When it comes to lockdown orders, the media standard has been hard to justify. The only reliable rule I see is blue states good, red states bad. From time to time, good/bad has meant early/late, or stringent/lax, but the goalposts move so fast and so inexplicably that I'm left concluding the only robust metric is blue/red.
New York has been a horrorshow, but the smart take continues to be that Cuomo is doing a bang-up job whenever he's not being personally sabotaged by the Bad Man. Florida has done very well, but it's better not to talk about it, because Florida is demographically similar to New York, while experiencing virtually none of its severe problems, and we really don't like the cut of that de Santis fellow's jib.
In an imaginary world where the point of all this ink was not to influence the November elections, it's hard to imagine we wouldn't be concluding that lockdowns work best when they're targeted, flexibly responsive to hard-data results, and as un-intrusive as possible. I do continue to wonder, though, whether the biggest difference isn't mass transit and single-family homes. Remember, mass transit kills, while sprawl will save us all.
The stock market is way too predictable, using certain tools, fear management, and astrology.
ReplyDeleteToday is a good day to sell some of the profits. Although no matter how many trades people can make, they should sell all the risky stuff, other than maybe Carnival and SWest airlines, off by Thursday/Friday this week.
The Guardian had a perfect example of what you're seeing here:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/us-coronavirus-outbreak-tennessee-kentucky
Tennessee is doing better than Kentucky in terms of per capita deaths (Tennessee has the higher population), and yet from the tone of the article you get the exact opposite impression. The numbers showing that Tennessee are doing better are right there in the article, but the sub-headings are telling the opposite story. I guess The Guardian just figured no one would notice?
It's such an audacious approach that I can't help but be a little impressed. Disgusted, but impressed.
Texas has a statewide online newspaper that in some ways isn't too awful; it's my usual source for election news, for instance. But I've noticed in the last few weeks that it's really grinding the ax on COVID-19 coverage, which is 100% about how "officials aren't doing enough to make us safe." This week there are lots of articles about counties opening back up. The pictures that go with the headlines are always something like two people in hazmat suits spraying each other down. The articles have a paragraph about opening back up followed by several paragraphs of interviews with the man on the street complaining about how we aren't testing 350MM people every day, for free, curbside service at your home and office.
ReplyDeleteThere is no amount of testing that will make people 100% safe, and no way to discuss any public policy that can't claim to be 100% safe. Luckily, Gov. Abbott is largely ignoring all of this. He threw out the Harris County (Houston) County Judge's order imposing fines on people who wouldn't wear masks, as well as a concerted local push to empty the jails. He's normally a little too big-government for my taste, but I'm liking him in this crisis.
If the metric really were about keeping people safe, we'd abolish transit and high-rises nationwide. Elevators kill! Obviously we won't do that, because the costs would land on people whose preferences can't be ignored, so we would revert to a rational analysis of cost/benefits, which such a measure would immediately fail by the most superficial standards. But put 25MM retail and restaurant workers on (maybe) unemployment, while furloughing workers in strangely empty hospitals? "If it saves one life," no cost could possibly be too great, and if you even think about disagreeing, you want to murder Nana personally.
The debate has become wildly stupid. Normally I don't relish leaders ignoring the public debate to this extent, but my principles are crumbling. More and more I'm reverting to the assumption that the state must let people incur their own risks without interference, and must not bail out too many of the ones who make terrible decisions. I was ready to make a temporary exception to protect the ICUs, but we've seen that that concern barely registers any more. The goalposts just shift as necessary to address the spasmodic public mood.
Team Blue has developed herd immunity to sexual assault allegations and also bad government decisions. Obviously they should be put in charge of everything and everyone.
ReplyDelete"we really don't like the cut of that de Santis fellow's jib."
ReplyDeleteYou would like Gillum even less if he had stolen that election.
I like de Santis just fine, I was ripping on his critics, who would be perfectly happy with his performance if only he were on Team Blue.
ReplyDeleteAnd if one considers the dissections of public policy that are provided regularly by The Manhattan Contrarian, lurking in the background of all this is the basic inability of Big-City Democratic Government machines to be functionally successful. They burn up all of their manpower and budget being politically successful, instead. The results show the difference in philosophy quite starkly. COVID didn't need 50 years of bad governance to grind the system to a pulp.
ReplyDeleteIn New York, the state *forced* nursing homes to accept covid patients into their buildings, despite their protestations and cries for more help. All while Javits center stood mostly empty. In a couple of homes, more than 50 people died after having those covid patients taken in. Criminal negligence, if you ask me, but they tell me Cuomo is doing a great job.
ReplyDeleteI have it on the authority of the Mayor of New York City that the real problem is the Jews, which he’s directing the police to disperse or round up as necessary.
ReplyDeleteMaybe, once rounded up, they can lend a helping hand distributing all those Ramadan Happy Meals.
ReplyDelete