Reade’s case is much stronger than Fords, will this blow up into a major scandal as we get closer to the election?
Do you really need an answer to that? Party politics, my friend. Only The Other Lot are rapists, Our Lot are falsely accused.
I hated the entire circus of the Kavanaugh confirmation. I very much doubt Democratic politicians are going to be calling for an FBI investigation of the allegation, or Daily Kos will be urging people to sign petitions, or that there will be a committee asking Biden questions about anonymous letters.
This does the Republicans no good, either; any mention of it will only get “Trump sexual assault and rape! grab ’em by the pussy!” and “Kavanaugh is a rapist, they’re all rapists, trufax!” rehashes in all the media.
I support the accusations being thoroughly investigated by the media. That’s about all that can happen on the investigation front, unfortunately.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Biden had done this, just on Bayesian priors about whether people will engage in poor sexual behavior. It seems like it’s out of character for Biden, but who knows. I don’t think any of his other behavior, even the “too touchy” stuff, seems particularly red flag, but Cosby looked good too.
If Tara Reade actually wanted Biden out of the race, she would have been much more effective going public with this as early as possible. Biden was tremendously vulnerable all through the campaign, right up until he wasn’t. There is other evidence about motivation that I would like to see throughly investigated as well.
My stance on politics has always been a “best option” stance, as in “pick the best option for actually advancing the interests of the country as you see them”. Even strictly on the “Do you want a credibly accused sexual predator in the White House?” question, Biden is preferable to Trump.
See, I’m on the other end here because the allegation sounds laughable to me. Its like what a really creepy middle schooler would do, not a full grown human male. At least in my mind.
Isn’t this basically what Trump claimed (on tape) to have done? If you think you have someone who is receptive, the little head/man in the boat can do all sorts of perverse thinking
I mean, Cosby was raping people who were catatonic. That strikes me as far less “understandable”, but humans can be stimulated in all sorts of profoundly bizarre ways.
I don’t think Trump was bragging he did it, he was saying you can do anything and get away with it if your a celeb, even something as dumb as grabbing their genitals (which is different but similar to this I’d think, not that I tend to think of this much). But perhaps this is Joe’s little fetish, I doubt it personally.
@Clutzy:
Did you listen to the tape? Or just read a transcript?
The whole conversation was braggadocio from Trump, “here are the things I do and they let me because I’m famous.”
I didn’t expect Matt Lauer’s office to be a sex dungeon, either. Grown human males do weird stuff, especially when they have power and there are women around enthralled by their status.
As far as Biden’s character goes, I would agree it would be out of character if it weren’t for all the weird touching/sniffing videos. That’s what he does in public. It seems to me like his character is that he has boundary issues, and difficulty telling what constitutes appropriate versus inappropriate levels of intimacy with people.
Although I think we’ve disagreed on whether the accusations against Trump are credible in the past, at least this has some honesty.
+1 to what HeelBearCub said. If this had come out early enough that there was still a credible non-Bernie alternative to Biden for the party to rally ’round, they likely would have done so, especially since before the SC primary the dominant narrative was that Biden was done for anyway.
Reade’s allegation is credible and indeed probably true, the NY Times has reported pretty clearly on it though it’s fair to say they haven’t trumpeted it as much as prior such allegations against right-wing figures, and it will make very little if any difference to the race. Biden is in no position now to use the allegations against Trump against him, but he wasn’t really in a position to do so before since 2016 demonstrated that those allegations weren’t politically salient.
Yeah this is not terribly complicated in my view.
1. Reade’s allegation appears to me to be well-corroborated, and based on that probably true.
2. Given that, I would prefer that Joe Biden drop out or be somehow replaced as the Democratic nominee.
3. If that does not happen I will vote for the best viable option for president, which in that case would be Joe Biden.
I think the media’s slow response to the story has been a mix of not wanting it to be true and Reade having some initial red flags.
Plus it is in the other half of the media’s interest for it to be a big story nearer the election.
The contemporaneous corroborations are not specific as to what the complaint was, and IIRC Reade had earlier complaints which were less serious. So the corroborations may not be as significant as they appear — they may not refer to the clear sexual assault complaints, but rather to more ambiguous “Creepy Joe” behavior.
I think 1 is not even remotely established at this point.
Biden looks good to you? What does a red flag look like to you?
Was this comment actually intended for me? I’m not sure how it tracks to what I said.
I said Biden, even assuming these accusations withstand scrutiny, looks far better than the alternative, which is Trump. I’d certainly like to know if Biden did this, even more I’d like to know if he made a habit of it, but credible accusations against Trump are more numerous and more severe.
And all that is leaving aside the more important question, which is their prospective performance as president.
I might be reading too much into your wording.
The rest of it makes sense for you to say.
Biden looks to me like someone who really believes in the power of human touch, and feels like it’s his job to proselytize, near unconsciously at this point. He’s the guy at work who wants to give you, another guy, a hug whether or not you want it.
Look at the top picture on this HR article.
That’s Biden putting his hand on the thigh of a middle-aged sheriff while on stage, getting side-eye from the sheriff.
But, does that verge into sexuality with women? I could certainly see it, but it’s hard to disentangle. Does it go past that? See Cosby for whether you can tell from the outside.
Perhaps the entanglement is “boundary issues.” He doesn’t know how to appropriately touch (or not touch) the sheriff, he doesn’t know how to appropriately touch (or better yet, really don’t touch) the young woman in his employ who catches his fancy.
Suppose you have two possible presidents, Alice and Bob.
Alice is a lousy human being in some aspects of her life, which fortunately don’t overlap much with being president. Maybe she likes to kick puppies and pull the wings off flies and she’s mean to her underlings and treats her husband badly–she’s had several affairs and is known to be verbally abusive to him. But she’s also really smart, attentive, and hard-working, and has an agenda you think is probably pretty good that she will reliably work toward. You assess that she will be a really first-rate president.
Bob is a genuinely good person. He has adopted several special-needs kids and raised them, he spends most of his time helping other people, he’s kind to everyone he meets. However, he really isn’t all that smart, he doesn’t understand how the government works very well, and he’s not attentive in briefings or anything. You judge that as president, Bob will do a lousy job.
Which one would you rather vote for as president? I don’t think it’s crazy or morally indefensible to say “Alice” rather than “Bob.” I mean, maybe that’s wrong, either on a basic moral level, or on a “Alice is a bad person so she’ll do worse things with her power” level, but that’s not clear to me. As an example, it seems to me that Bill Clinton is a worse human being than Jimmy Carter, but was a better president. And I probably care a lot more about how good a president we get than about whether that person is a great human being.
When we’re talking about either Kavenaugh or Biden, we’re talking about people trying for extremely important jobs. How well they do those jobs matters a great deal for how the world looks in a decade or two, and you can imagine disastrous ways they could do their jobs. Moral infractions in their pretty distant past actually aren’t very relevant to how they’ll do their jobs.
Suppose Kavenaugh really did everything Ford claimed as a 17-year old high school kid. Is there really any reason to think that’s going to change whether he’ll do a good job as a supreme court justice? Not as far as I can see–what’s relevant there is his history as a judge and his beliefs, which are probably not actually reflected much by drunken bad behavior as a teenager.
Suppose Biden really did everything Reade claimed as a senator. That’s more disturbing at a moral level, IMO, since he can’t use the excuse of being a dumb drunken teenager. But the guy’s in his mid-70 nowadays. Even if he was once in the habit of groping his more attractive female aides, he’s probably too old for that sort of nonsense at this point. It doesn’t actually seem to have any bearing on what he will do as president, or how well he will do the job. (Being in his mid-70s raises a lot more questions about that, IMO.)
Not to argue with you, but as an interesting aside…
From a somewhat immature point of view that still might be salient for many, there’s a big difference between “vote for” and “have”. It might be well less instinctively repugnant to support someone who is merely incompetent at something important than who was quite wicked on a personal level.
Agreed.
Your Alice/Bob argument is correct if the question is who should be president. But it’s not correct if you think of voting not as a means of changing electoral outcomes but as an expressive activity, something you do because it makes you feel good.
I just want to call this out as a real understatement.
Jimmy Carter is very sincere in his Christian faith, volunteers with Habitat for Humanity in his 90s, served his country in the Armed Forces… and is probably more intelligent to boot (becoming a nuclear engineer in the Navy while Clinton’s IQ is all social).
For all that, there were very valid reasons for him to not be re-elected.
Yeah, if I had to make a Mount Rushmore of “worthy opponents”, people whose opinions I disagree with a lot, but I can respect because they seem to be decent and honest folks, Jimmy Carter is almost certainly on it.
I don’t think it’s crazy or morally indefensible to say “Alice” rather than “Bob.” I mean, maybe that’s wrong, either on a basic moral level, or on a “Alice is a bad person so she’ll do worse things with her power” level, but that’s not clear to me.
But the Democrats and the media commentators and the bloggers made the Kavanaugh investigation a moral question.
It wasn’t simply “is this guy fit to be a judge because he might do something with his power”, it was “what is this telling rape victims and women and other vulnerable people?” It was assumed that he was a person of privilege and that his privileged background included the presumption of a right to rape.
The political decision was about “is he likely to try and overturn abortion?” but it wasn’t clearly stated that way, instead “he’s the type of guy who thinks women exist to service him and as a corollary he denies them the rights to bodily autonomy” on a moral level, not merely a political one. The abortion question was wrapped in “he’s a rapist and sexist and hates women so of course as part of all that he will try to control their sexuality and deny them the right to abortion, amongst other bad (as in “wicked/evil/immoral”, not bad as in “ineffectual/incompetent at being a judge”) things he will do!”
So having made rape accusations a moral test, then you can’t turn around and say “oh rape isn’t important, it’s not a question of morals, it’s a question of being good at your job”. Not without being accused of hypocrisy at the very least.
Biden wasn’t just vulnerable, he was in 4th or 5th place. Why put yourself in the national spotlight and all have all your dirty laundry aired to stop the 4th place loser?
Biden was 1st or second in polling the entire time.
The accusations didn’t pop out until he was weaker.
ETA: and Bernie was stronger, looking like he was in a two man race.
Biden always looked like a strong fart could blow him out of the race, despite his lead in the polls, but he was still the favorite for the last year.
I meant 4th or 5th place by votes once people started voting. He finished 4th in Iowa and 5th in New Hampshire. An awful lot of people thought he was done for.
If you want the case to be skeptical about her claims instead of just the corroborating elements, here is a former sexual assault prosecutor’s take.
Of particular note is that her contemporaneous confirmations appear to be have actually changed their stories after being first contacted by the press.
Also, she says she she filed a harassment claim with the Senate, but there is no record of that. I’d like to know how malleable those records are, if at all.
She has also been shown to have changed a blogpost immediately before making the accusations public so that it did not contradict the new accusations.
To be clear, none of this means she was not assaulted. Remembrance is not exact, sexual assault victims are frequently loath to tell their story, etc. It does mean that we have evidence that aspects of her story continue to change or resist corroboration, making them less credible.
I’ve seen some other things that would make this even more doubtful, but I don’t have reason to trust the source, so we’ll see what happens.
My personal assumption is that when someone recounts a memory of something very stressful and awful that happened decades ago, you should not put very much weight on their memory’s accuracy. I think human memory is extremely maleable in the best of times, and I think terrible things that happened to you in the past, or that you believe happened to you in the past, are probably the least reliable ones you have.
But note that this calls into question a huge number of old accusations. And it doesn’t mean those accusations are wrong, just that decades-old memories of traumatic terrible events are liable to be inaccurate in many important ways.
Agreed. As to whether this calls into question huge numbers of old accusations, I think that’s a different conversation.
However changing your written recollection from “this was not sexual” (dated a year ago) to “this was not just sexual” (dated days before going public with the accusation, my emphasis) isn’t that kind of hazy recollection.
My friends on social media are very left-wing, and they’re taking Reade’s accusation very seriously. But they never liked Biden to begin with; he’s too centrist.
No one cares about Tara Reade.
The Republicans (and Fox news) will pretend to care, but they really only care about the opportunity to call the Democrats hypocrites for not demanding Biden’s resignation the way they demanded Kavanaugh’s. Since the Republicans already believe the Democrats are the worst sort of hypocrite and are going to find an excuse to say so no matter what, they don’t really care about Tara Reade. They just hope that the Democrats do, because that will make the accusation of hypocrisy sting a bit more.
The Democrats (and the rest of the media) will pretend to care because #MeToo is part of their branding, but they can’t afford to really care because they care so very much more about bringing down Donald Trump and it’s too late to do that any other way than with a strong and relatively scandal-free Biden. So instead they’ll deflect the issue by accusing the Republicans of hypocrisy for having defended Kavanaugh while now piously denouncing Biden.
They’re all hypocrites, and none of them care. There is no level of proof for Reade’s accusation that will make the Democrats change their mind, nor disproof that would convince the Republicans. So why do we need to talk about this any more.
There has to be a line for us to elevate things from “every man of importance will get accused of something in this new world” to “this guy more likely than not did something real bad.” For me that is lots of contemporaneous evidence. At first I regarded this case as a 0, but my 0 has gradually become a 10 (out of 100). I dont see how people can see it otherwise. Initially she was just a crazy lady talking about things from 30 years ago. Now she has people saying she said things at the time, and she is demanding the release of documents.
Demanding the release of docs give you 10% in my book. At least. Sometimes you do it because you know they wont be, but that doesn’t seem like a real reason in this case. Its not like Biden’s 90s HR stuff is national security related. Sometimes (mostly) its a PR stunt. And sometimes its because you think there is something that will vindicate you.
This case is one where I don’t really know anymore. I was at a 0, went to a 10 and now after writing this whole post (which I wont edit the top of because I think its a good example) I think its a 20-25. Surely not enough to throw out Biden, but its certainly gotten to the point where I’ve talked my way through it to think we probably need some real journalism on this. (For me we are still 20-30 points away from earning a governmental investigation).
Suppose Biden withdrew at this point in favor of one of the other candidates. Why wouldn’t that give them a reasonable chance of beating Trump?
It occurs to me that Biden himself has not yet denied the charges, although his people have. Perhaps he is seriously considering withdrawing.
Problem is, one of the “other candidates” is very much not like the others. Bernie Sanders has more than five times as many delegates as all the other non-Biden candidates combined. Not quite that margin in the popular vote, but still substantial. And Bernie inspires both passionate support in a large fraction of his supporters, and passionate opposition among a good number of “we’re Democrats, not Socialists”.
If the nomination doesn’t go to Bernie, the Democrats suffer enormously. Most BernieBros will hold their nose and vote for a Biden who won the primary fair and square. That grudging support goes way down if one of the other other candidates is handed the nomination in a smoke-filled room over the clear vote- and delegate-winning “favorite” that is Bernie Sanders.
If the nomination does go to Bernie, with or without Biden’s endorsement, then the “Democrats not Socialists” group is going to complain that they all held their nose and agreed to combine in support of one mainstream-Democrat candidate that was mostly only their second or third choice, and the smoke-filled room has instead given the nod to their last choice just to pander to a minority of the Democratic electorate.
I don’t think either plan is a winning strategy for the Democrats. More importantly, I think the Democrats are going to fear the downsides of that plan more than they fear the downsides of running a creepy dirty old man in the post-Clinton, post-Kavanaugh era.
John, I think this is unfairly cynical as someone who has made some cynical takes.
The genuine voters do care, and quite a bit. Republicans in Alabama gave up a Senate seat because they’d rather have a Democrat than someone accused of sexual misconduct.
That’s why Democrats at the national level are in a bind. If it becomes common belief that of course Biden forced himself on female staffers, Biden will lose and lose very badly.
The Republicans(*) giving up on Roy Moore cost them a Senate seat, but it didn’t cost them their control over the Senate. And that was a pretty safe bet at the time. And Moore wasn’t an individually powerful or useful Senator; he commanded no great respect, chaired no important committees, held no leadership positions, etc.
Same deal as with the Democrats and Al Franken. Well, different in that they got to keep the seat and so their small hope of gaining control of the Senate didn’t get any smaller at least. But he was, ultimately, expendable and replaceable.
Biden isn’t replaceable. And, even if it becomes commonly believed among Democrats that he is a creepy sexual harasser and quasi-rapist, he’s running against a Republican who is also commonly believed (doesn’t matter whether it’s actually true) among Democrats to be a creepy sexual harasser and quasi-rapist. At least this one is their creepy sexual harasser and quasi-rapist. The Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents are probably going to stand behind him the way they stood behind Bill Clinton, with added righteous indignation fueled by Kavanaugh, Trump, etc.
* Really only a minority of Republicans, but a decisive one
Doug Jones voted against Kavanaugh, who only won 50-48. Had one Republican or Joe Manchin been just a bit wobblier, giving up that seat could have cost Republicans the Senate. This is a very big deal to Republicans; Jones sent a clear message to them about the dangers of voting your conscience, which will be considered in similar future situations.
I think John’s analysis is spot on here.
This is a non-story in the sense that it will change absolutely nobody’s mind about anything.
Disagreed, as I said in my comment above. It won’t change the mind of partisans, but you can’t win an election on 30-40% of the population. If this becomes a big story, independents abandon Biden in huge numbers.
How true is this when voters don’t know who is more likely a sexaul offender between the two candidates?
The Access Hollywood tape (which the media presented as “Here is Donald Trump admitting to being a serial rapist”) didn’t seem to harm Trump that much at all, aside from a pretty small short-term hit to his polls.
@Purplehermann
I think I mentioned above, but voters don’t believe Trump is a sexual offender.
None of the vague accusations against him in 2016 were good enough to make a serious media channel, and E. Jean Carroll’s is similarly fabulist.
It’s good to know this will be the narrative, though, since all of this board seems to have jumped to it.
Edit:
@Matt M
Because the voters didn’t believe they were actually admitting to being a serial rapist when they thought about them, obviously.
If the voters believed Trump was a rapist, he would not have won. Hardcore partisans might vote for a rapist as the lesser of two evils, but not enough to win an election.
Are you sure that independents who would vote against trump think that way?
@Purplehermann
Depends on what you mean by that statement.
Anyone who is an independent and believes Trump is a rapist voted against him in 2016, full stop. (I am leaving out the one crazed pro-rape independent. We all hate him.)
Such people are likely to either stay home or vote third party if they believe that Biden is also a rapist.
I do not think there are a substantial population of people who disbelieved Trump was a rapist in 2016 and voted for him who now believe he is a rapist and will vote against him in 2020.
And voters aren’t going to think that Biden is a rapist either.
Or at least, they aren’t going to think he’s “significantly more likely to be a rapist than Trump.”
Unless you’re already watching FOX News (in which case you’re already either pro-Trump or Never Trump), you simply are not going to get any coverage of this that tells you “The likelihood of Biden being guilty of sexual assault is higher than the likelihood of Trump being guilty of sexual assault.” In fact, I think “they both are rapists” is the best case scenario Trump could hope for in terms of mainstream media coverage. Most likely they won’t even concede that. They’ll just keep deflecting and saying “Trump had more allegations than Biden does, and they’re just as credible, and Trump even admitted it” and so on…
I mean people who would vote biden in 2020 if there were no accusation.
If the accusation becomes a big story (but it isn’t certain),
What percentage of them do you think would vote R?
What percentage of people would be willing to “waste their vote”?
Why do you think people who voted against President Trump (or would) think he is not an offender?
@Matt M
That is indeed what the media is hoping to accomplish by spiking this story, no question about that.
We will see if they are successful, but if they are it will be because they spiked the story or evidence came out exonerating Biden, not because the voters don’t care about rape, which is the implication I was pushing back on.
EchoChaos,
I think we just mainly disagree on exactly what it is that tips the scales for the independent/undecided voter. I’m pretty sure that you and I agree that such voters do exist (the Obama/Trump voters of the rust belt being the most relevant right now), and that they aren’t really going to be influenced by the sort of partisan pissing contests the media loves so much.
But in my model of these voters, they are voting mainly on issues, or at least on “am I satisfied with what’s going on or do I want a change.” I do not think they are voting on character or anything like that. The fact that they were willing to vote for Trump despite Access Hollywood, Stormy Daniels, and everything else should be evidence of that.
If they’re upset at the direction the country is headed by November, they’ll vote for Biden. Even if FOX News is calling him a rapist and NBC is saying “Yeah maybe he’s a rapist but so is Trump!”
@Purplehermann
Maybe a quarter or a fifth? There are a lot of politically non-engaged folks who are okay with either Trump or Biden but are leaning Biden because of whatever reason. Every non-Trump vote isn’t a partisan.
Biden is currently polling at ~47%. Roy Moore got 48% of the vote in an R+26 state, which shows that you can maximally lose half of your base, which I don’t see Biden doing. But a fifth would put him at ~40%.
Even more. Making a statement in an election where Biden is spiraling would be very powerful.
I don’t know that the question has been polled, but most people aren’t aggressively online and just get their news from the top headlines. The closest we’ve gotten to that for Trump is “Grab them by the pussy”. The idea that 100% of people who didn’t vote for Trump believed he was admitting sexual assault is somewhat implausible to me if only for lizardman constant reasons.
@Matt M
I think we both agree on that, but understand that ACTUAL RAPE is well beyond the line for 99+% of people. Those folks in the Rust Belt accept “grab them by the pussy” joking in private but would never accept anyone actually grabbing someone by the pussy. The way Trump fought back was by saying it was “gym room talk” because they understand that. He didn’t say “of course I grab women by the pussy” because he would’ve lost by a huge margin and everyone knew it.
And Biden knows that the voters have mostly made up their minds that Trump is crude but not actually a rapist, so if Biden parses as even possibly actually a rapist, Biden will get slaughtered.
Yeah, as far as I could tell, the Trump comments were never admitting sexual assault, they were bragging about how great it was to be Donald Trump–something I rather suspect Donald Trump would do every hour of the day if he could. People inclined to see Trump as evil interpreted those comments as an admission of guilt; people inclined to see Trump as good interpreted those comments as locker-room boasting. (This was helped by the fact that, based on his public persona, Trump is exactly the sort of fellow you’d expect to hear boasting about all the hot girls he’s gotten and how he can get away with so much because he’s rich and famous and hot.)
People are *really good* at interpreting facts in a way that reassures them of what they want to believe or what they started out believing.
Slightly overly cynical? Of course I’m interested in seeing how the Democrats respond to this because I strongly suspected during the Kavanaugh hearings that the Democrats and the media did not honestly believe that Ford’s story was credible or relevant enough for consideration and yet acted as though they did. But what would it mean for me, someone who wasn’t going to vote for Biden anyway, to “really care” or “not really care” about Tara Reade? The reasons I’m not voting for Biden have nothing to do with these allegations against him, but I’m also not one of those who was swarming the doors of the Supreme Court because we can’t tolerate someone accused of sexual assault in positions of power.
Do I “really care” about Tara Reade? I guess not, but I didn’t really claim to.
I think it’s a little messier than that. People are really good at convincing themselves of what they want to believe or what would be helpful to believe. I think a hell of a lot of Democrats really did believe Ford’s allegations against Kavenaugh, and that they (and a lot of partisan media sources) sought out justifications for believing them. And that far fewer Democrats will stretch to believe these allegations.
A really important idea I remember from Tyler Cowen’s interview of Dan Kahnemann: how certain you feel about something is actually a pretty poor guide of how likely it is to be true. It’s easy for emotional reasons or tribal affiliation or social proof to have an impact on your feeling of certainty. In his language, I think he would say that the internal sense of certainty is a System 1 thing, not a System 2 thing.
My impression is that the allegation has had lots of mainstream coverage – I’ve probably stumbled across a few dozen different references to it in the past few weeks.
One relevant difference is that there was an obvious path to dealing with the Kavanaugh allegations – Trump unnominates him and nominates someone else. The Biden allegations are really awkward because nobody has the power to unilaterally change the Democratic nominee even if they want to.
This is a fundamental misconception of the Kavanaugh case. If Trump changed nominees, Kavanaugh would stand as publicly convicted, and the next nominee would likely be subject to a last minute filibuster-attacks as well, at best. Indeed, the strategy was to kill Kavanaugh, win the Senate, and keep the seat open for 2-6 years as needed.
The Biden situation is actually much easier to deal with. Delagates are only pledged on round 1, the DNC can say all post C-19 votes are tainted (basically meaning there is no first ballot winner) and do whatever it wants. This is probably an order of magnitude easier than replacing Kavanaugh when you account for the Dem-shift in media.
For what it’s worth, I live in a fairly low-news but blue-tribe bubble (can’t afford to delete Facebook), and SSC may be the only place I’ve heard about this.
Kavanaugh was all over Facebook, especially during but even for some time after it was over.
Biden does. He can’t determine who it is, but he can determine who it isn’t.
Despite the lack of reporters doing the usual thing and asking Biden about the accusations when they interview him, I was pleasantly surprised to read this Vox Explainer which did a reasonable job of covering it once updated.
On the other hand, there is definitely potential for the whole Biden thing to blow up much faster once he’s the official nominee post-convention. Similar to #MeToo and Weinstein, there may be a whole bevy of potential complainers out there still to be exposed. Apparently he had developed something of a handsy reputation on the left as far back as 2008, which makes me wonder what else is out there:
Democrats would be well-served to get ahead of it and find someone else to represent them, but based on past action, by the time it’s apparent they should’ve, it’ll be too late, especially how the fix seemed to come in after Biden’s SC win. It could be they can count on any other left-wing victims like Reade to remain quiet in their political interest, but it also could be that there are one or two biding their time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Some thoughts:
It seems that a lot people are debating a full lockdown strategy vs let ‘er rip strategy, and that strikes me as a little unrealistic:
– A full lockdown for 18 months is impossible, and the economic damage it would cause would essentially amount to political suicide.
– Not doing anything while the virus infects 60-80% of the population, killing millions, would also amount to political suicide. Most people are not perfectly rational, selfless beings that will happily get COVID for the sake of the economy. They will get angry and rage against the government. That’s what humans do. (You might argue that Sweden is doing this, but the Swedish government has stated that they are not aiming for herd immunity. But if cases really ramp up there, I predict that the government will have no choice but to implement lockdown-like measures anyway)
You can do all the theoretical cost-benefit analyses you want and come to all sorts of (possibly true) conclusions about how one extreme would actually end up as the better option, but it might be pointless – the political will probably doesn’t exist to do either.
This leaves the Hammer and Dance method as perhaps not just the best option, but the only feasible option. I think more discussion should go towards how to make the Dance work, so we don’t end up in the epidemic yo-yo scenario where the the virus keeps breaking out and we have to reinstitute lockdown over and over again.
Interesting related article, though I don’t agree with everything in it: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-how-to-do-testing-and-contact-tracing-bde85b64072e
This is undoubtedly true. But when I look at the options, what runs through my mind is that both options are awful, but only the first is impossible. Which leaves the second. The fact that people will be furious or that the situation will be really bad doesn’t mean it won’t happen. The issue isn’t acceptability, but what we’re capable of. Some level of mitigation will go on, or at least gestures that appear to be mitigating. Very few leaders are saying “do nothing!” But it’s hard to say whether there’s a feasible hammer and dance strategy, or one that does more than postpone the infection rate. No doubt it will be used as a rhetorical tool to assure people that reopening isn’t agreeing to “do nothing,” and that things can change in response to future outbreaks.
Right, but “for the sake of the economy” is in many cases another term for “for the sake of their own survival or basic comfort.” For many, depending on risk profile and other factors, it would be quite rational, and require no selflessness or happiness on their part.
ETA: A point made in last thread was that a “middle ground” was probably the best option, but not definitely. Sometimes, a middle ground makes things worse than either extreme. And I worry about that.
What about: full lockdown until the number of cases is down to a level (a handful of cases in a country) where contact tracing and large-scale testing can keep it from reemerging?
That IS the Trondheim Hammer Dance, unless I’m completely misunderstanding it.
It will require an extreme lockdown to get R0 down to .5 or so. Then keeping that extreme lockdown for threeish months to get the number of active cases down to double digit thousands. Also given the vast number of asymptotic cases one will need to test the whole population every two weeks or so. If it was not the case that the vast majority of cases for people under fifty were asymptotic, that might work reasonably well.
Why do you think that? We could be at 0.5 right now. I would think 6 ft apart and masks for all would get us there.
Basic googling suggests that the total number of new cases in the us each day have remained basically constant during the duration of the lockdown. Am I wrong about this? Some of that may be increased testing concealing a true decline in new cases though.
Some of it may also be declines in the NE hiding increases elsewhere.
My understanding is that the number of new confirmed cases/day topped out around the time the number of tests / day topped out. I know one person who, >3 weeks after onset of symptoms, still hasn’t been able to be tested. My guess is that this has a big impact on the statistics, but I haven’t dug into it enough to know that for sure. But if my friend’s experience is any guide, it’s quite possible to be pretty sick from this virus long after exposure, without ever showing up on any official statistics.
That’s a version of hammer and dance. Personally, I don’t believe this is achievable in any country except for someplace like New Zealand that caught it early and is willing to close its borders indefinitely. This requires being small, isolated, and coordinated. Smaller regions within countries could also do something like this. I still can’t understand what mass-testing is supposed to do. The countries that contained it appear to have crushed it out with the lockdown and strict quarantines as much as possible early on, and then used contract tracing and lockdowns to crush clusters. Such a strategy can definitely work if you are willing to give up letting people cross the border without strict 2-week quarantines, which is a big if. But I see no feasible way of doing worthwhile red zones and green zones that is more flexible than this.
ETA: As edmundgennings points out, if the disease presented differently, it would be another story. Asymptomatic transmission is a big deal.
I don’t think they really can, though, at least not in the US. States and municipalities don’t have the authority to close their borders. Even Hawaii can’t just say “nobody in or out!”
They also don’t have the authority to fine you for going to church, but here we are.
Weird how “actually the supreme court has ruled that if it’s an emergency local authorities can do whatever they want” applies to someone traveling one block, but can’t possibly apply to someone traveling across the country.
@Matt M the one block thing can’t work as precedent for the long term.
Closing borders is something some countries do
My sister told me they were doing just that in Iron County Missouri. As in, the police were stopping cars, asking people where they lived, and if they didn’t live or work in Iron County, telling them to go away. (She and her husband own a restaurant there.)
(1) States cannot seal their borders and refuse entry.
(2) But they can enact quarantine laws, and they can use information about where you have been as part of those decisions.
There would be a challenge that (2) resolves to (1) and is therefore unconstitutional. But it’s not necessarily going to follow. It would also depend exactly on how a state implements in quarantine laws.
California has restrictions on bringing fruits and vegetables in, to protect against plant diseases. I don’t see why something similar couldn’t be done for human diseases.
Heh, I remember as a kid driving across the Oregon/California border and having to stop at a little checkpoint where some forest ranger-looking guy would ask “Do you have any fruit?” and we’d answer “no” and then get to proceed.
By “could,” I meant it is physically possible for them to do so. And I have a feeling there are ways in which it would be politically feasible for certain states to make such a decision. As other posters pointed out, we’re not exactly erring on the side of strict legality, but there’s also legal wiggle room in emergencies. Quarantines and screening could be used instead of total border closure. It’s unlikely to happen in the U.S., but it could happen within regions in other countries.
The outer banks in North Carolina are also doing this–if you don’t live there, you’re not allowed in. I don’t know how they’re enforcing this, but a cousin of my wife’s owns a beach house there, and not only is that house sitting idle this season, he’s not allowed to go there himself either.
You could imagine ways to do a state-line quarantine thing that would probably survive a court challenge. For example:
a. If your car’s license plates or your drivers’ license comes from a state with a major outbreak,
b. If anyone in your car is running a fever (from a forehead thermometer) or is otherwise visibly sick or coughing heavily.
c. If you answer incorrectly to some screening questions like “have you been around any sick people lately, have you been sick lately, have you been in any large groups lately”
then you get singled out for some kind of special treatment. Probably that’s a choice of either turning around and not entering the state, or agreeing to a nasal swab a self-quarantine until the test comes back.
You could also imagine just having a state trooper stop each car coming into the state, and requiring them to agree to self-quarantine for a few days–stay out of public places, order food for delivery or carry out, visit nobody but close family members, etc.
I think that few people propose lockdown for 18 months. If there is a debate, it is perhaps between those who want lockdowns to end immediately and those who want to wait until epidemic is under control, with some disagreement what “under control” means.
You see that in those European countries where epidemic clearly is under control (of course, even there it might quickly get out of control again once lockdown is lifted), discussion shifted towards what timetable of restrictions lifting should be followed.
Almost nobody is willing to admit that it means ongoing kilodeaths, so it means something that isn’t plausibly going to happen for a year or so without the sort of deliberate measures that have conspicuously not planned or prepared for the past couple of months. Because planning for it means taking the blame for the deaths that come with the plan.
The name of the game is “lockdown chicken”; the lockdowns can’t last eighteen months without catastrophic economic consequences, but the winning move is for the other guy to be the one who lifts the lockdowns and takes the blame.
This, but with a twist: in an opposition is clamoring for lifting of restrictions, winning move for the government is to throw their hands and declare that other side forced them to end the lockdown.
Right. And that’s why it really sucks to be a Republican governor right now – you’re going to have to lift the lockdowns eventually, almost certainly before there’s a vaccine, and you’re not going to be able to sell anyone on “The Democrats made me do it!”.
deWine shut Ohio early and looks smart enough to correctly handle the lifting of lockdowns in a prudent matter.
Time will tell if he’s right. And time will also tell if people think he was right, which is often a separate issue.
The only way to actually decide this is to go back and review his decisions a year or two from now, and that is something I have almost never seen a major media source do with a politician in an honest way.
The hammer and dance can’t work in the US. We can’t do the dance. For various reasons, some having to do with the virus (the long incubation period is a problem), some having to do with testing limitations (testing has plateaued, tests have a significant false negative rate) and some having to do with American society (lots of people are really, really going to avoid being traced).
Note, BTW, there’s no end to the dance. The author describes it as “I call the months-long period between the Hammer and a vaccine or effective treatment the Dance” Well, there’s no guarantee of a vaccine or treatment, ever. So if you sign on to the hammer and dance, you sign on to having your country run by public health bureaucrats, forever.
That assumes a lethality of about 1%. The recent research on how many people have been infected suggest something more like .1%, assuming the hospital system can handle it. If a large fraction of elderly people self quarantine, it should be substantially lower, so something in the 100,000 to 200,000 range, which, spread over a few months, the hospital system (in the U.S.) should be able to handle.
The critical question is whether the results from the recent research are correct. New York and Northern Italy seem like some evidence against.
I think the data from South Korea shows lethality between 1% and 2%. Since we have good reason to think that South Korea has found all the cases, and since these cases are old (so people have had time to die) this is the best data we have.
If we assume SKorea tested every person even reasonably suspect of having COVID19, this would be an upper limit to lethality (ignoring the thorny issues of age distribution) and it would suggest the USA has around 5x more contagied people than the testing says. Although a lot of the lethality in the USA compared to Korea may be due to some collapsed hospitals racking up the count.
But even at 5x the contagied, it still puts herd immunity far away.
You are saying, a lot, that the 0.1% if the death rate from infection. What are the IFRs you are seeing to think that’s a good summary, given that NYC is (at least) around 5x that?
As far as I can tell the available info suggests 1% or more infection lethatlity rate, apart from studies that look like they could just be false positives.
I recall one study claiming 4% positive with a 2% false positive rate, and if true the numbers were large enough to be significant, but how reliably can they know that the false positive rate is only 2%?
I would say the weight of the current evidence is .3-1%. Infections seem to be about 10x diagnosed cases, right?
It’s unlikely that different countries have the same ratio of undiagnosed cases.
Reports are that in the hardest hit parts of Italy excess mortality exceeds 1% of the population. Also, in NYC official deaths are in the range of 0.1-0.2% of the population, and that looks to me a lot more compatible with >1% fatality rate with many not infected, not all deaths counted, and not all deaths occurred yet, than it does with an IFR of less than 1%.
Starting with a discussion of what “Hammer and Dance” actually means, because I think that phrase has now morphed about as many times as “Flatten the Curve”. But most versions require more in the way of public trust than I think is likely to remain by the time we get to it.
Which still doesn’t mean “not doing anything”, it means doing lots of different things as everyone tries to muddle through as best they can with the resources and allies they have. That won’t be as good as a carefully orchestrated hammer-dancing master plan, but Americans are pretty good at improvising and muddling through.
“Men sooner forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony” – Machiavelli
For good reason. A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
C-19 Panic society is the opposite. They insist we sacrifice the young for the old.
This.
I agree, and I wonder how many 80 year olds would choose to saddle their family with 10MM to 40MM in non-dischargeable debt to give them a few more years.
And it is also good to remember that “it’s the economy, stupid” still applies politically
That’s the joy of government. You can have all of the benefits and none of the downsides by shifting all the nastiness onto “the government”.
@LesHapablap
72 years old here. I am plenty fine with abolishing the lockdown. I get frustrated bearing the blame for the economy. I think more old people are for abandoning the lockdowns. It is the lack of courage and integrity from the politicians that is the cause of this mess. Let’s go back to work. Us oldies on SS can afford to stay home and protect ourselves. We can all WFH.
Exactly. Other than the young SSCers I met on the internet, most of the anti-lockdown opinions I hear in real life are from older people. Older people have lived through more dangerous times, and younger people are more used to absolute (perceived) safety.
Alternatively, people don’t like looking bad in front of their peers, and a young person arguing for ending the lockdowns looks a lot worse than an old person doing so does.
At 72 my risk of stroke is around 6%. In another ten years, it will be closer to 16%. Should I really worry about dying from Covid? A couple of years ago I was diagnosed with A-Fib which apparently increases my stroke risk by a percent or two. The doctor prescribed blood thinner at more than $400 per month. I declined.
As far as quality of life goes, it is as good as ever and will remain so. People who think the quality of life when old is lower are blowing smoke.
But we are really aware of quanitity. I don’t really expect to be alive in 10 years so I am much less exciting by this risk or that.
I tried to see if there were any health insurance plans available for individuals/families which ignore the de-fanged portions of the ACA (like mandatory minimum coverages) but still provide good catastrophe insurance.
TL;DR: Apparently not? (Emphasis on the question mark)
I’ve got a couple of Reddit threads ongoing (linked below). Nobody has any useful suggestions post-ACA yet. It looks like the ACA has sucked all the oxygen out of the room when it comes to decent health care. Even now that the individual mandate has been rendered toothless by reducing the non-compliance penalty to $0 (eff. 2019), there doesn’t appear to be anything trustworthy available to the non-Amish. I would happily sign a non-malpractice pledge or whatever else. I’m an honorable man. I just want health insurance that doesn’t mortgage even more of my future and my kids’ future for Generation Boomer.
State of the Market:
There are shady ‘healthcare sharing ministries’, which look like scammers who jumped on the religious exemption (and, presumably, a few legit religious insurance pools like the Amish that get lumped in as being indistinguishable from outside).
There are Short Term Limited Duration Insurance (STLDI) plans which cover transitions and coverage gaps but aren’t what I’m looking for.
One respondent mentioned hospitalization insurance, but I can’t find any with reasonable prices.
Several scammers with shady insurance policies that have probably never paid a claim out have been PMing me.
Anyone have any useful pointers or areas to consider? I’m pretty close to Mexico, what about healthcare tourism? Any other suggestions?
Reddit thread 1 on r/HealthInsurance
Reddit thread 2 on r/preppers
The individual mandate has been defanged, but the ACA’s minimum essential benefit requirements remain unchanged. I.e., it’s illegal for insurers to offer non-grandfathered catastrophic insurance in the individual marketplace (either on-exchange or off-exchange). This is true even though it is perfectly legal for an individual to buy such a plan, since the mandate was repealed.
Interesting, that kinda makes sense? But then what about the plans for hospitalization insurance and so on? I’m guessing the devil’s in the details.
Still, it’s ridiculous now that I take a look at it. Cable bundling ripoffs got nothing on this insurance bundling.
Ways to get good health insurance for a US citizen:
1: Join the military. Tricare is good. Also cheap.
2: Get elected to congress. Congress gets good healthcare.
3: Reach the age of eligibility for medicare.
4: Emigrate.
5: Get a good job
6: Start a business
7: Live in an area with a reasonable selection of health plans
Music subgenre question!
If I told you that I was a big fan of “college music” or “college rock” would you know what I’m talking about?
I feel like this is a real subgenre with some pretty clear distinctions from rock in general, but honestly I’m struggling to describe what they actually are. It’s more of an “I know it when I hear it” sort of thing…
Things that sound like REM?
REM has the right sound, although they ultimately became too popular to remain “college rock” as college kids can’t like popular things too much. (See Well’s similar point below)
Does anything sound like REM? (Honest question.)
Sometimes Live sounds like them.
IDK if this is a brilliant troll, but when I search for them, I just get videos of live versions of songs titled “Sometime”.
@matthewravery
Heh, pretty sure he means the band ‘Live‘ sometimes sounds like REM.
Live’s (not Sometimes Live) best known song is probably “Lightning Crashes”, and their album “Throwing Copper” is brilliant. Those are more useful things to search for.
Live and R.E.M. don’t strike as musically similar though.
“Selling the Drama” by Live sounds like REM. I think.
REM apparently belongs to the genre known as Jangle Rock. I’m trying to remember the name of the website where I discovered that–there is also Math Rock and other strange (but generally accepted) descriptors.
Math rock is Fugazi right? Or Tristeza?
Math rock is basically a branch from Prog. Complex time signatures, odd chords, not pop friendly.
Battles – Atlas as an example that I like because it’s complex and kinda of the wall, and the video is interesting.
@HBC:
My mental model of math rock defaults to Dilinger Escape Plan. So the fun connection to Battles is, in 2002 I saw DEP once open for Tomahawk, whose drummer is John Stanier (also the drummer for Battles). Though I guess DEP might be more commonly thought of as “math metal”.
B-52s sometimes sounds a lot like them. They even merged for “Shiny Happy People.”
Plus what about all those bands that got their start as “college rock” and then somehow or other become non-college rock? They Might Be Giants comes to mind.
I think it’s just not really a genre. It’s more a
labelbadge that vaguely waves at the route by which certain bands become known (college radio, specifically).Like Weezer? Can’t think of anything else but I think I could tell from the song. Could you maybe link to a couple of songs by lesser-known bands, one of witch is collage rock and the others something else and have us guess? (Do a google poll if ambitious!)
Weezer was huge on MTV from the start, so I don’t think they count.
I think of College Rock as mainly an 80s genre. Early REM, Violent Femmes, Meatpuppets, Mike Watt, Dinausaur Jr., some Smiths, pre-fame Red Hot Chili Peppers, a lot of 80s punk.
Does College Rock extend beyond the early 90s? Seems like when Alt Rock stations originated they tried to extend College Rock in a more commercial directiton, quickly sucking the life-blood out of the genre.
A few year ago I took a drive from Albany through Western Mass and heard a lot of cool music that that sounded like College Rock but was contemporary. Seems like there was room on the dial for it because there were few hip-hop and Latino stations in that part of the world. The college stations that used to exist in many metros seem to have been removed from the dial.
Really? Every city I’ve lived in has featured a college station or two (where I paid any attention to such things).
There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to what those stations are likely to play, except maybe “artists who aren’t well-known enough to be played on mainstream stations”.
Perhaps I’m extrapolating too much from KTRU in Houston no longer being on the FM dial.
I’ll add: the 2 college stations on the FM dial in Houston broadcast either NPR or jazz-fusion music 24/7. Not what I would consider College Rock.
Hmm…that’s true, a lot of college stations are just local NPR or classical stations.
The Mountain Goats?
Things that would be played on a college radio station?
I mean yes, this is the hyper-literal answer.
But my point is more that these artists/songs tend to share certain commonalities, and I’m struggling to define what the commonalities actually are, in terms of the music itself.
Maybe the point is that aside from being played on college radio stations, they don’t.
lo-fi recordings, somewhat bland, depressing or at least not happy.
I very briefly DJ’d on a college radio station and was told off for playing too much “beat-driven” music
Apparently Beavis and Butthead beat me to this insight nearly 15 years ago.
Mike Judge can be credited with several astute high-level observations about music.
And FWIW, I would absolutely consider the Flaming Lips to be college rock…
I’d say they were bands that came up beginning in the 80s, as an alternative to the then mainstream popular music (in fact, I think “alternative rock” is often used as the same as “college rock”). That is, as an alternative to electro/synth pop bands (think The Human League, Thompson Twins, Howard Jones), new wave/pretty boy bands (Duran Duran, The Police, Power Station), hair bands (REO Speedwagon, Boston, Def Leppard), or R&B-based heartland rockers (Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Eddie Money, Tom Petty). They were mostly defined by what they were not, rather than what they were, and that they were played on college student-run radio stations. They tended to have somewhat of a punk outlook, experimented with instruments not often included in the standard rock line-up, brought in influences from other genres such as reggae, folk, jazz, punk into rock.
Included bands as diverse as R.E.M., The Cure, The Pixies, Husker Du, The Replacements, The Smiths, 10,000 Maniacs, Camper Van Beethoven, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Depeche Mode, Love & Rockets, The Violent Femmes, The B-52s, The Psychedelic Furs.
The height of college rock probably ended with the rise of grunge along with the break-through success of bands like R.E.M. and The Cure ending its “specialness” (standard “it’s popular so it sucks” reaction): you don’t need to listen to the college radio station if every radio station is playing the music.
It’s interesting how you and some others above have a bit of a different perspective than me because it seems like I’m a bit younger. I can’t really speak to the 80s or early 90s. I “came of age” during the late 90s, and my perspective is that sometime in the mid-90s, alternative rock became mainstream rock. There wasn’t really any “rock” that couldn’t also be described as “alternative.” Not on the radio, not on MTV, not anywhere.
But college rock was still a thing. I grew up in Oregon listening to both KBVR and KWVA (Oregon State and University of Oregon college radio respectively) and they played mostly the same sort of stuff. I’d say that college rock was a subgenre not of rock generally, but of alternative rock specifically. The bands were less popular, the music was more experimental, the lyrics were more quirky and humorous, etc.
The “China is a$$hoe!” meme makes me wonder: Are there any foreign memes that mock the ways that English-speakers stereotypically mispronounce words in other languages?
I know of none in Swedish, but that might admittedly be because there are very few native English speakers who ever learn Swedish, so there isn’t much material to make fun of.
Actually, we more commonly make fun of how we pronounce English words.
Not necessarily memes, but Japanese media (both anime and live-action) have had several “foreign” characters (played by native Japanese) who butcher their Japanese in the way many Americans do. It’s usually about incorrect enunciation and a drawling rhythm.
Adversarial collaboration Proposals for Covid-19.
This situation seems to me to be ripe for adversarial collaborations. To start with there isn’t a consensus on how we should measure the total deaths from Covid-19, how we should discuss the economic costs/benefits of lockdowns, how we should compare outcomes across countries etc. If we worked out how we should approach these issues now it would act like a pre-registration which would prevent some of the potential p-hacking, definition switching and biased interpretations, so I thought I would start this to ask who would be interested in helping to structure how to approach these questions and what questions they should be.
Feel free to expand on this below, I am more hoping this is a starting point than anything.
I like the idea, and would like to see two or three pairs running adversarial collaborations in parallel.
A slight tangent – it dawned on me some time after reading Scott’s post on ‘A failure, but not of Prediction’, that the sense I got of the situation – that now we know very well what the seriousness level is (a nightmare pandemic) – is wrong. Not wrong because (or just because) I disagree with ‘ A nightmare pandemic’, but because we’re not in the debrief position – we never really are.
If we have learned anything about our failures to reason clearly under uncertainty, then how can we show that now looking at how the pandemic will play out over the next year or more. Who wants to put a probability on the number of deaths exceeding a million? The economic loss exceeding 5 trillion?
I’m happy to say I have much less clue than I did two months ago. I was wrong in multiple ways then, and am more comfortable saying “How the hell would I know?” in answer to the questions I asked above.
Maybe that’s partly what I’d be looking for in a good adversarial collaboration – how would people justify their expectation of how events will unfold.
No idea about economics.
We’re already at 0.2M+ dead, 5 times that seems pretty likely if a treatment isn’t found pretty quick – countries are talking about loosening restrictions, and african countries are starting to get hit.
I’d guesstimate 85% that the world hits a million, though a million reported is a bit less likely
I also like the idea, and agree with @Anteros that it seems we may have to take an approach that is less metric-driven (this may not be the right word, but I can’t think of a better one), because there’s too much uncertainty involved. More focused on general principles of feasibility and flexibility, and finding the things with maximum impact that are also easiest for us to implement and understand. For example, it seems to me that the virus, if possible, must be prevented from entering a nursing home in the first place. This seems logistically easy to solve: the staff can’t be allowed to leave the nursing home. The question is whether we can find workers willing to do this, and the money to make it worthwhile, which is much harder. There’s also the issue of whether most of these people are willing to give up seeing relatives for years in order to avoid getting ill, which is questionable. But focusing on the mere number of nursing home deaths, and being appalled that it managed to enter the nursing home and spread widely, seems totally unproductive to me. It is of course very upsetting, but it is also inevitable as things stand. I don’t think this is going to be solved by a mathematical calculation involving the precise number of deaths attributable to COVID-19 and the economic value placed on a life or anything. Once a fatality rate is socially disruptive, that is significant. Learning that the rate is a little different than predicted probably doesn’t change strategy all that much after a point. Discovery of widespread longterm side effects would probably affect it more than even a moderate increase in the expected number of deaths.
No clue if Scott reads these OTs, but if you do, Scott, I hope you will consider hosting a classifieds thread soon.
+1
+1
+1 and not an Eel of Agreement for his excellent suggestion?
Oh ho ho ho, @EchoChaos! Who appointed you the guardian of my menagerie? That’s Ludovico’s job — until he finds paid employment.
Still … I’ve nothing better to do than peruse the catalogue. @Well… can have a Dog of Gratitude for his sagacity, while you yourself can take away a Puppy of Gratitude. Mind it doesn’t piss everywhere.
With aplomb.
Won’t be the first puppy I’ve had. Don’t you worry about me.
What breed?
(Also, I wish I understood this joke. But at least I got a compliment that required me to consult a dictionary; that’s always cool.)
Ah, the understated struggles of a fern.
@Well… says:
If Ludovico (that fool) can be trusted to write an accurate shipping manifest, the animals in question are Samoyeds.
You call my menagerie a joke, and wish you “got” it: but what’s there to get? And if there’s nothing to get, is it really a joke?
Samoyeds are fine with me. Love’em. I’ll have my wife spin the fruits of a daily brushing into yarn for a sweater, which should be fully knitted and in the mail by Christmastime.
@Scott Alexander see parent
I feel an uprising in the offing..
Isn’t there some position to which the caliph can delegate day to day responsibilities? A vizier? A seneschal? I am not familiar with the form of government, but he’s already delegated posting the biweekly threads….
Isn’t the delegate-ee in that case a robot? I don’t think that really counts as delegating.
Semi-weekly, actually. Only the non-hidden open threads are biweekly, i.e. every two weeks.
(Sorry about this, but we all have our crusades.)
@The Pachyderminator
No, I appreciate it! I debated it for a while and went with biweekly, but on examination it looks like biweekly is ambiguous and semiweekly is not. I’ll stick to semiweekly in the future.
Seconded. I have no personal use for a classifieds thread, but I find them interesting to read.
We’ve talked before about who predicted COVID being really bad early on (and acted on that prediction).
What are the predictions we, personally, should be acting on right now? What should I invest in to take advantage of the coming market changes? What should I be stocking up on to protect myself from shortages?
A few that are rarely well-defined in COVID-19 discussions on this board (and elsewhere):
opening up
lockdown
overwhelmed (re: hospitals)
flatten the curve
I often think that 80% of disagreements here are because people are using different definitions for these terms.
Don’t forget “essential service,” which has the difficulty of being partly objective, partly subjective, and time dependent.
“Flatten the curve” is especially confusing because somewhere along the lines the meaning shifted from “we can’t contain the virus so we’re just going to spread out the cases so that the hospitals aren’t overwhelmed” to “we’re going to stamp it out”.
I don’t think it shifted so much as people have been using it differently from the start. Perhaps this was deliberate to minimize the apparent disagreement among experts on the optimal approach.
Think the deliberately vague term “Medicare for all” that, until the Dem primary, politicians were free to interpret as anything from a range of actual policies.
“Social distancing” I have seen to mean being 2m apart, no handshakes and also referring to shelter-in-place rules.
@johan_larson’s movie executive friends are back, and this time they want you to do a treatment for a remake of a classic film. Forget about budget, use whatever cast you like, but just keep in mind two conditions:
1) It must be based on a classic film with a well-written twist, but one so widely known even those who haven’t seen the original know what it is (think The Empire Strikes Back, Planet of the Apes, etc.)
2) The twist must be replaced by something equally compelling, one that will surprise and delight modern audiences as much as the original did back in its day.
What do you do?
Planet of the Apes: instead of the Statue of Liberty he finds a newly constructed Stonehenge.
The Sixth Sense: turns out everybody is a ghost except for Bruce Willis, who is in a coma.
The Village: the rest of the world outside the village has descended into stone age technology.
Shutter Island: everybody on the island was secretly sane.
Sleepaway Camp: the real killer was cishet privilege.
They already did Planet of the Apes, but apes are for some reason Lincoln.
Planet of the Abes: two far future astronauts crash land on a planet where everyone is Abraham Lincoln.
I like the way you think, @FLWAB.
We mustn’t neglect any possible method of squeezing silly word-replacements from this humorous lemon!
Planet of the Snapes, of the Grapes, of the Vapes…
Planet of the Shapes – ooh, what the hell would that be about?
Two intrepid one dimensional astronauts suddently find themselves trapped in the terrible Second Dimension!
Planet of the Capes, an even bigger Marvel crossover.
Planet of the Tapes, where mysterious aliens have recorded all the galaxy’s knowledge but on VHS.
Planet Of The Shapes: A crossover of Planet of the Apes with Flatland. Includes plot elements from PacMan, Tetris and Snake.
No, I am your Mother!
Ah yes.
https://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/1152.html
“No, Luke, I am your son.”
“That’s impossible!”
“You remember that girl at Tosche Station?”
“She said our species weren’t interfertile!”
“Power converter? I hardly knew her!”
“You knew her well enough, Luke!”
Classic Mad magazine was 50 years ahead of you:
Remake of The Godfather, but instead of a horse’s head in the Hollywood producer’s bed, it’s a horse’s ass.
Remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey. When Moonwatcher tosses his bone in the air, it hits the orbiting space station. Startled voice from within: “What the hell was that?”
Sounds like a Mel Brooks gag, tbh.
Remake of Fight Club, except both Norton and Pitt’s characters are projections of Robert Paulson, that guy that dies halfway through project Mayhem, and the movie ends there after showing a montage where Robert is an unremarkable extra in all the other events of the film.
How about the Brad Pitt character is real, but Marla is the later ego of Ed Norton, and rather than finding out that his alter ego is some super handsome/charismatic leader that is going to tear down the whole system he discovers that his alter ego is a submissive homosexual or transexual who has fallen in love with a cult leader and will do anything for him.
I’ve seen this post on Tumblr.
Titanic, but it doesn’t sink, and Rose has to face what a horrible mistake she made, denounces Jack, and apologizes/returns to the rich dude.
Haha, I was just watching that film!
Cameron had to have Cal literally hit Rose before he looked like a bad guy. Letting her mother disown her and become a hobo (which she does in the ending even without Jack, and somehow becomes affluent anyway: note that she was able to afford expensive hobbies like flying a biplane!) was really dumb.
Titanic, but they all live happily ever after because Rose had the sense to paddle the mini-raft over to one of the lifeboats and offer some aspirationally rich dude, “I’ll give you one big-ass diamond if you’ll let my waterlogged friend have your seat in the boat”.
Louis XVI’s diamond was a total Idiot Plot in that film.
Apparently the water temperature the night of the Titanic sinking was estimated to be 28F.
That gives Jack about 15 minutes before he’s dead, so probably not a viable plan.
Ten minutes to paddle to the lifeboat, ten seconds for Rose to make the pitch, ten nanoseconds for the mark to say “gimme diamond NOW!”. I think it works.
@HeelBearCub: Jack is handcuffed in freezing water for longer than that anyway.
I’m somewhat confident that Rose spent 15 minutes diving in the freezing water just trying to rescue him.
The Crying Game, but Fergus is excited by the thought of being in a queer relationship, and is angered when Dil turns out to just be a woman. He finally accepts that a straight relationship is acceptable.
The Sixth Sense, only this time, Bruce Willis has severe diarrhea.
The Sixth Sense, but Bruce Willis is alive and trying to get a severely mentally traumatized child to stop seeing things.
What a twist!
Psycho: Norman Bates is socially awkward but innocent. His violently insane mother was actually a dissociative identity of his mentally ill father, Bruce Willis.
Planet of the Bates: Norman comes across a prone Statue of Liberty, which has been brutally stabbed with a giant copper knife, and cries “Mother! Damn you! Damn you to hell!”
Planet of the Kates: Leonardo DiCaprio wins a third-class ticket on the starship Titanic, voyaging to the planet Katia, where all women are Kate Winslet. This means the people in third class who want to immigrate are all either men or poor Kate Winslets. He finds himself in a whirlwind Betty and Veronica romance with a poor Kate Winslet and a rich Kate Winslet who doesn’t love her fiance.
@Le Maistre Chat
I would watch that.
Planet of the Plates: Norman is actually just really nervous about using his fine china to impress a visitor from out of town to raise the profile of his motel.
That basically describes the sequels to Psycho. Norman Bates just wants to chill in his creepy mansion but people keep trying to get him to kill again so he’ll get arrested again, ‘cos otherwise he might kill again.
Citizen Kane’s last word, rosebud, actually doesn’t refer to anything from his past. He was trolling anybody trying to write the definitive story of his life into giving him a bit of viral marketing in the course of the search…because “Rosebud” is actually the title of his stealth-produced auto-biopic, willed to go to theaters after his death. Despite being intended to air posthumously, it so coldly rewrites the story we’ve seen over the course of the movie that we’re left to conclude there really is nothing left in him of who he was as a child.
Soylent Green: Soylent Green is manna & the Torah is true.
The Matrix: Neo is a machine, the machines wiped out humans centuries ago but can’t handle the guilt so they’re fooling themselves into thinking they’re humans living in human-land.
Fellowship of the Ring: Boromir ushers in the Great Golden Age of Gondor
Nice. The sequels may be less rosy, though.
Middle Earth’s Game of Thrones
Obi-Wan killed your father.
Obi-wan was your father.
“Of course I know him! He’s me!”
All right, US tax experts of SSC, I have a question for you: For those of us who live in one state and work in another, how does this lockdown affect us?
Normally, you pay state income taxes where you work. So if you work in New Jersey and live in New York, you pay state taxes to New York; New Jersey taxes the same income but gives a credit for taxes paid in New Jersey. If I work from home regularly… well, what the state tax authorities don’t know doesn’t complicate the paperwork. But now we have the lockdowns, so I have now worked a significant part of the time from my home in NJ, not the (closed) office in NYC. Does this mean I should be paying only NJ tax until these lockdowns end? If so, given the direction of commuting… big windfall for NJ (which they don’t deserve), big loss for NY (which they do deserve), and most importantly, since NJ income taxes are slightly lower, small windfall for me. Is this the case, and if so are states like NY in for a rough surprise?
I don’t have an answer for this, but since I’m very likely to be living in New Jersey by the fall, and working from home, I’m curious. My general understanding is that you always pay based on where you live, regardless of where you work. I mean, the company I work for currently has an official corporate address in Nevada, and *no one* working in Nevada.
In my experience, you pay where you work AND where you live–and the tax interaction between the two depends on the specific states involved. So if you live in NJ and work in NY, you file income taxes in both–but if you work from home in NJ for a NY employer, you only pay NJ.
I can kind of give you an answer. I can’t fully answer partly because I am a corporate tax guy and don’t deal with these issues. But also because it is complicated because of state-to-state agreements and practical issues.
Technically you owe tax in the state where you do the work. So when you work in NY, you owe NY tax. When you work from home, you owe tax in NJ. However, before Covid-19, if you worked from home sometimes this would be ignored because of practical issues and not being significant. Now it is significant. Also, most states have agreements with each other to ease the practicalities, usually where the employee only has to pay tax in their home state even if they work in a different one. I presume this is not the case for NJ/NY since you imply you pay NY tax now.
It is hard to know how this will shake out. I presume your workplace is still withholding NY taxes from your paycheck, because it would be a royal pain to change that. Ultimately it will be up to the states to determine how you file your 2020 tax return next year. The Mass DOR recently issued some guidelines on this very issue. You’ll have to go to the NJ DOR to find out the rules there, but they likely haven’t decided yet. But lots of people are in your position, so I assume something will be decided.
As far as I know, New York and New Jersey have no tax agreement; both give credit (though not quite full credit for byzantine reasons) for taxes paid in other states, but as a NJ resident working in New York, I effectively pay the taxes to New York, most of which is covered by withholding.
I usually get a bit back from NY (mostly because they do supplemental withholding at the top tax rate, which is an overestimate), and pay to NJ (both due to interest/dividend income and the not-quite-full-credit thing). The tax forms are ugly (though this is largely because the New York State non-resident tax form is ugly on its own). Having the income divided between the two states is going to be even uglier.
Embedded in this article about how lethal Covid-19 is, I noticed something I haven’t seen discussed or even realized here.
Note: I am not saying people here are dismissing Covid-19 as “just the flu”.
I am pointing out that, comparing like with like, we would need to be comparing the case fatality rate of the two, not the infection fatality rate. That’s a huge reason why letting the disease just play out results in total deaths that are so high.
Then add in the fact that this is a novel virus, whereas the flu strains that go around are not, and have available vaccines, and you also would experience much higher overall infection rates.
The 0.1% is not a case fatality rate. You can look at the numbers here. They work out to an IFR between .10% (2015-16 and 2018-19) and 0.18% (2010-2011). The catch is they’re estimating symptomatic illness only, and asymptomatic flu does exist. Estimates for the asymptomatic rate for flu are all over the board, however.
I imagine one goal of that flu study in Washington State[1] was to get a better estimate of asymptomatic infection rate of seasonal flu.
[1] Where the lady running it spun up her own COVID-19 tests and detected community spread.
It’s not backed up by a citation, which is unfortunate. If I eyeball the CDC data for the US, I get a “Deaths/Symptomatic Illness” ratio of between 0.18% and 0.1% depending on the year and a “Deaths/Medical Visits” rate of about twice that, and those seem like reasonable stand-ins for IFR/CFR respectively (you’re definitely not a Case in the CFR sense if you don’t at least visit a doctor).
Now maybe the flu is 75% asymptomatic, leading to the 1/4 estimate from that researcher, but that’s news to me.
EDIT: The Nybbler beat me to it.
I have never been diagnosed positive nor ever even been tested for the flu. If that is how we do things, the epidemiology community is rotten to the core and should be razed.
Note that the virus isn’t the disease, and it’s reasonable to ask questions about them separately when trying to answer similar questions about them simultaneously can be costly and/or difficult.
Your approach runs the risk of razing useful tools for the crime of not being perfect.
Theoretically. But if I iterate the evidence I have it seems like I’d probably just be razing a rotten tree that was going to fall on my house and cause significant damage. Lets look at the field.
1. Heavily involved in modeling. A very suspect field. Thus, they start very low in my eyes.
2. Wildly variant and consistently making poor assumptions during the C19 incident.
3. Apparently don’t even conduct randomized sampling following flu seasons to try and accurately depict past flu seasons.
With these data points they are way past neutral into actively harmful.
1. Modeling isn’t a “field”. Every branch of science (hard and social) builds models. Every branch of engineering builds models. Hell, most humanities build models.
2. Fair, though make sure you’re criticizing the actual model vice folks who are misinterpreting it and trying to apply it to problems for which it was not designed.
3. That’s literally what the Seattle Flu Study was doing. Also, you’re definition of “accurately” might not be the same as theirs. Whether or not you’re accurate depends on what you’re aiming for. If you’re trying to estimate how many hospital beds you’ll need for the flu this year, the asymptomatic rate may not be important.
Re: Seattle study. I’m saying that its a humongous flaw they don’t do that every year with every virus.
I’m pretty sure the article is just flat wrong on that point. You can do some rough napkin math based on the CDC published figures. Couple of years ago was a bad flu season and ~80k fatalities and in a typical a year the flu infects around 15% of people (swine flu was a standout in this regard infecting something more like 20-25%, but it ended up being not that severe). Say we go with 20% infected of 320,000,000 and 80k dead that gives an IFR of 0.125%.
The argument that IFR is say, 1/4 or the oft repeated 0.1 or 0.025%, would have required something like 100% of Americans to have had that flu that year to get to 80k fatalities.
Saw a facebook post about this
https://m.facebook.com/notes/arlie-esau/virus-mortality-stats-its-a-crapshoot/10219859305266755/
@HBC
I had talked alot about that difference a few weeks back. I thought everyone who takes the time to inform themself about stuff like this, would be aware by know.
@HBC
To add to your ‘Difference between Flu and Covid-19’, Flu infection rates are around 5% per year – which is why the mortality figures are so low even with a 0.1% IFR.
Unchecked, Covid-19 would surely infect an order of magnitude more people than that.
Proportion of population getting symptomatic flu infections have ranged from ~3% to ~13.75% from 2010-2011 to 2018-2019.
Surely? I don’t think so. The CDC estimates 20% of the population infected in 2009 (Swine Flu), for instance. Not clear if that includes asymptomatic infections. And yet it was a relatively low death season (12,469), estimated IFR of 0.02%. (Yet somehow this same strain in later years was less contagious and more deadly. I’m starting to think Clutzy may be right about epidemiology being rotten to the core)
And order of magnitude more than 5%.
Given that you think flu by itself made 20% in a bad year, it’s hard to see how you could object.
Flu infection rates are typically greater than 5% (even considering only symptomatic infections), and a novel flu reached only 20% (which is not an order of magnitude greater than 5%).
One annoying thing I’ve seen is someone comparing the covid fatality rate among people under 40 with no other sicknesses to the total fatality rate of the flu; and then saying this shows it is no more dangerous than the flu
SSC Discord server invite is still broken (not planning to use it, but…).
Try the one in the sidebar: https://discord.gg/kAVSf9U
Some (terrible) English expressions.
Thanks to the coronavirus:
The meat industry has gone the way of all flesh
The shoe industry will pop their clogs
The apparel industry will wear a concrete overcoat
The construction industry is swimming with concrete shoes
Travel agencies will take their last train to glory
Shipping will be off on a boat
Seaside resorts have taken a long walk off a short pier.
The US gov budget has bought the farm.
They’re pining for the fjords.
The agricultural sector has bought the farm.
As a whole, manufacturers didn’t make it.
Vacation resorts are in a better place now.
Casinos in Vegas are cashing in their chips.
Casinos elsewhere are folding.
Much of the software industry is still quite agile.
Online video streaming services seem to be enjoying a comfortable buffer.
Delivery services are still driving forward, although USPS is apparently having trouble delivering.
The airline industry is experiencing turbulence.
The restaurant industry is getting taken out.
Pet adoption agencies are experiencing fur lows.
Gyms and spas are in bad shape.
Fashion boutiques are having to tighten their belts.
Professional sports are sidelined.
Facemask manufacturers are well-protected.
Turbulence? It’s plummeting!
Adventure travel has fallen off a cliff.
The cruise ship industry has run aground.
Toilet paper stockpiles have been wiped out.
They’ve been spread paper thin, at least.
Butt on the other hand, there’s been a gush of bidet sales.
Shipping is barely staying afloat.
I guess that’s closer to the truth. They’re probably not completely done for.
The oil industry is burning out.
People in the OPEC countries are feeling a bit dry, and not just because of Ramadan!
I don’t get your expression. What does “feeling dry” mean?
He may be using “dry” in the sense of without available alcohol–in the US there have been “dry” counties with prohibition on alcohol sales, for instance.
Ramadan isn’t, afaik, special in this regard–Muslims are always dry. But there might be the equivalent of “Easter Christians”, Muslims who submit to the restrictions generally just during Ramadan.
I swear I’ve heard “feeling a bit dry” used as a way to say “without money”.
In Ramadam Muslims refrain from drinking water during sunlight hours.
Actual news headline:
Run on toilets leaves Japanese lavatory makers flush with orders