4681

Absolutely. If Trump were a true leader, and he got on tv and said that the US was going to lead the world in solving this crisis, but that it would take tremendous sacrifice from every citizen, it could happen.

Pass a $2 trillion basic income program and then spend another $1 trillion on new hospitals and equipment, bring in the military and national guard, and draft other doctors into service to either care for the infected or help with research for a vaccine.

Then create a new Vaccine Bond program so the rich could contribute to the effort.

But Trump is a spineless divider of people, so not only wouldn’t he dare do something like that, nobody would follow him if he did.

Edit: meanwhile, on the national defense front, send a very clear message to countries like North Korea and Iran that now is not the time to fuck with us or other nations, and that they should focus on helping their own people. Remind them we have nukes and that in this trying time, when our focus is on coming up with a vaccine the world will benefit from, we’ve got itchy trigger fingers.

Edit 2: in addition to the Vaccine Bond program, a temporary surtax of 2% on the wealth of everyone above $2 million would be levied.

4682

Sure. I don’t think the bonuses are going to hit their maximum this year.

I guess what I mean is that if the Congress passed the appropriate legislation, the US could fairly quickly make a lot of most stuff. If the US wasn’t so crippled politically, that could happen. Maybe it still will happen once the situation gets bad enough.

4683

Since the rules of the SF lockdown are still kinda vague in some areas, I checked my local pot delivery place and they are still open for business and apparently getting slammed since there’s a banner saying delivery times will be extra long. I figure like waffle houses in the south, pot delivery should be a good barometer of how much civilization has broken down in SF.

4684

By both politicians and the electorate, so the beating will continue until morale improves.

4685

Coronavirus: saving lives.

“Given the huge amount of evidence that breathing dirty air contributes heavily to premature mortality, a natural - if admittedly strange - question is whether the lives saved from this reduction in pollution caused by economic disruption from COVID-19 exceeds the death toll from the virus itself,” Burke writes.

“Even under very conservative assumptions, I think the answer is a clear ‘yes’.”

The two months of pollution reduction, Burke calculates, has probably saved the lives of 4,000 children under 5 and 73,000 adults over 70 in China. That’s significantly more than the current global death toll from the virus itself.

Although this might seem a little surprising, it’s something we’ve known about for quite a long time. Earlier this month, research suggested that air pollution costs us three years, on average, off our global life expectancy.

4686

If it doesn’t, I have a plan involving a genetically engineered psychic space squid.

4687

Without any idea of your goals or how the squid would accomplish them, I am willing to announce my unreserved support!

4688

I was at a Mississauga Costco this morning. There was a lot of chicken breasts but they they seemed to be moving quickly. Lots of other meats to choose from. Stocks of most things are okay. No toilet paper, or paper towels. The lineup for checkout stretched to back of the store but they were running all registers and were moving things very quickly with some staff dedicated to nothing but managing the queues.

4689

4690

I wonder if you could use selective service to draft people into medical service, training them to supplement nursing. I imagine too late for it to have an impact though.

4691

My regression analysis from 3 days ago has continued to track positive cases in the U.S. fairly closely. (IOW, the predicted numbers for the last 3 days are quite close to the actual numbers.) We’re on track to hit 14,000 positive infections by Friday and 45,000 by a week from now if trends continue.

image
image763×466 23.5 KB

4692

Don’t they kill them first?

4693

The NY State quarantine should show in the data starting next week, and even more so the week after.

4694

They take fresh food seriously

4695

Las Vegas Sands Corp has announced they are closing the Venetian and Polozzo until April 1st, as has the Cosmopolitan, so that’s three more Strip properties shuttering for the time being. I was at Circus Circus today and it was practically deserted. Went to Fremont Street as well, and it was about as busy as a typical Tue morning. AFAIK, the only closures happening there are the live shows. We laid off about 50 people yesterday, and MGM pink slipped another 6000.

Not seeing much evidence of people taking precautions. A middle aged guy wearing a mask is the only example I’ve seen today of anybody not working who is even acknowledging this thing.

Small businesses seem to be taking smarter measures - fast food places are not allowing in-house dining, convenience stores are suspending drink refills and limiting “essential items” to 2 per customer. Meanwhile the grocery stores remain a free-for-all.

4696

Oof. We better not send them checks while everything is shut down, though, we don’t want to discourage them from working at all the closed casinos.

4697

I’ve been to Mississauga a bunch of times for my old company. I used to run around singing “Subdivisions” by Rush but not a single Canadian colleague even got it.

4698

Any idea how long it took from the containment efforts that China and South Korea took started to take before they reduced the R0? It seems like there would 5-8 day delay from the time we say stop going to bars and we’d see a flattening of the curve, and of course various measure were rolled out at various times, so this a data scientist nightmare/wet dream trying to understand the various impacts.

Here is one person arguing we are likely over-reacting. I’m only posting because his bio is sufficiently impressive John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University

4699

Here in St. Louis all the restaurants will be carry out only starting Friday. I don’t know why they are waiting. In Missouri all the casinos have closed. All the museums are closed. Schools are closing.

We haven’t had a lot of cases yet, but we haven’t done a lot of testing yet either. I believe we’ve had six in Missouri.

4700

He is talking shit. Just go to January’s China or today’s Iran, Italy, Spain and watch the bodies piling up or rotting in people’s homes because the healthcare services are unable to help them. Those dead people are real you don’t need data to know that and you don’t need a degree to realise what happens when you extrapolate those events to something that affects millions.