2020 is going to go down in history as one of those years that will forever be defined by a single event. No historically literate person hears 1914 without immediately thinking World War I, 1929 means the crash, 1776 conjures to mind the American Revolution. There is no disputing the fact that we are experiencing a disaster on a generation defining scale. What is subject to dispute is the nature of that disaster. Even that is a bit of an oversimplification. Most people of any intellectual honesty perceive all three faces of the crisis, the disagreement is about emphasis and relative importance.
So what are the three faces? Covid-19, the economic devastation resulting from the disease and the response, and the unprecedented level of government interference in our daily lives, three heads on a rabid junkyard Cerberus. We wake up each morning to updates on the spread of the disease, breathless counts of deaths, earnest Doctors draw us curves demonstrating doubling rates, numbers of ventilators and hospital beds, and foretelling death carts lined up to the horizon. Midday announcements from our Governors, the President, and various functionaries give us our latest marching, or more accurately no marching allowed, orders. These are never more than vaguely tied to a legal justification, but come with ample discussion of the need to flatten the aforementioned curves. And the stock ticker chatters away, a steady stream of numbers disappearing off the left side of the screen along with our hopes and dreams of retirement, or even ongoing employment.
How we rank the three faces is tied to how we view the world. For the most part the person you are fighting with on Facebook or Twitter does not in fact want your Grandparent to die, nor are they delighted that your business is folding and that your IRA is now a smaller entry on your financial statement than the change in your couch cushions. They probably aren’t actually happy about the idea that Governors have assumed emergency powers over every aspect of daily life. Most of them are just scared, and the disagreements, and the heat behind those disagreements, come from the fact that they are scared differently than you are.
To some extent the differing viewpoints are linked to Political views. This contributes to the inability to appreciate each other’s point of view because politics is, above all else, a team sport. We are inherently tribal creatures. Take away our tribal lifestyle by building a modern, highly mobile, industrial world and we create new tribes. If you doubt this, consider how you as a fan of tOSU feel about Michigan, go to Tuscaloosa and yell “War Eagle”, ask a guy in UK blue about Christian Laettner’s buzzer beater, or to swing back around to politics, just mention Trump to a lifelong Democrat or Hillary to a Republican. But at the root, the difficulty in communication comes from our hardwired reaction to threats.
When you are frightened your fight, freeze, or flight instincts kick in, and absent serious training and willpower, they overwhelm your conscious decision making. You get angry at obstacles. Anything you perceive as obstructing your path of flight, or entering your hiding place, or worst of all opposing you in the fight, becomes an existential threat, and you react accordingly. This response is on a trigger so automatic, and buried so deep in the hind brain, that it is almost impossible to override. So you are just being human when you lash out at someone who disagrees with your view, but humans are more than that hind brain, so when the frontal lobes take back the reins after the initial scared lizard reaction, make the appropriate apologies and reexamine what made you lash out.
Yes, obnoxious Twitter behavior is largely rooted in the fact that we were simultaneously predators and prey. We have instincts telling us to run and hide from threats, and instincts telling us to pounce on the weak. Be thankful this mostly plays out in nasty, ill-considered words online these days. You can deal with a Twitter dispute; you are descended from thousands of generations that survived worse.
So what does all of this have to do with the current crisis? The virus is not merely a misunderstanding. It does in fact seem to spread readily, and it does kill people in large numbers, or at least numbers that we perceive as large.
The economic disruption is likewise real. In a week we effectively doubled the number of unemployed. Thousands of businesses are in fact going under. Almost none of us are financially secure at the moment, even people with significant savings are seeing the value of their investments drop precipitously, at precisely the time that they are faced with the possibility that they may need to use that money to survive.
And whether you regard the government orders as appropriate and necessary responses to a massive threat, or power grabs far out of proportion to the threat, you cannot reasonably deny that closing businesses, schools, churches, and forbidding people from coming together in groups is largely unprecedented and represents a massive interference in our lives, and with our most basic rights.
In other words, all three heads of this hellhound bark, and all three bite. We cannot ignore two of the heads to deal with the one that scares us most. Frederic Bastiat called this the problem of the seen and the unseen.
The problem arises anytime a centralized, top down, response tries to confront a threat. Government is made up of two cohorts. Politicians who are, either by nature, or by virtue of the demands of election, focused on popularity, and bureaucrats who are focused on process over results. Neither group has any particular skill dealing with crises. That is not the basis by which they are selected, retained, or promoted. Bureaucrats advance by seniority and avoiding scandal, their jobs are largely about making sure the paperwork is all filed correctly. Politicians are hired, retained, and promoted by winning popularity contests. So what happens when a crisis arises?
The experts step forward. This seems appropriate. Who should craft the response to an epidemic? The obvious choice is an epidemiologist. Obvious choices should always be questioned. No matter how sweet your tooth, getting in the Free Candy van is likely to have a bitter outcome that overwhelms the sweetest treat. The clear advantage of an expert is that experts by their nature view the world through a set of assumptions, knowledge, experience, and training specifically related to the crisis. The less obvious, but no less real, problem is that experts by their nature view the world through a set of assumptions, knowledge, experience, and training. Experts have tunnel vision.
An epidemiologist sees the world in terms of number, frequency, and type of human contacts leading to spread of a disease. To him the world reduces to a series of ‘patient zeroes’ each of which forms the center of a spreading cluster of infection, each cluster shoots out lines, as other people get infected and then travel to another city, country, or even continent, and take their turn as that locale’s patient zero, starting a new cluster of infection. The epidemiologist’s first job, quite appropriately, is all about controlling the spread; he is not by training, temperament or mission looking at non-medical considerations. So we get shelter in place, no unessential work, lock down the borders, just stay home!
Then he turns his attention toward maximizing the resources available to treat the patients soon to be flooding the hospitals, and we get all non-essential procedures cancelled to empty the hospitals, and efforts to switch all production to masks, respirators, ventilators, and disinfectants. The fact, perhaps obvious to an economist, that the economy is all interconnected and massively disrupting parts of it will ripple through the rest, is not obvious to the epidemiologist. He isn’t being malign or uncaring. He does not want to put everyone out of work. He does not want to ruin your life; he wants to save it from the threat he is fighting. He is just looking down a tunnel in which minimizing spread and diverting resources to the fight is all he sees.
So we shut down all nonessential travel, work, and businesses. We cancel all non-emergency medical procedures and tell ourselves that every resource of the nation is now directed to the fight against the virus. But that is a lie. No matter how brilliant the person calling the shots, he cannot possibly hope to understand everything he is impacting. In fact he cannot even hope to understand a significant minority of what he is affecting. The aggregation of an infinite number of choices, actions, exchanges, lives, loves, and relationships that we trivialize by calling it the ‘economy’, is beyond any human ability to comprehend. It is literally everything everyone does, desires, dreads, or dreams.
The unseen effects of the actions taken to control the spread of the disease include every suicide from the depression a lockdown, firing, or business failure produces. Every child whose education is disrupted, and now will lead a different life than she otherwise would have led. Every business that fails costs us any innovation, any job, any product or service that might have been. These effects ripple off to infinity and no one can ever know whether how much was lost.
In the very arena we are taking these extreme measures to ‘support’, negative effects are seen. The shutdown of ‘unnecessary’ procedures means hospitals and medical practices are running at a loss. That will be dismissed as mere money, but money is not ‘mere.’ It represents energy, resources, and labor. Even in the very short term the effect is fewer Doctors available to treat illness. Fewer resources available to provide treatments, fewer minds coming up with innovations, and more deaths, both from the virus and from all the myriad other diseases which get shunted aside in our rush to handle Covid.
In the medium term converting factories, built for other purposes, to producing needed materials may paradoxically kill the actual producers of those materials. Manufacturers of masks are prevented from fulfilling their contracts to sell those masks abroad because we need them here. Some of that business will not come back. Meanwhile manufacturers of other products are being tasked to retool and make masks. So the mask makers are prevented from doing their ordinary business, while we as a society subsidize new competitors, who may be useful in the very short term, but who will rapidly produce a glut of masks.
But as these effects ripple, and our lives are put on hold, the Government has an answer. We will just dump money into the system to help everyone weather the storm. Two serious problems come with this solution. First, the obvious, dumping massive piles of cash into the system is inflationary; the newly created money is all in the form of additional debt, piled on a system that was already debt heavy, and dumping into a world market that is pretty nearly universally underwater with its own debt. Meanwhile the projected day when Social Security becomes insolvent, the ticking time bomb of the American economy gets ever closer. At some point even the strongest beast will collapse under the weight piled on its back; up until the last straw the camel seems strong enough to bear any burden, but there is a last straw.
Second, less obviously, but just as seriously, any time we dump stimulus money to ‘save’ the economy that money is awarded by politicians. The market rewards businesses that please their customers and therefore we get more of what we want, and less of what we don’t. Politicians reward businesses that give them contributions; businesses that do what politicians desire. This is a well paved path toward fascism.
Shutting down the massive, beautifully complex web formed by individuals pursuing their own lives, and funding those lives by serving each other, weakens us, and weakens our ability to deal with the very crisis that justified the shutdown. Will 2020 be remembered as the year of the virus? As the start of the second Great Depression? Or will it go down through the ages as the year liberty died?
I’m not sure if this is OT, but My observations at the grocery stores today – The first store had no occupancy limit posted, but had put down directional arrows on the aisles. However, no one paid any attention to the arrows and just went whichever direction was convenient. The plastic bag ban is in abeyance, and the stores (both) were giving out plastic bags for free. They were, however, the shockingly cheap kind that rip if you look at them wrong. The second store had a posted occupancy limit, but no indication anyone was enforcing it. There was Charmin on the shelves in addition to Angel Soft and Generics.
And to top it off, someone tore down the tape closing off the local park.
Oh, there was a bit of a shortage in canned soup and dry pasta, but I still acquired enough that it wasn’t an impediment.
Dry pasta was fully stocked at my local store, but the jarred sauces was the opposite of decimated (there was only ~10% left). Flour was still light, as was sugar and dairy. I was able to pick up almost everything I needed (no buttermilk… but I can substitute that pretty easily).
“the jarred sauces was the opposite of decimated”
I remember when I used to use jarred sauce.
Then you had to switch to canned.
You make tomato sauce with onions, garlic, olive oil, and canned tomatoes.
Don’t tell me what to do!
I have tried to make it with fresh tomatoes but pureeing them first ends up as pink water, and dicing them by hand is a massive hassle, and a mess. I’d love one of our resident Italian purists to post instructions.
You need a food mill. I am not a Dago but I did this once.
A salsa maker cuts tomatoes properly.
For Jarflax…
If anyone has stronger claims to authenticity, I’d like to see them.
SF’ed the link.
I was just walking through the aisle. But if I want the girlfriend to cook, jarred sauce it will be. She still panics even using jarred sauce.
No Charmin this morning, but I got a 12 pack of Cottonelle, which is a nice consolation prize.
The grocery stores here are essentially ignoring Governor Douchewine’s orders, and just letting people in like normal. Publicly they say they are complying, but it’s impossible, so they aren’t really doing it, or even trying.
I commented the other day that the Giant Eagle nearest me has a sign at the door limiting customers to 1,288 at a time.
No one was counting that I saw.
Publix had the arrows taped to the floor, but no one appeared to be observing them. Kroger designated one set of doors as the entrance and another set as the exit, and has hired an annoying security guard to enforce that.
One thing I noticed – the stores were mostly empty early in the morning. I’m gonna have to keep doing that.
TP returned to the shelves in force, but still no paper towels or disinfectants. Other than that, most shelves seemed pretty fully stocked.
“There is no disputing the fact that we are experiencing a disaster on a generation defining scale.”
Primary difference: this disaster is entirely self-inflicted and completely avoidable.
“…this disaster is entirely self-inflicted…”
Wife this morning: “Sunday we are supposed to have extreme thunderstorms and possible tornados. What is going to happen if we get tornados? What if we get a real disaster?”
Me: “People are going to pull their heads out of their asses and take care of business”
Exactly. There’s not much pushback among the chattering classes and pro-government people over this shit because they’re having a month-long snow day with some good moral preening over social media. Once Whole Foods runs out of frozen pizzas and they realize the state budget lines that fund their jobs are being cut because the economic strain has slashed tax revenues they’ll be ripping those N95s off and running back to the office.
“realize the state budget lines that fund their jobs are being cut because the economic strain has slashed tax revenues”
I wish this would happen, but it won’t.
Don’t be so sure. I work for a university, and the word is that in the short term everybody’s jobs are safe, but in the long term the money the university isn’t getting now that students are off campus for the rest of the semester (and had dorm fees etc. refunded) and possibly not even coming back in the Fall other than online, combined with the state budget in general being strained, means that people on the fringes are likely going to either get pay cuts or have their positions eliminated. There’s already a hiring freeze.
Almost entirely self inflicted, true. Completely avoidable? I am not sure on this one. As libertarians we knee jerk to the “Government is bad therefore everything bad is because of government” and engage in complicated mental gymnastics to lay every ill at the steps of the Capitol. The reality is that Government is bad, AND people are also largely driven by hardwired responses. Panic feeds on itself, and confirmation bias and fear of the unknown are built in to the basic human brain. We react according to our beliefs. The government ordered shut downs do not help, but most of the businesses affected would be in trouble anyway, because 2/3 or more of the public is scared of the virus and would not be going out anyway.
The virus is not an existential threat, that is pretty clear. The virus is largely killing people who would otherwise have died, but the overall death rate in Italy at the peak was 2.4 times, 240% of the year over year rate. This is a nasty virus and I do not think it is either intellectually honest, or rhetorically effective to claim it is nothing.
There is little reason to believe it exceeds a disease that our society routinely copes with every year with minimal disruption, at most. And there have been thoughtful dissenting views and studies to that effect since day one.
Is that due to the lockdown? Too early to say, but I strongly suspect the after action analysis will say we hugely overreacted and caused on net a lot more damage than if we had done little to nothing.
I have been seeing variations of this theme for a while now, and I’m really confused by it.
First, the obvious riposte : did I miss the yearly stories about how the hospitals in large states are overwhelmed with seasonal flu cases? Is the experience of Italy and Spain, where shit very obviously got super bad and way worse than the yearly flu, somehow anomalous?
Second : https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/fyf0yh/megathread_covid19sarscov2_april_10th_2020/
I can understand being differently influenced by the tenor of different news sources that one consumes. I don’t understand how anyone could spend 10 minutes reading medical professionals discussing this amongst themselves and conclude that this is somehow the same as the flu they deal with every year. Try it and see?
Example comment :
”
Every single shift is the same thing. Covid, nc admit. Covid nrb admit. Fill out death note. Covid tube. Death note. Covid CPAP.
A good day is two deaths.
“
I’ll be back to respond to comments, but amusingly enough, I have the first “needs to be done now” thing in 2 weeks just as this dropped.
Thanks for writing.
Hope you have TP.
Re-posted from the dead thread:
I’m beginning to think that the only way we’re really going to get these economic restrictions lifted is if Boomers, as a group, say that “we’ll take one for the team.” 94% of the deaths from COVID in the province of Alberta, to date, have been people 50 years of age or over. 91% have been people 60 years of age or over. 75% of the deaths have been people 70 years of age or older.
Why can’t we just suggest to everyone (say) above the official age of retirement (65 years) that they stay self-isolated whilst the rest of the pop’n (pretty much everyone of working age anyways) goes back to work with appropriate social distancing rules? Apparently that’s too hard, and it’s more worthwhile to inflict huge amounts of pain on the younger generations.
I’m a Boomer. I’d be perfectly willing to self-isolate under these rules. Boomers en masse are showing themselves to be selfish cuntes who think they have the right to live forever and damn the consequences to everyone else.
My parents started self-isolation about January.
Boomers are not being (especially) selfish. They aren’t even the ones pushing this shit. It’s mostly the Karens shrieking when anyone suggests it might be ok to go outside. Karens know no generation (or gender) – the Stasi-collaborator-like voices I’ve seen calling for everyone to duck and cover at home range from Generation Z to Boomers, and I’ve not noticed any pattern except the desire to control their neighbors.
Boomers are not being (especially) selfish. They aren’t even the ones pushing this shit.
Who is in charge?
A lot of people of various generations, not a single group of them being more than a tiny minority of its generation.
Fauci is 79. HOR average age is late 50s, Senate early 60s. Governors, looks like 57. These are boomers.
Probably a lot, if not majority, of HOR and Governor would be Gen X. The oldest Gen Xers would be 55 by normal convention. And I think the 1961-1964 group is more Xer than Boomer really.
Trump is barely a boomer, being born 11 months after VJ day. He qualifies, but juuuuust barely.
In my limited experience the majority of the people not losing their shit over this virus seem to be Gen Xers.
Gen X to me is 40s and early 50s. Median age of Governors looks to be 58, so I guess we are about split there on the generations.
So you are saying boomers in general are just like the percentage of idiot politicians who happen to be boomers?
As a boomer I will have to disagree, as politicians of any generation are generally useless sociopaths concerned only with their own power and self-aggrandizement. Politicians who are boomers are not typical of boomers anymore than AOC represents a typical Millenial.
Politicians who are boomers are not typical of boomers anymore than AOC represents a typical Millenial.
All true, but that won’t stop anyone from using them as an example of the Generation they hate.
I’m just saying we didn’t hold a vote on any of this and those that implemented the lock-down strategy are more likely than not to be of a certain generation (also the group more likely to be affected by the virus).
They are the group pushing this, not that any other age group would have necessarily pushed back on it.
“Most people who did this are boomers” != “Most boomers did this”
Come the fuck on, how am I having to type that out?!
You didn’t need to, I understand not all boomers. If we are looking at generations though, one holds more political power than the rest.
Zombie Al Haig?
My dad does pretty much whatever he wants, always has and always will, but he rarely leaves the house for very long anyway other than to play golf or visit me or my sister and our kids. He has always worked from home and shortly before this lunacy cranked up stepped back into semi-retirement anyway,
Mom works at the county jail coordinating inmate transportation, and she’s kind of pissed that other jail employees have been allowed to work from home but she hasn’t.
“The virus is not merely a misunderstanding. It does in fact seem to spread readily, and it does kill people in large numbers, or at least numbers that we perceive as large.”
I see the point you’re trying to make, and I’m trying hard to check my own biases here, but this is where you lose me. We don’t have solid evidence that this disease is exceptionally virulent or exceptionally deadly. We have no idea what the true case fatality rates are because it’s essentially impossible to measure during an outbreak. Huge swaths of the population may have already had it and had no symptoms, it might change in some way with the change in the season, hell there’s even some debate of how it kills people. We just don’t know. So what we have is:
A) The known catastrophic damage caused by shutting down the economy vs.
B) The unknown damage caused by a novel virus
I see our response as “the check engine light came on in my car; I’m just going to junk it because it might be something bad and better safe than sorry”. Not trying to be flippant or unsympathetic to vulnerable populations, but at the end of the day, it’s their own responsibility to look out for themselves. If I were old or diabetic or immunocompromised, I’d self-quarantine for my own protection. I would not expect my entire city to quarantine as well.
Question: on what situation if any would you consider the quarantine measures appropriate?
These measures? None. You quarantine known only vectors and advise the at risk people to opt to self-isolate.
I entirely agree. The only scenario in which I can see enforced quarantine is when a specific population is known to be infected and is willfully, deliberately attempting to infect others against their will, which is a scenario existing largely in fiction to the best of my historical knowledge. The optimal solution now would’ve been for vulnerable populations to self-isolate and take advantage of existing resources such as ubiquitous delivery and online services for basically everything in order to protect themselves. In the end, we might–MIGHT–have reduced infection rates, but the economic damage, not to mention the social and political damage, is going to be terrible. It already is, I think.
This – quarantine is the latest word to be ruined. Making the healthy population live in a police-state gulag ain’t it.
Exactly.
Sick people are quarantined.
Healthy people are . . . Oppressed?
I don’t think there is a situation in which they’re appropriate. My civil liberties are too precious to be sodomized in the name of “safety”, no matter what the threat. That’s my principled answer.
But even from a utilitarian standpoint (setting aside the fact that utilitarianism is immoral), the current situation IMO dictates these measures are not appropriate.
You metioned the u known danger of the virus which prompted my question. The conclusion being the danger known or unknown is irrelevamt
From a principled stand, that is true.
Most people won’t accept that argument, however; so couching it in terms of risk mitigation (my original post) is more effective against the genpop.
Of course there will still be a lot of precautionary principle douchebags and Karens out there that won’t accept that argument either. The fact of the matter is that most people are more than will to shit on liberty in the name of “safety”.
I personally respect the argument: I don’t care about the supercold if that affects my right. I don’t like the argument the measures are not needed because the supercold is not that bad. The second implies a much more utilitarian than principled view.
Yes! It is an ineffective, and somewhat dishonest argument as well. People will have different thresholds for perceiving a disease as ‘that bad’, so arguing based on your perception that it is nothing gets you nowhere.
I am not sure if I said this in morning thread or not, but the original purpose of “cower in place” was to flatten the curve to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. Outside of NY, mission accomplished. We aren’t even close, so that means we overflattened and need to loosen up to allow people to get sick faster and get us to herd immunity quicker.
That is the utilitarian argument against the restriction, we done did too much of it and people aren’t sick enough.
The counter i’ve been seeing (which bears some truth) is that if we just let everyone go back it will then blow up and overwhelm the hospitals.
I do think that if all the restrictions were removed, you would see a rise in cases. But for most states that can be handled, and wouldn’t overhwhelm the hospitals. Of course it is only worsened because for the last month the whole “Shelter in Place” has been justified to the masses as a way to “Stop the Corona” so a large part of the populace will think that it is gone, rather than just being managed.
The whole episode has been a tremendous example of how the Government will lie to people because they think that is the best way to get them to do what they want. “Don’t by Masks, the don’t help”. ‘Stay inside to stop the corona’. Even if we give them the benefit, and say they had good intentions, they have lied about these things to manipulate people, and that is dangerous.
Pure speculation. A major,problem with it is that viral epidemics are suppressed by hot weather. We Re running out the clock on this thing, at least until fall, unless it acts differently than other corona viruses.
really There’s not enough information at the time to judge how effective the shelter in places have been, but i was assuming some benefit from them in the sense that they probably did slow the spread a bit.
Unwind the restrictions one at a time and watch the hospitalizations. If they get over 80% or something, hold off on loosening up until the numbers drop again.
That would certainly make sense, but “No Life is Disposable”TM and all don’t agree. Nothing i stated here makes me of the opinon that the restrictions were ever right. I think that people and stores could have handled this fairly well. But even granting government interference, i don’t think they were very smart about it.
It’s classic Government. Even when they want to help they are not going to do it in a smart way, because the politicians have different incentives.
It is pretty clear that some people think they value the idea that they are free (because the default state of an American citizen when not quarantined is “free” I guess???) more than they value their own lives. I’m pretty sure it’s because they don’t actually believe their lives are in danger, because they’ve lived in a first world country in the 20th century where life threatening infectious disease pandemic is not common.
I think your question gets to the heart of the issue. If the disease were in fact so deadly and virulent that the only way to prevent everyone from dying was measures like these or worse, these people apparently believe they would continue to maintain their principles.
I doubt it. May we never find out.
Exceptional article. Thanks for writing it.
“the economic devastation resulting from the disease and the response, and the unprecedented level of government interference in our daily lives, three heads on a rabid junkyard Cerberus.”
Excellent.
“…the person you are fighting with on Facebook or Twitter does not in fact want your Grandparent to die, nor are they delighted that your business is folding and that your IRA is now a smaller…”
You have greater faith in humanity than I do. I am gonna say you are wrong on that one.
“The problem arises anytime a centralized, top down, response tries to confront a threat. Government is made up of two cohorts. Politicians who are, either by nature, or by virtue of the demands of election, focused on popularity, and bureaucrats who are focused on process over results. Neither group has any particular skill dealing with crises. That is not the basis by which they are selected, retained, or promoted. Bureaucrats advance by seniority and avoiding scandal, their jobs are largely about making sure the paperwork is all filed correctly. Politicians are hired, retained, and promoted by winning popularity contests. So what happens when a crisis arises?”
This is succinct and accurate. Answer: disaster. I have been there up-close and personal. The last person you want to see in the midst of a crisis is a government employee. People sort things out in spite of government efforts.
“The cure can’t be worse than the disease”
/stupid boorish Orangebadman president that will be the end of all that is good
I am failry sure there are plenty leftist who want as many businesses to fail because that proves we need socialism
That means a lot coming from you. Unfortunately here in the west voices like yours, those with direct experience, often are ignored.
“No matter how much information you give them they cannot draw a sensible conclusion. Forcibly taking them to the death camps and show them, they still will not believe. They will only believe when the boot is crushing their balls. Not before” – Yuri Bezmenov
You guys (gals?) are all smarter than me and I can’t keep up intellectually. Hopefully someone will get a little chuckle from this.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtYU87QNjPw
“Oh, now you see what I’m on about!”
Yeah, the counterpoint to that optimistic view of humanity is that oftentimes you’re dealing with people who are not operating on a rational level and cannot be reasoned with. I’m not going to go to bat for Vox Day, but he writes a thing about how some people think in terms of rhetoric rather than logic, which is to say they evaluate arguments on how they make them feel rather than whether or not they make logical sense. These people generally want to destroy rather than convince.
In other words, these people continue to think like sophists instead of Socrates.
I’m leaning towards a second Great Depression. Looking at the amount of money being pumped out by the governments, the expected failure rate of the businesses that were forced closed (or had their distribution/supply side shut down), and the unemployment numbers. Yeah, I’m still working and getting paid, but what level of inflation is going to be hitting in the next year? How much will my money be worth five years from now?
I really feel for those of you who were looking to retire in the next 5-10 years.
Just wait until inflation hits. When the dollar takes a shit, it’s flushing the whole world.
Yeah. I also don’t see the EU not trying to do the same level as bailouts as the US, with the predictable (and foreseeable) consequences.
The EU is structurally incapable of bailouts on our scale. There is enough sovereignty left in the nations that would foot the bill, and know it, that massive borrowing is blocked.
My gold holdings are offsetting my equities/bonds.
My ammo holdings are offsetting my gold holdings.
I wish it were possible for you to see a photo of my ammo holdings without some snooping govt slug getting a look at it.
Picture? I just want to know how you got it all into a canoe that time.
Your new handle is pretty rough and not tremendously effective.
(and I absolutely had to Google it to make that joke)
rough
I don’t doubt it: it’s an inside joke. Operations guys will recognize the rhythm of the nomenclature as probably Grainger; my guess was they would be the only ones who took the trouble to figure out what the SKU was.
I just want to point out… we are probably going to pass 100k deaths from Covid-19 worldwide today.
That’s almost 20% of an average worldwide influenza season. Of course, a bad flu season is 3-5x that number.
So, if we are nearing the halfway point in this mess…. or even 1/3 of the way through…… Well, that implies one set of conclusions, doesn’t it.
Hell, even if we are only 1/10 of the way through this thing, it would only be the equivalent of a bad flu year.
This is no time for perspective! We have to keep it all shut down and destroy the economy to
get rid of Bad Orange Mansave lives, dammit!When you are frightened your fight, freeze, or flight instincts kick in
The fourth and arguably most destructive fear reaction is frenzy.
Very well-written article, Jar!
I do tend to side with Q’s disagreement that “we perceive” this as deadly. No one will ever convince me that this isn’t entirely media constructed. When covid first hit the public consciousness, Trump tried to brush the whole thing off as being akin to a seasonal flu – no reason to panic. And the Media savaged him – savaged him – repeatedly going to the “pile of bodies” schtick. Covid hasn’t even come close to being as deadly as the vast majority of things that kill people worldwide on a daily basis: Covid19 can’t hold Diabetes’ jockstrap, much less heart disease, or cancer.
I’ll add one other comment that I hope won’t be misconstrued.
I really want to empathize with people’s fears of this virus, but it is very difficult for me to do that. Courage is a virtue that needs to be tempered by discretion, but cowardice is not a virtue at all. The fear response is a powerful and useful mechanism, but fables and fairy tales about inappropriate fear are universal to the human experience because fear that isn’t reality-based, or is based in a false sense of fear, can lead to very bad – truly horrific – outcomes. Hypochondriacs are bad be cause they suck up resources needlessly; the Boy Who Cried Wolf fable exists to explain why inappropriate fear-mongering leads to bad results.
In my view, we are way, way, way past “appropriate” levels of fear; cowardice is now being applauded, incentivized, and rewarded. We will regret that in ways that we can’t even imagine for generations unless something changes culturally. Indeed, I would argue that the reason we are where we are as a country is because “The Good” has been under unrelenting attack for 100 years with only middling defense of it and occasional interruption for brief moments of national courage.
^^^Best comment ever.
This situation is doing nothing more than exposing the rot within the national psyche. The complacency, entitlement and cowardice were already there, they were just hidden because things were going well. The news media/elites/pols drum up a crisis and all of a sudden it’s laid bare. Something was eventually going to do it, this just happened to be it.
I’m going to add my own comment, and i think you agree with it, as it is just a tweak.
cowardice is now being applauded, incentivized, and rewarded.
I think there are a large part of people who are not being cowards but being laid off from work, and being forced out of jobs and to loose their buisnesses because of the cowardice of the political class. It is apparent to me that the governors are exercising these restrictions in most part because they are afraid to be “The governor who did nothing and had crisis occur”. That in turn is driven by the cowardice of the people demanding Daddy rule over them to save them from their fellow man.
So i agree cowardice is being applauded and incentivized, but that it is largley so because the cowards are not bearing the cost of their cowardice.
That means to make this stop, we have to make people who are pushing this cycle bear a cost for it. The governors are most to blame, for not even trying to be creative and meet more than just the cries of those derranged with fear.
I do agree. I’m not sure it’s even a tweak. I didn’t specify who I thought were being cowards, though there are plenty of people that come to mind. I would agree that politicians, specifically the governors shitting their pants in states with minimal actual deaths from this, should be forever branded as cowards. In a country where courage was a civic virtue regularly practiced, these guys and gals would be hectored out of the public square and too shamed to ever show their faces again.
The reaction kind makes me think of Fabian. He was appointed Dictator after the Roman defeat at Lake Trasamine. He refused to engage Hannibal in open battle, and that pissed the Romans off and so they canned him and pushed two consuls who were more aggressive. In the end the romans ended up with the Battle of Cannae, and one of the deadliest days in Roman History.
Of course i’m sure both sides of the “We need the Restrictions/We need less Restrictions” side could see how that means they are right.
I could not agree with you more.
“In my view, we are way, way, way past “appropriate” levels of fear; cowardice is now being applauded, incentivized, and rewarded”
As CS Lewis put it:
““We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
Ozy, thank you for articulating so well the random thoughts on this that have been swirling around my brain for a while now.
to be perfectly fair, many are afraid for old sick relatives not themselves so much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E55t0lnp_8M
A perfectly reasonable fear, the answer to which is for the old sick relatives to isolate themselves and let the rest of us get on with our lives.
The best way to protect them is herd immunity.
If everyone else gets sick and gets over it, there is no one to give it to the elderly.
“If everyone else gets sick and gets over it, there is no one to give it to the elderly.”
Ok. You first?
That’s not at all unreasonable. We’d likely be practicing some sort of self-quarantine ourselves because we’ve got older relatives who are close and we have a three-month-old baby. But the problem is a.) “essential” employees with similar situations are still out and about, and b.) people without those factors are forced to limit their exposure to others, resulting in economic and social costs without any significant benefit. I take the view that there is a reasonable degree of precaution to be taken here, but people are erring towards carelessness or…let’s call it an overabundance of caution to nice, according to their personal biases.
Boom.
Ozy drops the nuke.
Thanks, dude.
Yup. Well said.
cowardice is now being applauded, incentivized, and rewarded.
BOSTON STRONG!!!
::shouted while hiding under the bed at the orders of the Mayor::
I think media created is a bit much. The media was all nothing to worry about in january then swiched like the media is wont to do. There was at least a factor of unkown risk to it, and the firt stuff out of italy enhanced the worry and enhanced the media shift. It ia off course hard to know the actual risk, but a very light version of PP is not completly off wrt unknown risk.
We’ll have to disagree. I offer as comparison how the media responded to H1N1 which wound up killing about the same numbers in the US as where we are now. The error bars are still pretty large on the H1N1 estimates, but we’re well within range for that. I remember quite clearly how far the Media had its tongue up Obama’s asshole. He waited months to do anything about H1N1, well after their June declaration of a pandemic, and when asked about it, he specifically said he didn’t want to start a panic. His statement was treated like it had the sagacity of Aristotle or Socrates. I dare anyone to compare the total US media response to H1N1 vs. Covid and try to argue that this has been anything but a media driven panic.
And you keep saying “unknown,” Pie, like we hadn’t heard anything about covid or fatality rates. Hell, if we were taking the Chinese at their word early, comparatively speaking it wasn’t deadly at all. It can’t be that the Media and the panickers get to have it both ways: it was totally unknown… but China’s numbers are correct! Lockdown worked!
Talking of the media, I am talking in general. You have a much more US-centric view. This is something often here, you talk purely US I don’t. While levels of TDS exist in Europe, the level of media activity here is not related to Tump. Looking at general sites web twitter etc there are plenty panicked that are not TDS related. I think when the info started, the China reaction combined with the lack of accurate China info caused many people to believe this is super serious. In Romania, for example, the dismal state of the healthcare system caused additional panic.
And you keep saying “unknown,” Pie, like we hadn’t heard anything about covid or fatality rates. – well it is unknown. if you take the known numbers, they are pretty bad. I have no idea how many people had covid and how many die of it. Actually of it. I have no idea how many people have flu each year and how many actually die of it. I don’t know how many covid cases actually need ventilator, how many more than flu. I don’t know if many people who die of the flu every year die at home, thus never end up on ventilators though it may help.
By definition, a viral strain less than 1 year old is unknown.
Looking at the released stats for Ohio, looks like hospitalization for confirmed cases is at ~40%, with ICU needed in ~10% of total cases. My issue is that number of confirmed cases. I’ve noticed they’ve already stopped talking about how there’s probably over 100,000 already infected in the state (based on the fact that there was probable community spread already). The confirmed case number right now is just over 5,500. Use that 100,000 number, and the hospitalization drops down to under 2%.
Pie, this may be a matter of semantics, but I think it’s worth making a distinction between “unknown” and “uncertain.” You keep using “unknown” to mean the same thing as “uncertain.” They are not the same. I do not mean to be flippant, but while there was much about Covid that people were and are uncertain about, I assure you that had this been a true Plague-level event of a species-threatening variety, even the ChiComs wouldn’t have been able to hide it.
It was NEVER that and that was fairly “certain” from the beginning of this. Uncertainty is not a justification for what’s been done; life is one long journey of uncertainty.
e Plague-level event of a species-threatening variety, – no one claim it was. this is not the unknown part. how bad it is between .1% and 1% is unknown…
Uncertain.
It is “known” to be within a range. i.e. a fixed value with a slightly larger error bar than we would prefer.
Ozy, sorry but it is unknown at this point. We are STARTING to have the data that we need to accurately assess the disease. I am not saying that it is a world ender. It clearly isn’t absent some freakish long term complication. But we don’t really know the numbers yet and won’t for months or years. We can’t know them in the middle of the ‘pandemic’. For the record I lean toward the belief that this will end up somewhere around 2-4 times a normal flu in terms of case mortality, and on the high normal end in terms of flu spread. So, as I said, nasty but not unprecedented, but that is a very lay belief.
I think you are perceiving me and Pie as arguing in favor of the lockdowns because we are not agreeing with you that the disease is nothing. That is every bit as emotion/confirmation bias driven a reaction as the people accusing me of wanting to murder Grandma because I oppose the mandatory shutdowns. The world is not binary. The choices are not Virus is nothing and Virus is end of world. And the argument should not be Virus = nothing; then rights = respected. Because that turns into virus = something; then -rights.
I agree, it drives me nuts when gun rights arguments are based on the murder rate vs the number of guns.
These numbers have nothing to do with human rights.
There’s a reason i use Stack Exchange only for my Programming needs. The need to be right and to make everything political is probably one of the things i hate the most about society:
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/459501/a-smaller-dataset-is-better-is-this-statement-false-in-statistics-how-to-refut
Son of a bitch! that was supposed to be a new comment.
My rights aren’t subject to a utilitarian statistical analysis.
I’ve told people my rights aren’t subject to some business case analysis.
No, I am disagreeing because Pie is leaning way too hard on “but we don’t KNOW!!!” and using “unknown” as a stand-in for the real word he means, which is uncertain. See my comment above. It was not a plague-level, species-threatening disease from the beginning. There are a lot of aspects to it that are not FULLY known, but that is another way of saying “uncertain.”
the fatality rate for the virus is unknown. We do not know the fatality rate, small or big. We can know a range I suppose. You can say it is uncertain if that makes you happy.
Pie, this thing was very early on identified as a “coronavirus” – a species of virus with which doctors and epidemiologists are well-familiar. It had an uncertain fatality rate – that was the concern. Just how deadly is this thing in comparison to all of the other coronas we have already had.
The only reason I am harping on the distinction was your use of that word in your up-thread question to Q about “what level of unknown” would justify a lockdown. And your response that you respected the “principle” of his answer – but implicit and unspoken (it seemed to me) was your disagreement – and that seems to hinge on your insistence that we “just don’t KNOW” about this thing. And I strongly disagree that is the case.
We knew a TON about this from very early on, but there was also a TON we couldn’t be certain about – the fatality rate being the most trenchant of those things. What I see in the Media and from the fear-mongering and fear-justifying is a very heavy lean on these claims of what wasn’t – and still isn’t – “known.” That sounds to me like it’s loaded with a big, heavy dose of rationalization.
We don’t KNOW anything, not even gravity – it was only recently we actually detected and measured gravity waves (as Einstein predicted). Yet I don’t hear people talking about how we can’t make life decisions in light of what we don’t KNOW about gravity. That’s an egregious example, but what we KNOW about coronaviruses, and viruses, is a pretty fair amount. The justifications for locking people down do not even come close to being justified by the uncertainties around this particular coronavirus.
Whenever I said unknown I was referring the exact fatality rate, which should come out of context. I was speaking colloquially not scientifically.
The only reason I am harping on the distinction was your use of that word in your up-thread question to Q about “what level of unknown” would justify a lockdown. – I did not ask that at all. I used the word know later after Q did.
And your response that you respected the “principle” of his answer – but implicit and unspoken (it seemed to me) was your disagreement – well there was nothing implicit abput anything there. I was just trying to see where Q stands.
and that seems to hinge on your insistence that we “just don’t KNOW” about this thing. – my insistence on what we know has nothing to do with this, just with people who keep saying its just the flu. If you think my view of principles hinges on some unknown, I never said that.
I wish you would respond to what I say not to what you imagine I say.
“Will 2020 be remembered as the year of the virus? As the start of the second Great Depression? Or will it go down through the ages as the year liberty died?”
Hopefully, none of those things.
Welcome to the new dark ages?
My guess – historians will look at it the same way they view the spasms and crisis of the late Roman Empire. An indication that under the surface things are not good and will soon collapse gradually or spectacularly.
This morning my wife, for the first time in our 25 year marriage, asked me if we have enough guns and ammo to adequately arm myself and our adult son in a crisis.
I hope the answer was “No honey. I definitely need more money, lots more money, to spend on guns in order to keep us safe.”
Never let a crisis go to waste!
Of course it was “no”. I
wantneed a good semi-auto shotgun, a nice bolt-action precision rifle, maybe something that runs on 5.56 that’s legal here…Remington 11-87, check
Ruger Mini-14, check
bolt-action, not yet.
Damn, I need to buy another gun.
This will help you lighten your wallet.
Scary black rifle
Available in tan and green…
Not Pepto Pink? Not with wood furnature?
Once that sweet, sweet bailout money arrives, I’m probably going to finally get an AR, preferably something close to an M4 since I should be comfortable with one (thought I haven’t shot one in more than a decade now), and a case of .223 to go with it. Probably need to bolster my buckshot supply, too.
No bailout money for the kinnath household. We be rich bastards I guess.
Correct answer to your wife’s question (from my POV): “Yes, Honey, and we have enough to arm you, too.”
(Granted, “enough” is always debatable, but you can never really have too many guns/too much ammo. Too many tragic canoe accidents just waiting to happen.)
Once the market returns to normal for a while, I need to do some sizable ammo purchases for storage.
#metoo
Same, even though I felt adequate (and probably are) before.
Stored at the bottom of the nearest body of water, I assume.
I don’t know, I’m gonna go with Drake’s answer on this one. If you’re gonna give me a permission slip to buy more boomsticks…I know myself too well to expect any kind of moderation or discretion on my part.
Excellent article.
Truly
I scored a 12-pack of Charmin at the local small town grocer today. Not my brand, but any port in a storm.
oh yeah? well I scored store brand paper towels yesterday! first I’d seen in a month at least. now for the elusive paper napkins.
We do have a weird shortage of garlic though. Every other produce is fine but zero garlic.
I picked up a jumbo pack of Bounty paper towels at Sam’s to go with the one I already had. Paper towels are good.
I am well stocked on Vanity Fair premium napkins. It’s the only thing Sam’s has had in stock consistently (limit one per customer). So I grab them every time I go in.
“To some extent the differing viewpoints are linked to Political views. This contributes to the inability to appreciate each other’s point of view because politics is, above all else, a team sport. We are inherently tribal creatures. Take away our tribal lifestyle by building a modern, highly mobile, industrial world and we create new tribes. If you doubt this, consider how you as a fan of tOSU feel about Michigan, go to Tuscaloosa and yell “War Eagle”, ask a guy in UK blue about Christian Laettner’s buzzer beater, or to swing back around to politics, just mention Trump to a lifelong Democrat or Hillary to a Republican. But at the root, the difficulty in communication comes from our hardwired reaction to threats.”
That’s why the best response: “Everyone should wear masks” wouldn’t work. For that to work, the President, the Governors, the media, celebrities, etc. would all have to be on the same side. Social pressure works, even in the absence of law. That’s also why “Everyone who is in a high-risk group should stay home” wouldn’t work. It’s why people accused travel restrictions as being “racist”. You can have a mostly voluntary common sense response only if people are willing to agree with their political enemies.
Comments to this thread are a good example of what I mean:
https://twitter.com/ODNIgov/status/1248397329515741184
More or leas OT today driving to my moms was the first time the police stopped me to see where i was going at a checkpoint
Did you cough all over them?
no. that would be stupid.
“On the advice of my lawyer I have been instructed to make no statements to police.”
neah I did not want a hassle. I gave em my driver license told him I am going shopping and went on my way.
Ah, so you’re obviously guilty! Only a guilty person wouldn’t answer a question from the police!
So what happens when a crisis arises?
Panic-buy toilet paper?
In my area the panicky buying has moved onto garlic. I cant buy garlic. Are people suddenly picking everything?
here beyond yeast most things are available
Havent seen yeast in Vegas since the shutdown…make your own joke-a-thon on that one….
Advantage homebrewers!
I’ve got several packs of dry beer and wine yeast, as well as some yeast stashed in the fridge from previous batches. I’d need to build them up a bit to get them viable again, but there is yeast there.
But making bread from that is tedious at best.
Tell me about it. I’m trying to do sourdough bread purely using the wild yeast. Let’s just say that the little buggers aren’t doing their job very well, and that’s with a “ripe” starter.
My sourdough starter is nice and lively. I’ve currently got some English Muffins proofing on the table. And as for using brewers yeast, it’s just going to be a slower rise.
The fridge stash would be annoying to use, as I’d need to step it up.
Your house probably has an abnormally high population of wild and feral yeast.
UCS: That is entirely possible. I have contemplated pouring the dregs of a sour ale into the starter as well, to see how that helps it out (the problem is you’d need an unfruited one, otherwise the color could hide a mold infection).
I remember hearing somewhere – I think townsends youtube – that back in the day bread was made with beer barm and it had a slight hoppy taste, so early 20th century, when standard yeast was used, some people added hops to the bread to recreate the old taste which some people were nostalgic about
Garlic?
No garlic
That’s . . . oddly specific.
yes, here too! every other produce is fine but no garlic. The restaurants can’t be buying that much, so where is it?
Can’t get Tony Chachere’s for love or money for some reason.
Chinese garlic supply is disrupted.
That I won’t mourn. The Chinese garlic we keep getting here in Alberta is always Teh Shit. The local (and sadly, seasonal) stuff we get here is orders of magnitude better. I go on a bit of a garlic binge every year around garlic harvest time here.
Wild leeks will be out soon. Garlicky AF. Go pick some in the woods if the cops don’t hassle you about it. Puree, freeze. Voila!
Yes, I also prefer my garlic unbleached and not grown in human excrement.
There is always panic garlic buying in Romania, so they still have garlic.
Great article Jarflax.
One of the ladies in our office asked her daughter to come down to visit her, it’s a 3 hour drive and she has nothing to do for a week.
Daughter’s first reaction: Am I allowed?, you’re only supposed to be with people you live with.
Went for a road trip with the wife last weekend. Nice trip. The only person we encountered was the nice girl at the A&W drive thru.
Talked to the neighbours as we were leaving, told them what we were up to for the day. Their reaction was “Are you allowed?”
I like my neighbours, but most people are sheep.
Seems like it, I still do what I want for the most part, they haven’t closed the trails at the dog park where I go running.
If they did I would go anyway, because I’m an asshole.
If the cops hassled me, I’m sure I would go to jail, because I’m an asshole.
That’s the spirit!
The people in our neighborhood are going for walks/bike rides constantly. I know this because my dog barks at everyone who passes by our house, and she’s been barking an awful lot lately, which is making it impossible to concentrate on work.
Fantastic Jarflax.
Your comment the other day was obviously the driver for this essay and I’m really glad you wrote it.
Or will it go down through the ages as the year liberty died?
It’s only ‘mostly dead’.
It was write it or go mad. I woke up at 4 am the night I wrote the comment you mention (which was posted just as the thread died) and knew I had to get this outof my head and on paper. I have ben much more mellow (comparativley speaking given my baseline lack of mellow) since writing it. Watching this all play out withthe ridiculous repsonses, over reactions, panic driven behavior, responses to other people’s panic driven behavior, devastation of the economy (which I think is a house of cards anyway), utterly misguided responses to the economic damage has stressed me out beyond all normal states of mind.
Think about the mental confusion and idiocy, not to say malice, that is required to simultaneously implement:
1. The PPP where we as a Government give employers forgiveable loand to keep everyone on payroll in order to prevent business failures during the ‘crisis’
2. $600 per week bonuses added on to ordinary unemployment benefits, with relaxation of, or elimination of the various requirements for qualifying for unemployment. Designed to draw as many people as possible OUT ofthe workforce and off of payroll.
I would note and correct typos in that comment, but there are so many I am just going to pretend I had a stroke while typing it as the less embarassing explanation.
Thoughts and prayers for a swift recovery. 😉
Watching this all play out with the ridiculous repsonses, over reactions, panic driven behavior, responses to other people’s panic driven behavior, devastation of the economy (which I think is a house of cards anyway), utterly misguided responses to the economic damage has stressed me out beyond all normal states of mind.
So as a silver lining, this mindset hit my wife too. Her coping mechanism was to end her social media habit, especially Facebook, and start lurking here on Glibs instead. She calls it a breath of sanity. I’d worry about her sanity, but it’s already in question since she married me. As someone noted above, there’s also been encouragement to expand our firearm and armor inventory. I can’t say no to that.
I like to think that other non-glib people have similarly been repulsed by the hysteria and maybe we can see some good come from this (not that it will outweigh all the bad). I think reported firearm sales doubled last month over 2019 and those increases can’t all have come from us. Not that I have much hope anyway of this ship being righted.
Great article, Jarflax.
Breath of Sanity!? Why we’ve never been so insulted.
It could be argued it was brutally beaten prior to this.
Oooooh look who knows so much.
That’s not where I was trying to put that comment
Great piece Jar, thanks.
Let the day drinking begin. It is my first sour. The smell is off putting but doesn’t taste horrible. Reminds me of vinegar but I like vinegar. How this is called an “Ale” confuses me.
Ale just generally refers to the family of yeast used to ferment it. There’s things other then yeast that give most sours their delightful flavor.
Lactobacillus for one. Yummy, yummy bacteria.
Brett also, but I guess that is a yeast.
Based on the statement about vinegar, sound like his also had acetobacter in his beer, which would almost always be considered a flaw.
Aaaaah, thanks. I think that particular sour would be a better chicken marinade than a beverage. I cleansed my pallet with some pepperoni and provolone and have moved on to an oatmeal stout.
I mostly avoid American sours, I havent found many that can hang with the Belgians.
Cascade Brewing
But most American sours are some kind of Berliner Weisse mixed with trendy fruit made as a one-off thing by brewhouses that focus on other stuff.
Serious question for the “doctor” doctors here :
My understanding is that almost all of the time, what kills you is not the virus, but your immune system’s response to the virus. For example, when a virus gets into your lungs, your immune system kicks into gear and starts fighting the infection in your lungs. Acute inflammation occurs, you get pneumonia, and die.
Would it be feasible to prevent deaths by using immunosuppressants to regulate the immune system’s response? Or large doses of anti-inflammatories, depending on the circumstances?
Also, noted that there are secondary infections that kill, etc. etc. Standard disclaimer IANAD.
Maybe, but I’d argue that here in the States, the process began at least in 1860, if not before.
Arguably June 1798 (Alien and sedition Acts) or 1794 when Washington sent in troops to end the Whiskey Rebellion. Hardcore liberty lovers (cough Spooner cough) might even say August 31, 1786 (Shay’s Rebellion which indirectly gave us the Constitution). Statists gonna State.
Well, MGM didn’t even put up a fuss with me changing my vegas reservations. They refunded a ‘non refundable’ prepaid reservation without hassle. It probably helped that I rebooked the other one to thanksgiving. But the room rates at thanksgiving are so much lower than the end of may that I practically got two nights for the amount I’d prepaid for one. (small differential to be paid at the counter).
Since this won’t be a joint trip, I’ll have to redo the entire schedule.
You can go visit all the post-apocalyptic wastelands that the ‘rona has created in the meantime.
Er, wait. They’ll all be where the big coastal cities (‘specially New York) used to be. Scratch that. Sorry. Carry on.
Random thoughts
1) One size fits all, doesn’t. There is no reason that the proper response to the pandemic must be the same in Iowa and New York nor must it be the same for upstate New York and New York city.
2) Politicians use power for the sole purpose of holding onto the power they have or to seek additional power. When a crisis hits, politician react according to the fear they will lose their power or to the opportunities they see to grab new power or to both at the same time. The politician that uses power to make the world a better place for the people they represent is almost as rare as a unicorn.
3) The media exists to make money for the people that own the media. The media will broadcast/narrowcast whatever will pull in the most eyeballs. Blood and panic sells.
4) A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
5) I need more guns and ammo.
Hat tip Sir Terry Pratchett for #4, and he couldn’t be more right. Also, #5 is what we refer to as “evergreen content” at work.
Psst, Men In Black was #4
Damn, you’re right. There’s a very similar quote in The Night Watch, I believe.
#4 is a great quote because it’s 100% true.
Well fuck. A bike ride I was planning on doing in August just got cancelled.
This is why i only use stackoverflow, and AskUbuntu from the stackexchange world. And never go to the political one. Why do people need to make everything political?
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/459501/a-smaller-dataset-is-better-is-this-statement-false-in-statistics-how-to-refut
Serious question: why do the models show the curve flattening and then going back down? Is it assuming the lockdown has stopped the spread? Why would the spread of covid just stop as we go into August? We certainly don’t have herd immunity and haven’t killed off the most susceptible. Why wont it just go back up if/when they lift the cower at home? The models act as if it is just going to go away after this week.
Everybody is going to be dead. Duuhhhh.
Probably has something to do with the standard way epidemics are modeled.
Actually, you can. It is not unprecedented in our history. We are currently working on an article concerning the smallpox epidemic of 1721, which most of our Founders experienced in some way or another. The parallels are fascinating and prove that the justification for the current assault on our rights based on that “the Founders could have never imagined this” is absurd.
There is nothing new under the sun and Massholes are always going to be Massholes.
largely unprecedented
It is highly unusual. And largely unprecedented flows better than “Has happened before during times of peak fear such as (insert list of epidemics and panics including a bunch of yellow fever (not the fun kind), smallpox, typhus, and cholera outbreaks). Surely a man in you line of work understand the value of rhythm in rhetoric!
Yeah I know, if you actually look at history you realize that we have never really protected individual rights except those belonging to the group pulling the strings.
It’s not a criticism, it’s shilling for an upcoming article.
It is amazing to me that you can draw a direct line from debates about the proper treatment, to church closings, to partisan media, etc. from 1721 to 2020. We have learned nothing.
Except no one has thrown a hand grenade into a hydroxychloroquine factory yet.
We have learned nothing
People don’t change. We just have cooler toys than the people 200 years ago.
Is an AR really cooler than a privateer?
True. They did have some cool toys back then….
Oddly I find that comforting in a way. It reminds me that this too shall pass.
Yet…
Really? I thought only OMWC dated from that era, and possibly Warty via the timesuit.
https://apnews.com/5f9c18b0003178b81b3858e6d52a6321
I hate people.
Howling at the moon? They’ve all gone loony.
I stole from someone here.
“I am not racist. I hate everybody.”
hah…..back in my younger days I had an SOD shirt that said that.
I used to always say this as a joke, but it’s getting less funny as time goes by.
That article, you’re not fooling me, that’s the Bee, right?…Right?
*Looks again*
You’ve got to be kidding me!
“I remember when I used to use jarred sauce.”
Common misunderstanding: Canned and Jarred prepared foods are meals. They are not. They are bases.
Re: Fear
I was in the line at the pharmacy an hour ago. An older woman and I were chit-chatting. She asked me if I was scared.
“I am scared that we are going to have tornados Sunday. I am scared of tornados. I am scared of house fires. Other than that, no.”
Such Toxic masculinity. Real mean cower under their moms skirts.
I also told her if we do have tornados I am grabbing my chainsaw, a case of bottled water, some blankets and bandages and heading to the sites. If I get infected, then I get infected. If I die from it then I die from it. I am not going to abandon my neighbors over this nonsense.
Her reply….”You know where I live, right?”
“Yes Ma’am, I do.”
Under Winston’s Mom’s skirt, anyway…
That is it’s own form of bravery.
That Samuel Adams passage
comes to mind when I think of any of the cringing, pathetic, bootlicking cretins advising we stay “quarantined” forever.
A lady in the office this morning was crowing about a pastor having Easter Services, how he should be locked up, and his congregation was too stupid to live. If they all caught it it would be what they deserved.
This is a black lady who loves Black Lives Matter, so I assume she knows cops are dangerous, but she has no problem sicking them on others.
Go from us in peace before I wring your neck, lady.
I don’t get the disconnect there though. If she thinks the congregation is too stupid and deserves to get the disease, then why does she care that the pastor holds Easter Services?
Because it’s not worthwhile virtue signaling unless you heap extra hate on there.
Yeah, this is not revealing flattering qualities in a lot of our countrymen, I have to admit. One thing that is annoying the shit out of me is the narrative that it’s anti-science or whatever to not follow what doctors happen to recommend to the letter here. I got into it the other night about that. The point I kept trying in vain to make is that many doctors, as with many experts, are myopic. They are concerned solely with their area of expertise. If you ask an IT security guy to make a server secure you’ll wind up with a userless box connected to nothing. If you ask a cop how to make a neighborhood crime-free you’ll get a police state. When a doctor calls for total isolation for months he or she is likely not considering economic factors or civil liberties.
If you ask an IT security guy to make a server secure you’ll wind up with a userless box connected to nothing.
A very apt example.
You wanted it secure.
It is secure.
What?
Hackers can’t steal your data if you smash it with a hammer.
/rollsafememe
It’s ultimately the boss’ responsibility to do the cost – benefit analysis. I think Trump gets it (we’ll see soon). Most the governors and none of the medical bureaucrats have shown zero ability to even grasp the concept.
Jarflax, thanks for writing this. My two sons (19 and 21) had words yesterday – older boy works in a supermarket and expressed his apprehension about his situation, which led to some harsh words between the two which they now regret. I went for a walk with the younger one and tried, badly, to articulate what you wrote here. I am going to have the both of them read this, I think it will help.
Thank you. If this article helps someone that will make me very happy. Usually the best I hope for is amusing someone, or maybe starting an argument.
Oh, I need no help starting arguments. It’s the aftermath I have trouble with (my 19 year old is very much his father’s son). Thanks again.
I can only echo the words of most of my Glib friends. My son and daughter, both in their mid 50s, have been so ‘worried’ about me because I have ignored the virus warnings as best I can. Very early on I compared the death figures and saw the triviality of the latest panic.
Obviously I am in the ‘danger’ zone but I certainly don’t feel threatened. Some of my peers seem to be terrified. Of what? Of death? After losing so many its hardly a surprise anymore. Sure, I miss my brothers, sure, I miss friends and relatives but you know, none went to the graves of our parents after the funeral day. Even I only go 1 or 2 times a year to see my parents’ stone and I only live 3 miles away.
Its not death I fear but the pain associated with it. I want to see my friends/relatives now, not in May, June or July. See them again then too, if possible.
Thanks Jarflax, and all the rest of the Glibs, for making a geezer happy and comfortable. Now I want to see as many as possible in September for the biggliest Honey Harvest we’ve ever had, at least until HH 2021.
Mr. Fourscore, you provide us all much needed perspective. I can afford to be glib about Covid because I’m fairly healthy and I’ve been faced with the fear of being gassed with Chem/Bio weapons in the past. Once you’ve genuinely faced that fear, of Death via all of terrible means, it’s hard to countenance the fear-mongering. Death comes for us all eventually; the best possible scenario you can hope for is that it’s without significant, lasting pain.
Can I put in dibs on a jar of ? ? I’ve got fiat currency (that could be worthless by then) I can offer in trade. ?
https://twitter.com/phillyTRU/status/1248656214642262016
Stupid cops, they should have used a choke-hold.
I understand why you would feel this way but as a retired LEO, I can say not all just want to lay hands on people. He should’ve been given a mask or written a citation nothing more. Plus I think he kept his dignity well considering what had just happened
It’s gone from “Don’t generalize, it’s just a few bad apples” to “Don’t generalize, there are a few good ones left.”
The entire Moon is American. I consider Luna to be an unicorporated overseas territory of the United States. Actually it could be #51, and the Stars and Stripes rearranged, with the Moon sitting in the middle of the field of blue surrounded by the 50 stars. USA! USA! Fuckin’ SPACE FORCE! WOOOOOOOO!
Can you imagine the international uproar if the US tried to plant another flag up there?
We were there first. So therefore, it belongs to us. That’s what all the whiny ass anti-colonialists are going on about all of the time, right?
OK, then. From now on, no more colonialism. We’re the native Moonlandians. It’s ours. Case closed.
i was the only one at the grocery store yesterday without a mask. in Virginia. about a dozen customers (low day?) and as many or more employees.
bought some more ammo today.
“bought some more ammo today”
My father called me a few days ago. I answered and he started the conversation with “No one is laughing at the peppers now, are they?”
peppers
I’m a pepper, you’re a pepper, wouldn’t you like to be a pepper too?
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQn5fNGQ-44
Pie was!
Weekly grocery report
Safeway has one way aisles marked now. Most people were doing it with a couple of people not. One jackalope thought it was his business to correct one cart pusher. Jackass. Sanitizing wipes that were partially restocked last week are back to sold out. Limited paper products. Noticing more non-panic buy foods running out and not being restocked. About a quarter wearing face masks including many employees.
Foo foo grocery was perhaps half masks. Even more of specialty brand and locally supplied stuff sold out that wasn’t before. My conclusion is there’s increasing non zero disruption in the supply chains.
Butcher shop changed their hours and opens two hours later. Line was across the parking lot (spaces out) and took about 30 minutes to get in. Future orders will be by phone at the cost of not handpicking cuts.
Butcher shop changed their hours and opens two hours later. Line was across the parking lot (spaces out) and took about 30 minutes to get in. Future orders will be by phone at the cost of not handpicking cuts.
I’ve noticed most stores have reduced their operating hours. I get cutting your hours to save labor costs if customers aren’t visiting your store. But grocery stores and others in high demand are framing their reduced hours as a response to improve safety due to the corona virus. I’ve failed to figure out how reducing the store hours could possibly improve safety.
Just shut up and do as you are told.
Sanitizing, so you filthy germ ridden non social-distancing maskless virus denier jerks can’t contaminate the entire store.
Chicago – 30% to 50% of patients tested for the coronavirus have antibodies.
Damnit link https://chicagocitywire.com/stories/530092711-roseland-hospital-phlebotomist-30-of-those-tested-have-coronavirus-antibody
Beat me to it, that is good stuff. I wonder how long that phlebotomist will be employed.
I want to believe this, but the sourcing is iffy
You’re right, it is very anecdotal. I’m hopeful though.
Is this one better?
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/04/coronavirus-new-stanford-research-reveals-if-youve-been-exposed/
I believe that the test texists. I’m having trouble believing that the person who draws the blood (who is not the same person who does the analysis who is not the person who reports out the results and absolutely none of which should be collecting or processing data on a large scale) is a good source for population analysis.
Not unless it’s one of those “know right away” tests. If it gets sent to the lab, HIPAA rules mean the Phleb will never know the results unless the patient comes back and tells her.
The serological tests apparently show results within minutes. If that’s the case, there could be some truth to the phlebotomist’s claims.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/02/974964/the-coronavirus-test-that-might-exempt-you-from-social-distancingif-you-pass/
Sure, but its not like data from “reliable” sources has been up to par on this subject.
The positive anti-body test results get the person a 2 week stay at home order in San Miguel County.
Why don’t you trust Sumaya Owaynat, you a sexist or xenophobe?
Because if Roseland Hospital is letting one of their plebotomy techs see the results of the labwork, they’re not a very good hospital.
So… sexist?
You misspelled sexy.
I am not taking that bait.
This is the false information being spread in communities of color leading people to believe their is a high level of immunity. The story itself is beyond suspect – so they are testing for the virus AND antibodies? Plus what Adahn said.
I want to send this to Orange Man Bad. Good write up Jarflax.
He has already been making similar noises…and of course people start tearing their hair and gnashing their teeth, run around in little circles screeching “Orangemanbad!”
We need Rand in there sweet talking him again. Almost had us pulled out of some ME shit spots until the Military Inc. folks had their say.
Yeah, it pisses me off that he caved. I imagine someone told him that if he shoots that cash cow he might have an unfortunate accident….or his family.
Nah. It would be more subtle. Maybe have a CIA guy pretend to be a whistleblower….
As bad as he’s been with buying into the Keynesian BS, he also seems to be the only one pushing for a return to business as usual. Everybody else in the political class is having a grand old time, and ending that is the last thing they want right now.
As soon as he pushes all the way there will be screams of “Trump’s a murdererererrrrrr!” (ululate that for effect)
I’m afraid Andrew Yang appears poised to win the round. That saddens me.
Nice analysis, Mr. Jarflax!
My apple trees are starting to bud out as expected for the 10th of April. And for the third fucking year in a row, there will be a hard freeze in mid-April after the trees start to bud.
So much for global fucking warming.
Have two I planted last spring that are about to flower for the first time – and there’s a frost warning tonight.
The temp is important. I can’t recall the exact numbers, but it is like 20% bud death around 29F and 100% bud death and 25F. So an overnight frost generally means partial loss of fruit.
My extended forecast is 5 straight days of hard freeze: 25F, 23F, 25F, 22F, and 27F. The early blooming trees are fucked.
’91? I think it was. Ice storm and then hard freeze for a week in mid April.
The fruiting/nutting plants in Louisiana hav e a much lower resistance to cold than northern ones do. That year we had zero fruit or nuts. The poor wild critters took a real beating that year. I remember hunting that fall and I let all of the deer I saw go on their way. They were so skinny and pitiful looking.
I will say again…in a non-industrial environment you are always one drought or late freeze away from starvation. Few people today in the west appreciate this.
LOLOLOL!!!!
Hahahahhahahaaa!!! Fuck! If you don’t laugh at that, you can’t be alive.
Hadn’t seen that Bee article, what a great headline.
The part I was really laughing about, outside of the Bernie Sanders bit, was the Wuhan ‘Our wet market safest place on planet’, lol.
RuPaul teaches self-expression and authenticity
I assume you meant the video and not the ad.
I didn’t see the ad.
IIRC various news outlets were treating the Trump “I’ll take a look at it” (in reference to a question about pardoning Joe Exotic) seriously.
It was obviously an off the cuff dismissive response.
More non-fake news from our betters.
Yeah, I saw that. I remember it showing up somewhere as ‘Trump says he might pardon Joe Exotic’.
Obviously, no one could derive that from what he said, so I guess I’m still at the ‘most of the media are intentionally dishonest’ point.
Fun.
That’s just crazy-talk.
How can we win the war on coronavirus if we don’t do our part?
Great article, Jarflax
Thank you, and thank everyone who had kind words.
On the lighter side:
The Queen Of England Gives A Speech In A Green Dress And The Photoshoppers Know What To Do
SF doesn’t know what to do, though.
Trying again:
https://www.boredpanda.com/queen-green-screen-outfit-photoshop/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic&fbclid=IwAR0zBVULaf_8VQl3LAjLmtJD42LMdsakdWJGngXBvsbH5snDcJurMvHv9A4
That is pretty light.
Great article and discussion, Jarflax. Thanks!
Just got back from a trip to Meijer (it’s like a nicer Walmart). About a third of customers were wearing some kind of mask or face covering. Surprisingly, it was mostly young and healthy looking people wearing them. One older guy was wearing a bandanna old west style. Unfortunately it was solid baby blue, so it just looked stupid, not cool.
I was discussing this on the Discord the other day. I work for a bank in the PNW. We have accepted and are processing 7500 loan apps for the PPP portion of the CARES act. I’ve been deputized to help with the loan processing and approval.
This is going to be a shit show.:
1. I’d guess somewhere between 10% and 30% will be able to pay these loans back and continue full operations in the future. Many of these business are going under with or without the loan.
2. The ones that get forgiven (the language is ” may be forgiven if certain requirements are met” mean the taxpayers are on the hook. Which means *money printer go brrrrrrrrr*
3. What these loans are going to do to bank liquidity ratios, and the way it is going to undermine credit markets that are already jacked up is going to be spectacular. Expect lots of bank failures in the next 12 to 18 months.
4. Regulatory environment afterwaards when fed.gov hammers banks that tried to be even vaguely rational in who they gave credit to, and some activist claims some group had a disparate impact are also going to be fun.
Buckle up, buckaroos. Looks like all the hard work to get my credit score over an 800 by paying all my bills on time makes me a sucker.
I’m in the process of applying. Our bank has put about a dozen paperwork requirements on us.
Almost certainly, we’ll be able to claim the forgiveness and we’ll just put the funds in a backup account for when the economic shitshow spreads to commercial construction (I expect about 4 to 6 months out).
I quoted a boiler this morning.
So that brings me up to a grand total of eight hours worked in the last four work weeks.
It took you eight hours to looks up a boiler price on Amazon?
/sarc
I predict that in 50 years the damaged economy will be remembered but people will say Coronawho?
What are those loans for? It is business only?
Can I get another $100,000 for a home down payment at 0%? Fuck that shit, I’ll take half a million.
It’s all small business loans. One of the few requirements is it being in operation from 2/15 or before.
We have 6500 in process loans, and another 3500 waiting over the last week. We normally do 20-25k loans in a year.
Yeah, I know. I was just kidding.
I don’t have a business, we’re looking to buy a home. Rates are pretty damn low as it is, but zero percent sounds even better.
So, I keep wondering about what happens to the real estate market now? Will it become more of a buyers market, or are all of us potential buyers completely fucked now?
I know Portland has a relatively hot real estate market. But people are making and having accepted below asking price offers. That’s unheard of since I moved here.