Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Let's not confuse social distancing with lockdowns although lockdowns may be interpreted as an extreme case of social distancing.
And I would reduce the list, there are some "studies" here particularly from The Lancet that are dated in in March, April 2020, in other you can find gems like: "As evidence from coronavirus outbreak control is scarce, we must turn to evidence for the benefits of school closures from influenza epidemics and pandemics."
Why would you read any further? Flue spreads through schools like frigging hurricane, and kids get sick. After opening schools in Ontario, and almost everywhere else the evidence exists that the infection rate in schools is not even close to influenza. The province is on lockdown the schools started re-opening last week.

In other study, dated in March 2020, I found the statement that statistical models should, at this stage be used as the evidence of how effective the non-medical measures are. Statistical model as an evidence, is this a sign of ignorance, deliberate lying or just poor peers review?
Through the history of research mathematical models of any kind had to be confirmed by evidence no one ever confused them with evidence until it was politically useful.
What is incredible to me is that the Imperial College models are on your list.
We can discuss anything here but, if the studies based on models from March, April 2020 is what the governments are using now to guide their policies, than only God can help us.

 

No need of studies to support this piece of common sense: If people don't mix they can't catch stuff off each other.

Of course, if people stop mixing, but with this exception, that exception, the other exception etc etc etc then there isn't much hope, because the isolation/lockdown is in name only. And when people do have to mix, they should act as if they are in a dangerous situation, indeed, as if they are dangerous themselves.

Watching the news out of UK, for the past year, and the performance of bumbling Boris and his three-word slogans, I have seen just one thing that has made me think about how I behave and what I do: "Act as if you've already got it." But there's no way that I or most of us are going to be able to act with the awareness of and respect for routes of infection of an intensive-care nurse, because we haven't been trained that way. Of course, I think I act clean, but frankly, I'd probably be thrown out of a professional kitchen, let alone an intensive care ward.

What to do with people like me? What to do with people who score 5% against my level of awareness? Lock them up. err.... down. And if only we (me, you, us; all of us) could do the thing properly, it might not have to be for very long.

 

I stop caring about the numbers from FL since I don't trust the FL Gov office once bit at all (since he is either lying on the numbers and using it for political gain). I also don't fully trust the #s from CDC or from the Federal Gov. I'm not saying that Covid-19 is a joke, which it is not. I'm just having a hard time believe in the #s on both sides of the argument.

I have to give FL Gov credit for one thing, keep pushing back on lockdowns and focus on Freedom is getting a lot more people to move to FL during this time. Most places near me are open, but most require a mask to get in. My local cafe down the block from my apt is packed and barely anyone is wearing a mask. FL just overtaken NY as being the 3rd most populated state in the union and from reviewing the voting records here, they are GOP-leaning voters. Like it or not, people don't think collective here in FL.

Americans don't like being told what to do, so they move/vote with their wallets/needs.

 

I appreciate this @Stuff Jones, I really do! It is an honest accounting - a right wing moral calculus laid open for all to see. What is your life $worth$, and how is this kind of worth (there are other kinds obviously) calculated? Turns out in a Adam Smith-esque moral universe a person's life is worth $7.4 million dollars (or something similar).

With this figure in mind (or so the story goes) prudential and moral decisions in governance are relatively easy and straight forward. You just calculate the cost of anything, in this case lockdowns and other pandemic mitigation efforts in one column, and compare it to the column of the cost of each death by said pandemic (and here we will lay aside the unnecessary complication of trying to predict # of deaths in each iteration of differing procedure). Here is the math for today:

417,538 deaths so far X $7.4mil = $3.09 trillion.

See that, easy peasy. The complications of life boiled down to dollar and "sense" (though just what sort of "sense" is involved here I note is never actually stated ). Who needs priests, philosophers, counselors, artists, and other such wise men and women when you can just boil life and death down to actuary science?

You and @wormcycle should start a website calling it "Actuary Science Review for Life, the Universe, and Everything". ASR-LUE. Beauty, love, sacrifice for your neighbor and more turns out are quantifiable and measurable, just lines on a graph in the end...

 

We have not reached this point yet, but if you think about a dollar as something spend on headphones, or to invest BTC, you may be right.
I think about a dollar that is needed for hospital equipment, for paying people who are out there working so we can eat, hospital workers, people on social assistance, those programs, some of them useless, some essential, that are run by government from our taxes etc etc..
I you have not figured out that the economy is not only the economy of rich and comfortable, that economy at its core is to sustain life, life of the people and life of the social organisms, well I cannot help you.
If you think we can live isolated and print money for the next two years well, I cannot help you either.
And priests, philosophers, artists, they all live now on borrowed time, and we need them. Economy is to sustain them as well.
EDIT: here are the dollars I am talking about: https://nationalpost.com/news/local...tive/wcm/3c708e53-acb4-444d-8727-f2ac4dde7b26
"Montreal researchers conclude colchicine tablet is effective at treating COVID-19 symptoms
The results showed the medication helped reduce hospitalizations by a quarter, the need for mechanical ventilation by half and deaths by 44 per cent"

 

Uh huh, I get it - your out for the little guy, the forgotten, those overlooked by The Man and his ham fisted and costly lockdowns. ASR-LUE is not a scientism, its a review site and critique of misused science...or something.

I would be more apt to believe you if the little guys and their children were, I don't know, starving in the streets because the tattoo parlors and restaurants they used to work at were shut down. Turns out most of them are still open, and while these sorts of economic sectors have $contracted$ and real suffering has occurred (getting another job is a real bitch, psychologically and otherwise), those who are not ASR-LUE calculators see several other parts of the story. It's like @Stuff Jones says, there are "trade-offs" in any moral calculus. What is the value, not only in dollars, but in other terms, of a single human life? 7.4 million dollars is the easy answer...too easy.

 

Bolded above is the funniest part of everything IMO. No former Dem to GOP old school voter that I know will admit that they were ok with big spending government programs. I guess most got programed to the point that government program for helping people = bad.

 

That's fine... if they get educated and become experts and make their own informed decision. Not so fine if it is just ignorant ego bullshit.

It isn't just Americans. Nobody like being told what to do. Especially by a bumbling moron with orange hair. Not yours: the British one.

I don't like being told what to do. But in this case, I sure as hell don't know what to do. The instructions and information I am getting may be wrong, but they are the best available.

The country I now live in is emerging from lockdown and, unlike the European experience, it doesn't look like it is going bad on us again. I hate even saying this, in case I wake up tomorrow and find it has all changed again.

But, dear America (and hey, I do like you a lot), please note that we stand second only to you in number of covid deaths --- with four times the population.

Mind you, I suspect that our government has probably forgotten that they advised >60s to stay at home, back in March. Hello! Can we come out yet? lol.

 

Dear India, I have no idea how you're doing what you do with the size your population, but you guys get some things incredibly right through amazing complex emergent systems.

 

Hi, we are the American Government, we don’t know how to actually do much lately other throw a bunch of money at problems and hope that it fixes it.

Now we have a new government that was partly elected with the help of liberals, who demand now is the time to solve problems like childhood poverty. Like Marv said, this new round of stimulus is buying votes or paying the IOU.

This part will garner some dislikes, but fuggit. These stimulus checks bother me to the extent that my tax money (e.g. over half of my hard-earned bonus) helps subsidize the purchasing of high end audio gear by people here and elsewhere. Not the midfi stuff either, but the gear that I deemed to extravagant for me to continue to own or buy on recent FS threads. Now I’m all for freedom to buy what you want, but I get grumpy when my taxes will go up even more to cover these giveaways. I’m fine with paying taxes as long as the government isn’t too stupid with how they spend the money.

 

The US should of had a month long

I understand your point of view. I have no issues with helping people who lost their jobs because of Covid,or stimulus checks going out to people who really need them, or PPE loans to medium to small business to keep them going. But, the last round of stimulus checks went to people like me who really didn’t need it. Or big companies taking these interest free loans while smaller companies where having a hell of a time getting approved. My wife was laid off but she had a hell of a time trying to get approved for unemployment (and never did) while an acquaintance is at home playing games all day, streaming, because of unemployment. Not everyone is like him as I know people who where on unemployment and got contract jobs in the mean time.

The way I read it is that Wallstreet looks good while our real economy is practically sputtering along. The infusion of cash it to keep spending going until our economy is back on its knees (I won’t say feet because that will take a while). I just wish the monetary infusion was targeted better. If we don’t infuse cash now then it’ll take much longer to get back to where we were. I hate blanket solutions as it’s lazy imho. So it looks like do we steal from ourselves to keep things above water or not and let the economy do its thing?

 

The problem is that it doesn’t go to everyone. It only goes to those who earn some arbitrary line of income and then gets phased out. I’m not complaining that I didn’t get any stimulus money. I’m just complaining that clearly some people received money that didn’t “need” it. Now, I’m happy to debate means of economic stimulus, however, just like the Covid-19 quarantine debate, there are academic and common sense arguments on both sides.

 

Well the interest rates are so low that companies can easily borrow to finance projects. I think @Phantaminum was referring to PPP loans that weren’t loans but giveaways.

 

Yes the PPP/PSP "loans" are technically loans (not sure what interest is involved - it's prime + a bit if I remember correctly) but they are in the main "forgiven" in the end if the company meets the requirements (e.g. actually using them for payroll, etc.). United Airlines for example received $5 billion this past Sept. In otherwords it's all free money - stimulus for business.

 

Several of them gave back the loan but only after being called out. While several smaller businesses where having trouble getting most of what was requested or only a small part of what was requested.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/big-businesses-ppp-loans

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksh...ic-companies-ppp-loans-money/?sh=1dc03ebe40d2