Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[iam416]

Georgia Ds want Obama to campaign there. Not Biden. Certainly not the nutjob Squad. Just Obama. Heh.

[iam416]

And yes, Mike, it was goddamn miracle that we managed to simultaneously get rid of PDJT and have the Rs keep the Senate (or at least 50/50 w/ everything running through Manchin) AND repudiate the woke bullshit of the Left.

[Jeff Buchanan]

I read today that $44.5b flowed into the US stock market the day the the Pfizer vaccine news was announced. Biggest in-flow of money in one day ever. This tells you just how much fucking money is on the sidelines waiting to be invested when COVID is tamed and it will be. Add to that unemployment dropping to near seasonal lows as people return to work and things don't look particularly bad on the economic or social side of things.

The risk now to the global economy is panicky reactions to the growth in new COVID cases, including retreat to our homes. Brief exchanges yesterday here provided point and counterpoint to the potential for the Biden administration to impose a wide ranging lock-down. The numbers the math and even the science point to the need for it. Limiting mobility and social contact works - no doubt about it.

The problem is such steps taken without consideration of the downside impact would be insane. The global economy was just, or in the US where opening instead of closing is the norm, starting to regain form. Choking that off would be catastrophic on several levels - materially and psychologically. I don't think airing of the downside risks is getting much attention. For the voices doing the loudest talking about COVID, it is much more politically endearing to their constituencies, social media users and TV viewers to emphasize new rising case numbers, new deaths, strained hospitals and staff, than it is to champion a pathway to recovery that proceeds with courage over the issue of closings. The "do something" approach resonates with what citizens are hearing from the media about the horrors of COVID.

Yes, some flattening and downward trending of new cases is needed but, there are ways to achieve that and, frankly, one of them is what seems to have happened naturally in every peak ..... the rate of infection, sometimes inexplicably, declines without doing much of anything except asking citizens to protect themselves and behave responsibly. So far, what is coming out of Biden's lips speaks to that approach. OTH, those having been named to PH positions or are seemingly speaking as past or current PH advisors to Biden being interviewed are calling for lock-downs so less people, essentially no more people, die. I suspect there are voices who are not calling for lock-downs and are in Biden's circle of PH advisors but, no surprise, the press isn't interviewing them or they don't want to be interviewed. Their views aren't getting out there. Bad news.

A military analogy: In WWII the Allies were fighting a two front war against the Axis powers. Battles raged in the European and Pacific theaters. Casualties were mounting but instead of retreating in the face of what appeared insurmountable odds of prevailing against the Nazis and Imperial Japan, political and military leadership ordered US forces to advance and advance they did. In the Pacific, Nimitz new the small islands leading to Okinawa had to be taken and Iwo Jima was one of them. Marines took that Island with huge numbers of dead and wounded. But in the end logistic chains were neutralized for the Japanese and gained back to facilitate a US Army advance to, if necessary, invade Japan. Wasn't needed. The point is that millions died but authoritarianism was defeated, democracy prevailed and survived.

We're facing a different adversary now but people are going to perish to preserve the viability of an interconnected and mostly free global economy if it continues to open up .... and it should. The alternative is to retreat, shutter businesses, restrict vital social mobility and take shelter from the enemy in our homes. Meanwhile our other enemy, the PRC, thrives and will undoubtedly take another step forward in their goal of global hegemony, authoritarianism and dictatorial communist governments. Meanwhile, we'll continue to see COVID flourish and spread just like it has after every lock-down and subsequent re-opening. Maybe will get lucky and vaccines will work. Maybe they won't. Maybe next year there will be a new virus that humans aren't immune to. People, wake the fuck up this is our world.

So, go ahead president elect Biden, shut everything down for a few months. Maybe you'll get to a vaccine. Maybe you won't or it will fail to curtail the spread of the virus, Your people will tell you, the costs of closings and tough restrictions to social mobility will be accepted by Americans as the cost of maybe defeating the virus..... maybe. Moreover, they'll tell you your saving lives. Think what our world would look like today if Winston and Franklin had retreated in the face of what appeared at the time to be omnipotent adversaries on two fronts with little hope of winning. What would have happened if they had retreated to save lives. I don't even want to think about it and I really don't want to think about a world where Western style democracy and economies are permanently hobbled as a result actions taken to mitigate the virus out of fear.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Welp, after I just posted the above (somebody at CNBC must have read it!!!), this popped up:

"President-elect Joe Biden’s Covid advisors nix idea of U.S. lockdown to curb pandemic"

KEY POINTS

• Implementing a widespread lockdown on businesses is “not the opinion” of the panel of infectious disease experts advising President-elect Joe Biden, said Dr. Celine Gounder, who sits on the panel.
• Gounder told CNBC that state officials should focus on implementing tighter restrictions on places where there’s a high risk for the virus to spread instead.
• “I think of this as a dimmer switch, not an on-and-off light switch,” she told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Encouraging read but, what does it mean to implement tighter restrictions on places where there’s a high risk for the virus to spread ..... I can think of a lot of places where there is a risk but no solid evidence that spread is actually occuring. Gyms for example. Lock-down advocates always have these facilities in their cross-hairs. In Broward County I've not heard of a single gym or fitness studio being the cause of infections, let alone super spreader events. I'm still worried lock-downs are on the horizon.

Good read:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/13/biden-advisor-dr-gounder-says-covid-advisory-panel-doesnt-support-full-us-lockdown.html

[Jeff Buchanan]

So, your tired of my COVID reporting. Tough shit. Suck it up ...... this is important. Look, we're entering a new phase of how leadership is going to deal with the pandemic. Trump fucked this up to start. No doubt. He also deserves credit for some of things he did right and that would be Operation Warp Speed and what I understand is a massive logistics operation to get it produced and distributed. We'll see. Proof of it's success is yet to be determined.

Great. A VACCINE ISN'T GOING TO BE ENOUGH, PEOPLE. Just read a WSJ article that I linked to even though it's probably paywalled but it is a very good piece of journalism from a scientist no less - which is amazing in and of itself. Scientists and engineers are shitty writers.

The article advances the concept of the Swiss Cheese Model of risk reduction. The concept was introduced three decades ago by a British psychologist. The Swiss cheese model is a classic way to conceptualize dealing with a hazard that involves a mixture of human, technological and natural elements. I'm familiar with this as I am a serious student of the Safe to Sail plan introduced by a commission with some heavy hitters in the COVID world on it. This panel developed procedures to let cruise ships start operating again using "layers" of protective measures to reduce the likelihood that enough SARS-CoV-2 virions will pass from an infected individual to a virus naïve individual and cause COVID-19. It's an amazing bit of applied science in what is otherwise considered a unsafe congregate setting. It isn't when risks are managed ...... this thinking can apply to a whole range of human activities that are considered unsafe and the official answer to risk reduction is typically lock them up. Stupid.

It's not that hard to understand or, in fact, to implement. We are already doing it to a certain extent. Improvements can be made and a good deal of that comes from the leadership, at various levels, speaking with one voice and enlisting the support of Americans. I think Biden can do it but it isn't going to be easy. He has to get people to buy in and then everyone who is in a position to decide on mitigation measures has to start thinking in terms of multiple layers of protection like 5 slices os Swiss cheese stacked up so there are no holes aligned and nothing can pass through.

On a practical level it means doing the basic stuff then SELECTIVELY implementing the measures that we don't like and find inconvenient but, again, I stress, only when such measures can be justified. Are these restaurants spreading the virus? If so, when is the most likely time this is occurring? OK, after 11pm. Close the place at 11. Is that gym spreading the virus? No record of it ..... don't shut it and the rest of them down. I could go on. You get the point.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-swiss-cheese-model-can-help-us-beat-covid-19-11605283134?mod=hp_lead_pos13

[lineygoblue]

I just saw part of Trump's presser where he said that when/if an effective vaccine begins to be distributed, it will be spread over 49 states. "With the exception of New York, whose governor said that any vaccine developed under this administration will not be allowed to be used in New York".

[THE_WIZARD_]

To call Cuomo a tool is very offensive to the tool industry...

[Dr. Strangelove]

Hall of Fame tweet right here

[lineygoblue]

Reminds me of Algore.... good stuff.

[Mike]

Reminds me of Algore.... good stuff.

It shouldn’t. These situations are not nearly the same.

[Ghengis Jon]

You never know what you find when out for a walk.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/09/super-rare-100-year-old-carrier-pigeon-message-found-in-france

[froot loops]

Voter fraud in Pennsylvania!

[Jeff Buchanan]

The link below, if you can figure out how to get to it contains an excellent run down of the COVID impact on the US economy, jobs and small business. I was struck by it's depiction of the resiliency of all US businesses as measured by the drop in unemployment and the restoration of near pre-pandemic level consumer spending. That spending has benefitted smaller retail and on-line stores due to the thinking of US consumers that shopping in small stores or online reduces one's exposure to the virus. Clearly, certain sectors have been hit hard by COVID, travel and leisure probably took the biggest hit and will be slow to recover. The widespread distribution of a vaccine is going to help that sector recover rapidly but recovery won't be until late 2021.

Household income has been depressed in the US but not dramatically so and in the aggregate it has held up well. Lower income households have absorbed larger losses than medium and upper income ones. The cushioning of household incomes with the first stimulus package was particularly effective containing the $1200 pp helicopter money and the bonus $600 per week in unemployment benefits. The PPP less so as generally, the money in that program went to large businesses that had no intention of doing much scaling back or laying off compared to small businesses that didn't get it. The lesson learned her WRT to future stimulus legislation is that it doesn't need to be the crazy handout the Ds are calling for. There needs to be one but Mitch is right.

The economic recovery in the US as measured by GDP is stronger than in the EU. One reason for that is the approach by EU governments to the pandemic contains much more stringent mitigation measures, lock-downs predominating. Given that fact, I then went outside the article to compare EU v. US PH using deaths/d/100k population as a comparator. What is striking is that deaths/d/100K population is considerably higher in the EU than it is in the US and not by a small margin. If one ever needed proof that lock-downs don't confer great PH benefits with economic costs outweighing them, this is it.

This data ought to do a couple of things: (1) make it clear that on a local level the recovery of the local economies and employment could easily be choked off by unjustifiable and politically motivated official decisions to close businesses. (2) Even the initial distribution of a vaccine, although on a small scale, has the potential to boost overall business activity and consumer spending enormously.

Why would the Biden administration even consider taking steps that might stifle that in the misguided hope that the spread of the virus can be mitigated more rapidly by imposing anything at all from the federal level. Let the states and counties decide what to do based on the granular, contextualized data that is available to them to guide the application of mitigation measures locally. A reminder: The most effective mitigation measures are those that are undertaken by individuals taking personal responsibility for themselves and members of their communities. If Biden wants to do anything, that's the kind of message he should send.

https://www.economist.com/finance-an...arketing-cloud

[iam416]

Speaking of the vaccine, the White House expects that the Federal Government will distribute 20M doses by the end of DECEMBER. Of course, none will go to New York because Democratic Hero Cuomo doesn't think the PDJT government is to be trusted. He even said it was bad news that the vaccine happened so quickly.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/white-house-expects-to-distribute-20-million-coronavirus-vaccine-doses-by-december/

[iam416]

Why would the Biden administration even consider taking steps that might stifle that in the misguided hope that the spread of the virus can be mitigated more rapidly by imposing anything at all from the federal level. Let the states and counties decide what to do based on the granular, contextualized data that is available to them to guide the application of mitigation measures locally. A reminder: The most effective mitigation measures are those that are undertaken by individuals taking personal responsibility for themselves and members of their communities. If Biden wants to do anything, that's the kind of message he should send.

PDJT's primary failure was and remains messaging. Biden's plan, however, is essentially doing the same things -- waiting for the vaccine. His messaging will be better, but that well was already poisoned by PDJT.

So, we're all still in the wait-for-the-vaccine stage and Biden ain't changing that. I'm hoping the Moderna vaccine is a little more distribution friendly than the Pfizer one.