Coronavirus / COVID-19

[Montmorency]

BOY TELL 'EM (Watci this)
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/s...98068464025606


Reporting on NY state and city preparation and response to the crisis through February and March, and what went wrong at first.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/n...se-delays.html

Even as deaths rise in New York, slack remains in the healthcare system while hospital admissions are declining. Fingers crossed - but then what?
https://twitter.com/RebeccaJarvis/st...46048291143681
https://twitter.com/brianmrosenthal/...75715465850881


Paul Romer has a pandemic phase-out proposal that relies on daily testing capacity of over 20 million. In the United States. (We've only just reached 150K/day nationally.)

And here I thought 1 million daily would be a solid achievement for this country.

Reminds me of the archmair generals who estimated that if Nazi Germany had built 20000 Tiger tanks or whatever, it could have held out.


Singapore seems to have lost containment of its outbreak. Nationals returning from abroad were not adequately quarantined, and now the disease is widespread among barracks-concentrated guest workers.

Bodies in the streets of Ecuador. Official death toll 315.


Seamus, I'll reply later. In the meantime, enjoy.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Mostly, these are coming from densely-packed migrant worker accommodation.

This is the scary part about what comes next. Not only in the US, with it's huge population of undocumented immigrants, but in areas like Africa, and especially in India, which has millions of poorly-treated migrant workers (who, btw, are making a mass exodus from the big cities to rural areas, spreading the virus wherever they go).

It [Singapore] also has one completely dominant political party and a compliant media, but Prof Dale says even with "clear, crisp messaging to a community that trusts the government" he is concerned that "the average Singaporean still isn't quite grasping the importance of their individual role".

Multiply by a magnitude of factor for the US. Which is going to make a restart that much harder.

Reminds me of the archmair generals who estimated that if Nazi Germany had built 20000 Tiger tanks or whatever, it could have held out.

And some of the currently proposed methods of restarting economies are just as unlikely as that:

https://www.vox.com/2020/4/10/212154...n-unemployment

Potential problems with Romer's proposal:

So far, America is struggling to get into the millions of tests per week. This plan requires tens of millions per day. Most experts I’ve spoken to doubt that’s realistic anytime soon, though some believe it’s possible, eventually. So far, we’ve added testing capacity largely by repurposing existing labs and platforms. To add more, we need to build more labs, more machines, more tests. And there are already shortages of reagents, swabs, and health workers.

But even if those constraints could be overcome, how are these 22 million daily tests going to be administered? By whom? How do we enforce compliance? If you refuse to get tested, are you fined? Jailed? Cut off from government benefits? Would the Supreme Court consider a proposal like this constitutional?

A sobering outlook:

these aren’t plans for returning to anything even approaching normal. They either envision life under a surveillance and testing state of dystopian (but perhaps necessary!) proportions, or they envision a long period of economic and public health pain, as we wrestle the disease down only to see it roar back, as seems to be happening in Singapore.

Can't keep lock-downs in place indefinitely. At some point, economies will have to be restarted. The path and methods chosen to accomplish this will determine how things will unfold.

[Shaka_Khan]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/dumped-mi...160839647.html

Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic

David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery

In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil...

[a completely inoffensive name]

Do we really need to produce this much milk in the first place?

[Greyblades]

Whats in a need? There was a massive, seemingly permanent demand and that has started to dry up in the coronavirus' wake, pun intended.

Only short term alternative to dumping milk is to kill the cows. You cant just turn off the milk making; you can interrupt the required pregnancy cycle for milk production but they're still going to make milk for the current offspring. If they dont get the milk removed regularly they are going to start developing infections, and what do you do with excess milk? Cant just stick it in a silo and wait for better times.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Whats in a need? There was a massive, seemingly permanent demand and that has started to dry up in the coronavirus' wake, pun intended.

Only short term alternative to dumping milk is to kill the cows. You cant just turn off the milk making; you can interrupt the required pregnancy cycle for milk production but they're still going to make milk for the current offspring. If they dont get the milk removed regularly they are going to start developing infections, and what do you do with excess milk? Cant just stick it in a silo and wait for better times.

Blades, please stop it man. Just google once before shooting from the hip.

US Dairy is one of the most regulated and controlled goods by the USDA, we have several policies mandating minimum levels of prices, production, and subsidization of milk and dairy products.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/anim...ry/policy.aspx

You can go on the official website where they track supply and demand on a monthly and annual basis:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/dairy-data.aspx

We have American milk consumption per capita decreasing since the 1970s, but our policies have only pushed production higher and higher per year.

The farmers are not even profiting from the subsidies now that this discrepancy is so out of wack, so even they don't want to be producing this much:
https://www.realagriculture.com/2018...ys-new-report/

So again, I ask the question. Do we really need to make this much milk?

Also, you can store milk 6-12 months by pasteurizing with an ultra high temp process and then aseptically filling into a tetra-pak or similar container.
https://scidoc.org/IJFS-2326-3350-09-001e.php
You could also just turn it into cheese or butter.

[Greyblades]

Blades, please stop it man. Just google once before shooting from the hip.

Good job covering for your failure to communicate by blaming the reader for not picking up a context you made no effort to allude to. Doesnt make you look like an asshole at all.

Also, you can store milk 6-12 months by pasteurizing with an ultra high temp process and then aseptically filling into a tetra-pak or similar container.
https://scidoc.org/IJFS-2326-3350-09-001e.php
You could also just turn it into cheese or butter.

All of which requres production capacity that didnt exist when the drop in demand came. Even were the pasturisers, cheese and butter makers inclined to keep processing with little guarentee of even breaking even let alone turning a profit you would be bottlenecked by the need to process much more milk than the existing infrstructure is capable of, thats not even getting into storage of both milk waiting to be processed and the finished product.

Fortunate then that milk production can be stalled through holding off on the next cycle of insemination instead of something drastic like a culling. Less traumatic for aĺll involved to be disposing of milk than bodies.

[Montmorency]

(Standard) eggs are now $3.50-$4 a carton. Used to be like $1.50.

As some forms (e.g. meat) of production are disrupted, food becomes more expensive. Falling incomes combined with rising food cost has typically been a recipe for riots in most times and places. Let's see how that works out.

The immediate context. I'd been posting about the colossal, civilization-shaking ineptitude, negligence, corruption, and malice of the Trump administration, the sort that led Noam Chomsky to declare Trump the most dangerous criminal in history. You quoted my sentiment regarding a mechanism to punish society's maximally-destructive actors. Under the quote you made a comment imputing a premise about the sociopolitical significance of wealth. Practically speaking, you linked the two despite them - as I pointed out - having no strict relationship to one another. That was a very strange thing for you to do. Basically it looks like me complaining that 'these crooks are a disaster' and you interjecting with 'Why are you such a Commie?' It's a non-sequitur, or if it's not a non-sequitur then you would have to be saying that criticism of Trump necessarily reduces to the belief that wealth is an inherent evil.

Either way it's disturbing. Do you get it now?

If you're interested in wealth as a separate topic though, start with the two articles I linked.

Numerous forms of power do this and have throughout history. Less so, though sadly only marginally, in many Western societies.

How does one negate power? Not counter it or shift it or redistribute it -- all of these have been tried, are being used and none of them answer the problem of power completely. So how does one negate it? And if successful, how does anything get done in its absence?

First of all, I object to taking for granted the idea that there are no answers to the question of the distribution of power. There have been different distributions of power in this country within living memory, albeit flawed in many dimensions. I swear, there is this conservative tendency to act as though things that have been tried and succeeded are impossible, in order to justify persisting with systems that are continuously failing right now. To wit, how many thousands of years of failed conservative policies does it take? This exchange unavoidably reminds me of the other one in the Democratic primary thread, where you seemed to be saying - I still don't quite understand - that because resources are not unlimited, it is impossible to adequately prepare for disasters and crises. Even though that seems to me so obviously, demonstrably wrong at face value at all levels and forms of governance, on the personal and institutional levels, and in all places.

The deeper leftist dream of spreading power out as widely as possible has indeed never been achieved comprehensively, but the case against trying to do even what we know can be done is the circular logic of futility, that there are always budding or resurgent oligarchs and aristocrats lurking somewhere like thirsting Chaos gods. It's an argument that amounts to humanity being eschatologically-doomed by its flaws (as opposed to redeemed by its virtues), which is like, maybe, but don't take pleasure in being part of the contras, and fully accept the ramifications of syllogistically-inevitable self-destruction (as some on the alt-right do).

At the top of the thread you referenced an ideal of "local control." Many leftists do explicitly organize their ideas around that concept, but there's a more general form of the argument that every individual should have some input on the local conditions that affect their lives. I oscillate on what this should mean in practice, since time and again we have seen "local control" mean space for parochial racists, NIMBYs, and cushy insiders to run rampant over their petty fiefdoms (thiefdoms).

Maybe you'd like to talk to the anarchists. (Is this what you mean by local control?)

Some justice was meted out at Nuremburg. Some punishment and vindictiveness as well. It was, as you note, an imperfect tool. Attainder, either in the meaning of legislative determination of guilt absent trial or the confiscation of all real property and chattels has been, historically, much abused. Was your comment (which I thought a hyperbole when I read it) prompted by justice or vindictiveness? Only you know.

If you want to have a conversation on what actual mechanisms are either abstractly desirable, or practically available, for extraordinary cases of wrongdoing, that is naturally a very complex topic and I'm not comfortable carrying on about it in this thread. There are so many considerations. It could be that the law does not capture the nature of the crimes committed, or their scope is so vast and destructive and the need for resolution so acute that no preexisting process is adequate to the task (e.g. Nuremberg).

In Trump's case it's more a matter of his insulation from all accountability. Trump ought to suffer something like attainder based on his world-historical record of carnage, but the availability of attainder to Congress would not ensure its correct application for the same reasons that Trump achieved and remains in a position to perpetrate attainder-worthy deeds.

So yes, it's basically just venting.

As to malfeasance, everything connected to this pandemic will be under a microscope for years. If such has occurred, it will out and criminal charges can be leveled as appropriate.

Continuing the above, we are a broken society, so it will never happen on any scale. Generally, a society that produces great crimes and the criminals who do them will not in the first place have what it takes to reckon with those symptoms - without revolution. As far as I am aware that is simply a descriptive fact of life; there is no specific form of either reform or revolution that I can think to advocate for to fix that.

Another aspect to the attainder, etc. discussion is that there is probably no way to engineer legal or institutional failsafes for extraordinary social circumstances, because those circumstances will tend to overwhelm pre-existing structures. If attainder became available tomorrow it would only become another tool for bad actors to subvert and abuse, for example by trying to strip Barack Obama of US citizenship for being a Kenyan Muslim or something.

In another callback to earlier in the post: it's very common to successfully prepare for natural disasters, but I don't think there is a way to plan for fundamental social disasters, those disasters being chronic and constitutive of human actors. In these social disasters the problem itself recursively handicaps any self-correction without a disruptive force majeure. Or to paraphrase HL Mencken, maybe we get the government we deserve, good and hard. I would rephrase that to say in a degraded environment all of us are subjected to the government deserved by the worst.

Look at those who reflexively say that the President must not be criticized during a time of national emergency, for the sake of preserving norms of comity.

They are incapable of admitting that the COVID emergency supervenes on the Trump emergency. For the existence of Donald Trump, the worst man ever elevated to high office is an emergency, an ongoing and overlapping one. But how did that come about?

Trump as emergency can only unleash the devastation it does because of its enabling by the whole Republican Party, so the Trump emergency supervenes the emergency of the Republican Party, of the biggest right-wing party in the world embracing fascism. But how did that come about?

If Republican politicians represent their voters well, and Trump represents them perfectly, then these voters being (at best) political nihilists in the 19th-century sense, who revel in cruelty and mysticism to the point of willingness to die if they can take down some Others with them, then the incentives that make all the preceding possible are established upon the common Republican individual. The emergency of the Republican Party supervenes on the Republican base at the bottom of it all. But the existence of such people in such numbers is itself an emergency whose effects are magnified over time.

In the space of a single generation, Republican leaders, by Republican politicians, by Republican voters, have brought this country - and so much of the world - to its knees. How much more can we survive?

When there is such a fundamental underlying conflict, everything else follows from it, and to surmount the latter is conditional upon surmounting the root. If we were the sort of country to elect Biden-type centrists to every single political office, then we would be the most progressive and prosperous country in the world - and I admit that as a leftist.

In conclusion, there is arguably no greater human threat to the average person than the existence of the Republican base. Americans have a duty to themselves and to the world to reckon with that gutting reality.

As to those pumps, the stated purpose was to build up a federal "reserve" that could be deployed to hot spots in danger of being overwhelmed. Mind you, setting up such a reserve in the manner it was done and with those hot spots already appearing and clamoring for resources was poorly handled -- but I am generally readier to believe in ineptitude and ham-handed reactive efforts by government in general (and this sad sack administration in particular) than I am to assume malfeasance.

Hanlon's Razor is defeated by the coexistence of incompetence and malfeasance, which are both in evidence in the administration's handling of the pandemic, and in basically every aspect of its policy agenda from Day 1. The benefit of the doubt applies only when you don't know the score, or else it's just an unconditional allowance.

[a completely inoffensive name]

words

I'm looking at what the local Republicans are saying on FB. CUrrently holding a poll on whether they would take Bill Gates vaccine or Hydroxychlorquine.

The unproven drug is winning 228 to 24. These are the same people saying that not being allowed to go on the beach is one step away from willingly hitching a ride to a concentration camp.

Seamus says similar things that my parents say, which to me is not so much being blind to the reality but simply not willing to accept the implications it entails.
It always has to be a problem with 'both sides' or some intrinsic sin of humanity that we are facing our current problems because how can you even acknowledge living in an America where a specific segment (that you may still nominally identify with) has devolved so far underneath your nose.