We’ll it’s still mostly Covid, most of the time. The election is intruding, but that now involves Covid too. 🙂
Open Thread.
547 thoughts on “Oct 2 open thread…”
Comments are closed.
We’ll it’s still mostly Covid, most of the time. The election is intruding, but that now involves Covid too. 🙂
Open Thread.
Comments are closed.
A nice video highlighting my home state: https://vimeo.com/453779469
My cabin is roughly 200 miles west.
Very beautiful!
The large number of people in this explosion of cases is a bit mysterious. These people were basically engaging in the same (reckless?) behavior all along and then it hit like a covid bomb went off in a short time period. Looks like a super spreader event. It seems that maybe certain people get mega-contagious, or alternately once somebody pierces the bubble then all bets are off.
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Many of these people were getting tested regularly. The high visibility of the people involved might make this a good case study for how the virus spreads.
Tom Scharf,
“The large number of people in this explosion of cases is a bit mysterious.”
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You mean the ‘second wave’ of confirmed cases in many places, or the specific instance of Trump and those around him?
Tom,
Supposedly everyone was tested with fast turn around time tests before the gathering too. I don’t have details of exactly when or who did the testing.
I read that they were all tested earlier that day.
I thought that false negatives were usually from testing too early. It hardly seems possible that someone could go from a negative test to being highly contagious in a matter of hours. Unless, that is, the person was already shedding a lot of virus and tested negative anyway.
Is there terminology to distinguish a false negative when the test should be positive from a negative test that results from testing too early in infection?
Yeah… the text is “Guests at the event sat closely packed together, many not wearing masks after being tested earlier in the day.”
I wonder if non-guests (as in waiters, staff etc) were all tested that day? (Haven’t read details on the testing protocol. I bet they aren’t available.)
I don’t think there is a term for that. From the minute you are infected, a test that doesn’t pick that up is a “false negative” because the goal is to catch everyone who is infected.
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We know there are false negatives.
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Sadly, these gatherings of a large group of people many of whom just flew in, all of whom are mixing around a lot is the situation that most stresses the “testing” scenario. The modeling for places like University of Illinois assumes that to some extent, the population is “isolated” with some in and out flux of visitors. So while the test does have some false negatives — even some false negatives of infectious people– the goal is to keep Ro low for that group because you can’t most people before they mix.
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But… well… these are all “how the hell are you?!” “handshaker” type people who meet and greet lots of people.
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Testing would probably still keep spread down– but obviously not perfect.
lucia (Comment #191364): “I don’t think there is a term for that. From the minute you are infected, a test that doesn’t pick that up is a “false negative†because the goal is to catch everyone who is infected.”
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Sure. But with the rapid testing there is also a goal of catching people who are likely to be infectious *now*.
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It seems to me that there is an important distinction between a result that is wrong (negative result for someone who is shedding lots of virus) and a result that might be misinterpreted (negative today does not guarantee negative tomorrow). Even if for some applications the distinction might not make a practical difference.
MikeM
I agree there is a distinction. I just don’t think we have specific terms to differentiate between these two types of false positives. Pre-covid, the main goal was to for diagnosis. So false positive was “failed to diagnose you had it when you did have it”.
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Right now, for public health we have another goal. Identifying that you are infectious is the larger goal. But…well I don’t think we have a different term.
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From what I read: the people outdoors weren’t tested. That’s a big hole especially since they were told they didn’t have to wear masks.
Trump tweeted 3 minutes ago. He should hold up a fresh print copy of a recent newspaper– like a hostage negotiation’s proof of life. 🙂
Without knowing who is being tested, don’t know what the data is telling us. If only those who are symptomatic are being tested the data is only telling us what percent of those who think they are sick are really sick. Since 40 percent of infected people are believed to be asymptomatic, is a positive test telling us the virus is spreading or only uncovering existing infections. Only in climate science and the corona virus industry would data like this be used to make decisions.
Verifying email account as requested.
thank you.
PMHinSC,
I think your post got through.
From the NY Post:
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We have never heard anything like that before. No, I am joking, we have talked about it endlessly. Nice that someone with ‘academic credibility’ is also saying it.
There is an online petition, signed by thousands of doctors, calling for focused protection:
https://gbdeclaration.org/
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Also, prominent doctors and scientists criticizing the reaction to the virus:
https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/24/12-experts-questioning-the-coronavirus-panic/
https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/28/10-more-experts-criticising-the-coronavirus-panic/
Mike M,
This you got to love:
“Dr Michael Levitt is Professor of biochemistry at Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), a member of the National Academy of Sciences and received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.”
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He thinks the public response to covid-19 is misguided. And yes, he is without doubt a crazy Trump deplorable who knows nothing. /sarc
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You can’t make this stuff up. The public response to covid-19 has been the ultimate lefty policy catastrophe: maximizing damage both economically and socially, and serving no purpose to speak of. I just hope enough intellectual freedom remains in the world for this sorry episode of political foolishness to be a warning to people in the event of a future pandemic.
I think Trump takes a hit right before the election as Halloween is canceled.
Seems very low risk to me to do as always, but already the school here is saying they do not recommend trick or treating or trunk or treating.
I don’t care about Hunter Biden at all. I generally assume Federal politicians will setup cozy deals for themselves and their families when and where they can. That is all.
Achieving herd immunity would take at least 36 months in the U.S. During which time we could expect more than 2 million deaths.
Wear a mask. Social distance. Wash your hands. Seems like a more reasonable alternative.
Thomas,
Absolutely. But I think we must elaborate on social distancing so that people who say it know what it ought to mean:
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* don’t go to large political protests (BLM).
* don’t go to Rose garden parties.
* don’t eat in restaurants and especially not bars.
* don’t attend in person lecture or classroom sessions at universities.
* etc.
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If you make exceptions for causes you “like” then you aren’t really for social distancing. You are for …. something…. else….
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Honestly, we don’t quite know how long it will take to get herd immunity in locations (e.g. NY, Chicago etc.) Nor do we know how long it will take to establish herd immunity everywhere in the US.
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The current uptick in cases in locations like NY definitely indicate herd immunity has not been reached. I think I’ve heard of an uptick in Sweden too— no true heard immunity. (Or maybe.. the virus isn’t increasing exponententially– not sure so one might say it is “herd immunity”, but that just shows there are still dangers when there are outbreaks even if they aren’t exponentially increasing ones.)
So if a model says we don’t have to worry about increases in cases… there is something wrong with the model….
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It looks like most of Europe’s reaction to the current uptick in cases is to come close imitating the behavior of some jurisdictions in the US. Those places would be… uhmmm Florida and the states that did not impose severe restrictions. They are not imitating New York.
Thomas Fuller (Comment #192021): “Achieving herd immunity would take at least 36 months in the U.S. During which time we could expect more than 2 million deaths.”
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Nonsense. Many places appear to be close to herd immunity. Overall, we are almost surely within a factor of two, unless immunity is short lived.
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Two million deaths is just plain innumerate. At the current pace, that would take 7 or 8 years.
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The idea that we can control this virus is a deadly fantasy.
I have no idea how to interpret these numbers, but I think they need to be understood. I was wondering what is found when you test people randomly with PCR. What I found:
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Kansas City area (Johnson County, Kansas) in early April: 3% positive. At that time Kansas was reporting about 200 new cases a week per million population. Ratio of “active” cases to weekly new cases = 150.
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Indiana in late April: 2.7% positive. Compared to about 600 reported new cases per week per million. Ratio = 45.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6929e1.htm?s_cid=mm6929e1_w
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Hermiston County, Oregon in July: 17% positive. Compared to about 600 reported new cases per week per million for OR as a whole. Ratio = 300.
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UK, late September: 7% positive. Compared to about 1000 new cases per week per million. Ratio = 70.
https://www.bbc.com/news/54270373
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If 10% of cases are reported, then a ratio of 70 implies that on average people remain positive for 7 weeks. Or else there is a large false positive rate.
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I don’t put much significance on the KC and OR numbers since they had small sample sizes and I was comparing county to state. They just imply that the Indiana and UK results are not outliers.
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Any ideas as to what these numbers mean?
MikeM
I’m not sure what you are trying to “interpret”. They are numbers. What the ratio means… well… dunno. Depends on what an “active case” means and also whether each set of numbers is over or under inclusive for what it is even supposed to count.
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Well….if “active cases’ really means active, you would expect “active cases” to “new cases” to be large for any disease. You are active until you recover or die.
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For disease spread:
* new cases is one useful metric. Ideally you identify all new cases, though realistically you won’t.
* “active” case would be useful if it meant “infectious”, which an positive PCR tests sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t.
You would nearly always expect the ratio of this sort of “active cases” to be quite a bit greater new cases/day since new cases would be assumed to become infectious at some point. If they were infectious only 1 day, that would make the ratio 1, if 2 days, 2 and so on….. (So caveats apply… maybe a case never become infectious?)
For medical load: active cases be meaningful if “active case” meant symptomatic. It doesn’t seem to since a positive PCR case may not be infectious. But one that has live virus is.
You would also nearly always expect the ratio to be quite a bit larger than 1 for this sort of metric. (Caveats apply… but if no one ever gets sick… well… it’s almost not a disease!)
If the column for what is called “active” cases includes recovered who still trigger a positive because of dead virus in their system and never get infectious… well… that’s not necessarily useful. The ratio means…. well the ratio of people in one bin vs. another…
lucia (Comment #192030): “active case would be useful if it meant “infectiousâ€, which an positive PCR tests sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t.”
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Indeed. But anyone with a positive test is deemed to be infective. That is not my position; that is how the authorities treat it.
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lucia: “You would nearly always expect the ratio of this sort of “active cases†to be quite a bit greater new cases/day since new cases would be assumed to become infectious at some point.”
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Sure. That is why I used new cases per *week*. Symptomatic people are rarely infectious for more than a week and are only strongly infectious for 2-3 days.
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lucia: “You would also nearly always expect the ratio to be quite a bit larger than 1 for this sort of metric.”
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Of course. But 70? Using weekly cases? And that is an underestimate for the UK since the numbers are for a time when new cases were rising dramatically.
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I have no conclusion, other than that the numbers seem remarkable.
Mike M.,
Early on, possibly as late as early June, when test availability was low and positivity was high, missing 9 of 10 cases was a reasonable hypothesis. But when the positivity rate is below 5% or maybe even 10%, then, IMO, it is extremely unlikely that 90% of new cases are still being missed unless 90% of cases are totally asymptomatic, which I also doubt. The vaccine testing process should give us a much better idea of the ratio of asymptomatic to symptomatic infections and a lot of other information as well.
Thomas Fuller,
I’ll pile on as well. The Imperial College estimate of two million deaths in the US was a bad joke from day one. In fact, models of COVID-19 have been so bad, I’m not sure why anyone bothers with them. The same Imperial College model in 2009 predicted the same death rate for the H1N1 virus. While SARS-CoV-2 does seem to be more virulent than H1N1, which is fortunate considering the incompetent response to the H1N1 pandemic by Obama/Biden, recent data indicates that the infection fatality rate for SARS-CoV-2 has dropped a lot and is nowhere near the 1% or so that would be necessary for two million deaths in the US with 70% of the population having been infected.
Look at France, for example ( worldometers.info ). During their first wave, they had about 160,000 confirmed cases and 30,000 deaths. Currently, there are 780,000 confirmed cases but only 3,000 additional deaths. It’s not quite as striking in the US, but the current death rate is about 750/day based on a seven day moving average compared to a peak of 2250/day on April 17 when NY and NY were being ravaged. Daily new cases, OTOH, have been over 50,000/day since early July compared to 30,000/day in April.
It would take a lot longer than three years too. Even at 100,000 infections/day, it would take over six years to get to 240 million (72%) new infections.
“Wear a mask. Social distance. Wash your hands.”
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These are low hanging fruit, I don’t have any problem with them. I will however question whether they really work. If we take US politics out of the equation and look at Europe, did this work? It depends on the question. Did this likely reduce the infection rate? Very likely. Does doing this eliminate the virus that is already in widespread transmission? I very much much doubt it. In theory you could eliminate the cold and flu this way as well.
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Health experts say these things because it’s the only options they have. Too many people oversell this and go even further to blame the non-compliers for the very existence of the pandemic. I have grown weary to the extreme of this line of thinking.
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I’d much prefer to see an adult explanation that these things are very wise, but a stopgap measure and instead put a sh**load of pressure on getting a vaccine out faster. Buried way down in the news is the fact China has been distributing a vaccine for months already.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-china-rush-to-fill-covid-19-vaccine-void-left-by-the-wests-cautious-approach-11602761396
Mike M
Well… I wouldn’t be remotely surprised by a number that high for a ratio of “on going” to “new” if it was cancer, diabetes, arthritis etc.
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I’m not sure what is puzzling you about the ratio. You say you don’t know how to interpret it. It might not be an informative ratio. I think it makes more sense to have something you want to quantify and then figure out if which numbers will help you than to just compute ratios and say “what would this ratio mean?”
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Each of those numbers separately could inform us of something if you know what is counted in that ‘bin’. Once you know the ratio tells you something about the relative rates of those two things… But other than that… I’m not sure why one would struggle to “understand” that particular ratio.
Tom Scharf
Yep. The advice is not wrong. It’s clearly not enough to entirely prevent the disease from spreading. It can result in a more prolonged epidemic measured in calendar time with a somewhat smaller death level. But unless those things also result in more mild cases and a lower case mortality rate, infections go up as people relax their compliance.
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And bear in mind, this isn’t just “normal” hand washing rates. I don’t normally wash my hands before every dance lesson. I normally wash them before eating, after using the bathroom, before preparing food and so on. But I don’t normally wash or sanitize just before entering and just after leaving the grocery store, before and after every dance lesson and pretty much before and after every interaction with someone outside my home. Maybe some people do, but I don’t.
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I bet most people at political protests probably don’t normally use hand sanitizer every half hour just in case they touched something and worried they would later touch their face. (I bet many didn’t during the protests that have happened this year either!)
The thing that got me wondering about random sampling is the issue of hospitalized WITH the Wuhan virus vs. hospitalized FROM the Wuhan virus.
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Anyone admitted to hospital is tested for the virus. It seems that if they test positive, they go in the books as a hospitalization from the virus, even if they were admitted for some unrelated cause. The same seems to happen with deaths.
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At any given time, there are 500-550K people in hospital in the U.S. (2/3 of 800K beds). The Covid Tracking Project shows 37 currently hospitalized with the Wuhan virus, about 7% of all hospitalizations.
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On any given day about 8000 people die in the U.S. From the same source, about 700 deaths per day are due to the virus. About 9%.
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About 6% of tests are coming back positive. Is that higher than would be seen in a random sample? Surely it must be, but it might not be by much.
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So people with the virus are only slightly more likely to be hospitalized than people without it? And only 50% more likely to die? Note that those numbers only apply during the time they are “infected” (positive test). And they are greatly inflated, since people in hospital are far less likely to be missed by testing.
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It seems more than a little strange. Unless the percentage of positive tests in a random sample of people in much smaller than among those actually tested. But that is not what random sampling seems to show.
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I am just thinking out loud, so maybe I have tied myself in knots.
MIkeM,
Yes. I think it’s hospitalized “with”. That is the normal standardized way to track things with other diseases. I don’t see any reason it should be handled differently from Covid.
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Well… we can debate what is slightly. But people get hospitalized because they are ill and often already likely to die. I’m not sure that I’d be “surprised” if people admitted to the hospital for heart attacks, gun shot wounds, car accidents, cancer weren’t just as likely or even more likely to die as people who were admitted for Covid.
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Many minor operations are done outpatient. So they don’t go to the hospital. Many people are deferring or delaying surgery that is not time critical.
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Without a hell of a lot more info, I don’t think you can conclude much of anything from the relative rate of death among those admitted with Covid vs. those hospitalized w/o covid.
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I wouldn’t use the word “only” followed by “50% more likely to die”. That’s a big jump in death rate.
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You wrote a lot of stuff about this. But could you clarify precisely what is strange about any of this? Because my psychic powers elude me. I need you to say what is strange. I haven’t read any numbers that sound “strange” in your paragraph.
lucia (Comment #192043): “Yes. I think it’s hospitalized “withâ€. That is the normal standardized way to track things with other diseases. I don’t see any reason it should be handled differently from Covid.”
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Huh? If you get hospitalized with a suspected heart attack, they don’t test you for influenza.
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You don’t see anything strange about 7% of the entire population testing positive at any given time?
In late September, 7% of a random sample of the UK population was positive. As of Sept. 30, the cumulative case count in the UK was 0.7% of the population.
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=gbr&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usca&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=ustx&byDate=0&cumulative=1&logScale=0&perMillion=1&values=cases
So if everyone ever infected tests positive, the UK numbers imply 10 actual infections per positive test.
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0.2% of the UK population tested positive during September. So if you remain positive for one month, the random sample implies 35 actual infections per positive test.
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0.28% of the UK population tested positive during July through September. So if you remain positive for three months, the random sample implies 25 actual infections per positive test.
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More than passing strange.
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Oh. It seems that they are doing random testing in the UK, but the 7% is not the random testing result.
MikeM
If they know you also have influenza, they list that as a person with influenza. So the rule is: if they know you have something, the list you as having it. That’s the same rule.
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Your objection seems to be that they test people. But of course they are: it’s a communicable disease. It is sometimes asymptomatic. Hospital staff are not vaccinated against it. It is useful to know if someone has it to allow staff to be aware they need to take precautions.
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But this doesn’t make it difficult to understand the statistics.
well… you mean 7% of the sample tests positive.
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You’ve stated a factoid. You say you find it strange. I’ve asked you what you find strange about about that factoid. Instead of telling me what you think is “strange” about it, you ask me if I don’t find it strange. That’s not an answer to my question.
My answer to yourquestion is: No. I don’t see anything strange about the facts. It’s not as if someone found a river flowing up hill, claimed they have a perpetual motion machine or they claim 120% of the population is infected.
Lucia,
“The current uptick in cases in locations like NY definitely indicate herd immunity has not been reached.â€
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Well that depends on where the cases are. NYC could be well past herd immunity, but outside the city area not. Early antibody testing by NY State (early May) showed more than 20% of people in NYC were seropositive, but much lower positive up-state. I suspect most of the new cases are from outside the city area. The other thing to keep in mind is that the fatality rate per diagnosed case in NY is now far lower, suggesting that many more mild cases, which don’t lead to hospitalization/death, are being diagnosed.
lucia (Comment #192023)
October 15th, 2020 at 7:43 am
“The current uptick in cases in locations like NY definitely indicate herd immunity has not been reached. I think I’ve heard of an uptick in Sweden too— no true heard immunity.”
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Yes, the number of Covid-19 cases in Sweden has been rising in the last 30 days after an earlier decline. I don’t know if cooler weather is a reason for the increase.
The number of deaths from Covid-19, however, has not increased along with the rise in cases. Sweden may be doing a better job of protecting the most vulnerable (e.g., those in nursing homes) than
before when the country had so such a high fatality rate from this disease.
Are they only taking questions from women on Trump’s town hall? Maybe it’s a bizarre coincidence, but it seems a trifle sexist to me. I like it, sexist that I am. I’d rather listen to women ask questions personally.
[Guess it was a coincidence. Now a guy is up with a question.]
Sweden has had a recent increase in cases, but nothing like some other European countries:
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=swe&areas=gbr&areas=fra&areas=che&areas=esp&areas=ita&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usca&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=ustx&byDate=0&cumulative=0&logScale=0&perMillion=1&values=cases
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I don’t think that herd immunity means that cases can’t increase, except in the most simple models. One reason is the one SteveF points out: Some areas might have herd immunity while others don’t. Another reason is that the herd immunity level changes as behavior changes. Also, case levels may well be dependent on testing. Finally, there is probably a big stochastic component.
Mark Bofill, in 2012 on one night of the Republican convention, MSNBC ran every white male speaker but one, but for the rest, they only showed Ann Romney’s speech, and cut away from the rest.
I don’t think it was a coincidence. They didn’t want their audience seeing Republicans supported by women or minorities.
Re Mike M. (Comment #192071)
October 15th, 2020 at 8:00 pm
True, some areas within states or countries should approach herd immunity to Covid-19 before others, but I doubt herd immunity will come soon anywhere. By soon I mean in a year or two. I hope I’m overly pessimistic. My guess is a vaccine or vaccines will come first and help accomplish the same goal.
I hope there is a potential for variolation as we await a vaccine.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2026913
The following is from the editorial page at the WSJ today. I think Andrew Cuomo’s “confession” is in line with the reactions and rationale of many other politicians with regards to the Covid-19 pandemic.
It will be interesting to see what the politicians reactions will be to the current and upcoming surges of Covid cases. In my view there are two countervailing forces acting on political decisions: the fear factor and feed-up with restrictions factor. I personally see the fear factor winning out and with a great deal of credit for that going to the MSM.
There are many places that had high numbers of new cases, then the new case rate dropped in a manner seemingly disconnected from public policy, then stayed low but not zero as restrictions relaxed. I don’t see how that is not at least in part due to herd immunity.
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I doubt that it is entirely herd immunity. The restrictions probably somewhat reduced R0 and surely increased dispersion. The latter would be due to the fact that some people were not able to significantly lower exposure while others were able to nearly fully isolate. Both lower R0 and increased dispersion lower HIT. So the effect of restrictions might well have been to reach HIT sooner than otherwise would have happened. But that was a temporary HIT.
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I think that what I just said is 100% in agreement with mainstream epidemiology, except that the mainstream might ignore the dispersion part. But I think that is quickly becoming mainstream.
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Once HIT is reached, the new case rate decreases. As that happens, cumulative infections overshoot HIT. As restrictions are eased, HIT rises. In a simple, deterministic, well mixed SIR model, the cumulative infections would stay at HIT while HIT rises.
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But there is a big element of chance in what happens in a given community. Absent superspread events, R0 is below unity for this virus. So a community that is below HIT can have both a low number of cases and little growth in cases. That is, until their luck changes and they get a big surge in cases.
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Even within New York City, there are thousands of communities that overlap with each other in space and interact with each other to varying degrees. So even if NYC is mostly above HIT, communities within NYC might be well below HIT.
MikeM
I don’t disagree. But current rise in cases rising suggests that at least parts of NYC have not reached herd immunity. That means that NYC cannot be said to have reached herd immunity. Sure, parts may have. But overall, it has not.
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Even with respect to parts having reached it– it may be that parts have only reached a provisional HIT that depends on them maintaining distancing. I don’y consider that the “true” HIT because it requires perpetual vigilance. (Similarly, I don’t consider New Zealand to have reached HIT. They are controlling spread by vigilance, which is different.)
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A similar things can be said for the US overall. The US overall has not reached herd immunity. Perhaps parts have. And even that is perhaps. The some what random nature of spread means that a pocket with no cases could be well below HIT but has avoided having a Covid case walk in and do a super-spread event OR it could be that they have reached HIT and a Covid case that walked in would not result in a spread-event because enough people are immune.
lucia (Comment #192099): “But current rise in cases rising suggests that at least parts of NYC have not reached herd immunity. That means that NYC cannot be said to have reached herd immunity. Sure, parts may have. But overall, it has not.”
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I don’t disagree, but I think that is a quibble. Herd immunity is a well defined quantity only in simplistic models. But otherwise, it is vague. Even being vague, it is useful as a guide for vaccination since that can keep a population so far above the threshold even if the threshold is only vaguely known. But otherwise, some communities having reached HIT while others have not is to be expected.
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I don’t think anybody has claimed that the U.S. has uniformly reached herd immunity. I don’t think anyone is even claiming that Sweden has uniformly reached herd immunity. Mostly I was responding to the claims by OK_Max and Fuller that we are not even close to herd immunity. I think that the evidence is that herd immunity is having a significant impact on reducing new cases and that will only improve in future.
MikeM
It’s fine to call it a quibble. But if the term HIT is going to mean something then it’s not right to then slowly let it slide to mean something else. So even if you think it’s a “quibble” if you start defining it as “exponential growth is still possible… but somehow less”… well that’s not herd immunity. Or if it is then the term comes to mean nothing at all and we need another to mean…well… “herd immunity”.
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The model to predict the fraction of the population that must be infected to achieve herd immunity is simplistic. That doesn’t make the term herd immunity itself vague. It just means the simple model may not predict the level.
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No. I brought it up as an analogy. We wouldn’t claim the US as a whole had merely because “parts” of the US had. Likewise we shouldn’t claim NYC as a whole had reached it because “parts” of NYC have reached it.
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It may (or may not be) that parts of NYC have reached it. But as a whole, NYC has not because some parts have certainly not. And the over all case level is rising suggest that over all it has not.
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I think the number of recovered people may be sufficient to have have a significant impact. But that’s not the same as saying it is reached herd immunity.
Herd immunity is not individual immunity. It just means the probabilities are very low for exponential expansion among the herd. This may be semantics to some. The 30% (or whatever) of the herd is still exposed. If they all happen to be in one group then …
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So as this thing moves along one would expect pockets of the virus to continue to break out but those pockets to become smaller and smaller as time goes by, and the breakouts to be quicker and quicker to decline. I suppose one could get the current data and do some numerical modeling and try to estimate HIT through this. Although all the other confounders will no doubt make it hard.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #192093) quoting the WSJ: “Mr. Cuomo’s virus rules have always seemed arbitrary, and now we know he’s not trying to educate the public about the balance of risks. He’s protecting himself politically by letting fear drive state policy.”
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Indeed. Of course, that has been obvious for months, but it is interesting to hear Cuomo admit it.
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In my state, Governor Lujan Grisham issues diktat after diktat with no real explanation and no observable impact on the virus. The state has by now amassed a huge amount of data on how the virus actually spreads, but have not released that data. Instead, they just give out aggregate numbers. When they go down, Lujan Grisham takes the credit. When they go up, she blames the public. She promulgates an atmosphere of fear while presenting herself as the noble protector of the public. The fact that the unemployment rate is near double that in many red states is ignored.
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Rant over.
Tom Scharf (Comment #192105)
October 16th, 2020 at 10:31 am
I was going to post the same point concerning HIT. The classical HIT is based on a homogeneous population. We know this is not the case and it might not even be a good approximation in the longer term over large regions. The non homogeneous nature of the population would also weigh on these outbreaks after a heterogeneous HIT is reached if we consider any closely knit/associated groups living within a local area that has attained herd hetero-immunity. The chances of one person bringing an infection into the group from the locale is not zero and that group with close association has to have an extremely high Rt even though that term would probably not be used for a small group.
I would really like to see a Bayesian analysis that attempts to account for all infectivity probabilities over the time span of the pandemic that evolve from what we know or suspect we know about the heterogeneity of a regional population but with consideration of groups within the population. I would also be very interested in the uncertainty in the results that such an analysis could provide. I suspect it would be high. It would be a pleasant change from listening to know-nothing politicians and journalist babble.
The lack of release of relevant contact tracing info seems intentional at this point. For example I would be quite interested to know how many people contracted the virus while being vigilant with masks, social distancing, etc., also I am quite interested in how many people have not a clue where they contracted it from versus those who have a pretty good idea where they got it from.
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I suspect that the data shows that a good deal (25% ?) of the transmission is uncorrelated to vigilantly following health guidelines. Releasing this info would increase skepticism of experts in the population so they chose to not release it. The public can’t handle the truth!
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My guess is a year after the virus subsides we will get lots of interesting information we would all have liked to have had earlier.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #192108),
There are models that account for heterogeneity. This one allows for variation by county, but uses the usual assumptions within counties:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.05.20207100v1
More promising is the work of Gabriela Gomes that is the inspiration for what Nic Lewis has been doing. For instance:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160762v2
I am afraid that I do not find her papers very readable.
Tom Scharf (Comment #192111): “For example I would be quite interested to know how many people contracted the virus while being vigilant with masks, social distancing, etc.”
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The CDC has published a report that shows that people who have contracted the virus show the same level of mask use as the general population. I seem to have lost the link.
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Found the link: https://www.foxnews.com/media/tucker-carlson-responds-cdc-mask-wearing
Scroll down to: “Carlson cited a study conducted by 11 medical institutions that analyzed a group of people who tested positive for coronavirus during the month of July.”
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I note that the CDC tried to trash Carlson’s summary of the report by saying:
to which Carlson responded by gleefully playing a tape of CDC director Redfield saying that he:
Mike M, I was familiar with the second linked paper. I think both papers make good points about thinking in terms of a heterogeneous population concerning Covid-19, but neither takes it to the levels or complexity I would like to see nor provides a detailed look at smaller group outbreaks after hetero- HIT is reached. Covids capability to infect and perhaps the lack of knowledge concerning pathways make for the requirement of more rigorous modeling.
From Mike M. (Comment #192100)
October 16th, 2020 at 9:37 am
“Mostly I was responding to the claims by OK_Max and Fuller that we are not even close to herd immunity.”
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MikeM, I will explain why I believe we are not even close to herd immunity.
The U.S. population is about 328 million. Johns Hopkins reports
8 million Americans have had or have Covid-19. From what I have read, herd immunity would require at least 198 million or 60 percent of the population to have had this virus, and possibly as many as 263 million or 80 percent.
Obviously, 8 million out of 198 million to 263 million is nowhere near herd immunity.
OK_Max
The thing is…. the 60% number is the estimate of the % require using a likely simplistic model that really only gives the upper bound were we absolutely know we would reach herd immunity.
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There have been many papers published since explaining how factors the model leaves out change that number to something between as low as 20% to.. well 60% is the upper bound. Even newspapers now report that 60% is not a solid number– it’s an upper bound. (I don’t have links. I just noticed it in many articles now and thought “Wow! That actually got in!!)
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I myself don’t really buy the assumptions that result in the estimate as low as 20%. But you can’t exclude that.
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The number who have been infected is not known with great certainty. So while I too would say that I really, really, really doubt we have herd immunity at 4% past infections, I wouldn’t count on the idea that it’s really as low as 4%. I would say… Who knows?
Lucia,
Certainly early in the pandemic there were many more cases than officially documented; how much higher is unknown, and. may never be. I think the “official†total count of confirmed cases is effectively meaningless as a gauge of progress toward herd immunity. But while case counts mean very little; total deaths do matter. I remain more than a little puzzled by the apparent lack of curiosity by the MSM about the wild divergence between countries, or even the same country at different times. France now has more new cases than at the peak of deaths in April, yet the current death rate per case is by comparison tiny. Seems to me the USA needs to focus on why some places have such low deaths per case compared to most of the USA. One thing is certain: the difference is not due to forcing people to wear masks.
OK_Max (Comment #192123): “The U.S. population is about 328 million. Johns Hopkins reports 8 million Americans have had or have Covid-19.”
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Wrong. Johns Hopkins does not say that. They say that 8 million have had positive tests. it is a *fact* that the number infected is many time that. We don’t know just what the multiplier is. A factor of 10 is a reasonable guess. So that gives 80 as a very rough estimate for the number infected.
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OK_Max (Comment #192123): “From what I have read, herd immunity would require at least 198 million or 60 percent of the population to have had this virus, and possibly as many as 263 million or 80 percent.”
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Those are early estimates based on simplistic models. More realistic models indicate the the HIT might be 20%, or even less. That is 66 million people.
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66 million is less than 80 million.
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Those are really crude number. Even if they were accurate they would be not prove anything since the population is not well mixed.
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It is clear that many places in the U.S. have not reached herd immunity. It looks like other populations in the U.S. have reached herd immunity. The implication is that more and more of the country will approach herd immunity in the not too distant future.
OK_Max, I credit you with being a faithful and accurate reader of the MSM. You have been presented here with alternative views on the matter of HIT. You might want to counter those views with links to the MSM or science based papers and articles.
My concern with the current global resurgence of cases and a potentially larger one this winter is the reactions of politicians who have by their precedent setting earlier actions and the public’s majority agreement with these restrictive policies put them in a position to shut down the economy (without repercussions to them) once again and crippling further an already severely crippled economy that will have very detrimental long term effects. Unfortunately, I judge that politicians will react as though nothing has been learned during the past 6-7 months about reacting to the pandemic, i.e. it will be the fear motivated dull axe and not the scalpel as Andrew Cuomo so aptly put it.
I would also like to see models that deal in more detail with local resurgences and that take into consideration the rather unique and not well understood pathways for the infectious spread of Covid-19.
NFL, college football keep getting false positives, including Nick Saban.
Perhaps the 8 million positive tests is only 4 million.
Re lucia (Comment #192126)
October 16th, 2020 at 6:00 p
I liked your post.
RE Mike M. (Comment #192128)
October 16th, 2020 at 6:34 pm
MikeM, I’m sorry my post gave the impression every American has been tested for COVID-19. My post was poorly worded .Very few people I know have been tested. Obviously, the number infected is greater than the number tested.
I don’t know whether the actual number of Americans who have or have had this virus is 80 million as you have stated. Maybe it’s more, maybe it’s less. If it is 80 million that’s 24% of the 328 million total U.S. population, and already above the 20% HIT you mentioned.
To quote you, “More realistic models indicate the the HIT might be 20%, or even less.â€
So if HIT is 20%, and 24% of the people in this country have already been infected with Covid-19, the number of additional people becoming infected should have been declining. But after declining during Summer, the reported number of new cases has in the past 30 days been growing.
It looks like a 20% HIT could be right only if the number of unreported new cases of the virus have declined by more than the increase in the reported number. I don’t know why that would happen.
Anyway, you seem more optimistic than me about when the Covid-19
epidemic will end and we can resume our usual activities. I hope you are right, but I will continue to be cautious.
RE Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #192145)
October 17th, 2020 at 8:12 am
“OK_Max, I credit you with being a faithful and accurate reader of the MSM. You have been presented here with alternative views on the matter of HIT. You might want to counter those views with links to the MSM or science based papers and articles.”
“My concern with the current global resurgence of cases and a potentially larger one this winter is the reactions of politicians who have by their precedent setting earlier actions and the public’s majority agreement with these restrictive policies put them in a position to shut down the economy (without repercussions to them) once again and crippling further an already severely crippled economy that will have very detrimental long term effects …. ”
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Thank you, Kenneth. I do read mostly MSM, but occasionally also read science based articles. A recent example of the later is
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-00451-5. I thought the
following quote from that piece was interesting.
“For COVID-19, which has an estimated infection fatality ratio of 0.3–1.3%1,5, the cost of reaching herd immunity through natural infection would be very high, especially in the absence of improved patient management and without optimal shielding of individuals at risk of severe complications. Assuming an optimistic herd immunity threshold of 50%, for countries such as France and the USA, this would translate into 100,000–450,000 and 500,000–2,100,000 deaths, respectively.â€
Kenneth, regarding your concerns about the economy, I wouldn’t say it had been shut down but it certainly has been crippled, particularly in some sectors such as bars, restaurants, airlines, and other businesses where customers congregate and in manufacturing where workers are close together.The economy likely has suffered more from government Covid-19 restrictions than it would have suffered from voluntary actions to prevent the virus, but then government probably has saved lives.
Personally, I don’t have a lot to complain about. My wife and I are fortunate in that our wealth has increased during the pandemic, offsetting some of the inconvenience of measures we take to avoid the virus. Many Americans are less fortunate, particularly those who have died or suffered from the virus and the poor who have lost their jobs.
Patient management seems to have improved. No more intubation which seems to have harmed more than helped early on.
We do seem to be shielding nursing homes now.
I don’t think 50% is the “optimistic” threshold. 20% is the optimistic threshold. 50% is very close to the absolutely most pessimistic value of 60%
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I do hope we get a vaccine sooner rather than later. But… well… the paragraph you quote is describing what happens under the worst. case. The worst case would be very bad. No doubt.
OK_Max,
We don’t know the IFR because we don’t know how many people have actually been infected. We also don’t know if the IFR is a constant. Given the experience of, say, France, the IFR is probably much lower now than in March and April, which seems to the the data people are using to estimate IFR. Or worse, they still are using Chinese data whose provenance is highly questionable.
I second lucia that a 50% HIT, which would put actual herd immunity at 70-80% is not by any stretch of the imagination optimistic. Cases are mostly going up where the rate of new infections had been low. They’re catching up. Herd immunity is something of a local phenomenon.
The only rational justification for lockdowns was to flatten the curve so that local medical facilities wouldn’t be overwhelmed. The way we, and most of the rest of the developed world did it, it could never ‘beat’ the virus, only cause infections and deaths to happen more slowly. Now if we were China, we would have hard quarantined New York City and it’s environs like they did in Wuhan. That might even have worked if it had been done in mid-January. But it was never a real option, Thomas Friedman to the contrary.
I don’t understand why the above comment is all italic. There should have been only one word. Or this one either, for that matter.
This indicates that the IFR in Europe is about 0.1%:
https://healthy-skeptic.com/2020/10/10/the-epidemic-in-europe/
It is reposted from someone’s Twitter feed. I have not tried tracking it back to see how they got the numbers or if it makes sense.
Over the 10 year period 2010 thru 2020, the CDC estimates â€Symptomatic Flu Illnesses†ranged from 9.3 million to 45 million with an average of 30 million per year. All CDC flu statistics are estimates.
Over an equivalent 8 month period from Feb 1st to Oct 8th, the CDC reports 8.1 million
total COVID-19 cases; less then 30% of flu cases over an average flu season. Based on this CDC data, flu is far more infectious than COVID-19. And no I don’t believe this data.
As of Oct 8th, the CDC weekly report shows 203,043 “Deaths involving COVID-19,†not deaths caused by COVID-19. “For 6% of the deaths [12,180] COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.†“For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.†At least for CDC data, infections appear to be vastly under-counted and deaths caused by Covid over-counted.
DeWitt,
“ We also don’t know if the IFR is a constant.â€
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We don’t know the exact numbers because we don’t know how many people have been exposed but had asymptomatic or nearly asymptomatic infection, but we do know that it varies by multiple orders of magnitude: tiny at age 16 or less and rising with increasing age, exaggerated by other heath problems often associated with increased age.
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I am sure this will be sorted out by epidemiologists after the pandemic is over, but in the current politically charged atmosphere, any suggestion that the illness is ‘not as bad as we thought’ brings instant howls about wanting to kill grandma…. or worse. The hysteria has, if anything, grown ever greater, even as the death rate per confirmed case has dropped quite dramatically most everywhere. For this I can only blame irresponsible government.
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If there were ever a argument in favor of limiting government power over individuals, it would be the response to the pandemic in most places… a destructive FUBAR that never seems to end.
PMHinSC,
A direct comparison of actual population death rates in the States with expected rates (based on historical data) indicates there was a substantial increase in total deaths starting with the spread of the pandemic. So no matter how the deaths were officially classified, there certainly was a significant increase in deaths at the start of the pandemic. IIRC, the initial increase in total deaths was slightly greater than the official death count for covid-19, suggesting a modest undercount, not overcount.
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But I believe overall death rates have now fallen below the expected (historical) rates, for multiple reasons, the most important of which is less spread of other infectious illnesses which constantly kill people, and which will continue to kill after the pandemic and the lockdowns are over. Unfortunately, life is always fatal.
OK_Max, I have had a similar increase in wealth, but the potential long term detrimental effects of the Covid related restrictions on the economy, the profligate government spending and the precedent setting restrictions on individuals with the politicians’ eagerness to use and the majority of public to accept without complaint gives me no joy. I am even more concerned about the effects of all this on my kids and grandkids. Lots of short term thinking going on in the world today and the politicians love it.
Herd immunity and increasing cases are not a contradiction, when the number of cases daily is in the tens of thousands and the population is in the hundreds of millions.
There would still be 80% uninfected who do not pick up immunity from the 20% who got infected.
MikeN (Comment #192229)
I think if you define HIT as that for a given large regional population an increasing number of cases good be a contradiction – or something unaccounted for has changed from what had been originally assumed. With many locales averaged to obtain a HIT that assumed homogeneity between locales and some locales that did not obtain HIT for that local, you could have increasing cases in those locales that cause the overall larger regional population cases to increase.
That is my intuitive guess for which I await a critique from someone who has thought the problem through.
Without a reasonable explanation or model for the resurgences that I think are probably occurring currently and going to occur going into the winter, I think the fear factor is going to put us back to spring time restrictions or worse and the detrimental effects thereof.
SteveF,
I saw somewhere recently that non-COVID excess mortality was about 100,000 in the US so far this year, so it’s in the ballpark of COVID-19 mortality now and could end up being greater than COVID-19 mortality if we continue to shoot ourselves in the foot.
Those who scream the loudest for shutting down the economy for covid are those most insulated from its effects. I have been almost unaffected by the shutdown and could stay that way for a long time. This is mostly by chance and timing.
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It is striking as time goes by how few “healthy” people actually die from the virus. Numerous athletes, celebrities, and students have now caught the virus and very few have died. The headlines are full of people testing positive but it is very rare that they succumb. The people who are dying from covid appear to be the same “unhealthy” people who are dying from other stuff all along. It seems to be a factor that is pushing a lot of people near the edge over the edge.
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This is just an observation, I’m not saying we shouldn’t be reducing risk. Nobody wants to roll three dice and if they all come up one’s to be declared dead. The reality is if you are unhealthy you only get two dice, and if you are over 70, you get one die.
OK_Max,
The IFR in Singapore is 0.05%. But we don’t hear about that. We only hear about yet another likely bogus projection from IHME about how many are going to die if we don’t stay locked down. I say likely because every previous projection has not panned out.
Here is an interesting graphic: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2
Shows that as of early October, Covid -19 related deaths count for approximately the same number of deaths as influenza and pneumonia.
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This page shows the recent total death rate, where the impact of the pandemic is put in perspective relative to the normal seasonal death rate: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard
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The total deaths from all causes is currently about 6% higher than normal; it peaked back in April at 35% above normal when NY and the rest of the Northeast dominated covid-19 deaths.
SteveF (Comment #192223)
Yes, to the extent that mitigation efforts have reduced Covid-19 deaths, they have also reduced deaths from other infectious diseases and traffic accidents. With ERs and doctor offices effectively closed for months, one can only wonder what has become of the “Respiratory disease,†â€Circulatory disease,†and “Diabetes,†patients who have gone untreated. One can only wonder about reported increase in suicides, crime, and abuse from people deprived of their livelihood. One can also only wonder how many of the CDC reported “Deaths involving Covid-19†from “Circulatory disease†should be attributed to Covid-19; were 39,000 deaths from “Cardiac arrest†and “Heart failure†really caused by Covid-19? “Intentional and unintentional injuries, poisonings and other adverse advents†can easily be interpreted to include suicides. Was a similar methodology used to categorize flu and Covid-19 deaths? Until better data are available, we are reduced to “I believe†and “one can only wonder.â€
The IFR for the flu is accepted as 0.1%. In late September CDC Director Robert Redfield reported to the Senate “more than 90% of the population – remains susceptible;†i.e. 10%, or 32M, in the US have SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. If there have been 32M infected and 200K deaths, the IFR for Covid-19 is 0.625%. Assuming Covid-19 IFR is comparable to the flu, and there have been 32M infections, the number of deaths would be 32,000, not 200,000. Assuming the 200,000 deaths is correct, an IFR of 0.1% would mean 62% of the us population has been infected. Assuming I got these numbers correct…what to believe, what to believe.
PMHinSC,
“In late September CDC Director Robert Redfield reported to the Senate “more than 90% of the population – remains susceptible;†i.e. 10%, or 32M, in the US have SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.”
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I give zero credibility to estimates of resistance based on antibody screening, for three reasons:
1) It has been demonstrated that many people who have for certain been exposed (household member sick with covid-19) and who have confirmed T-cell mediated resistance, do not have enough antibody in their blood to give a positive antibody result. A rough guess is a factor of about 3 to 4.
2) A substantial portion of the population has significant T-cell mediated resistance due to exposure to other (common-cold) coronaviruses. A rough guess is about 30% of the population.
3) Kids do not get serious disease, and are unlikely to spread it if they do get it. Those under 15 years old represent perhaps 15% of the population, and are effectively part of the resistant population.
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So I think a more plausible estimate of people with existing resistance is: 30% + 15% + 3.5 times the confirmed cases. Or 96 million + 48 million + 30 million = 174 million. The other ~146 million or so remain susceptible, of course. How many will contract the virus and die before it peters out for “lack of fuel” depends on multiple factors, and especially on how well those most susceptible are isolated. But it seems to me unlikely the pandemic can continue, even under a “let-it-rip” scenario (no restrictions on personal behavior), when only 30% of the population (~96 million) remain susceptible, so a worst case outcome for deaths looks like somewhere under 1% of (146 million – 96 million), or under 480,000 additional deaths. A more realistic end of the pandemic is with far lower additional deaths. I doubt it will reach 200,000 additional deaths, even if there is no vaccine.
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A vaccine can only reduce the death total significantly if it is first given to those most likely to die from the infection. By the time the pandemic is over (my guess: by mid-2021) a vaccine won’t make a lot of difference in total deaths. But I am betting lots of people at relatively low personal risk, but with lots of political influence (politicians, teachers, bureaucrats) will be at the head of the line for the vaccine.
PMHinSC (Comment #192237): “In late September CDC Director Robert Redfield reported to the Senate “more than 90% of the population – remains susceptible;†i.e. 10%, or 32M, in the US have SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.”
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That is nonsense. I am not saying that Redfield did not say it, just that it is nonsense.
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Redfield is the idiot who claimed that wearing a mask provides more protection than a vaccine. The CDC says that wearing a mask does not protect the wearer.
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Back in June, it was already 24 million with antibodies: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/06/25/ten-times-more-people-have-covid-19-antibodies-than-are-diagnosed-cdc-reports/#501c2dcd7293
The number of positive tests has quadrupled since then.
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In July, it was already just under 10%: https://www.newsmax.com/health/antibody-coronaviris-covid-cdc/2020/09/26/id/988994/
The number of positive tests has more than doubled since July, when those data were taken.
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And by July, people were probably already losing antibodies. In Manaus, Brazil the number with antibodies dropped from 46% in June to 28% in August. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.16.20194787v1
That study found a half life of 3.5 months for measurable antibodies.
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One still sees data from Spain and New York taken in April cited as if it was current. Deliberate deception.
What a contrast.
Joe Biden shut down campaigning today until after the debate. He is no capable of both campaigning and prepping for the debate.
Trump is both campaigning and prepping for the debate. All while doing his day job: running the government.
Mike M,
Well, Joe is suffering from the early stages of dementia, so there is plenty he can’t do…. like speak coherently for more than 5 seconds. My experience with Alzheimer’s says Joe is not going to get better over the next few years.
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I thought Nancy Pelosi was just trying to rattle Trump’s cage with her “25th amendment committee” bill, but I now think she was just setting the stage to throw Biden out of office ASAP if he wins. She doesn’t want to have to depend on a groups of Biden loyalists in the cabinet to invoke the amendment, she wants to be able to force the issue. Should the Dems gain control of both houses, they will scrap the filibuster and pass that law, along with a multitude of others. If Biden has a lick of sense left (and he very well may not!) he will veto the bill. I sure hope Republicans hold on to the Senate.
Steve,
I think that as well, regarding Pelosi and her 25th amendment motive.
mark bofill,
Actually removing Biden would require a 2/3 vote of both houses, which means significant Republican support. Of course, Republicans actually don’t want an Alzheimer’s patient as president, and Pelosi is probably counting on enough Republicans to act in the interests of the country to reach the 2/3 majority that is required. I expect news reports of Joe’s mental decline to start showing up frequently in the MSM shortly after the election if Biden wins.
Interesting idea about the 25th amendment ploy… but yeah…. It’s much more likely she could use it for Biden than Trump.
SteveF,
Another possibility is that, assuming Biden is elected, the press will suddenly discover the Hunter Biden laptop and use that to force him out.
Only a couple weeks left, plus whatever time to count mail in ballots. I can’t wait for this election to be over.
DeWitt,
Unless individuals come forward and confirm blatant quid-pro-quo corruption, I doubt that will happen. I mean, the Clintons were far more corrupt (and far more shamelessly money grubbing!) than Joe Biden and his family, and the MSM never went after them; they skated on everything. Yes, Joe Biden has been the Senator from Credit Card Companies for his entire career, but that is the kind of soft corruption that it seems many career politicians get involved with.
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Biden is obviously of questionable honesty, but in this case, if he is asked “Did you ever meet with a representative from Burisma?”, he can answer “I have absolutely no memory of any such meeting” and be telling the truth…. though it is clear he did meet with the guy from Burisma…. he just can’t remember anything.
I don’t know if Biden’s invulnerability continues past the election. It could transfer to Harris. It’s sort of up to the press and the social media moderators.
mark bofill,
Ya well, the fact is that Harris “got ahead” politically by being the much-younger-girlfriend of the Speaker of the CA Assembly, Willy Brown (29 yrs vs 59 yrs), and took high salary/little work “committee” and “study” assignments (at the direction of Willy, of course), while concurrently working “full time” as an assistant prosecutor. Willy also gave her generous gifts like new cars. You will never hear the MSM address that part of her background, so in that sense, she is already ‘invulnerable’.
Steve,
Yes. I spoke poorly in my brevity there (cell phone comment). Harris already carries ‘The Progressive Card’, good for kid gloves treatment and protection with the mainstream media and social media tech giants both. I may be wrong, but I believe the reason HRC was never held to task for her flagrant corruption was that she also carried ‘The Progressive Card’.
I’m not saying anything that’s not obvious. Once Trump is beaten (assuming Trump is defeated), they don’t need Biden, since they’ll have Harris. His ‘Progressive Card’ may be canceled, at which point the mainstream media and big tech social media may consider his corruption fair game.
Or not. Shrug. It could go either way. I suspect they’ll tolerate Joe so long as he toes the radical left line and doesn’t exhibit too obvious symptoms of dementia.
I could care less about Biden’s son and his grifting on his father’s name. The fact that Facebook and Twitter effectively banned the story from being spread is much more malicious. The policing of social media content is going to be a disaster and it was 100% predictable. There are no neutral judges for free speech, the only acceptable answer is information chaos and let the reader decide.
The media coverage lately was getting so poisonous, just kind of desperately poisonous, leading up to the election that I tried an experiment and only read the WSJ and non-news sites for the last week or so.
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Not sure I’m going to go back, ha ha. “They†say you should get views outside of your bubble to stay properly informed. However when the news from outside the bubble is just jammed full of “my political opponents are not just wrong on the issues, they are immoral†viewpoints then there is a price to be paid for getting those views. I rarely clicked through to any of those articles but it is apparent that shared communal outrage is what generates revenue for most media outlets. The seduction of providing this in an over the top manner is just too much for anyone struggling to make ends meet, which is pretty much everyone in journalism.
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One of the downsides of web based news is how finely tuned the media outlets can measure what people read and adjust accordingly. More people come back to your website when you leave hits of crack laying all over the place. Everyone is doing Trump bashing because that’s what people want to read, strike that, it is what people actually read. If they want more ad revenue (advertisers demand to know how many people see their ads) then they need to be better at providing what people read than their competitors. This has become an arms race between media outlets that has degraded journalism to near tabloid quality (see CNN).
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Anyway it is clear that I am no longer their target audience (outside of the WSJ) so I’m going to have to stay less “well informed†and they can market the poison to whoever it is that wants it. It is distorting people’s actual views and amplifying extremism. It’s just not worth it. The product is bad and getting worse.
Tom
I care some that Biden’s son is corrupt. There seems to be some awareness on Biden’s part and possibly facilitation– that’s the issue.
But you are correct that the real story is social media squelching the story. I have no idea whether a repair man really found material or it’s all made up. I have no way of knowing right now. (It doesn’t affect my vote BTW. I already voted for the libertarian candidate for president and would still.)
I’m still deciding between Trump and no vote. I’m leaning to no vote at the moment.
The latest spin effort is to claim the Hunter Biden emails are Russian disinformation. But the source for that seems to be Adam Schiff, i.e. no credibility there.
Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe says this about it:
[Edit: for clarity:
]
Not that I trust any of these darn people, but there it is anyway.
mark bofill,
As I said, zero credibility for anything Adam Schiff says.
The WaPo fact checker may have to invent a new scale for Adam Schiff, four or five Pinocchios just isn’t enough.
Schiff is obviously a brazen liar.
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From the Democrat Dictionary,
disinformation = facts that show we’re the disgustingly immoral people we pretend we aren’t.
“Sources say” = shit we made up.
Lucia,
“I care some that Biden’s son is corrupt. There seems to be some awareness on Biden’s part and possibly facilitation– that’s the issue.”
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It is clear that Biden has been enabling his son’s many problems for a very long time. I can understand if he recognizes his son’s corruption but is reluctant to cut his son loose. Still, I think he should long ago have cut him loose, for his son’s sake if nothing else. I think a bigger issue is that Biden seems to be an active participant in at least some of his son’s very questionable dealings. Back that up with Biden’s own questionable dealings involving other family members, and it looks very bad. The meeting with a Burisma representative (which appears to for certain have taken place) is a bridge way too far.
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The ‘soft corruption’ of obvious influence pedaling by politicians seems to me so common that it almost never even gets a mention in the MSM (see: the Clintons). That doesn’t make it anything like right. Influence pedaling enriches politicians at the cost of worse government.
Tom Scharf,
“I’m still deciding between Trump and no vote.”
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I do hope you change your mind. Trump is at best a fetid ‘hold-your-nose’ candidate, but I think he will be far less damaging than an all-Dem government. In two years, with no filibuster, the role and scope of the Federal government will change dramatically. Add the possibility of SC packing, and you have a perfect storm of bad government doing very bad things, many of which will be essentially impossible to undo in a generation…. if ever.
lucia (Comment #192284): “I care some that Biden’s son is corrupt. There seems to be some awareness on Biden’s part and possibly facilitation– that’s the issue.”
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Yes, the issue is not Hunter, it is Joe’s probable involvement.
Joe appears to have done Burisma’s bidding by getting the Ukrainian prosecutor, Shokin, fired. He says Shokin was corrupt. Maybe he was. It seems that pretty much anyone who gains any power in Ukraine gets accused of being corrupt. And it seems that more often than not, the accusation is true. But lets say Shokin was corrupt. Why did Biden twist arms to get that particular corrupt official fired? So far as I know he was the only Ukrainian official, corrupt or otherwise, who got ousted at the behest of the U.S. government.
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In the case of China, Hunter appears to have negotiated a payoff for Joe, to be held by Hunter.
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As Tom and lucia points out, the attempt by Big Tech and the fake news media to squelch the story is a really big deal, regardless of the extent of Joe’s involvement in Hunter’s sleazy dealings.
DeWitt,
“The latest spin effort is to claim the Hunter Biden emails are Russian disinformation.”
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I am reminded of Harry Reid’s total fabrication that the wealthy Mitt Romney didn’t pay any Federal taxes…. an utter bald faced lie, which he knew was a lie. Romney paid a fortune in taxes. When questioned about it later, Reid’s reply was basically “He didn’t win, did he?”
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That is exactly what is going on here. Blatant lies. The ends justify the means…. AKA typical Democrat political strategy.
So did I, Lucia. Do you happen to remember his name? On my ballot I recall a nickname in quotes.
I am interested in how big the turnover is going to be in my area from Republican to Democrat. It has been happening over a few years but was greatly accelerated in the 2016 mid terms. If the political yard signs are any indication it is going to be big.
Kenneth,
” If the political yard signs are any indication it is going to be big.”
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I think it strongly depends on the region. I drove from the People’s Republic of Massachusetts to Florida last week, and my observation is that where Trump is certain to lose the yard signs are overwhelmingly for Biden. Where Trump is certain to win, the yard signs are overwhelmingly for Trump. Where it is close, I didn’t see many yard signs at all. I think there may be reluctance to get into a shouting match with your neighbors where the race is competitive; it is a sorry sign of our divisive times.
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What is not clear to me is how big the “shy Trump voter” will be in regions where there are lots of very outspoken Trump haters (eg Philadelphia suburbs). Even more than in 2016, I believe the shy Trump voter will be key in all the battleground states. I am convinced that lots of people have no interest in participating in telephone polls after seeing how Trump supporters have been socially ostracized….. and worse.
Re Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #192227)
October 19th, 2020 at 7:56 am
“OK_Max, I have had a similar increase in wealth, but the potential long term detrimental effects of the Covid related restrictions on the economy, the profligate government spending and the precedent setting restrictions on individuals with the politicians’ eagerness to use and the majority of public to accept without complaint gives me no joy. I am even more concerned about the effects of all this on my kids and grandkids. Lots of short term thinking going on in the world today and the politicians love it.”
_______
Kenneth, not being sure how and when the Covid-19 related restrictions will affect the economy in the future, I’m not sure where to invest now. Of course I’m never 100% sure about most things. That said, I suspect the market is now over priced except for mid and small firms, and I may move some money from bonds to indexes of those firms.
I wouldn’t worry so much about the kids and grandkids. Kids don’t get very sick from Covid-19. That’s not to say they aren’t affected by the school closures and the fear among parents and grandparents.
Re DeWitt Payne (Comment #192235)
October 19th, 2020 at 11:05 am
OK_Max,
The IFR in Singapore is 0.05%. But we don’t hear about that. We only hear about yet another likely bogus projection from IHME about how many are going to die if we don’t stay locked down. I say likely because every previous projection has not panned out.
______
DeWitt, I doubt you would want to live in Singapore. Restrictions on personal freedom there probably would be too much for you. In Singapore even spitting on the sidewalk will get you fined or arrested.
I’m not suggesting you are guilty of spitting on the sidewalk a lot.
Kenneth Fritsch: “Do you happen to remember his name?”
The Libertarian candidate is Jo Jorgensen. A she, not a he.
Like I said, I don’t care about the Hunter Biden story from a quasi run of the mill corruption viewpoint, but it would seem that the lack of denials coming from the persons of interest might be a story angle the media would want to look into. Then again, maybe not. Really, based on the “standards” they used for Trump Russia Collusion this story is rock solid.
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The Biden story is obviously a political timed hit job that somebody has been holding onto for a while. Yawn. You can’t ignore it though. The same thing happened with Tara Reid. The bias is glaring and obvious. It’s an embarrassment to their profession.
HaroldW thanks for gender correction. I was thinking of her running mate, Jeremy “Spike†Cohen. I am a small letter libertarian. The Libertarian candidates allow me to vote for someone but when I read about their political philosophies it usually turns out that they are not all that libertarian from my point of view. If running for office would allow a libertarian candidate to get the message to a larger audience I would favor more the runnings of a candidate, but that is not what has been happening. The big government political movement has its roots in the current views of the intelligentsia. They are who influence the thinking of the voting population and not the politicians.
While I am on this political topic, I have to voice my opinion of Trump’s dealings with Nancy Pelosi and where that indicates we stand vis a vis big government. Trump, a former Democrat or maybe not so former, coined the phrase: “go big or go home” in reference to an already profligate stimulus bill. He recently stated that after negotiating with Pelosi he now wanted a bigger spending bill than she had offered. Trump evidently somehow thinks that is going to buy him some votes. I would hope that the Senate keeps going small and does not acquiesce. If they do I do not see how a fiscal conservation would differentiate a big government Democrat from a big government Republican.
I look for Trump to lose more ground during the next debate. Biden is going to push the Covid issue with Trump and Trump being the narcissist that he is will take the bait in attempting to brag about all he did. Trump is not sufficiently aware that the failure/success of the US efforts with Covid is constitutionally in the hands of the governors and mayors and therefore will not make that point. He is so used to slinging superlatives around he is incapable of pointing in detail to the fact that in the early part of the pandemic nobody and no agency made the right call including himself and Biden.
You’ll watch the debate?
mark bofill,
I won’t. Too horrible to watch.
The last one (presidential) *was* pretty tough to stomach. I’ll watch it though, what the heck.
https://mobile.twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1318002756012056576
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“The King County Prosecutor recently implemented a new policy requiring employees to sign an “equity and social justice” pledge and assigning “continued training for white employees,†who must “accept responsibility for their own racism†and “question the White power structure.â€
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The “social justice” race to implement systemic racism continues. You’ll find this stuff being taught in schools as well. Imagine telling kids that part of the class is oppressing other parts based on skin color or gender. What could go wrong?
I have not watched a presidential debate or any political debate for many years now and do not plan to start. I have posted several times in favor of a written exchange on political philosophies and ideas by candidates. Those people sponsoring current debates must think their audiences are idiots.
DaveJR (Comment #192325)
I recall back in the day where I was employed when senior management was required to attend “sensitivity” training courses. Those doing the training had little or no clues on managing in the real world and would mostly present a syrupy rendition of something out of a social studies course.
I had 3 approaches as I recall in avoiding being bored out of my mind. One was to reply in ever more agreeable terms and offer an even more syrupy rendition with the hopes that the instructor and my class mates would get the idea without me being accused of outright mockery. Another was outright mockery when the instructor was totally clueless. The third was to present my approaches with real life examples.
I suspect in today’s world in a liberal corporate setting my shenanigans would get me fired.
Kenneth,
“ I suspect in today’s world in a liberal corporate setting my shenanigans would get me fired.â€
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If you worked for a big company, yes, you would probably be fired. In small companies you would never have to deal with such nonsense.
Pope Francis endorses same-sex civil unions.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/10/21/pope-francis-says-lgbtq-people-should-able-have-civil-unions/6004512002/
I was surprised to see this, but I haven’t been keeping up with what the Pope thinks and don’t know the details. I’m not sure exactly what it means.
DaveJR,
The real question is what happens when someone refuses to sign.
Activists will likely keep pushing this stuff until it hits the obvious legal barriers. The sooner this stuff gets squashed by the court system the better.
OK_Max,
“Pope Francis endorses same-sex civil unions.”
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No surprise. Pope Francis is a ‘woke’ lefty, and always has been.
But it is a bit funny how all the ‘infallible’ policies of previous popes over centuries suddenly become wrong when Francis takes over. Stare decisis it is not.
Well… he’s ex-Pope. There usually is no ex-Pope. So. . .
Amy Barrett will be confirmed on next Monday, and likely sworn in the same day. That means the Court will look a lot more critically at Democrat claims of state voter suppression (eg disallowing mail-in ballots that arrive after election day without a post mark, disallowing unsealed mail-in ballots, etc.).
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If the election is very close and there are legal fights about individual state results, having Barrett on the SC could be decisive. Congrats to McConnell.
Lucia,
I am confused by your comment. Francis is the Pope, not ex-Pope.
Yeah… you are right! I was thinking it was the other one…
I’d forgotten Benedict is still alive. It’s what happens, living amongst these heathen Baptists all these years…
It would be news if he endorsed same sex “marriage”, that’s a red line that won’t be crossed anytime soon. Almost everyone is OK with equal legal rights for gays, the militant activists demand that they also be OK with “religious” marriage as well. Activists just push the boundary wherever it is.
Tom,
The church has long make the distinction between “sacramental marriage” which it considers real and “legal marriage”. That’s how they don’t recognize legal divorce as ending a marriage.
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So in some sense, it’s not a huge leap for the Pope to recognize civil unions for same sex couples. However…. there is that sex thing…. Presumably people are going to avoid asking him whether sex between civil-unioned gays is sinful. Given the church’s history on sex between married heterosexual people being sometimes sinful… well… the answer could be anything.
https://babylonbee.com/news/embarrassed-pope-suddenly-realizes-hes-been-reading-the-bible-upside-down-this-whole-time
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I read that Benedict was somewhat more hostile to same sex relations. But then, Benedict explicitly stepped down because he felt he could no longer publicly lead the billion plus Catholics in the world.
The Catholics tend to be a bit rigid. Previously they stated that it is not their job to adapt to society norms, but to lead society morally. It seems that is changing. I don’t really have much of an opinion on it. I was brought up Catholic. I’ve seen it from both sides. The adamant secularists tend to inappropriately view religion as a cult. Churches do a lot of good for society, many people use them for their social circles, and I personally see very little harm here. There are some whackos, but every group has them.
It seems that Australia is now practicing infant sacrifice to the Lockdown God. Four newborns in Adelaide had to die because they could not get required surgery locally.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/lockdown-kills-four-newborn-babies-in-australia-die-after-travel-restrictions-prevent-them-from-receiving-lifesaving-care
Mike M,
Ya, but at least in Australia they aren’t pushing grandma off the cliff in her wheelchair. 😉
I am not religious and I have no problem with a religion that stays away from being a state religion or making declarations that favor more state control. Pope Francis’ political positions are anti-capitalistic. He recently relegated private property to a secondary right and appears to be making nice with the Chinese Communist party. I have no problem with him determining positions of the Catholic church -as long as those positions do not involve state enforcement. I can only hope that his flock pays as much heed to his political views as it does his views on birth control and abortion.
Very accurately, the babies died because South Australia has a lack of local facilities. The Victorian premier has denied the Melbourne refused them entry – that it was local decision not to send them.
More interesting would be a QALY calculation for lives lost due to lockdown versus those saved. In NZ, anti-Covid measures have significantly reduced overall mortality compared to previous years.
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/covid-19-causes-mortality-rates-spike-around-globe-nz-sees-dramatic-drop-in-deaths
Too early for detailed analysis but lack of seasonal flu and colds are suspected as being major factors. https://www.flutracking.net/Info/Report/202042/NZ
Road toll down to a 5 year low as well.
I think if we can extrapolate Phil’s statistics on Covid 19 restrictions from flu and colds for saving lives to other areas of the restrictions for saving lives and the environment, like with less fossil fuel consumption, we can help politicians make a case for more permanent restrictions.
In the US we could add in restrictions of a national speed limit of 20 miles an hour and a confiscation of all guns and really make some savings on lives and fuel consumption. We could declare it a war and instead of calling it restrictions we would call it our patriotic duty.
Kenneth. Yup, it is a real pain living in this communist hell. You would hate it, but seems the Labour landslide on Saturday would suggest the locals are pretty happy with the balance struck so far.
But moving to something you would like better…
Sorry if this has been discussed while away but here is paper looking at effect of lockdown-type measures (non pharmacutical interventions) on both the epidemic and the economy done at county and state level in USA. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Arnon-et-al-conference-draft.pdf
“We have three main findings: First, NPIs introduced by state and local governments explain a small fraction of the nationwide decline in contact rates but nevertheless reduced COVID-19 deaths by almost 30% percent—saving about 33,000 lives—over the first 3 months of the pandemic. However, NPIs also explain nearly 15% of the decline in employment—around 3 million jobs—over the same period. Second, NPIs that target individual behavior (such as stay-at-home orders) were more effective at
reducing transmission at lower economic cost than those that target businesses (shutdowns). Third, an aggressive and well-designed response in the early stages of the pandemic could have improved both epidemiological and economic outcomes over the medium-term”
Phil Scadden (Comment #192376): “The Victorian premier has denied the Melbourne refused them entry – that it was local decision not to send them.”
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Why does that matter? Not rhetorical, I just don’t see a reason why it would.
Because it smacks of South Australian officials scapegoating Victorian Covid restrictions when it sounds like there may have been other reasons for not sending them to Melbourne, if the premier is correct. It is also possible that premier of Victoria is misinformed and Melbourne did block a transfer. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over next little while. Looking at coverage, it seems that real rub here is the inadequate funding of South Australia hospital system.
From dailymail coverage.
The Women’s and Children’s Hospital has sadly seen the deaths of three babies in the past four weeks who were unable to be transferred, who almost certainly would have benefited from on-site cardiac services,’ Professor Svigos said, according to the Adelaide Advertiser.
The respected obstetrician, who now heads up the WCH Alliance lobby, bluntly asked how many more deaths of babies and young children will the community and staff be forced to endure before the situation is improved at the hospital?
Shortly after the explosive testimony, Ms Mulholland informed the committee a fourth child had also tragically died on Friday.
She told the committee a chronic lack of resources is leaving medical staff on the brink of ‘burnout’. Ms Mulholland explained it was common for junior doctors to be found ‘sleeping on the floor because of a lack of resources’
Phil Scadden (Comment #192389): “it sounds like there may have been other reasons for not sending them to Melbourne”
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If so, that would relevant. I guess that raises the question of whether such babies have been dying all along in Adelaide.
Thanks for the link, Phil. It is most revealing as the excerpt below from the study shows.
I believe the study/model concludes that government policy had considerably less effect on reducing the detrimental effects of Covid-19 than did voluntary precautions- if contact rate is used as a proxy. The study also indicates that the employment/unemployment rates were considerably more affected by voluntary actions than government policies. That might be difficult for some to believe but in should be noted that the study was done by unbiased experts.
It is most fortunate that the study included an attempted measure showing that some bad actors (in this case Republican voters) did not comply voluntarily to good practices and therefore we have ammunition for stricter government policies.
While this study is all well and good we should not depend on it and other such studies if we truly believe that no effort (restrictions) is too great to comprehend when it comes to saving lives. We have set a precedent for restrictions that have been received in good order by the majority of the citizens and a majority that may grow even larger after the upcoming election where bad acting Republicans are put in their place.
We need to be ever more vigilant in seeking out and finding more emergencies that allow governments to use their newly found power to solve other critical problems. Who amongst us can deny that the ordinary flu causes deaths and should not be considered an emergency. If we look sufficiently closely who can deny that climate change is not an emergency as witnessed by recent outbreaks of wildfires and hurricanes any other extreme weather events we have been experiencing.
Kenneth,
“While this study is all well and good we should not depend on it and other such studies if we truly believe that no effort (restrictions) is too great to comprehend when it comes to saving lives. ”
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Well said. I am 100% for eliminating all personal liberties if that allows a mandated maximum reduction in risk of death, of course. Cars, guns, ladders, swimming pools, obesity, smoking, drinking, airplanes, and much more all have to be eliminated to minimize deaths.
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But a funny thing I observed in my recent drive from Massachusetts to Florida: on every roadway, of every size, in every place, liberal or conservative, >99% of the drivers choose to disobey the posted speed limit. Actual speeds always range from a 3-5% to about 20% above the posted limit.
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Lets face it, we all know that leftists are nearly perfect in every way except for a few ‘problem areas’ like obeying the law and telling the truth, while people on the right are inherently bad and always in the way of ‘social progress’, mainly because they always find ways to think wrong things about liberty and freedom. But no matter, we need to find better ways to force everyone, especially those damned Republicans, to comply with our vision of how life must be led…… we have to find effective ways to force them into submission. Calling people racists, and then punishing them with public abuse, struggle sessions, and loss of their jobs seems a good start. What could possibly go wrong?
Calvin Coolidge on July 5, 1926, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:
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That we suffer the uneducated, greedy simpletons we do today in the presidency is a sad commentary on our society.
SteveF (Comment #192411)
October 22nd, 2020 at 9:53 am
Yes, SteveF, what you say sounds like an enlightenment on correct political thinking, but you like me must be careful not to be so forthright in our views. I am told that there are sufficient numbers of the unwashed and uninformed out there who might need convincing in a more nuanced manner. I am also told that those like us could do no better than to learn at the knee that great communicator, Barack Obama.
Since I hit the mute button the moment his face appears on the screen, I can’t confirm this personally, but I have heard that Obama’s oratorical style is much like a Baptist preacher.
DeWitt,
“I have heard that Obama’s oratorical style is much like a Baptist preacher.”
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Depended on the audience. For some audiences, his style was very much like a Baptist preacher… including some put-on accent. That was the style of his infamous “you didn’t build that” campaign speech. For other audiences, it was more like endless talking points, without reason or meaningful argument, delivered in standard American English.
The news is making a big deal about the IHME’s, that highly reliable source /sarc, latest projection, 300,000 deaths in the US by December 31. Worldometers.info has total deaths in the US at 227,696, that means 72,304 deaths from October 22-December 31 or an average slightly over 1,000/day, about 30% higher than the current seven day moving average. IHME is a classic example of the Mark Twain (and others) quote:
What surprises me is that IHME still has any credibility.
Any time “science” studies attempt to measure behavior based on political leanings then I tend to immediately stop reading and move on and disregard the study in its entirety
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In the case above the behavior is more likely linked to rural / urban behavior and the size and timing of the outbreaks in the local area. It is well known the rural areas of the US lagged in infection outbreak. The question would be why even bring politics into it at all? It poisons the well.
I can’t imagine what driving around in a cop car must be like. Everyone in front of you slowing down and driving the speed limit. How utterly annoying that must be.
Tom Scharf,
“ How utterly annoying that must be.â€
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Maybe, but I note that the police cars are always going well over the speed limit, and when they get slowed down by someone, that someone inevitably lets them pass without delay. I figure cops are as frustrated by speed limits as everyone else. Except on the German Autobahns…. where there are neither significant speed limits nor a significant number of cops.
“I guess that raises the question of whether such babies have been dying all along in Adelaide.”
More here. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-22/unanswered-questions-over-baby-deaths-at-adelaide-hospital/12801108
The South Australian Premier also agrees that there were no travel restrictions preventing babies going to Melbourne. Looks like have to wait for coroners inquiry now.
Kenneth: “I believe the study/model concludes that government policy had considerably less effect on reducing the detrimental effects of Covid-19 than did voluntary precautions- if contact rate is used as a proxy. The study also indicates that the employment/unemployment rates were considerably more affected by voluntary actions than government policies.”
Agreed. Note this conclusion as well.
“Compared with the actual policy response, we estimate that wider implementation of stay-at-home orders and school closures – without any non-essential business closures – could have delivered a larger reduction in deaths while sustaining at least an additional one million jobs.“
As far as I can see, this paper is conference draft without peer-review. The methodology looks to encompass the things I would like see in a study (use of google mobility data, accounting for voluntary action) but it is so far outside of my areas of expertise, that I would like what peers make of it.
DeWitt,
IHME is essentially an advocacy group for lockdowns, and have been since day one. One of the principles even admitted as much when their initial projections were shown to be wildly wrong. Nobody should pay any attention to them. They are lefty partisans, nothing more.
Biden is kicking the crap out of Trump.
That said, Biden is uttering some direct falsehoods. He seemed to just deny that Hunter made any money dealing with China? I didn’t think that was disputable.
Biden is doing pretty well (and lying his butt off) but I would not say anyone is winning. And least after allowing for the moderator.
——–
I should add that I have not been listening all that closely.
Trump turned it around some eventually. I don’t know that I’d say Biden was the clear winner, but. My personal feeling is that Biden did a better job in the debate than Trump did.
Trump just isn’t as good at debating as Biden is.
[Edit: I think Trump did the damage it was in his power to do. His potshots seemed effective on Biden’s opposition to fossil fuels, and possibly on Biden’s corruption. At least he forced Biden to make some strong statements on the Hunter Biden thing. We’ll see how well they age as election day approaches. Anyway. Glad that’s done!]
mark bofill (Comment #192451): “Trump just isn’t as good at debating as Biden is.”
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Trump is certainly not as good at putting on a traditional performance. But that was true 4 years ago and he crushed his opponents in the primary. In other words, the traditional performance is not what most people want.
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People like us thought Trump did badly in the first debate, but the general public was more divided. Hispanics, by a 2:1 margin, thought Trump won.
Mike,
That’s true. Maybe my impressions are wrong. I hope they are.
Phil Scadden (Comment #192429),
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That link sounds like someone outside the process who says he does not see why there was a problem. Not at all the same as there was no problem.
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I looked at a couple of the links at the bottom of the article and at lest one clearly said that it was because of travel restrictions. Apparently the issue was a two week quarantine when returning to South Australia. So maybe the highly trained people doing the transport would have been sidelined for two weeks and the hospital decided it could not lose them? In which case the Premier may have been telling the truth and lying at the same time.
Mike M. At moment, too muddy to be clear. Both premier’s believe travel restrictions shouldnt have been a problem but they are too far from decision makers to be sure of what went on. On other hand, people pushing for more money could be trying claim of travel restrictions as plausible support. Coroners inquiry will settle it. I wouldnt jump to conclusions either way.
Should also say that we had protocols for medical staff (and others) to be able to move in and out of quarantine areas (PPE, testing of them and close contacts, contact tracking). I would be surprized if Australia didnt have similar. Lots of people have to cross the border and work closely with people on the border.
I didn’t watch the debate but I have seen snippets. Biden made some super stupid statements.
1. Nothing UNETHICAL happened in the Ukraine. (No, his son was paid $80,000 per mo. to be legal advisor to Ukraine Co., when son was totally unqualified as a Ukraine lawyer)
2. The US had good relations with Hitler before the war. [This to me is equivalent to Jerry Ford saying that Poland was not communist]
3. I also saw where Biden claimed that all people with Covid will be treated as having a pre-existing condition (Couldn’t quickly confirm this as I am typing it up). If so, it is a remarkably stupid statement. 98-99% of the people who have had Covid should not have lingering permanent conditions. –similar to the flu.
….
I think Biden is going to have a hard time walking away from these statements which strongly tend to show that his cognitive abilities are not good and are declining.
…….
Also, I was amazed to watch Trump hear Biden lie about Hunter and the Ukraine and Trump actually kept his mouth shut and let Biden continue on with multiple lies. (In the first debate, Trump’s interruptions let Biden off the hook for stupid statements or lies that he was on the verge of making) First time in his whole term that he has ever learned from his past mistakes.
I still wish some asked Joe “How much is 13 times 15?â€
JD Ohio (Comment #192460): “I think Biden is going to have a hard time walking away from these statements which strongly tend to show that his cognitive abilities are not good and are declining.”
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That is just a small sampling of the silly and/or untrue things that Biden said. But I expect that, with the “press” running interference, he will have little trouble getting away with them.
I think 30% of voters have already voted. I have… I could go in and cast in person, then they’d pitch the mail in vote. But…. Not going to do that.
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I’m not sure it matters hugely to the election outcome.
Looking over the post mortems on the debate, it sounds like Trump one. A big reason is that Trump has the clear advantage on policy and performance, but many voters are turned off by his style. He was way more presidential yesterday than people expected. Also, it sounds like he scored on the corruption front. If Biden can’t beat Trump on style and character, then he can’t beat Trump.
See, for example, this discussion of the reactions of a focus group of undecided voters: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/presidential-trump-helped-himself-in-final-debate
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Yes, 25-30% of voters have already cast their ballots. But I doubt that many undecided voters have cast their ballots. Technically, no undecided voters have cast ballots.
An aside about ‘the Talk’ mentioned in the debate — Teaching one’s kids to be respectful of police, to not make sudden movements at traffic stops and to keep hands on the wheel is not some exclusive black family phenomenon. I’ve taught my kids the same darn thing. At least in Huntsville AL, I strongly suspect most kids are taught to be respectful of authority. I sure hope people are teaching their kids not to make sudden and alarming movements around police that can cause accidents.
That this is thought to be indicative of systemic racism is actually indicative that there is something fundamentally wrong with popular thinking about systemic racism, AFAICT.
[Of course, it’s not necessarily popular thinking. It’s Corn Pop frenemy Joe Biden’s take…]
I rather doubt there actually exist many undecided voters. How many voters are motivated enough to cast ballots in support of their candidate is almost certainly a bigger issue.
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I remain very dubious of the predictive power of telephone surveys in competitive states. With the populace as divided as they are on the future direction of the country, and the willingness of many progressives to “socially punish” and ostracize anyone who supports Trump, getting a representative sampling of voters in telephone surveys seems to me problematic, if not impossible. I expect Trump may get a higher % of votes in most competitive states than in 2016, but Trump may not get the plurality he did in those close states in 2016. I believe Trump can thank Hillary for his 2016 election because she was such an unlikable candidate, and willing to purposely offend and write off a lot of ‘deplorable’ voters to boot. Save for Hillary being so widely disliked, I doubt the third party candidates would have gotten many votes that would otherwise have gone to Hillary. With Joe being less offensive to most voters than Hillary, but Trump remaining just as offensive as ever, that may be enough to switch several close states.
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We live in interesting times…. with really bad presidential candidates.
The political hit job on Biden is ongoing, not that it will make a difference. In classic fashion once the official denial is in then more damning information is released.
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The Biden ‘Family Legacy’
What we learned from the text messages of Hunter’s partner Tony Bobulinski.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biden-family-legacy-11603409528
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“In a statement, Mr. Bobulinski said he went public because he wants to clear his name, which was contained in those published emails, and because accusations that the information is fake or “Russian disinformation†are “offensive.†”
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“Hunter, in his own angry texts, makes clear that his contribution is his name. He rails at Mr. Bobulinski that the CEFC heads are “coming to be MY partner to be partners with the Bidens.†He reminds him “that in this instance only one player holds the trump card and that’s me.”
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“Mr. Bobulinski’s texts show he even met with Joe Biden. Mr. Gilliar reminds him in May 2017: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u are face to face, I know u know that but they are paranoid.â€
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This is just undeniable slimy influence peddling by Hunter. Joe Biden was obviously involved at a distance, and was either not excited about it or was doing it for his son. He’s basically lying with his denials at this point.
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Hunter is a dirt bag, plain and simple. The story continues to be the media’s ignoring of the story and the “standards” they use for reporting. If this was Trump they would be devoting lots of investigative resources on the matter. I expect the media handling to quickly transition from “it didn’t happen” to “it doesn’t matter”.
“With the populace as divided as they are on the future direction of the country, and the willingness of many progressives to “socially punish†and ostracize anyone who supports Trump”
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Yes, this is not a good look. I saw this in my local paper the other day.
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We will not forget who supported Trump | Column
Your country needed you. You did not stand up. And we remember, writes Leonard Pitts.
https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2020/10/21/we-will-not-forget-who-supported-trump-column/
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“As far as we’re concerned, the stink of what you did — what you failed to do — will follow you the rest of your days. May it make you less employable. May it haunt you at sidewalk cafes. May your kids ask you about it.”
“We will not forget.
And we will not forgive.”
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Nice, ha ha. The love/tolerance crowd speaks again. I seriously just don’t get where this type of venom comes from. Where does your head need to be to write stuff like this? Chill out people.
Yesterday Biden claimed that Wuhan virus deaths are over a thousand a day and that there will be 200K more deaths by the end of the year. The latter is plain nonsense since it would require nearly 3K deaths per day, but I decided to fact check the former. The most recent 7 day average is 786/day, but there was one day over 1000.
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So I wondered if it might be on the way to 1000/day. I looked at the time dependence of CFR using lags of 1, 2, and 3 weeks. The trends since April are remarkable similar for the various assumed lags: a steady decline that seems to be approaching an asymptote somewhere under 2%. So I tried fitting the data from April 15 to the present to an exponential plus a constant. Works pretty well, especially for the two week lag.
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The fitted asymptotes were 1.4% for lags of one or two weeks and 1.8% for a three week lag. So with 60K new positive tests per day, deaths should stay well under a thousand a day. But positive tests are rising with no sign of leveling off, so who knows.
I ran across this Twitter thread that is a progressive/liberal (so it pleases my prejudices) take on the Hunter Biden story. I haven’t followed the saga very closely (Giuliani and Bannon inherit Hunter’s laptop? Yeah…) but this is almost as much fun as watching Giuliani play with himself in Borat 2, so I offer it to conservatives here for dissection, not distribution:
https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/1319004223082811397
Mike M,
It all depends on who gets the virus: young or old?
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In the US military (with a relatively young average age and very few people over 60), the published ratio of cases to deaths is over 700, and I would bet it is actually much higher than that, since lots of very mild cases were probably never even tested. Like Africa, the US military is very resistant. Not so the elderly.
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Most places in the States the recent ratio of cases to deaths is over 50, but it varies a lot, suggesting a wide range of infection rate among the elderly to very elderly. Some places are just doing better than others in reducing exposure of the elderly.
Thomas,
I don’t know what you think that twitter ramble demonstrates. You appear to be asking us the equivalent of the Common Core math problem ‘Bobby attempted to count apples where there were four containers holding eight apples each and obtained the wrong answer of twelve, please explain where Bobby went wrong.’
I have no clue what kurteichenwald thinks he’s demonstrating there. I don’t really care. I guess I’d be willing to read what you think that screed demonstrates if you’d care to share your thoughts. But again, don’t much care one way or the other.
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I assume [Federal] politicians are corrupt without needing details. I figured Biden is corrupt. I assume Trump is corrupt. So on. The whole story doesn’t make much of an impression on me. As somebody noted above (and as has been widely noted elsewhere) the mainstream media and tech social media response to the corruption has been the real story.
Mike M. (Comment #192491)
“So with 60K new positive tests per day, deaths should stay well under a thousand a day. But positive tests are rising with no sign of leveling off, so who knows.”
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In IHME projections Covid-19 deaths rise to more than a thousand per day this winter.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view=total-deaths&tab=trend
Yes, who knows.
Thomas
I think this is what can be said about that: the author of the long choppy Twitter ramble likes to ramble on twitter. Like many on Twitter he seems to think he is presenting some sort of counter argument to some group of set of claims by someone. At least some elements of the “argument” he is rebutting are strawmen or red herrings. . .
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I assume that’s your take on it. If it’s not, let us know what you think about that tweet ramble!
For something completely different that made me chuckle, here’s an article about countering China’s growing naval numeric and area denial advantages with American privateers.
And yes, the Constitution does in fact authorize Congress to grant Letters of Marque.
mark bofill,
I think the cost for conflict-capable military ships is well beyond the range of most individuals, and even most organizations. Yes, privateers are allowed under the constitution. No, it is not likely to actually happen.
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The Chinese want to exclude USA Navy ships from the Western Pacific. No surprise there; the Chinese want mainly to take over Taiwan by force (or threat thereof) and to bully all their neighbors in the Western Pacific. They don’t want any interference from the US Navy. When a government (like China’s) is not legitimized by popular election, then they can tolerate no dissent… in this case, the glaring dissent of the 24 million residents of Taiwan.
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FWIW, I suspect the USA would want to exclude Chinese Navy ships from the Eastern Pacific as well if California demands to leave the union, should Trump win re-election. 😉
Steve,
Yes, but piracy (ah, eh-hm. Beg pardon. Privateering!) against Chinese commercial vessels tho! ‘Murica!
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LOL. No, I agree with you. I thought it was a startling and basically absurd idea that just sort of caught me off guard and made me laugh a bit.
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[I shared it to share the laugh, essentially. 🙂 ]
OK_Max,
“In IHME projections Covid-19 deaths rise to more than a thousand per day this winter.”
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Of course they do. They have made many projections that turned out to be wildly pessimistic; that is not going to change. They are an advocacy group for the left, not legitimate forecasters of anything.
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They are projecting deaths of 2,000 per day by Christmas. They’re nuts.
Thomas Fuller,
The Bidens are obviously corrupt. It is not completely clear if they should be subject to prosecution for that corruption, but corrupt they are. Trump is no saint when it comes to influence, of course, and many also call him corrupt. I think the difference is Trump operated mostly outside of government, buying influence when needed for his business interests, while Biden has operated 100% inside of government, consistently selling influence to line his pockets and those of his family.
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Some no doubt consider the two equally corrupt. I don’t.
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When I was in my early teens, my mother noted that lots of people get elected to Congress who are not very rich, but very few leave Congress who are not very rich. The selling of influence is widespread and destructive, leading always to worse government and social damage. Short of constitutionally prescribed term limits, I see no simple solution. Most career politicians are in it for the money/power… nothing else.
Oddball question that just occurred to me: Can dead people legally vote? You get an absentee ballot, mail it, then drop dead before election day. Does your vote count? I think it must, because there is no way to uncount it. But the vote does not technically count until election day. So you will have voted after dying. Seems wrong.
It happens. A rough estimate: there’s nine-ish weeks between the first Tuesday in November and January 6’th, if you want to look at it this way. If you figure people live an average of 30,000 days, about two tenths of a percent of the population will die somewhere in that window of time, unless I’m doing my arithmetic wrong (assuming a uniform age distribution which is silly but easier). Assuming voter turnout similar to 2016 (and again assuming a uniform distribution which is silly but easier), something a little over a quarter of a million voters I think will die after casting their votes but before the President is elected.
mark,
The question is not about a voter dying after Nov. 3; it is about a voter dying before Nov. 3 and still getting to vote.
Same idea then. I don’t have an easy estimate on hand of how many people vote absentee how early, but. Several thousand US [c]itizens die every day, so I’m sure it happens.
MikeM
It probably gets counted. At least if we use the methods in Illinois it will. When I worked the polls, what happened is the mail in ballots were delivered to the polling place. We checked the voter registrations and whether the person had voted that day. If they were not on the registration or had voted… pitched the ballot. If they were, we took it out of the envelope and read it in.
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My guess is there is no way those registrations got updated to eliminated people who had died in the past month. Updating is slow and no one wants to risk the mistake of disenfranchising someone. So if you die between mailing in your ballot and election day, I am reasonably sure your ballot gets counted.
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I don’t see a big problem with that. It’s not the same as a living person casting a ballot for someone who is already dead. The bigger risk of fraudulent mail in votes is at congregate living places where the post office drops off mail which is then distributed by a non-USPS person to internal mailbox slots. (That happened in the dorms.. and happens at work places etc.) At places like that, someone could send for many ballots, intercept and…well… fake things. (The signature would be something of a check, but perhaps not as strong a check as one might think especially in a place with lots of older folks who need assistance with their living.)
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I don’t even know if that’s a big risk, but it’s a lot bigger than worrying about the few random people who die between the time of mailing in a ballot and election day.
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Lucia,
“It’s not the same as a living person casting a ballot for someone who is already dead.â€
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That made me chuckle a bit. What happens if Biden has a heart attack and dies the day before the election? I rather suspect there would be many millions of living people casting ballots for a dead person. 😉
Mike M,
Requiring in-person voting on election day pretty much solves the dead-voter problem. Also reduces the potential for fraud. But it won’t ever happen.
mark bofill (Comment #192544): “I don’t have an easy estimate on hand of how many people vote absentee how early, but. Several thousand US [c]itizens die every day, so I’m sure it happens.”
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Something like 50 million ballots have already been cast and about one adult in 1000 dies each month. So if the ballots are cast on average one month before election day, that would be ballpark 50K dead voters.
———
lucia (Comment #192545): “I don’t even know if that’s a big risk, but it’s a lot bigger than worrying about the few random people who die between the time of mailing in a ballot and election day.”
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I agree. I am not worrying about it; I just thought it curious. But the two issues are linked.
SteveF (Comment #192546): “What happens if Biden has a heart attack and dies the day before the election? I rather suspect there would be many millions of living people casting ballots for a dead person.”
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It *might* hurt Biden’s chances of winning.
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If that happens or if Biden dies after the election and before the Electoral College meets, then the DNC will meet to select the next president. Anyone they like, as long as the person meets the constitutional requirements. Yes, really. So Hillary still has a chance!
But they would most likely pick Harris.
Yeah, that’s a better estimate I think. Mine was high.
Mike M,
“It *might* hurt Biden’s chances of winning.”
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I am not certain it would. Might even help him… no more gaffs.
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I watched a couple of World Series games. Biden is blanketing the games with pairs of ads: 1) Trump is evil, followed by 2) Joe is a saint. No policy substance in either ad. These spots probably cost north of a million each. I guess it helps to have effectively unlimited ‘dark money’ from wealthy donors.
SteveF
Yep. And many of the living people will be voting for a dead person intentionally. Dead people have won elections in the past– not presidential. But those are the names on the ballots. People who want a DEM president would vote for Biden even if he died. Those who want a GOP one would vote for Trump.
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Heck, if Trump actually dies I’ll go in on election day and vote for him! That will cancel my mail in for the Libertarian I voted for!
I have been looking for published statements from elected Democrats saying they won’t support packing the Supreme Court if Biden wins and Dems take control of the Senate. So far, I have found none. A few refuse to say if they will support it, but carefully do not rule it out. But most enthusiastically support it, along with immediate elimination of all filibusters.
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This election really is very important for the future direction of the country.
Ten days out. If one believes Trump could take North Carolina, Arizona, Florida, and Pennsylvania, then one believes Trump could take the election. He is within three (3) points on the former states and within five or six on the latter according to the 538 average. RCP shows similar but slightly better numbers for Trump.
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Will Biden’s remarks on transitioning away from fossil fuels sway Pennsylvanian voters, I think is largely what this election boils down to in the end this year. Polling data I listed above for battleground states was prior to the debate and so don’t reflect impacts yet.
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It’s going to be a long and painful wait these last couple of weeks.
Lucia,
“Heck, if Trump actually dies I’ll go in on election day and vote for him!”
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The Donald would likely be badly hurt to hear that, but I doubt he will kill himself. Of course, in Illinois, it won’t make a bit of difference who you vote for as President, and that is the same in most states, not just Illinois.
MA has a ranked-choice initiative on the ballot. Wondering what people think about it.
Quick description of the algorithm: Voters rank their 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. choices. First round: a candidate wins if listed as 1st choice on >50% of the ballots. If not, the candidate with fewest 1st-choice selections is eliminated, and those voters are moved to their 2nd-choice candidates. Repeat until a candidate has >50%. (If a voter runs out of choices — say they listed only 2 choices when there are 4 candidates — that voter’s ballot is effectively discarded.) [Hope you can follow that description; if not, follow the link above.]
With our current 2-party system & weak 3rd parties, I don’t think it would change the results of any final election; it would come down to how many voters rank Biden higher than Trump and vice versa. But it might well affect some crowded primaries (e.g. MA 4th district Democratic primary), in which the winner received 22.4% and second-place received 21.1%
Ranked choice probably would have prevented Doug Jones from winning in Alabama.
It seems like a better solution to me than what we have now, but I’d need to go looking for downsides before I was sure of that.
HaroldW,
I think for most races ranked choice is too confusing. Certainly, it’s too confusing for presidential elections. Besides, there were only three choices on my ballot for president.
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I suspect the libertarian candidate would get lots of 2nd choices though! If 10% picked libertarian as their first choice, it’s not impossible neither the DEM or GOP candidate would get 50%. Then the libertarian would win!!!!!
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This would be despite the fact that the libertarian was almost no one’s choice ….
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Although I might not be unhappy with this, I think I’m seeing a big flaw with ranked choice.
mark bofill,
“He is within three (3) points on the former states and within five or six on the latter according to the 538 average.”
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I don’t believe the telephone polls are accurate.
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Trump is clearly at a disadvantage: he has to win all those close states (or substitute a couple of unexpected wins in other states) to win re-election, while Biden just has to win one or two of them. Like every potential Democrat candidate, Biden starts the election with a solid 178 electoral college votes, and a very likely 40+ more…. so starts within ~50 votes of victory, while most any Republican starts with about 170 certain or likely votes… 100 away from winning. The only things that give Republicans a chance at the Presidency are that Dems, driven by the extreme left of their party, often select poor candidates who support even worse policies.
~grins~
I’m not sure if that’s a bug or a feature. It could be argued its a feature. The libertarian is nobody’s first choice, but a choice everybody could live with.
I’d rather have a libertarian than a democrat. I expect lots of democrats would rather have anybody than Trump.
Lucia, in ranked choice, the last place candidate is removed and those ballots are reallocated to second choice.
A Maine congressional race was decided with ranked choice, as the Republican who was in first was overtaken. Before that Paul LePage won twice for governor of Maine with a plurality of the vote with the Dems split. The first time an indepedent was a close second, and LePage won with 38% of the vote.
The next time the independent was much lower, and LePage got all the way to 48%.
Steve,
I know. I don’t have confidence in polling either right now. It’s not just the ‘shy Trump voter’ thing. It’s that we’re in unprecedented times in a lot of ways. Pandemics don’t happen all that often. I think our media and technology are introducing unprecedented variables that get stronger as the mainstream use of / dependence on the technology becomes more dominant. The interactions between numerous items in these categories is complicated.
Beats the heck out of me, still. I hate it. I want the uncertainty to be over already.
HaroldW,
I think ranked choice voting is designed to maximize the chance the dominant party in each region wins, even when they have an absolutely horrible candidate (like Hillary). And to give voters another way to virtue signal, of course. The MA proposal is strongly supported by most Dems and strongly opposed by most Republicans; I think that pretty much says it all.
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I think it will make the election of less qualified candidates more likely, and so is not a good idea.
Lucia,
So with ranked voting, is your second choice Trump or Biden? (Sorry, I had to ask. 😉 )
SteveF, it depends on what one considers to be the playing field.
Biden has to win Minnesota and Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and (Nevada or (New Mexico and New Hampshire))
or is it that Trump has to win Florida and Ohio and Georgia and Texas and North Carolina and Iowa and Arizona and one of (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, (Nev and (NM or NH)))
FYI: WSJ goes of the grand city of Naperville and interviews local residents.
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Illinois Businesses Brace for New Covid-19 Restrictions
New limits on indoor dining leave shops and restaurants in Chicagoland worrying business will tank
https://www.wsj.com/articles/illinois-businesses-brace-for-new-covid-19-restrictions-11603544400
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“At Allegory, a restaurant in downtown Naperville, chef and owner Christopher Mason said previous shutdowns and dining restrictions have already put him out tens of thousands of dollars. He isn’t sure what the latest limitations, which again pause indoor service, will mean for the future of Allegory, which is about two years old.”
538 has Biden with an 88% chance of winning, slightly better than the 86% chance Hillary had at this point 4 years ago.
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A key question is whether the conventional pollsters have actually improved their methods rather than just tweaking them.
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The shy Trump voter might be a bigger issue this time around. Four years ago, support for Trump might expose one to ridicule, maybe cost a few friends. Now, it can threaten your job and career, and might even carry the risk of violence.
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Trafalgar, who have their own way of doing things and got Michigan and Pennsylvania right last time, thinks that Trump will win.
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I remain confident that Trump will win. But I am aware that my confidence stands on very shaky ground. 🙂
I suspect the US hitting a new peak of infections right before the election will not be helpful to Trump. Not that Biden has any miracles up his sleeve beyond ostracizing the non-maskers. It’s looking like a big wave approaching.
Tom Scharf,
Illinois has 50% more case per day than back in May, but only 1/3 as many deaths per case. So I guess that means the re-instated restrictions should be about (1.5 / 3) = 50% as draconian as the earlier restrictions. I doubt they will be.
Mike M,
“I remain confident that Trump will win.”
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Much as I would like Biden to lose (not really for Trump to win), I can’t put Trump’s chances at any better than ~35-40%, in part because Trump’s campaign has run out of money and he is not running TV ads where he needs to (like Florida).
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The shy Trump voter impact remains an imponderable, but almost certainly it is a bigger factor than in 2016: the left’s name/shame/punish campaign against anyone who supports Trump is definitely making it less likely Trump supporters in competitive states will talk with pollsters… or anyone else!
Biden has a financial advantage, but the Trump campaign picked up a reasonable chunk of change recently:
https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-10-23/trump-raises-26-million-around-final-debate-with-biden
Mike N (#192566),
It is clearly the later case: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/2020_elections_electoral_college_map.html
I think that map is a little crazy, since some of what they call toss-ups (like Texas) really are not; Trump will win Texas easily. But that said, Biden for sure has many more paths to 270 than Trump.
I know that the press and most of the population of the US and probably the world are innumerate, but it’s still annoying when other countries like France (643), Belgium (1443) the UK (301) and Switzerland (764) have higher new cases/million than the USA (245) and the new case rates in those countries also appear to be accelerating faster than us. But somehow we in the US are the bad guys and Trump should have prevented it. Biden claims to have a plan, but other than a national mask mandate, it appears to be identical to what Trump has already done. Which makes the Biden campaign ads featuring health care workers complaining about Trump even more annoying.
Of course it doesn’t help that worldometers.info forces you to calculate new cases/million.
It’s not innumeracy I don’t think. It’s just that 93% of journalists are democrats, it’s an election year and election issue, Orange Man Bad and Orange Man absolutely must go.
[Edit: No, I know. Only 28% are democrats and 50% are ‘independent’, which AFAICT means mostly they don’t want to openly admit to being dems]
So far this year, excess mortality in Sweden is *negative*.
https://cornucopia.cornubot.se/2020/10/september-2020-least-deadly-month-ever.html
Actually, there are have been about 3700 more deaths than last year, but last year was unusually low. Deaths have been trending downward. It looks from the graph like this year is above the trend line, by maybe 1000 deaths. In spite of 6000 deaths “from” the Wuhan virus.
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One of the commenters notes that there have been many cancelled surgeries and claims that death rates go down when doctors go on strike.
A better measure is political donations by journalists.
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“CPI identified about 430 individuals working in journalism who contributed to either candidate between January 2015 and August 2016. Of the $396,000 they contributed, 96 percent ($382,000) went to Clinton, and 4 percent (about $14,000) went to Trump.[4]”
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“Ballotpedia also reviewed three other analyses. The Center for Responsive Politics found that 65 percent of contributions from those identified as journalists went to Democrats in the 2010 election cycle.[6] An analysis by MSNBC.com found that 87 percent of the 143 donors (who made contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign) gave to Democrats or liberal causes.[7] The Media Research Center found that 94 percent of donors affiliated with five news outlets also contributed to Democrats between 2008 and 2016.[8]”
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This isn’t really necessarily a journalist things as much as it is a NYC/DC, educated class, urban, etc. thing. It’s definitely a thing though. Political bias does not necessarily prove reporting bias, but it is always humorous when these very same people declare the existence of racial disparities as evidence of racial bias but never apply that standard to themselves. The burden of proof conveniently shifts.
“Which makes the Biden campaign ads featuring health care workers complaining about Trump even more annoying.”
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These are running in FL now and it is very annoying. If only we would be like the Europeans! (oops, that was a circa July 2020 talking point, sorry). Personalizing a global pandemic is just … annoying. That same money could be used for public service messages on how to reduce personal risk. I’ve never seen a single commercial (or can’t think of ever seeing it on TV at all) to avoid poorly ventilated indoor spaces with other people, and why. Instead we get OMB.
Tom Scharf, that stat must be biased towards the elite (which we can expect to be Hilary biased) because the vast majority of journalists don’t make anywhere nearly enough money to be contributing to political campaigns.
I’m not saying that journalists aren’t largely liberal–they are. That’s what happens when you’re paid to look at reality. You get more liberal. But looking at donations is skewed from the get-go.
I needed a good laugh Thomas. Thank you.
DeWitt,
“I know that the press and most of the population of the US and probably the world are innumerate..”
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Especially the press. Besides, math, rational thinking, and all hard sciences are blatantly racist. Of course, Joe Biden couldn’t add two three digit numbers in his head if his life depended on it, and maybe not on paper either. That matters not to the innumerate, who seem particularly good at finding racism most everywhere.
Thomas Fuller,
“That’s what happens when you’re paid to look at reality. You get more liberal.”
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LOL.
“I don’t care who you are, that there is funny.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFlCD5CYAcU
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“..the vast majority of journalists don’t make anywhere nearly enough money to be contributing to political campaigns.”
Who says there is no economic justice in the world?
MikeN, thanks for your reply #192562, which answers lucia’s objection in #192559 suggesting that a 3rd party candidate could win even with a minority of first-choice votes. To clarify, say that there are 3 candidates (D,R, & L), and 40% vote (D,L,R), 39% vote (R,L,D), 12% vote (L,R,D), and 9% vote (L,D,R).
First round: D 40; R 39; L 21.
L is eliminated, and the 21 L votes go to their 2nd choice: 12 to R, 9 to D.
Second round: D 49 (40+9); R 51 (39+12). R wins.
Whenever I gameplay this in my mind, it just comes down to how many rank D above R vs. vice versa. The third parties are eliminated round by round. Unless the major party candidates get a very low % of first-choice votes, they end up being “alive” in the decisive round.
=====.
The ads in favor of ranked-choice talk about how this will eliminate the “hold-your-nose” vote. But the way I see it, holding one’s nose still comes into play, just further down one’s list, when one comes to ranking R and D. (If you don’t put them on your list at all, then your vote won’t count in the last rounds.)
On the plus side, ranked-choice allows one to vote 3rd party without thinking that it’s “throwing one’s vote away”. A non-R/D candidate might then be able to garner >10% (say) first-choice votes, which they don’t typically get under current plurality rules. This might create an impetus to add them to the debates. It would be great to expand our representation to more than 2 parties. (Yes, there’s been an occasional non-R/D Congressperson. But no bloc beyond R/D.)
God, I’m still chuckling about that one.
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It’s a good thing my company pays me 50K a month to smoke crack and sleep with hookers, instead of paying me to look at reality. Oh wait, that’s right, I was uh, uhm.. thinking of somebody else.
HaroldW (Comment #192587): “The ads in favor of ranked-choice talk about how this will eliminate the “hold-your-nose†vote. But the way I see it, holding one’s nose still comes into play, just further down one’s list, when one comes to ranking R and D. (If you don’t put them on your list at all, then your vote won’t count in the last rounds.)”
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Indeed. There is something to be said for ranked choice voting in a multiparty system when there is just one office on the ballot (like Canada). But in a two party system it can only create mischief. Well, I guess it can provide succor for those childish people who want to both vote for a oddball candidate and get a say in the actual choice.
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That is the best case scenario. Ranked choice might contribute to the proliferation of third parties. My sample ballot has 26 offices for me to vote on. Imagine filling out such a ballot if one had to rank 5-10 candidates for each office. Ridiculous.
MikeN
Yes. That’s how I understood it. It’s why the libertarian would win. They’d get 10% of the first place votes, the DEM and GOP would each come under 50%– likely 46% vs 44%.
Then the Libertarian would get all of the the 44% added to his 10% and vault over 50%. The Libertarian would be President.
SteveF
With luck, I could use a write-in option for my 2nd choice!! 🙂
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But I guess…. It must be Trump. Here’s my analysis:
1) If Trump dies between now and election day, I will go in and vote for him.
2) If Biden dies, I will not go in an vote for him.
Do, I won’t vote for Biden, dead or alive. But I will vote for Trump provided he’s dead. So I must prefer Trump.
Thomas,
I thought engineers were the ones paid to look at reality. If we don’t our stuff doesn’t work.
Ok… on ranked…. I see my blunder. 🙂
Hiya Lucia
I thought engineers were paid to build reality. I sometimes get the impression that they don’t often look on their works (ye mighty and despair…). Anyhow, they get paid a lot better than journalists. I don’t think that proves anything, but…
On a later topic, I’m wondering how many volunteers we might find to make your voting for Trump a reality? (Not me, not me…)
Thomas,
I’m not looking for a volunteer to make that a reality. I’m pretty sure he’ll stay nice and safe. But anyone could die of a heart attack between now and then.
Thomas,
By implying that ‘building reality’ doesn’t involve ‘looking at reality’, you have demonstrated mastery that usually takes decades to achieve. I hereby promote you to the position of honorary Software Development Manager. You now have the proper credentials to allocate resources and schedule and track personnel and activities to develop software systems of arbitrary scope and complexity.
😉
It’s certainly couldn’t be that people have different values and priorities and vote accordingly. It’s probably instead one side is correct on everything (reality) and the other side is wrong on everything. If the opposing side was smart enough then they would see the error of their ways and they would simply give up their previous values acquired through life experience and change. Personally I have found that calling the other side too stupid to understand reality to be the most effective way to nudge them to a different solution.
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It’s best to just assume the opposing side are morons, that is the best way to a true and just society. There really aren’t controversial issues where both sides have legitimate points, there is just right and wrong. And my side is right. Wow, now I see how it works! Thanks.
So, here’s my theory: In modern America, administrations come into power and do a mix of good and bad things. Sadly, they do the good things first and then the bad things start to pile up and piss people off. So we vote the other side into power and the same thing happens.
Due to the peculiar characteristics of the Trump administration, the time frame telescoped and we have exhausted the possibilities of a Republican administration well before the end of his first term. The things that Republicans wanted from Trump they have largely gotten. He’s not even offering an agenda for his second term.
It seems the majority of Americans are more than ready to switch horses, no matter where in the stream we are. Biden, a very ordinary Democratic politician, is offering initiatives that a clear majority of Americans are in favor of–a $15 federal minimum wage, a public option for health insurance, increased spending on clean energy and lower emissions, substantial forgiveness of student loans and free (or low cost) tertiary education, etc.
If the Democrats win a majority in the Senate, we will probably get those things before the administration runs out of steam. Which is probably when Biden runs out of steam as well.
So the 2024 election will really be a lot of fun.
Mark, would that be a scrum or agile development house, or do I get to choose?
Tom Scharf, I don’t know how you come up with that, if indeed it is based on anything I have written.
I am a leftist. Leftists have been left out in the cold for significant portions of recent history and I would argue the country is the poorer as a result.
But the country would also suffer if conservatives were shoved into a corner for any significant period of time. This country, for better or worse, has evolved to a point where both sides need a) to be led by intelligent and caring people and b) need to have a prominent seat at the table.
Whether it’s in January of 2021 or 2025, Republicans will ditch the clown cars carrying Qanon supporters etc. and tack back towards the palatable center that has let them be the governing party for most of the past 40 years.
The interesting question is how long the Democrats can maintain their tenuous hold on moderate liberalism. Biden did beat us leftists in the primary and has planted his flag firmly in the center. But politics is a moveable feast.
Thomas
Ehrmm….. I’m not convinced the clear majority of American’s are in favor of these. You can quote whatever % answered whatever to various polls. But I think it’s better to look at reality. If a clear majority was really for a $15 minimum wage, we’d have it in numerous states. It wouldn’t even be hard to get it. It’s not that high in even one state. (It is in DC.)
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/mw-consolidated
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The support for student loan forgiveness is pretty dang contingent. People support some amount of forgiveness…. but not if it’s paid by higher taxes. It all depends how you ask a question.
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In reality, the student loan issue is very thorny. I honestly can’t see why someone who makes more than $100K a year should have any loan forgiven. They should be able to carry the payment.
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I’m pretty sure Americans generally come out against free tertiary educations. Moreover, it could be a catastrophe.
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I think they should allow some partial forgiveness of student loans under formal bankruptcy, but with caveats that make it harder than discharging other debts. Does that make me “for” or “against” forgiveness.
Hiya Lucia
Well, the polling says differently. And of course the devil is in the details. But as broad policy positions each of those is favored by over 60% of the public. And those are good polling companies that repeatedly come up with those results.
Thomas,
Polling says anything someone wants it to say. If I google those, I can find polls to support both that people want free education and that they don’t.
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And not withstanding polls: Not one single state has passed a $15 /hour wage. Not. One. And the law permits them to if they wish to. So whatever any poll might say: I’m not buying it.
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There are good polling companies who get the exact opposite. Depends what you ask.
Polling depends on who you ask, what you ask and how you ask it. Companies I trust (some of whom I’ve worked for) do all three things correctly and get the answers right time after time.
OTOH, there are a lot of push polls out there that miraculously come up with the answers most satisfactory to the client that commissioned them. For some reason I don’t have a lot of faith in those.
As far as the minimum wage thing, Biden is calling for a $15 federal minimum, not states.
“As of May 28, 2019, the movement has seen successes on the state and local level. California, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, and Connecticut have passed laws that gradually raise their state minimum wage to at least $15 per hour.
…”Major cities such as San Francisco, New York City and Seattle, where the cost of living is significantly higher, have already raised their municipal minimum wage to $15 per hour with some exceptions.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_for_$15#:~:text=As%20of%20May%2028%2C%202019,at%20least%20%2415%20per%20hour.
It’s worth noting: The Pew question on free education is at public colleges. That’s limited and so not the same as free tertiary education. Private colleges would still cost. The question also makes no connection to how the cost of running the public colleges would be paid for. (Taxes? Shaking a magic money tree?)
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Sorry, but people don’t really support a program unless they are willing to pay for it. Yes. A “poll” might “show” they say they support it. But it’s not real support unless the would pay for it.
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The term ‘scrum’ belongs to the Agile methodology actually; same thing. But no, don’t sell yourself short. The bone-headedness of thinking building reality doesn’t involve looking at reality is far beyond that of a simple scrum master; no. It’s real Dilbert pointy haired boss territory we’re talking about.
Thomas–
Those state laws are to reach that level in the future. They aren’t there now. Cities are, of course, not states.
“Two-thirds of Americans (67%) support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, including 41% who say they strongly favor such an increase, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this spring.
“Large majority of Democrats favor increasing the federal minimum wageDemocrats and Democratic-leaning independents are largely united in backing a $15 an hour federal minimum wage: 86% favor this, including nearly six-in-ten (59%) who say they strongly support it.
Republican opinion on this issue is more divided, but a majority of Republicans and Republican leaners – 57% – oppose raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, including nearly three-in-ten (29%) who say they are strongly against it.”
You don’t get better polling than Pew Research Center.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/two-thirds-of-americans-favor-raising-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-an-hour/
Thomas,
They are lying. And they don’t know what the current rate is.
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Perhaps. But it doesn’t make the polling good.
Lucia, policy proposals are rarely, if ever, trotted out with a specific price tag attached. Republicans are remarkably weak on this.
Both Hilary and Biden put fully costed proposals in front of the public prior to election day. Didn’t help Hilary much.
Lucia, after 26 (! God, I’m getting old) years in the biz, I have noticed that people who say survey respondents are lying usually have a particular interest in another outcome. It has been my experience that people are remarkably honest in surveys, as long as you don’t query on hot button topics.
The occasional and inevitable prevaricators are swamped by the vast number of truth tellers.
Thomas,
I didn’t say proposals were trotted out with a specific price tag. I said that if people aren’t willing to pay for them, they aren’t really for them.
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Eventually, when passing a program, the price is discussed.
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Thomas,
How do you know? Real question.
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I used to lie on telephone surveys about politics ever time. Mike Royko suggested it. I lied about nearly everything (and somewhat randomly.) I now have the land line disconnected so I don’t answer them.
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The only survey I answer and I don’t lie on is Univesity of Michgan’s multi-generation survey of blah…. It’s not politics.
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And even apart from outright lies– which is what I did, I think people lie to themselves just as much as to the pollster.
Are you counting those who lie to themselves are prevaricators? I bet you aren’t. The Pew question on college didn’t ask anything about how much they would pay in taxes, how we might screen to see who is qualified… blah… blah….. Sure. I’m sure people think they are telling the truth. They’d like a “free” option. But they are lying to themselves– and hence the polsters.
Dang lucia. Well put!
HaroldW, I think with ranked choice, an independent would have won as governor over LePage. This is not unusual for Maine.
Ranked choice brings in the possibility of independents winning who wouldn’t otherwise. They start out popular in polls then fall off at election time as voters decide they aren’t viable.
Might Ross Perot have won?
I think the Republican who ran against Chuck Robb and Oliver North would have had a chance.
mark,
FWIW: Illinois minimum wage is currently $10 an hour. (No, it’s not $15 the way the quote Thomas posted suggests.)
It will rise to $11 on on January 1 and $1/year until it hits $15 in Jan 25.
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If Illinois voters really were for $15 an hour the legislature could have just raised it to $15 now.
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The slow timetable is there precisely to make many people not notice it’s been raised. The reason they don’t want people to notice it’s been raised is…. well… the legislators don’t want to have to defend raising it to $15/hour at the voting booth. The reason they don’t want to have to defend raising it is…. well… people don’t really want it.
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I don’t doubt they say they want it when asked on a poll. They likely think they want it. Some do want it. But, most? Nope. They are lying to themselves — and consequently to polsters.
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The law is passed. It will likely stick. Lots of small businesses that went down the tubes in 2020 will not come back in 2021. Other businesses will find ways to replace or reduce human labor. (I use self check out at Walmart. 🙂 )
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One bright spot: Youths, the provision allows “youths” to be paid $2 less than adults. New employees can be paid $0.5 less already. (I bet we’ll see more and more provisions for getting around the minimum. Apprentiships … “trainees”. Categories will be found. : ) )
Lucia, I doubt if this surprises you, but this is just one more way in which you are different from most people.
Forgive me if I don’t bore you with the methods we use to identify serial prevaricators. Trade secrets and all that…
I will let you know that people who fail logic traps and other tests (like what they said the last time we asked a question) are not prosecuted or persecuted–we just throw their answers out.
Thomas,
No one ever asked the same question twice when they called.
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If you throw out inconsistent answers, you probably throw out plenty of truthful answers too. Many people give inconsistent answers if they are require to answer from 1-5.
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Thomas,
I should note that the “logic” tests still doesn’t catch the main reason people lie which is they lie to themselves also. Lots of people lie to themselves.
Thomas Fuller (Comment #192603): “The interesting question is how long the Democrats can maintain their tenuous hold on moderate liberalism.”
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Until 2013. There has been nothing moderate about the Democrats since. The only thing that has saved us has been divided government.
A classic, pertinent, polling issue is climate change. When asked alone, people are concerned, and it gives the impression it’s an important issue, however, when asked to rank it among other concerns. Not so much.
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Talk is cheap.
Another example of how polls fail, from Campus Reform”.
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Campus Reform’s Cabot Phillips went to Florida International University in Miami to test the waters on a “Socialist GPA†policy in which students with higher GPAs would be forced to “spread the wealth†and give some of their GPA points to students with lower GPAs.
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Despite the overwhelming number of students who initially said they’d support socialist policies, few agreed to go along with such a plan.
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“I’m all for helping, but I wouldn’t give some of my points… I’ve lost a lot of sleep so I don’t know if that would be fair,†one student said, while another answered no because “I like, study all day for my grades.â€
Lucia,
“I won’t vote for Biden, dead or alive. But I will vote for Trump provided he’s dead. So I must prefer Trump.“
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Biden: unwanted, dead or alive. 😉
On looking at reality: Lucia is right, technical types have a livelihood which is directly connected to a clear-eyed assessment of reality. I worked for 15 years as an independent technical consultant, in 8 different countries, and had my analyses of the problems I was hired to solve been unrealistic, I would have starved. The reasons most journalists, especially young ones, don’t make so much money are: 1) most of what they study in school is fluff, and certainly not difficult, and 2) there are many more people interested in journalism than the need for journalists. Since the fluff course work doesn’t thin the ranks, there are more journalism graduates than needed. Same goes for a bunch of other fluffy fields of study.
Are you for eliminating poverty?
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Are you for eliminating poverty if you have to pay $1,000 more per year in taxes?
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Turns out these are entirely different questions.
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For example, you can’t ask questions on clean energy without the benefit and the drawback both being included or it is * meaningless *. Just because you aren’t sure what the cost will be for a clean energy transition doesn’t mean you get to leave it out and pretend there isn’t any. Andrew Revkin used to call climate change support a “mile wide and an inch deep” for this reason.
Polls can be most useful for ranking priorities but I don’t think they are particularly helpful for financial allocations.
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Gallup Poll 2020. Do you consider the amount of federal income tax you have to pay as too high, about right, or too low?
Too high – 46%
About right – 48%
Too low – 3%
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This is not a minor point, it is the entire point. You can enact all the new programs you want, just don’t raise taxes or have the wonderfully giving 3% pay for them (I have a feeling these 3% are the polling liars, ha ha).
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There is a difference between not supporting a justifiable cause in theory and not being willing to pay for it. Budgeting is a near zero sum game in politics. Put a bleeding heart on a committee to distribute taxpayer funds among a long list of worthy causes and they will eventually come away a fiscal conservative, ha ha.
Tom Scharf,
Good comment. Talking about only the supposed benefit of a policy, while ignoring (or downplaying) its cost is one of the most common forms of dishonest advocacy. You see it everywhere: Havard admits less qualified applicants and never discusses the negative impact on those excluded who are more qualified. A “living minimum wageâ€of $15 or even $20 per hour surely would help some, but would make others unemployable, and inevitably lead to many businesses off-shoring jobs or substituting automation for labor, not to mention higher cost of living for everyone else. Forcing people to say home, closing restaurants, closing schools, etc for sure reduces covid-19 transmission rates, but at huge social and economic costs…. which are borne most heavily by those least able to pay.
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The dishonesty in this common type of advocacy is almost limitless.
SteveF,
Fast food used to be a widely available entry level job. Kiosks are replacing cashiers. I suspect McDonalds will figure out how to totally mechanize preparing fries.
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Increases in minimum wage in Chi-town were ok while employment was rising. We’ll see what happens next. . . (I’m guessing lots of jobs that “rely on tips” are going to replace non-tipped work. We’ll see whether these jobs really get tips.)
lucia (Comment #192634): “Fast food used to be a widely available entry level job. Kiosks are replacing cashiers. I suspect McDonalds will figure out how to totally mechanize preparing fries.”
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There are a lot of jobs that only make sense at a certain low wage. Raising the minimum wage will eliminate such jobs. That would be fine if the workers just got better jobs as a result; increasing productivity is a good thing. But there are many workers who are not worth $15/hr. Eliminating such jobs means that the workers will be either unemployed or employed in the underground economic. Neither is good for either the workers or society.
Lucia,
“I suspect McDonalds will figure out how to totally mechanize preparing fries.â€
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Sure, and not just McDonald’s. If the cost for the equipment can be kept under a couple hundred thousand, it is going to happen, and the higher the minimum wage, the sooner.
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I saw an automated packaging system installed at a chemical plant 30+ years ago. It cost several millions (today it would be cheaper), but it eliminated 28 very expensive jobs (about $26 per hour fully loaded costs), so paid for itself in under 4 years. Side benefits were demonstrably better operation…. no lost production from human error….. and consistently more accurate package weights.
This is the obvious endpoint of the knowledge economy combined with higher efficiencies and automation. An increasing percentage of people are literally unemployable because they can’t provide any service people are willing to pay for. As this group gets larger and larger they compete between themselves for a shrinking low knowledge job market.
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AI is going to make things worse and worse for this problem. Call centers are increasingly automated, checkouts, etc.
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It will be necessary to just give people money to lead their unproductive lives as they wish. A large percentage of teachers, truck drivers, etc. can be automated out. One could construct artificial make work jobs that are intentionally not automated among other solutions. What’s missing with a living wage and other solutions is people want to * feel * productive and provide for their families and themselves. Being on the dole is shameful for many. This emotional need is a big problem.
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Maybe the market will work it all out as it has in the past, but I’m not sure if we are heading to the automation dystopia of Blade Runner or The Jetsons. Probably something in between but there is likely going to be some friction between the can work and can’t work groups.
Tom Scharf (Comment #192637): “This is the obvious endpoint of the knowledge economy combined with higher efficiencies and automation. An increasing percentage of people are literally unemployable because they can’t provide any service people are willing to pay for.”
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I don’t think there is supporting evidence that can not be otherwise explained. One can certainly make the case that there is a surplus of low and moderate skilled labor. But there are multiple causes of that: automation, uncontrolled low skill immigration, and unfettered export of jobs. Certain people push the “obvious endpoint” story because that deflects blame from the devastating policies those people support.
In the extreme capitalism ends up with nearly everything automated and humans beings almost completely expendable. Those are the incentives and the intent in many cases. No reason to think it won’t be successful. We will have robots manufacturing and fixing robots, and AI writing code. The AI singularity if you wish. Computers have recently mastered Go, Chess, and Jeopardy. It is accelerated evolution. Those who can offer nothing to support it will get whatever scraps it deems acceptable to handout. Endless sci-fi books on this subject, most of them bad.
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Just think where society was 100 years ago, barely had cars, roads, and airplanes. Radio was high tech. Vacuum tubes. The internet only showed up 20 years ago. The first airplane to man on the moon in 50 years. Compare that to the progress from other 100 year periods, 1600 to 1700. Maybe they discovered sanitation back then and so forth. We are in a very serious technological surge here. Almost all for the good. Unintended consequences are a very big question that nobody can answer.
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The answer isn’t necessarily the disposal of AI and an outbreak of hippie communes with urban organic gardens everywhere. The “AI threat” does need to be thought about though, and managed.
Joe Biden:
https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/24/joe-biden-says-democrats-created-the-most-extensive-and-inclusive-voter-fraud-organization-in-american-history/
Tom Scharf, Mike M,
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I don’t think we are headed for a “Blade Runner” dystopia, unless the left enables and encourages the continuation of destructive culture. The answer to people who are effectively unemployable for lack of knowledge and skills is to change the culture(s) which produce(s) those unskilled and unknowing people. Each technological leap that in the past has disrupted large segments of the economy, nationally and internationally, displacing many workers, has led to workers moving to more productive and skilled jobs.
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There are no reasons that ever increasing productivity and overall growth in wealth can’t continue, save for two: 1) There are many on the left who refuse to allow economic incentives to move people toward better education, training, and more constructive personal behaviors, and 2) There are many on the green left who object to greater productivity and economic growth on purely philosophical grounds: humanity does not deserve to dominate the Earth….. and the fewer and poorer humans are, the better for the Earth.
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I believe the social/political battle in the coming decades will be between those on the left who’s objectives are incompatible with economic growth and increasing wealth, and those on the right who want everyone to become richer via economic growth and technological advancement. It is unclear to me who will win that battle.
MikeM
It will President Kamala by February.
Ton Scharf,
“Endless sci-fi books on this subject, most of them bad.”
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Indeed, almost all really bad. Autonomous artificial intelligence seems to me no closer today than when I was in high school, and was regularly reading about future artificial intelligence. Solving defined problems like chess, go, etc. is not artificial intelligence, any more than is the complicated software I write for control of a lab instrument. Thinking about things like whether or not dark matter is real is a better indication of intelligence.
Lucia,
“It will President Kamala by February.”
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If that happens, I may hurl….
Mike M,
Biden has dementia, and that is obvious to any disinterested observer; everything he says and does is consistent with the onset of dementia.
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But observers in the MSM are not disinterested observers (of reality, Thomas Fuller). Whether they can carry a mentally failing Biden over the finish line to install Krazy Kamala Harris as president remains to be seen.
SteveF,
Those who vote for Biden will vote for him whether he has dementia or not. Their alternative to not voting for Biden is Trump.
It’s similar to me being willing to vote for Trump if he’s dead. (The only difference is I won’t vote for Trump if he’s alive!!!!)
Like it or not, we don’t have much in the way of choices.
Well, it’s nice to see Ray Kurzweil’s theories discussed. I confess I don’t understand the fears of an enlarged leisure class, although I have no doubt it will lead to an explosion of even worse science fiction.
There probably is no real reason we should be working more than 25 hours a week now (indeed, some skeptical Taylor-ite measurers of productivity speculate that that’s all we’re working–we’re just better at Bartleby-like concealment.)
But really–less need for hard work is a bad thing? I have spent decent parts of my life working hard (cutting down trees, caring for handicapped kids) and decent parts of my life working soft (in front of a computer managing information for companies that thought it important). Working soft is better. And I’m not dreading retirement, either.
I’m working on a couple of science fiction books now…
Lucia,
“Those who vote for Biden will vote for him whether he has dementia or not. Their alternative to not voting for Biden is Trump.”
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Those are two alternatives, but there are others: don’t show up, vote for the libertarian, or don’t vote for anyone. I actually know someone who selected the second option. 😉
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I don’t not know how many people who mostly want Trump to lose are willing to effectively vote for Harris. Really, her candidacy didn’t even make it to the primaries, because she is a) nuts, b) incompetent, and c) extremely unpleasant; not Hillary unpleasant, but close.
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I have to believe Ol’ Joe’s obvious dementia is not helping him with a segment of the voters. I can’t guess the size of that segment, but every time he says something bonkers, I think that segment has to grow.
Self learning AI has been “5 years away” since the 1960’s, ha ha. It is making progress though. Go was a much harder problem then chess or Jeopardy is my understanding. It will be a huge breakthrough if AI can figure out relativity on its own given the evidence without the answers. I think we are probably a long way from that, but I really don’t know. We have to get to a cockroach level first. AI can now discriminate between pictures of cats and dogs for example. How much is real AI and how much is clever common programming I don’t know. However the amount of time it takes to get from cockroach to dog will be way shorter than it took nature I suspect.
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The human brain is pretty limited. We can’t really increase it’s speed or memory capacity. We have figured out how to team up a bunch of brains effectively. But new breakthroughs are taking exponentially more time and effort. The single person in a lab changing the world phase of humanity seems to be over. Building new colliders is a pretty expensive proposition.
I guess the question is if dogs had toiled and worked for centuries and invented a better version of themselves (let’s call the invention humans), would that invention care very much about the future of dogs? Perhaps it would keep them around as pets.
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I bring up dogs because obviously cats would be immediately disposed of by their SkyNet! I mean, come on.
Tom Scharf,
“The single person in a lab changing the world phase of humanity seems to be over.”
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Maybe, but I am not convinced. Too many times I have been part of a “team” assigned to solve a difficult problem. Sometimes the team succeeds, sometimes not, but when it does succeed, it has always been because an individual had a clear insight which generated the solution; the rest was details.
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I don’t think it is going to take more than one person to generate a comprehensive theoretical model which simultaneously accounts for anomalous galaxy rotations/dark matter, Hubble red shifts, and “dark energy”, all at the same time. We are not there yet, but I doubt it will be a consortium of collider experts which generates that theoretical model. Some smart individual will.
FWIW:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/10/why-you-shouldnt-vote-early.php
Illinois is not on the list of states where you can do that. So either they missed that (more likely) or lucia is mistaken (less likely).
It takes a lot of people to build things like rockets and Hubble telescopes that allow information to be gathered to test theories and advance science. That one person won’t get it done with his telescope from Walmart and he won’t be grinding glass. Scientists have been standing on each others shoulders for a long time now. Certainly the very smartest are key to discovery over the just smart. The origami Webb telescope should be launching next year. $10B.
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/comparisonWebbVsHubble.html
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Mike M,
I don’t know about everywhere, but in Florida, if you vote early (in person) you can’t change your vote. When you cast your ballot, it is fed through a reading machine and there is zero information about who voted that way. So there is no way to have a do-over.
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If mail-in ballots are not counted until after election-day voting is over, then in theory an in-person vote could make the mail-in ballot invalid. But I don’t know if this is how mail-in ballots are handled.
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All the more reason to vote, in person, on election day…. after Ol’ Joe has spouted all his Alzheimer inspired rants.
SteveF,
Maybe, but I’m not holding my breath on that one. OTOH, we might already be there if the High Energy Physics community hadn’t been sidetracked by string theory. String theory explains everything by explaining nothing. Even better, it’s not falsifiable, or “not even wrong (Wolfgang Pauli)”
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/
The blog author wrote a book titled Not Even Wrong.
DeWitt,
“Even better, it’s not falsifiable, or ‘not even wrong (Wolfgang Pauli)'”.
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Yes, it is what I would describe as part of a “bandaids over bullet holes” approach to the obvious problems of theoretical physics.
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The existing physical models OBVIOUSLY break down at very large scales of time and distance. New thinking is needed. What is not needed is ever-faster and more insistent arm-waves involving ad-hoc explanations like “dark matter” nobody has ever found and “dark energy” nobody can even speculate on. It is all far too much like pre-Copernicus epicycles used to explain motion of the planets….. AKA wrong.
Thomas Fuller,
“I’m working on a couple of science fiction books now…”
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Everything I have read from you suggests this may in fact be your calling. Good luck.
The Ptolemaic model of the solar system isn’t exactly wrong. It’s just a different reference frame with the earth at the center rather than the sun or the center of mass of the solar system. It’s even useful to calculate eclipses. Admittedly, it doesn’t explain the motions of the planets, but it fits the observational data.
The problem is gravity. Einstein wasn’t able to come up with a unified field theory using his geometric methods and I don’t think anyone else has come particularly close since.
Battles in theoretical physics probably makes red vs blue look tame.
DeWitt,
“Admittedly, it doesn’t explain the motions of the planets, but it fits the observational data.”
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Of course it fits the observational data. So does any ad hoc addition like ‘dark matter’ that is used to explain a process which is not understood and accurately modeled. When you ‘make shit up’ it always explains the observations, without the difficulty of having to improve your current understanding. Which is always the hard part. That’s why both ancient and current observers made up their respective ad hoc explanations.
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That doesn’t make Ptolemaic or the current explanations of discrepancies physically correct… or even reasonable. I agree that the disconnect between gravity and everything else is a clear indication of a fundamental problem: theoretical physics doesn’t explain what it is happening at very large scales of time and distance, nor how to connect the small scale to medium or large scales. Some very new thinking is needed. I’m not seeing it so far.
Thomas,
I’d love to argue with you about how much we ought to work. Unfortunately.. I have work to do.
Briefly, I don’t have to work anywhere near as hard and much as I do. I work the way I do because I like to.
More power to you, Mark. I like choice.
SteveF,
Did you miss the part where it’s easier to calculate eclipses in an earth centered reference frame? The Ptolemaic model may be ‘wrong’, but it is useful.
Treating the observable cosmological observations like galactic rotation curves, the expansion of the universe and the behavior of galactic clusters as a breakdown of scale has been tried. It hasn’t worked. It’s, if anything, even more ad hoc, and less useful, than the Ptolemaic model. It’s nowhere near that simple. Dark matter and dark energy makes far more sense. It also solves the flatness problem, which scale breakdown doesn’t even begin to explain.
DeWitt,
We will see… assuming we live that long. I am confident nobody will identify the particles that make up “dark matter†(beyond today’s ad hoc nonsense). From everything I have read, the dark duo make no sense at all. IMO, they are just silly bandaids.
Thomas Fuller,
Minimum wage laws and others like Davis-Bacon have done far more damage to Blacks and other minorities than they have helped. They haven’t helped the restaurant industry either. The idea that a Federal $15/hour minimum wage law would help the economic recovery is simply ludicrous.
Here is a brief, plain English overview of what is known about transmission of the Wuhan virus:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6515/406
Mike M,
Thanks for that. A clear and concise article.
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“The majority of SARS-CoV-2 infections likely occur within households and other residential settings (such as nursing homes). This is because most individuals live with other people, and household contacts include many forms of close, high-intensity, and long-duration interaction.”
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“A crucial factor in community transmission is that infected individuals not experiencing symptoms can transmit SARS-CoV-2. Infectiousness may peak before symptom onset (7). Viral loads appear to be similar between asymptomatic and symptomatic patients (8), although the implications for infectiousness are unclear. People experiencing symptoms may self-isolate or seek medical care, but those with no or mild symptoms may continue to circulate in the community. Because of this, those without severe symptoms have the potential to be “superspreaders†and may have an outsized influence on maintaining the epidemic.”
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“Overdispersion means that there is more variation than expected if cases exhibit homogeneity in transmissibility and number of contacts; hence, a small number of individuals are responsible for the majority of infections. … For SARS-CoV-2, studies suggest that ∼10% of cases cause 80% of infections ”
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“If transmission is highly overdispersed, broad and untargeted interventions may be less effective than expected, whereas interventions targeted at settings conducive to superspreading (such as mass gatherings and hospitals) may have an outsized effect.”
Tom/Mike M,
What the article fails to mention explicitly: The initial infection of a person in the household is initiated out of the household.
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Barrett should be confirmed today. This process was much less hostile than I anticipated. I suppose the political calculus was another Kavanaugh circus would have hurt Biden’s chances, probably a wise move. Three SC justices makes the Trump clown show worth it in my view. My priorities are fiscal sanity and the protection of free speech (and thought). It should be noted I don’t support legislating from the bench and believe the spirit and words of the Constitution need to be respected until such a time as they are changed by the legislative process provided.
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Conservatives don’t win all the cases by far, but they win most of them that are at direct odds with the Constitution.
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The attacks on free thought are mostly from the private sector and social media now and they are unfortunately effective. I deplore these but feel they will eventually rectify themselves in time as the thought suppressors will collapse under their own oppressive weight. I hope I’m not wrong.
Lucia,
“Although transmission may be easiest and most frequent in households and congregate residences, community transmission connects these settings and is, therefore, essential to sustain the epidemic, even if it directly causes fewer cases. Inevitably, “community contacts†include a heterogeneous mix of interactions. The probability that any of these interactions results in transmission stems from a complex interplay of pathogen attributes, host characteristics, timing, and setting. Hence, the properties of community transmission are difficult to measure, and this is where much of the remaining debate around SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs.”
Tom Scharf,
“I suppose the political calculus was another Kavanaugh circus would have hurt Biden’s chances, probably a wise move.”
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I agree, Dems lost a couple of Senate seats because they went over the top attacking ‘gang rapist’ Kavanaugh. Barrett is a much less attractive target for borking than was Kavanaugh, and too politically risky to attack.
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I suspect Dems are mainly counting on gaining control of both the Senate and Presidency, then eliminating the filibuster and packing the court with four relatively young liberals like Sotomayor (55 when appointed) to ensure the court does’t block their “fundamental changes in how people lead their lives”.
Tom Scharf,
“….the properties of community transmission are difficult to measure, and this is where much of the remaining debate around SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs.”
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Which is what I found most disappointing about the article. They basically punted on the only issues that matter for public policy…. and economic damage.
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Surface contact transmission (‘fomite transmission’) is very unlikely to be a significant route of infection, but they didn’t touch that subject. The effectiveness of masks, a really hot-button subject, was completely ignored. Seems to me the authors carefully avoided any data which would suggest draconian policies are not very effective.
At least the article was honest enough to say they still really don’t understand it very well.
SteveF (Comment #192697): “They basically punted on the only issues that matter for public policy…. and economic damage.”
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Indeed. To repeat a quote that Tom cited:
They don’t really follow through on that. Maybe because they didn’t want to break ranks, maybe because they did not want to be “political”, maybe because they felt they could not get away with more.
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I don’t blame them for avoiding the mask issue; that is related to but outside the scope of the article.
Mike M,
“I don’t blame them for avoiding the mask issue; that is related to but outside the scope of the article.”
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Sure, once they carefully avoided the most important subject…. the effectiveness of “broad and untargeted interventions”…. they sure weren’t going to discuss the effectiveness of mandated mask use.
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I still blame them for punting on the only issues that matter: How does community (not household) transmission happen? Small aerosol droplets? Bigger droplets? Surface (fomite) transmission? Both?
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Without these answers, public fear, and the economically damaging public policies those fears enable, will continue, almost indefinitely. They hint that the most effective policies will minimize super-spreading events, but couldn’t bring themselves to actually say it. They hint that small children don’t spread the virus much, but don’t actually say it.
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BTW, the public school system in NYC is now suggesting they will never return to normal classroom instruction… and will eliminate all competitive entry requirements for their historically competitive high schools.
Are Kepler’s laws strict rules, or just approximates?
I believe earth centric fits Kepler’s laws, if you have just the sun and earth. Keep earth fixed, and the sun will rotate as an ellipse with the earth as one focus, etc.
Kelper’s laws:
First Law: Planetary orbits are elliptical with the sun at a focus. Second Law: The radius vector from the sun to a planet sweeps equal areas in equal times. Third Law: The ratio of the square of the period of revolution and the cube of the ellipse semimajor axis is the same for all planets.
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No provision for Earth being the center of the earth-sun system.
The community faced in 2020 the outbreak of coronavirus COVID-19, thinks fitting not be the changeless Strict measures charmed through numerous governments to baffle the spread of the disability, including the finding enjoyment in or complete closure of cinemas, forcing the vigour to perestroika and determine unknown ways to interact with the public. It intent engage several years before the further structure proves moving, covid-19SF3535sd$fsdfsdfsdf! as lengthy as each is hermitical film lovers are told to retain the most noted movies epidemics that filmmakers are lily-livered to pass nearby, and to compete with stories with reality.
WSJ ran an article today about coronavirus fatigue, specifically in Europe. What was striking is that mask wearing in public spaces in France and the UK has increased over the past few months and is very high, >90%. These places are also experiencing huge surges in cases. Part of the explanation is that people are not wearing masks in private social interactions that are happening much more frequently than a few months ago, but left unstated is that mask wearing is not magic.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pandemic-fatigue-is-realand-its-spreading-11603704601
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“Gallup polling over the same May-to-September period showed the number of Americans avoiding small gatherings with family and friends had fallen from 71% to 45%.”
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“The resolve to wear masks also appears to weaken in certain social settings. A U.K. survey found that 98% of people reported wearing a mask over a seven-day period ended Oct. 11. That figure dropped to 19%, however, when it involved one-on-one social activity.”
Tom
Microwaving the newspaper? No wonder she’s tired!
Tom Scharf,
I’m not sure it is ‘fatigue’ as much as it is the growing realization that the multitude of restrictions may just not be worth it, socially or economically. And by any rational measure, the restrictions most certainly are not worth it to people under about age 50. If you look at the ratio of confirmed cases to deaths in European countries with new “surgesâ€, nearly all are above 75 and some close to 200. Ratios like that can only happen if the age of those being infected is far younger than it was earlier in the pandemic. People will, in the long run, tend to act in what they perceive as their personal interests…. IMO, lots of relatively young people are starting to ignore the restrictions.
Lucia,
The only positive thing I have found in the hysteria is the silly (and quite funny) behaviors I often see… like some 30 odd year old driving alone along the interstate, windows closed, wearing a mask to avoid infection.
SteveF,
I admit I don’t understand people wearing masks while driving alone in their cars. Maybe I could understand it if they were driving delivery vans and dropping stuff off. Then taking it off and putting it back on might be a nuisance and time consuming.
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But most drivers are no longer taking signatures at doors.
SteveF, what I mean is if you keep Earth’s position as a fixed (0,0), then the Sun’s position would make an ellipse with the Earth as one focus. I don’t remember if I showed the second law works as well.
Mike N,
Sounds like Mike N’s laws, not Kepler’s. Kepler knew the planets move around the sun.
Barrett has been confirmed 52/48. I hope Harry Reid regrets his decision to force Obama’s many lefty judges through the Senate, but I doubt he does.
MikeN…. hemmm… transformation might work for sun described around earth. I’d have to do it. I doubt if subsequently the moon and sun would obey the rules together…
I guess I’ll have to do the math. But not tonight.
MikeN (Comment #192707)Are Kepler’s laws strict rules, or just approximates?
SteveF (Comment #192710)
Kepler’s laws: First Law: Planetary orbits are elliptical with the sun at a focus.
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Thinking about it most planet masses that did not fall into the sun possibly approached the sun at an angle when forming that would not allow for a true circular orbit hence the usual ellipse?
The other planets might exert a slight force on the orbital path as well.
There would be an unique speed for any approach that would culminate in a true circular orbit.
Ellipse is a bit easier and anything else either went into the sun or off to outer space.
Might have been a bit crowded in the past.
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Anything but Trump comment.
angech,
A circle is just a special case of an ellipse, with major and minor axis the same. All actual orbits of planets are ellipses, not circles. So is the moon’s orbit.
angech
Approximates. They were observational when Kepler first note them. Using Newton’s law of gravitation: they would be strictly true if there was 1 planet orbiting a much more massive object. They work very well for our solar system because the sun is Yuge compared to the planets and the planets are far enough to each other not to screw each other’s orbits up apreciabily.
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Comets often get screwed up if they approach far away stars or planets.
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Well…. yes and no. There is a relationship between distances and speed for a circular orbit. So there is a unique (speed, distance) pair that represents a stable orbit. Finding it is a high school physics problem.
Florid covid deaths are falling despite a continued rise in confirmed cases. The 7 – day rolling average has fallen to 61 per day. The state’s covid dashboard, with deaths listed by date of death, indicates the drop in rolling average will continue for at least several days, perhaps dropping below 50.
There were overnight riots in Philadelphia after police shot a black man on Monday afternoon who was wielding a knife and moving toward them. They shouted for him to drop the knife before shooting. 30 officers were injured during the subsequent rioting, with one officer run over by a pickup truck.
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Rioting is not a good look for the 100% Democrat controlled city.
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I predict condemnation of the police by local politicians and lots of early retirements by police officers to follow.
Lucia,
Elliptical orbits tend to be slowly circularized by tidal forces, so even a relatively non-circular orbit early in formation of the solar system would be expected to (very slowly!) drift toward circular. The moon’s initial orbit could have been quite elliptical, even though its orbit is now almost circular, since tidal forces are pretty strong in the Earth-moon system.
In a simple 2-body system using inertial coordinates, each body moves in an ellipse with the center of mass (cm) as one focus. The sun’s location is opposite the earth’s but (much!) closer to that focus by the ratio of earth’s mass to the sun’s.
Transforming to an earth-fixed system, the cm must describe the same size ellipse. The sun’s distance from the earth is a multiple [1 + m/M] of the earth-cm distance, so it should describe a slightly larger ellipse.
(Caveat: I haven’t looked at this in mathematical equations, so this reasoning may well be incorrect.)
SteveF (Comment #192743): “Florid covid deaths are falling despite a continued rise in confirmed cases.”
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Looking at national data from the Covid Tracking Project, 7-day average deaths may be leveling off at about 800 per day. But the last few days might be incomplete. Also, about two weeks ago positive tests leveled off for a bit then resumed rising. So it is way too early to declare that a maximum has been reached.
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It looks to me like 3 things are happening. Positive tests are trending upward. Deaths are lagging positive tests by about 2 weeks (plus or minus perhaps as much as a week). The CFR is trending downward.
Maybe it’s ghoulish of me to observe this. Pennsylvania has [a] greater chance of being a tipping point for Trump than any other battleground state according to 538. The rioting in Philly could have an impact.
The pollsters are going to end up looking like morons for a second time. They should move into climate modelling.
mark bofill,
“The rioting in Philly could have an impact.”
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Donno. It seems to me more likely to have an impact in the surrounding counties (Montgomery, Chester, Bucks, and Delaware) than in Philly itself. Of course, it is hard to say for sure what kind of local TV coverage the rioting and looting will get, but my guess is the local broadcast stations will blame the cops for everything….. including the looting.
One week to go, so I am going to make two not-so-bold predictions:
(1) Turnout will blow away turnout from 4 years ago.
(2) Nobody has a clue as to how that will affect the results.
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The high turnout presumably means votes from a lot of people who do not usually vote. My guess is that a major reason people don’t vote is that they figure it does not make much difference. Whichever party wins, we end up with the same old same old.
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I am also guessing that the reason turnout will be high is that people realize that Trump is not the same old same old. They probably mostly fall into two groups:
“Finally! We can escape the same old same old.”
“OMG! We can not take the same old same old for granted.”
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I have no idea which will predominate. Complicated by the fact that there will be Boden voters and Trump voters in both groups.
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We live in interesting times. Unfortunately.
SteveF (Comment #192750): “It seems to me more likely to have an impact in the surrounding counties (Montgomery, Chester, Bucks, and Delaware) than in Philly itself.”
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Maybe, maybe not. People in the suburbs may not feel they have much to fear from a breakdown of order in the city. But most poor black people know who will suffer the most from a breakdown in order.
Mike M,
About 40% of Delaware county is within 6 miles of the rioting. I suspect those folks may not feel terribly secure.
SteveF (Comment #192753): “About 40% of Delaware county is within 6 miles of the rioting. I suspect those folks may not feel terribly secure.”
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I did not mean to imply that there would be no impact in the suburbs. Only that there might be a significant impact in the city, possibly even bigger than in the suburbs.
Ah yes, the three body problem. Things get real hard real fast over long periods when more than two bodies are present. Not a bad sci-fi book either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem
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Orbits do wobble a bit due to Jupiter and other planets. When asteroids make close passes these slight errors can make huge differences in future trajectories. Basically inaccurate initial position and trajectories leading to huge errors over many passes.
“Had these officers employed de-escalation techniques and nonlethal weapons rather than making the split-second decision to fire their guns, this young man might still have his life tonight,â€
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De-escalation techniques are a great idea for officer training, but there is no reason to believe that they will work very often, especially with mental health issues. There is video of this incident, the guy approaches officers backing away with the knife, similar to a previous incident this year. There is a cycle of non-lethal weapons being introduced for police use only to be banned because they are sometimes lethal in edge cases as well.
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The immediate leap to looting and vandalism within hours of an incident based on social media rumors is not a great sign of things to come.
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This is a mental health incident, and it’s very unclear what should have happened differently. Multiple cops could have jumped the guy and taken him down with likely success, but who wants their spouse taking those kind of chances on the job? They could have just walked away, then what to do about crazy man walking around with a knife?
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I think they need to allow powerful “mostly” non-lethal weapons for this type of thing. The community needs to stop the insta-looting exercise, this is a very bad look.
Last week I voted by mail for the first time. Voting by mail saved an hour or two of my time. I hope I can trust this way of voting.
I am looking at these statements, like the one above, and those from detailed analysis to determine, in my expectation for the Covid infection rate to surge into winter, how far government restrictions could proceed further from even the most severe and precedent setting ones that were imposed earlier in the year. The statement above would be difficult to argue against since it makes sense given what we currently know about Covid infection and how it can spread – although in my view there is a lot we do not know. In general I am curious if the politicians in charge will see and acknowledge the damage a fear driven and one size fits all approach set of restrictions can do to our economic and psychological well being and consider more voluntary self-imposed restrictions based on individuals’ needs and views of their situations. Governments could make recommendations and provide information even when it involves seemingly contradictory conclusions.
What I am doing is attempting to predict a likely political response to the conditions sited in the above statement. I believe that masking has been an iconic reaction to and symbol of the Covid infection spread. I hear more and more about a federal mandate to require everyone to wear masks. In moderate to higher infection areas it has been my observations that a near 100 percent of the population adheres to mask wearing in public and private and would do so on a voluntary basis in those areas.
However, in an environment where cases are surging nationally I would not be surprised to see much stricter government mandates on places that would require mask wearing but also the types of masks that must be worn. The excerpted statement above points to the number of Covid cases that can be transmitted within the home setting even while implying that those cases could be brought into the home from a community transmission to a single family member. I can provide an example from real life from a recent incidence that occurred at the residence where my autistic grandson resides. It had a single staff member test positive for Covid-19 but subsequent testing of all the residents and staff were and are to date negative. I attribute that outcome to the protocols in place voluntarily at the residence – even though my grandson refuses to wear a mask there or at his school. My point here is, if the state judges that in residences, including family settings, the spread of Covid can be reduced with protocols, will these restrictions be made mandatory? And if so how would the federal, state or local governments enforce them?
I believe most of us realize that there are no major constitutional impediments to what the governments can impose in an “emergency” and that that nice lady, Amy Barrett will not be riding to our rescue from it. The only question which is not clearly posed is what constitutes an emergency. Can we translate the current emergency to lesser outbreaks of seasonal infectious diseases and other areas that big government politicians and their supporters consider in crisis?
Tom Scharf (Comment #192757)
October 27th, 2020 at 11:09 am
Ah yes, the three body problem.
I can remember the state of quantum mechanics when I was in college. All that sophisticated mathematics and physics could solve the hydrogen two body problem (wave equation?) but higher number bodies required better and faster computers to approximate I believe.
Question for all out there: How many body systems can be quantum mechanically solved today?
My area is still under mask orders and compliance is very high indoors. Plenty of covid around still. They just don’t understand the primary infection routes outside the home because they don’t have the tools to figure it out. They also think it is unethical to figure it out in experiments in lab settings which I still find inexplicable.
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National mandates are going to be quite unpopular with a certain set of people, let’s call then Sump Trupporters. Still stinging from an election loss they will not be in any mood for compliance to Biden liberty limitations. Realistically Biden’s mandates won’t do much to control anything given the built in non-compliance due to politicization of the issue pre-election. Biden would be wise to not pour gas on that fire.
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I expect “Trump’s vaccine” will become “Biden’s vaccine” overnight and pundits will switch arguments immediately, thus further deteriorating trust in vaccine safety. The usual suspects from Team Science will immediately lecture the rubes on their stupidity.
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The restrict liberty contingent on the progressive side will find out pretty quickly that population compliance is not something they can just switch on by dictate, and if they try to order the police to enforce these restrictions they might just find out they have not made many friends in that group lately.
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The extent of emergency powers being tested by the courts would be a good thing. The government has fairly broad powers here but they will no doubt be deemed temporary and limited in scope. They will need to prove these limitations are effective, which is a big problem given the great uncertainty.
The number that I would think that the politicians react to is the number of Covid hospitalizations vis a vis the overwhelming of the healthcare system.
I heard this weekend and without verification that hospitals get more revenue from governments for Covid cases. Is that the case? If so how many “extra” hospitalizations might that lead to than are medically required. Also what actions have occurred to reduce the hospitalization pinch point?
Tom Scharf,
“National mandates are going to be quite unpopular with a certain set of people, let’s call then Sump Trupporters.”
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I think they would be very unpopular with the Supreme Court. There is zero legal precedent for anything like a national health mandate; such issues have always been local and state. I suspect that is how they will remain, even if Biden is elected.
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Besides, Biden wouldn’t take office until late January…. by then, it will be much harder to argue for a need for any specific mandate, never mind a national one (see the falling death rates in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere, for example). Local police have zero legal obligation to enforce Federal mandates…. in many places there would be nobody will to enforce such mandates. It is just not going to happen. And by the end of January, Biden may not remember anything about covid.
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Kenneth,
“And if so how would the federal, state or local governments enforce them?”
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They couldn’t and wouldn’t. Even if the local authorities were stupid enough to attempt to get warrants to enter people’s homes (and I doubt they ever could!), the push-back would be overwhelming… including shooting stand-offs. This is not China; people have guns and would use them.
DaveJR (Comment #192749)
October 27th, 2020 at 8:47 am
The pollsters are going to end up looking like morons for a second time. They should move into climate modelling,
_______
Perhaps you are referring to (a) the the voter who will tell the pollster he plans to vote for a candidate when he is ashamed to admit he plans to vote for that candidate’s opponent, and/or (b) the voter who isn’t ashamed of his choice but for whatever reason wants to give the pollster the wrong answer.
I doubt there are enough of these misleading voters in polls to make a difference in the upcoming presidential election. Biden is polling stronger than Hillary did previously. I’m not even sure the misleaders made the difference for Trump in that election.
Mike M,
Since you made election predictions, I will as well.
1) Turnout will be modestly higher than in 2016, not dramatically.
2) Trump will carry nearly all the states he carried last time, save for possibly Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.
3) I put Trump’s chances at about 50% if he carries PA, and under 25% if he does not.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #192762)
October 27th, 2020 at 11:55 am
“My point here is, if the state judges that in residences, including family settings, the spread of Covid can be reduced with protocols, will these restrictions be made mandatory? And if so how would the federal, state or local governments enforce them?”
_________
If by “family settings” you mean houses where people live, I don’t think government restrictions can be mandatory. In rental apartment and condo apartment buildings, I’m not sure whether government could have mandatory restrictions for common areas such as party rooms, but apartment building owners and condo associations might.
Trump narrowly loses most of the battleground states, loses by a large margin in the electoral college. I can say with high confidence that mental health counselors will not be made available at academic institutions for the great trauma felt by young Trump supporters as they were in 2016.
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Ultimately an important lesson will be learned by the under 30 population a couple years from now that a change in the White House does not make very thorny intractable social, financial, and foreign policy problems any easier to solve.
Hmmm …. anything wrong with this strange statement?
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538:
“Barrett’s confirmation is incredibly consequential, too, as she will likely shift the center of gravity away from Chief Justice John Roberts and toward the right edge of the court’s conservative wing, which could potentially result in rulings that are significantly outside the mainstream of public opinion.”
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I think the requirement is legal opinion, not public opinion. As far as public opinion goes, it’s apparent pretty fickle. Same article:
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“Now, though, Americans may actually have warmed to the idea of Barrett joining the court before Election Day. According to tracking polls by Morning Consult, support for confirming Barrett rose from 37 percent when she was nominated to 51 percent after the hearings were over and a Gallup poll conducted during Barrett’s confirmation hearings found a similar result. Notably, according to that Gallup poll, this was substantially higher than the share who wanted the Senate to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 (41 percent), and is even slightly higher than the support previous nominees since 1987 have received on average (48 percent).
Barrett’s confirmation wasn’t that divisive”
C. S. Lewis saw this coming over 60 years ago:
I lifted the quote from: https://healthy-skeptic.com/2020/10/27/a-head-full-of-coronavirus-research-part-46/
Unfortunately, he does not give the source.
Tom Scharf,
You mean like Roe v Wade or Windsor v. United States?
Mike M.,
Technocracy is Plato’s Philosopher Kings in a slightly different form. It’s equally stupid and would, like socialism, rapidly deteriorate into tyranny when people ignored the ‘experts’. It’s not possible for any single group of people to know everything, or not yet anyway.
Ton Scharf,
“…support for confirming Barrett rose from 37 percent when she was nominated to 51 percent after the hearings were over and a Gallup poll conducted during Barrett’s confirmation hearings found a similar result.”
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Ya well, she seems nearly a saint: Talks the talk, and more importantly, walks the walk. She gets glowing praise from even Dems who clerked with her at the SC, was first in her law school class, has the admiration of her students, is generous to a fault, is kind to all, not a hint of scandal in her life, etc, etc. Even the crazy Dem Senators on the judiciary committee recognized that personal attacks on Barrett would only back-fire, and cost them next week. I think those Senators are wrong about most everything, because they have no guiding principles, save for an insatiable lust for power.
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But choosing to not attack Barrett personally they got right.
DeWitt
Even if Roe v Wade is overruled, abortion will remain legal in tons of states.
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I suspect a similar thing will happen with same-sex marriage because it already was and most people see that the “parade of horribles” some claimed did not happen. As long as sacramental marriage is allowed to remain along side legal marriage, and no religious person is required to officiate a sacramental marraige that violates there religion, there really is no strong argument against same-sex marriage. Priests, ministers, Rabbi’s etc don’t have to officiate these things. Those who object to these marriages really don’t have much of a leg to stand on.
SteveF
Yep. She is in many ways the idea lots of Roman Catholics would strive to be. Almost everyone fails.
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I find her nothing short of amazing.
DeWitt,
“You mean like Roe v Wade or Windsor v. United States?”
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I think those are two pretty good examples. Kelo was an example of Orwellian corruption of the plain words of the Constitution for a lefty political end. The SC just made shit up in all three instances, overruling the Constitution in Kelo and the expressed wishes of the voters and their representatives in the others.
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The endless social conflict Roe has brought on and the withering criticism of Kelo may inhibit the SC from venturing so far into legislating and re-writing the Constitution from the bench, at least for a while. Justice Stevens was clearly wounded until the day he died by the broad criticism of his most infamous opinion… and IMO, he deserved every bit of that criticism and more. Worst SC opinion in a century.
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But if Dems pack the court with lefties, the potential SC mischief in rewriting laws and subverting the Constitution is unlimited. Roe and Kelo will become small distractions.
I have no prediction for the election. I suspect Trump is going to lose. He might win. I don’t think the world ends if he loses. I look forward to the issue being decided one way or another so we can put it behind us.
mark bofill (Comment #192782): “I have no prediction for the election. I suspect Trump is going to lose. He might win. I don’t think the world ends if he loses.”
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If the Republicans hold the Senate, the Republic can survive Biden/Harris. But they will leave it in even worse shape than Obama did.
Funny how court stacking is only stacking when the other side does it and how it is well balanced until any new appointment is made.
Will approach this election like the last.
Go to bed on election result time like a groundhog and only come out when it is decided.
I expect Trump to lose just like I did last time.
Lucia,
“..there really is no strong argument against same-sex marriage. Priests, ministers, Rabbi’s etc don’t have to officiate these things. Those who object to these marriages really don’t have much of a leg to stand on.”
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Sure, so long as religions are not required to condone same-sex marriage, there is not a lot to argue, at least from my personal POV. But mine is not the only POV. If the argument you make is that strong, then surely state legislatures will all enact suitable laws and be done with it. The problem I have (and it is the same with Roe) is that these cases placed the justices above the elected representatives, “discovering” constitutional requirements which completely escaped notice for 200 years. Roe gave voters no recourse save for protests and endless legal conflict; it was the most blatant usurpation of legislative power by the Court in my lifetime. I personally have no objection at all to early stage abortions; I do strenuously object to Roe.
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It is surely true that in many places (an probably most places) abortion will remain legal, even if Roe is reversed. Same with Windsor. These judicial rulings are socially destructive for no good reason.
Mike,
Most likely, yeah.
Oh, I’m sure I’ll be up all night election night, more fool me. The election probably isn’t going to be decided on Nov 3’rd anyway, what with mail in votes taking time to count. I’m a junkie when it comes to politics is all.
angech,
“Funny how court stacking is only stacking when the other side does it and how it is well balanced until any new appointment is made.”
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What are you talking about? Court packing (not ‘stacking’, which doesn’t exist) is not filling vacancies on the court, it is adding two to six new justices (all with a specific political POV) specifically to stop the court from ruling as it otherwise would. The SC has had nine justicies for about 150 years. If Dems increase the Court to 11 or 13, then you can bet the next time Republicans have control (as they did just a couple of years ago), they will add 4 or 6 more; wash rinse, repeat, until the court has hundreds of justices…. a lifetime appointment to a “super-legislature” if there ever was one. It is crazy.
SteveF,
I’m just predicting that most states will keep SSM. The arguments agaisnt it were never actually strong– but inaction less work than action. So same sex marriage laws were being enacted slowly. I think reversing to take it away is going to be very, very difficult.
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This is separate from whether the way it got enacted was constitutionally right or wrong.
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Some states would make abortion illegal. I prefer it legal, but those who think it’s murder have a clear message.
angech,
You’re not American…. right?
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Court packing has a specific meaning. It is the action of congress specifically increasing the size of the court in order to create vacancies that can be filled by the administration of their choice.
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Filling vacancies as justices retire and die is the ordinary process. It is absolutely normal that a President will nominate people whose views align with his. This has always happened and is not considered “packing”. It is also normal for the Senate to vote down or up based on their views. This has also always happened.
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There is also always a lot of rhetoric and hot air about what is “right” or “wrong”. The rhetoric has gotten stronger over the past 40 or so years… but it’s part of the “advise and consent” process and part of politics.
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But no matter what the rhetoric: The court ending up more conservative or liberal is not “court packing”.
SteveF (Comment #192787)
October 27th, 2020 at 5:25 pm
The legislature can also subtract justices and I would suppose they could decide which judges to subtract -maybe those with the least seniority.
Packing and unpacking the Supreme Court would at least recognize that the court is political and it is more orientated towards that than interpreting the Constitution and the law. That the court can be constitutionally packed and unpacked should be made clear just like getting rid of the filibuster and appointing a justice immediately before the election. The Supreme Court can also decide that an important decision made long ago is no longer constitutional. It is a Constitution and not common law.
I think those on the right should face up to the reality that the Constitution is not going to be the institution that will save us from a very authoritarian government.
As an aside and making a connection to Covid restrictions, politicians are not inhibited with restrictions on personal freedoms because of the Constitution but more with how fearful or not the populace has became and made the restrictions more or less amenable to a majority of potential voters. Governments reactions to violators of restrictions with a large majority in favor of the restrictions will be harsh and violent reactions of a minority would be put down with great force and MSM cheering it on providing it is their party of choice doing the putting down.
Kenneth,
I doubt Congress can “unpack†the court. I do not believe Constitution provides a practical means to remove justices (they serve for life, after all). Congress could reduce the number and then not fill the excess seats as judges died or retired. But simply remove justices? I don’t see a mechanism.
. I am clearly not a cynical as you about the Constitution, and especially not with the SC’s current composition.
angech,
You’re not American…. right?
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Sigh.
Sat my ECFMG in ? 1970 and passed but a combination of MTGOMD’s
And a lack of fortitude led to my deciding to stay in Australia.
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Probably a good thing for me and even better for America.
Country upbringing conservative, uni education left wing many years.
Older age back to conservative.
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Contrarian always.
People used to watch soap operas.
Now you guys are living in one.
Four years is a pretty good run, they tend to get a bit stale.
SteveF,
I think the only way to “unpack” is the reduce the number of seats and then let the number decline by attrition. The political will for this would be difficult because
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(a) They won’t want to do it if they control the house, senate AND the president.
(b) A president probably wouldn’t sign the bill if it meant he was the one to not be allowed to appoint anyone during the “unpack” state. So they’d have to override a veto.
(c) A united (Dem/Dem) or (GOP/GOP) congress/senate might not want to risk passing it to start happening in the upcoming as yet unknown president who they might like. They only want to hamstring the president of the other party.
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Ken: of course you are right that packing or unpacking the court is not unconstitutional. There are ways of doing it that might be…. but merely doing it is possible.
angech,
What is MTGOMD?
Lucia,
For all those reasons and more, short of a constitutional amendment, Congress is never going to reduce the membership on the Supreme Court. Whether of not Dems take the insane step of packing the court is not yet clear.
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What is clear is that progressives view the Senate as an “illegitimate†body, because its membership is not proportional to population in different states. So affirmation of Barrett is automatically illegitimate. Likewise the electoral college is considered “illegitimateâ€. Since these things are set out in the Constitution, the logical conclusion is that progressives also reject the legitimacy of the Constitution, and I thing that is a fair description. If progressives were trying to change the Constitution via amendment (using the procedures the Constitution provides), I would say “more power to yaâ€. But that is most definitely not what they are trying to do; they are trying mostly to subvert it by any means available. For a while that was just legislating from the bench by progressive justices, but now it is a grab bag: creating extra states to gain long term control in the Senate, packing the SC with progressives, agreements between states (unconstitutional, of course) to bypass the role of the electoral college, etc.
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The common thread is a simple rejection of the Constitution by progressives. I think that is the fundamental cause for the growing political divide in the country, a divide I find both dangerous and destructive.
As I recall same sex marriage was voted on in 31 states and rejected 30 times. Meanwhile “equal rights” for civil unions were passed by legislatures without many problems. It has always been the perceived intrusion into sacramental marriage by the militant activists and their demands to be fully “accepted” unequivocally that caused the problems. You can’t demand people accept your chosen values. A bunch of Trump supporters camping out in the NYT editor’s office demanding acceptance isn’t likely to change his mind on anything except how radical the group is. You can demand to be treated fairly by the law and expose unreasonable intolerance.
The SC is an equal branch of government here in the US. There are mechanisms to change how it works but the intent is not to make it subservient to another branch. The Constitution is the founding document of the nation and is basically sacred in my view. All branches are subservient to this document. The SC’s most important cases are interpreting whether laws and actions by the executive branch pass constitutional muster. A detachment of this prime directive because it is inconvenient to the whims of social opinion would be a disaster.
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I’ll be the first to admit the conservatives got lucky with SC timing of justices. But it was just that, luck, not a nefarious plan. The end result here is a stricter accordance of laws and actions with the founding documents which is undesirable in some quarters. It is certainly possible that the Constitution did not foresee everything and requires changing. There are ways to update it, but these are very high hurdles, especially in today’s partisan environment.
I’d prefer abortion to remain as it is to avoid social upheaval. Both sides have legitimate and irreconcilable arguments here. If it is overturned I just don’t see much real world impact beyond forcing people in Alabama to drive across state borders to get their abortions, etc. It’s not worth it.
Tom
Yep. Most states will keep it legal because most people support it being legal. This is even true of some people who think it’s immoral, wrong etc.
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Correct. And yes, the GOP got lucky. Part of this was owing to RGB’s decision to not retire sometimes in Obama’s term– ideally, the 3rd year.
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Supposedly, she wanted Hilary to replace her. Well…OK. That didn’t happen. Likely as not the not-retiring issue was as much the ordinary not-wanting-to retire issue that affects many justices and the “have Hillary replace me” was just icing on that cake.
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Do bear in mind there seems to have been more than just luck. Some say there was work behind the scenes to encourage Kennedy to retire. He could have hung around like Ginsburg, but didn’t.
Tom Scharf,
“You can’t demand people accept your chosen values.”
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But lots will try, and try to use government to enforce that demand (eg ‘make a wedding cake celebrating our gay wedding, even though you think that wedding is immoral… or else’).
SteveF, Congress has the power of impeachment and is very vague about cause and how that might be interpreted. It requires 2/3 of the Senate to convict. That could be a path to reducing the number of justices with a concurrent statute on the size of the court. That would probably only occur if one party obtained a majority in the House and super majority in the Senate.
However, it would take a simple majority in the House and Senate, if the filibuster is abandoned in the Senate, to reduce the size of the Supreme Court and I see nothing preventing that happening post facto, i.e. I see nothing unconstitutional about that including the elimination of sitting justices. I am confident that you and most posters here are aware of the necessary and proper clause (see below).
“The size of the Supreme Court is set by statute: Title 28 § 1 of the United States Code. Under the necessary and proper clause, Congress has the power to pass legislation about how “all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof” are carried into execution. Supreme Court justices are officers of the United States.”
If you are looking for creativeness in accomplishing a legislative simple majority change of the Supreme Court I believe a current House bill will provide it:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-termlimits/democrats-prepare-bill-limiting-u-s-supreme-court-justice-terms-to-18-years-idUSKCN26F3L3
In my view all that prevents this currently from happening is tradition and the potential negative reaction to overturning traditional processes and not the Constitution per se. A left wing that is impatient with changing government and a compliant public with the advice and consent of the MSM is not going to allow tradition to get in their way.
Lucia,
“Likely as not the not-retiring issue was as much the ordinary not-wanting-to retire issue that affects many justices and the “have Hillary replace me†was just icing on that cake.”
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Sure, but I think she was also thinking the Senate might change hands in 2016. The Dems lost control of the Senate in 2014 (which probably surprised her). By 2015 Obama could only have replaced Ginsburg with a relative moderate like Garland, not a firebrand lefty with as much respect for the US Constitution as Che’ Guevara. She probably figured Republicans were very unlikely to beat Hillary, and so was willing to wait and see if Senate control returned to the Dems. Even if Republicans maintained control, the worst case was someone like Garland replacing her.
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The only real miscalculation was assuming Republicans wouldn’t win the White house in 2016.
Kenneth,
“The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour, and shall, at stated times, receive for their services, a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.”
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Hard to see how you remove a SC judge under that clause of the Constitution, or limit their term to 18 years, absent an amendment…. unless you say “good behavior” means always agreeing with specific political positions. I just don’t think voters would accept that kind of Orwellian reading.
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If Dems pack the Court, I think unpacking it is not going to happen, just ever more packing in the future.
What Schumer should say to McConnell
Ye have sown the wind…
Thomas Fuller,
It was Harry Reid that got this crazy ball rolling… Reid did indeed ‘sow the wind’.
Although the Senate had approved 99% of Obama’s judicial nominations, Republicans were holding up three nominations to the DC Circuit, because they believed those judges would be far too political in reviewing Federal agency rules and regulations. Reid decided ending the filibuster and getting those judges confirmed was worth the potential long term damage. Obama could have nominated less ideological judges for those seats; he refused.
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“Democrats won’t be in power in perpetuity,†said Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), a 27-year member. “This is a mistake — a big one for the long run. Maybe not for the short run. Short-term gains, but I think it changes the Senate tremendously in a bad way.†November, 2013
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IMO, Reid did terrible damage to both the Senate and the country; he could have insisted (on multiple occasions) that Obama compromise on legislation and on appointments. Reid didn’t do that. History will not be kind to him, nor to Obama.
Thomas Fuller,
If you are going to make a point, make one that is comprehensible.
SteveF (Comment #192797): “The common thread is a simple rejection of the Constitution by progressives. I think that is the fundamental cause for the growing political divide in the country, a divide I find both dangerous and destructive.”
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Concise and accurate.
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Tom Scharf (Comment #192801): “The Constitution is the founding document of the nation and is basically sacred in my view. All branches are subservient to this document. The SC’s most important cases are interpreting whether laws and actions by the executive branch pass constitutional muster.”
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But there is a problem with that. There is no mechanism to ensure that the Supreme Court remains subservient to the Constitution. As a result, the progressives on the Court have felt free at times to rewrite the Constitution and to usurp the powers of the other branches as well as the states. The Left is furious that, for the time being, the Court will ensure compliance with the Constitution.
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SteveF is right about there being no mechanism other than impeachment for removing Justices. The “good behavior” clause might provide a path, but it has never been used. Any attempt to implement it will surely be met with a Constitutional challenge. I have a pretty good idea how SCOTUS would rule.
SteveF (Comment #192810): “History will not be kind to him, nor to Obama.”
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That depends strongly on what happens next week. History is written by the winners.
The legislature is always free to write clear laws that are within constitutional boundaries to prevent the SC and other courts from legislating from the bench. A lot of the work of the court is guessing what written laws are suppose to mean or dealing with conflicting laws.
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For example, the court never wanted to rule on whether carbon emissions were part of the Clean Air Act, but Congress couldn’t agree one way or the other so the court was forced to rule.
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There is no doubt that activists who can’t get their way through lawmaking try to force their way through innovation in the court system (see environmental lawyers). There is a system there and they can try, and they are usually not very successful and it is very expensive (see where all the money goes for environmental causes). There are exceptions but they are just that, exceptions.
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Gun laws, abortion restrictions, and free speech restrictions typically find a very uninviting reception at the highest court. It may very well be that racial preferences have a very short shelf life for the future as well. I think the system is working moderately well, but the expectation is always that people will work any angle they can get to get what they want.
Tom Scharf (Comment #192815): “The legislature is always free to write clear laws that are within constitutional boundaries to prevent the SC and other courts from legislating from the bench.”
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That is true as long as the court is merely interpreting a law enacted by Congress. But it does no good when the court makes decrees that have no basis in the law or Constitution: Roe v. Wade, Obergefell v. Hodges, Trump v. NAACP, and many others.
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Here is a good discussion of the good behavior clause:
https://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/3/essays/104/good-behavior-clause
The bottom line is that the only means of removal pf judge is impeachment and conviction, although maybe the requirement of good behavior sets a lower bar than high crimes and misdemeanors.
SteveF (Comment #192808)
October 28th, 2020 at 9:35 am
I wanted to show that unpacking the court is a possibility and makes packing the court easier for some to digest. It prevents the situation that you have described whereas the court continues in unlimited growth in the number of justices.
Anthony Fauci made this comment recently:
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/939871?src=mkm_covid_update_201027_MSCPEDIT&uac=213176SZ&impID=2642424&faf=1
Using monkeys, Pfizer showed that their vaccine cleared the virus from the subjects when challenged in both the nose and lungs. I think Fauci has his head where the sun don’t shine, but that shouldn’t be news.
Mike M,
“The Left is furious that, for the time being, the Court will ensure compliance with the Constitution.”
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That is true, of course. But there is more than that to the outrage: The left understands the court could actually force broad compliance with the constitution by reversing egregiously unconstitutional court opinions like Roe, Kelo, the individual mandate (Obamacare), and institutionally sanctioned racial discrimination. I think those potential reversals motivate the left more than the prospect of constitutional rulings in new, unrelated cases.
DeWitt,
“I think Fauci has his head where the sun don’t shine, but that shouldn’t be news.”
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He doesn’t want public fear to ever end, since that would end destructive government policies….. can’t have that. IMO, Fauci is a moral midget who allows his personal politics to guide his every action.
From the link above describing the Democrat House bill on Supreme Court Justice term limits I would judge that term limits certainly do remove justices without impeachment or a Constitutional amendment and could be accomplished without the filibuster with simple majorities in the House and Senate.
“Term limits for high court justices have for years had support from a number of legal scholars on both the right and the left. Several polls in recent years have also shown large majorities of the American public support term limits.”
The U.S. Constitution doesn’t specifically grant Supreme Court justices lifetime tenure. Instead, Article III, Section 1, states that federal judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behavior” and nothing more.
From Ezra Klein to Chief Justice Roberts himself, the notion of Supreme Court term limits is supported by both conservative and liberal legal scholars because it is fair, does not require amending the Constitution, and gives voters an opportunity to have input on the Court through their vote for president.
In attempts to answer my own questions posted here about the many body problem I found this link that I think does some plain talk explaining the classical mechanical and quantum mechanical cases.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/252/what-are-the-primary-obstacles-to-solve-the-many-body-problem-in-quantum-mechani
My question on the validity of hospitals getting extra revenue from some Covid-19 cases confirms it as true, but the link below argues against hospitals intentionally misclassifying Covid-19 cases in favor of Covid-19. I would believe that argument, but it does not touch on the issue of the extra revenue for admission of a Covid-19 case being a motivating factor for lowering a standard for admission or even what that standard might be.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-covid-19-death-count/
I looked for standards/criteria for admission and discharge for Covid-19 patients. I found the one link directly below providing criteria for discharge.
https://www.bumc.bu.edu/id/covid-19-response/clinical-algorithms-for-admission-and-discharge/
The link directly below lists some criteria for admission. It appears to me that admission criteria leaves more discretion to those doing the admission and in going from EC to admission than in the discharging end.
https://www.nebraskamed.com/sites/default/files/documents/covid-19/summary-guidance-document-inpatient-icu.pdf?date=05022020
Increasing hospital capacities for handling Covid-19 case appears to depend on alternative care sites, more hospital beds and increased staffing. I was not able to find any comprehensive plans for capacity increases online which gives the impression of winging it.
Foot note:
This post would appear to be me having a conversation with myself and that does happen more often since I have been living alone. It is acceptable in my house but not so sure it will be looked upon favorably at this blog.
Kenneth,
If you read further in that article, you will see that other legal scholars, including some who support 18 year terms, say that only a Constitutional amendment would allow it. As someone noted above, the constitutionality of such a law might not be looked on favorably by the SC.
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BTW, I find most of what you write is interesting, even if I don’t reply.
Kenneth,
Yeah me too. I only respond when I have something I think is reasonable to say, which isn’t all that often. But I enjoy your comments.
Kenneth Fritsch: “The U.S. Constitution doesn’t specifically grant Supreme Court justices lifetime tenure. Instead, Article III, Section 1, states that federal judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behavior†and nothing more.”
To me, that seems like lifetime tenure, barring impeachment for “non-good” behavior. Why do you think otherwise?
[edit: cross-posted with SteveF’s #192824, who also thinks an amendment is necessary.]
Perhaps Congress could open up new judgeships that are of limited terms, but I think even this would violate the ‘hold offices during good behavior’ provision. FISC judges do get rotated out, but they keep their main judgeship.
The filibusters of judges and other appointments wasn’t about those individuals. Republicans were unhappy with Harry Reid’s tactics of limiting amendments by ‘filling the tree’ with his own pointless amendments.
A primary tool of the minority had been forcing Senators into uncomfortable votes that they could use at election time.
MikeN,
There were obviously multiple points of contention. Reid was the focus of many of them.
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Reid is a perfectly dreadful person: “He didn’t get elected, did he?â€. AKA blatant lies are OK so long as you get what you want.
I don’t think term limits for SC Justices, Senators and Representatives can be impose by legislation. The SC has already ruled against states imposing term limits on Senators and Representatives. I haven’t read the decision in a while, but what I remember strongly implied the need for a Constitutional Amendment.
HaroldW (Comment #192826)
October 28th, 2020 at 1:46 pm
Most of what I have written and opined concerning the Supreme Court is not what I think is Constitutional, but rather how I think a party or parties impatient to change how the government operates might interpret the sometimes vague wording of the Constitution.
“shall hold their Offices” could be construed to mean good behavior during their term of office and that term being whatever the law said it was. If the Constitution had been written to say for the life of the Justice and/or on the Justice’s voluntarily leaving office then there would be no weasel room.
I am sure I can find a legal “expert” who can rationalize this argument and I will now go look.
I should have added that hold their Offices could also be construed to mean hold their judgeship but not on the Supreme Court. I believe when David Souter and Sandra O’Connor left the Supreme Court they continued their “life time” appointments in lower courts
https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/08/experts-tout-proposals-for-supreme-court-term-limits/
However, you look at these proposals, in my mind, I see it all aimed at structuring a “living” court and the original meanings of the Constitution be hanged.
SteveF (Comment #192796)
What is MTGOMD?
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Met the girl of my dreams.
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Did not realize they had they good sense to put 9 judges on 150 years ago. That is almost the perfect number for decision making, some say 6 or 7.
The extra bonus in the larger number is that the blame and the kudos gets shared by a larger number of people appointed by different administrations and presumably a bigger number of state backgrounds.
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The current problems in part are due to the Democrats and RBG struggling to keep her going to next term even though with pancreatic cancer and chemotherapy she was simply not up to doing the job effectively. There has to be a mechanism to apply common sense to the role.
She should have retired 4-5 years ago instead of clinging to the limelight and let another Democrat nominated judge in.
The people appoint the government and the government appoints the judge in that 4 year term, if they have the numbers. Common sense.
What a hoot when people comment about outrage when their “side” loses influence as if having influence is a god given right but only when to their side.
Kenneth Fritsch (#192831)
Thanks for that clarification. Yes, I’m sure that some will think that SCOTUS term limit legislation is ok; some pose no limits on legislative or executive action.
I think an amendment would be required, but I also believe that there would be broad support for such an amendment, if only to avoid squabbles such as we have endured this year & 2016. [On the other hand, if such squabbles distract Congress from passing damaging legislation, perhaps that’s a good thing. /cynic]
angech
Actually…. it hasn’t always been 9. The number has varied.
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But the word “packing” was used when Roosevelt proposed to increase the number specifically to change the political balance of the courts so that the court would stop overruling laws the legislature passed and Roosevelt signed into law.
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In other instances, the numbers changed for other reasons. For example: The number of district courts increased as the country grew. One of the jobs of the justices is to over see the district courts , so the number was increased rather than have judges needing to oversee too many cases that arouse in more courts.
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This is generally not called “packing” because the motive was different. Admittedly, it can give the president a chance to fill the court with justices more to his liking if it occurs…. but the motive was still different from Roosevelts and it happened to occur during a time when the debate over SCOTUS rulings was not as contentious. At those times when the number was increased it was not the motive to fill all the slots with “X-leaning” judges who they thought would rule in a particular way.
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It is legal for Congress to increase the number of justices for any reason. The debate is over whether it is right.
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Regardless of the debate “packing” has a specific meaning.
HaroldW,
I agree an amendment would be required; it might even garner significant support. But I doubt it would help much if the goal is to make the Court appointments less partisan. Only a constitutional amendment requiring 3/5 or 2/3 vote for confirmation in the Senate would do that….. that requirement, in this sadly partisan era, would force Presidents to nominate people who are relatively close to the political center, or never get their nominees confirmed. There was a time not long ago when a dedicated lefty (Ginsburg) or a dedicated righty (Scalia) could get 2/3 or more, but that time is long past. The necessity to compromise, which Senate supermajority rules used to require, have eroded to the point that the Senate has effectively abandoned compromise. I would be all for a Constitutional amendment requiring supermajorities in both houses to pass all laws and approve all executive appointments. I think divisive governing is destructive governing, but unfortunately, I suspect a supermajority amendment would never gather much voter support, and even less support among politicians.
Two covid observations:
Daily reported deaths in Florida continue to decline, in spite of slowly rising reported cases, with the 7-day trailing average now at 51; it peaked at about 180.
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Brazil, with poor healthcare infrastructure and limited mask requirements (which are very rarely enforced!) has had dropping deaths for a couple of months, from ~1,100 per day in early August to 430 yesterday (7-day trailing averages). Brazil now has slightly higher total deaths per million than the States.
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The demographics in Brazil are favorable compared to the States (32.6 years vs 38.1 years median), but health care is not nearly as good. For its demographic profile, Brazil looks to represent a near worst case scenario, with total deaths likely to reach 0.1% to 0.11% of the total population. With a little older population, but better care, that could be a reasonable final rate for the States as well.
In countries with a healthy jury system, jury members are more attuned to public opinion than lawyers and judges. When they feel something should not be a crime (it happened here in Québec, Canada in the ’70s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgentaler ), they can decide not to convict the accused even if the law says it is a crime.
Judges should stick to interpreting the law, and keep their private opinions somewhere private.
FDR’s threat to pack the court was followed by two justices, that had previously opposed the more restrictive New Deal initiatives on Constitutional grounds, now ruling in favor of the initiatives. FDR appointed nine Supreme Court justices on being elected to four 4 year terms and serving a little over 3 of those terms. The New Deal was a prime example of the government using an emergency, which in this case was the Great Depression, to increase the power of government. We need not be reminded that a lot of that power was not temporary.
I suspect if FDR had needed to pack the court to get his New Deal programs implemented he would have been able to pull it off with a concerted effort to appeal to fear and the “emergency”. The Roosevelt administration was able to lock up US citizens of Japanese descent during the WW II emergency with little opposition.
Lest we think the idea of emergencies and government increasing its power and reach is a relatively newer development we have the following from Alexander Hamilton:
I do not see the constitutional bounds set for income tax rates, a wealth tax and wealth tax rates and confiscatory inheritance taxes. I point this out as a reminder that even without changing the Supreme Court make-up there is a lot of power that the government can wield. Those who might want to impose even more extreme governmental powers will most often use an emergency, real or invented, to undertake actions like packing the court or even bullying/intimidating the court. With so-called conservative justices like Roberts able to rationalize the ACA mandates based on construing a penalty as a tax, and even after it being sold by congress as not being a tax, there was little need for progressive to consider packing the court after pushing the “health care uninsured emergency”. From my readings Supreme Court packing during FDR’s time was even less popular than it is today – even though it is difficult for me to reject the idea that the court was intimidated. I think the real push for court packing in current times will come out of some “emergency” where the court might rule to limit government reaction to it – unless, of course, sufficient members of the court cave.
Kenneth,
I can only conclude that Hamilton’s political judgement was sometimes very comparable to his judgement about the prudence of pistol duels. The very worst unconstitutional actions of the US Federal government (like the internment of citizens of Japanese descent in 1941) were justified by such rubbish arguments of “emergency needs”. On a smaller scale, we have the many intrusions upon liberty justified, IMO wrongly, by the covid pandemic.
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I expect there is at least a 50% chance the ACA individual mandate is declared unconstitutional by the SC early next year, as I think it should have been when first considered.
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Whether or not Dems decide in response to pack the court (or try to) is unclear. I think there are a number of Democrats in the Senate from relatively conservative states who understand they would be thrown out of office if they agree to do away with the filibuster completely and pack the court. Same with adding new states: almost guaranteed to send 3 or 4 Dem senators packing. Schumer can’t do away with the filibuster without those votes. The only way Schumer would get those votes is if the at-risk senators decide that they are ready for retirement and don’t care if they lose office; imponderable.
SteveF (Comment #192843): “I expect there is at least a 50% chance the ACA individual mandate is declared unconstitutional by the SC early next year, as I think it should have been when first considered.”
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Can’t happen since there is no individual mandate and has not been one for two or three years.
I would say the quality of your healthcare system isn’t very relevant for a global pandemic with no proven effective treatments. I’m struggling to find anything particularly relevant even among regional cultures etc. Cultures with more contacts per capita tend to fair worse. The declines and expansions of the virus are almost random (don’t think so? feel free to try to predict them).
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Pandemic fatigue is a big deal now. Vaccine still months away at best. Science continues to pat itself on the back as it condescends to the rubes while failing miserably. No vaccine. No treatments. No usable advice beyond wash hands, wear mask, stay away from indoor crowded spaces. Perhaps that should have been the expectation all along but this version of science has been billing itself as magical for a while now. A humbling setback in perception that they don’t recognize.
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The spreads of plagues in the middle ages was measured in decades, not months. These were a bit different (rats, etc.) but the interconnectedness of today’s world is a huge super spreader. Ironically people in the middle ages were way safer from covid than circa 2020.
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A hospital in Spain reports 80% of hospitalized covid patients were vitamin-D deficient. The usual single study, observational, blah blah blah. At the moment it seems like low vitamin-D is a flag for worse outcomes, but taking extra vitamin-D even if deficient may or may not help anything.
https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2020/study-finds-over-80-percent-of-covid19-patients-have-vitamin-d-deficiency
Mike M,
The mandate is still part of the law, but the penalty for non-compliance has been set to zero. That penalty can, at any time, be increased by Congress without limit. The unconstitutional part of the law isn’t the amount of penalty, it is that a mandate to purchase health insurance, with detailed requirements for what that health insurance must include, is part of the law. As Scalia (and others) pointed out, the penalty is no tax; it is pure coercion to force behavior. If the legality of the ACA stands, then there is no limit at all on what the Federal government can coerce citizens to purchase.
Tom Scharf,
Interesting paper. Doubt remains as to whether low vitamin D is the cause for higher susceptibility or just correlates with a more fundamental cause… eg, a weak immune system and low vitamin D levels could just be strongly correlated, but one doesn’t cause the other. The fact that those covid patients who were already on vitamin D supplements (with high blood levels) and covid patients with low vitamin D had statistically identical outcomes (severity, deaths, length of hospital stay) suggests correlation, not causation. But nobody can know for sure based on this study alone.
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The other interesting data in the study is the very weak effect of “comorbidities”. They were not even statistically significant in most cases.
The government is already forcing taxpayers to pay for healthcare through Medicare and Medicaid. In this case you are paying for * other people’s * health “insurance”, ha ha. The legalities of the ACA are somewhat interesting in isolation, but healthcare needs a comprehensive solution beyond let poor people die on the sidewalk. This has been discussed ad naseum, but the market isn’t working for healthcare in the US, we have the most expensive solution and bad relative outcomes. The perception is that the Democrat’s seem to at least be trying, even if their answers are tax and spend, socialized medicine. The Republicans need better answers, an answer at all would be a good start.
Tom Scharf,
“….healthcare needs a comprehensive solution beyond let poor people die on the sidewalk.”
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If possible, please provide a link or reference where someone actually supports letting poor people die on the streets. I doubt one exists.
I agree with Steve. We have a program called ‘Medicaid’ already, so I don’t see why poor people are going to be dying on the sidewalk.
Also, Trump has a healthcare proposal. Doesn’t get much coverage on the news, and maybe isn’t a very interesting proposal anyway, but he does have one.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/America-First-Healthcare-Plan.pdf
I’d like to know out of the starting gate why exactly we should think Medicaid is inadequate.
Glen Greenwald has resigned from The Intercept after being censored on the Biden story.
SteveF, you misunderstood Scalia’s dissent. He is saying that if the mandate were labeled as a tax, then it is acceptable.
I think the Supreme Court has already ruled the mandate unconstitutional, but Roberts declared it was just a tax.
Roberts at least placed a limit on government power, by saying it could be unconstitutional if the tax were set too high.
The minority did not speak to this point.
The objection to the ACA individual mandate is being forced to buy a product by the government. The point is you are effectively already buying this same product for poor and old people. It’s just semantics if you ask me. People who don’t get health insurance will still get healthcare when they show up at the emergency room. You are already paying for this with increased insurance costs. So I think the objections to the ACA mandate are academic when the bigger picture is considered.
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If people don’t want to be forced to buy health insurance I interpret this argument to be that they don’t want insurance and are willing to accept the consequences of that risk, namely being denied healthcare when not able to pay.
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Poor people still get free healthcare while other people who refuse coverage do not if they can’t pay? Or everyone gets healthcare even if they refuse to buy it?
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I’m much more interested in how to make the healthcare system more cost efficient than semantical changes to the Gordian knot of how it is paid for.
MikeN,
Ignoring the facts for a moment (eg the Congress specifically described the mandate penalty as a “penalty” not a tax, and explicitly planned to raise that penalty to force complete compliance by everyone), I think you misunderstood Scalia’s objection.
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A penalty to compel behavior is not a tax. A tax would be based on income, or if really regressive, just a flat value for everyone. The key difference is the link between coerced behavior and obligation to pay. Social Security/medicare taxes are taxes. Income taxes are taxes. Sales taxes are taxes; same with real estate taxes and excise taxes. Coerced purchase of a product is not a tax, it is simple coercion. Roberts, to his eternal discredit, decided to confuse the two to preserve a clearly unconstitutional law.
Glen Greenwald is pretty much left of left in the grand scheme but has no love for the Democratic party and the leftish media complex in the US. He will not tolerate censorship and restrictions on speech. He detested the Clintons. He always thought the Russia collusion story was total BS from the start. I generally like the stuff he writes, even if our politics don’t line up.
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This is a pretty funny read, talk about petty.
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-the-intercept/
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“The narrative Glenn presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies — all of them designed to make him appear as a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum. It would take too long to point them all out here, but we intend to correct the record in time. For now, it is important to make clear that our goal in editing his work was to ensure that it would be accurate and fair. While he accuses us of political bias, it was he who was attempting to recycle the dubious claims of a political campaign — the Trump campaign — and launder them as journalism.
We have the greatest respect for the journalist Glenn Greenwald used to be …”
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My guess is his version of events is pretty accurate.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept
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“The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles.”
For the record I think the ACA mandate decision by the SC was wrong as SteveF has specified. They changed whether it was a tax or penalty several times along the way. This doesn’t mean the fundamental problem of paying for healthcare in the US doesn’t need to be changed.
Glenn Greenwald’s rather harsh resignation letter is eerily similar to Bari Weiss’s from the NYT.
After I read all the garbage Greenwald went through, I gave him $50 to subscribe to his blog. Yes Tom Scharf, his resignation from the company he co-founded is very similar to Bari Weiss’s resignation from the New York (Fish Wrap)Times. In both cases, the organizations are run by people who place the need for defeating Trump above all else; they simply will not allow anyone to say the obvious: Joe Biden appears up to his neck in a cesspool of corruption, selling influence to enrich his family and himself.
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I disagree with most of Greenwald’s preferred policies, of course, but supporting honest journalists over the hacks that now dominate the MSM is worth the money. It is at least possible to have a meaningful conversation with someone who is honest like Greenwald, even when you disagree. That conversation is not possible with those so motivated by their politics that they will not acknowledge factual reality.
Greenwald’s article that was disallowed:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-biden-censored
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This is really just a stock Greenwald rant on “the press prefers an outcome and they are blind to anything else”. I have no idea why the editors would be so threatened by it, there isn’t much new stuff there.
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Greenwald publishes emails discussing the article with the editors:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-editors-showing
SteveF, Scalia would have been OK if ACA had a 5% income tax on people who did not buy approved medical insurance.
He did not object to government using tax power for coercion.
His objection was that ACA did not have a tax, but instead a penalty for not buying health insurance.
MikeN,
Scalia did not write a separate opinion of his own, but joind a common dissent which said in part about Ginsburg’s claims in her dissent to Roberts opinion:
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It is clear that the four in dissent saw clearly what was a stake: do individuals have agency and liberty, or are they always subject to the demands of the Federal government in all things and every part of their lives? They answered a clear and firm “no†to the individual mandate. With Barrett replacing Ginsberg, I think there is a reasonable chance the Court will reverse Sebelius, and mealy-mouthed Roberts be damned.
Reversing Sebelius, does not contradict what I am saying.
If ACA were passed again with the individual mandate replaced with a 5% income tax on people who do not purchase health insurance that meets the government’s requirements, then Alito and Thomas would not object, as they did not in NFIB, and presumably also Kavanaugh, Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett(RGB!).
It wasn’t just Roberts that was OK with individual mandate as tax.
MikeN,
Did you actually read the opinions?
The unsigned dissent rejected the ACA as unconstitutional for multiple reasons:
1) It coerced states by threatening to withhold existing Medicaid funding unless they agreed to expand medicaid dramatically (Roberts agreed with this and that part of the ACA was struck.)
2) The law as written was unconstitutional because the power to force participation in commerce (not to regulate commerce) meant the power of the Federal government to control peoples lives was effectively unlimited, and no longer meaningfully limited to the specific powers the Constitution enumerates.
3) Interpreting the actual words of the statute (“penaltyâ€) as meaning “tax†was beyond the judicial power under the Constitution, and so itself unconstitutional.
4) Even if an unconstitutional judicial re-write of the pain text to substitute tax for penalty were allowed, the bill was then unconstitutional because it was a tax bill initiated in the Senate not in the House, as required by the Constitution; ergo again unconstitutional.
5) As construed by Roberts, with a penalty suddenly becoming a tax, the form of that tax would appear to be a “direct tax†which is extremely limited by the Constitution… and so again of questionable constitutionality.
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Instead of sending the law back to Congress for the repair it needed, Roberts, to his eternal discredit, twisted and distorted the Constitution to keep the most Constitutionally damaging part of the law in force. Shame on him. As I said, with Barrett on the Court, there a reasonable chance Sebelius will be reversed. And Roberts be damned.
SteveF,
If the House passed a modified ACA law with an X% surtax for those without “adequate” medical insurance (rather than a “penalty”), that would seem to satisfy your 3), 4), & 5). Leaving only 2). I think that 2) is the fundamental problem — I agree that it would seem to place few limits on Congress as to its ability to dictate behavior.
Right now, both R & D are willing to invoke governmental control of health care, at least with regard to coverage of pre-existing conditions. I think we’ve started on a path which leads inevitably to a single-payer governmental system similar to that of other countries.
Need we be reminded that there were four justices who had absolutely no problem with the concept that the Federal government has total control over all private conduct and did not need any Roberts weaseling to get there. Anyone in my view wanting to at least maintain the personal liberties we should now enjoy would want the court to return to this issue and fix it.
On the other hand consider a packing of the court with a few justices of the political bent of the 4 justices who were OK with the mandate. One of those justices, I believe it was Kagan, was asked if the ruling means the Federal government could mandate what food we bought and as I recall she did not come up with a direct reply.
I am not familiar with the case(s) to be brought to the court concerning ACA, but Amy Barrett did talk a bit about the issue of separability in her hearing when she was questioned about the ACA.
HaroldW,
“If the House passed a modified ACA law with an X% surtax for those without “adequate†medical insurance (rather than a “penaltyâ€), that would seem to satisfy your 3), 4), & 5).”
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Well, two things. 1) Congress did not pass such a law. The ACA remains unconstitutional on multiple counts. 2) The overreach of the ACA remains, rendering most other Constitutional limits on Congressional power meaningless.
SteveF: Sorry, I meant to say that if Congress *were to pass* such a law…
And I agree about the unlimited power Congress seems to be allowed by SCOTUS.
HaroldW,
I would add it is important to keep the camel’s nose out of the tent.
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Kenneth,
Yes, there are still four votes (three very solid), on the court to dismantle the limitations the Constitution sets on Federal power. I remember ~20 years ago being stunned by an interview I saw on TV of Justice Breyer, where he discussed his judicial philosophy. His position was that it is essentially illogical, and even immoral, to “interpret” the constitution based on what it actually says and means. He stated clearly that doing so was entirely inappropriate and that the “interpretation” of the constitution had to “evolve” based on changing political needs over time. That led to a discussion of “the living Constitution”, but by that point I was nearly ready to vomit, so I turned it off. I concluded Breyer has zero respect for the Constitution and the rule of law…. it is for him 100% about the political power needed to force “progress”. Kagan and Sotomyor seem to be identically inclined. It is all about power.
Wasn’t Justice Breyer the one that invoked the Commerce Clause to justify banning guns near schools? I think the argument went something like “education is very important to commerce, by its nature, modern day commerce covers multiple states.” Ipso facto.
A very high percentage of the US population is quite satisfied with their current healthcare. The most negative comments come from those who would point to the higher percentage of GDP that goes to health care costs in the US and the supposed lesser outcomes when compared to nations with a single payer system. Those promoting that idea I doubt see any unintended consequences in going to a single payer system when making this simplistic comparison and ignoring what is different about the US.
Our Medicare and Medicaid programs are not sustainable from a financial perspective as neither are the single payer systems of other nations. The recent talk of the magic of government debt and printing money by those who would encourage much more government spending on programs like health care is an admission of a longer term financial problem in the classical sense. Their solution is the fairy dust of Modern Monetary Theory. This argument may have seemed too far out there to be taken seriously, but the Covid-19 crises has provided an excuse for the total abandonment of fiscal discipline and profligate government spending, and in turn has brought this argument evidently into much greater favor. Our Federal Reserve has more recently been buying up both public and private debt in unprecedented amounts, keeping interest rates artificially low and encouraging more government spending. They are certainly practicing MMT even if they may want to avoid calling their actions that by name. This situation applies to not only the US but all developed nations of the world.
Both Medicare and Medicaid are going broke while in effect being subsidized by private insurances that make up for the lower edicted and unsustainable rates for Medicare and Medicaid. In order to have Medicare for all would require government rationing of health care services unless the percent of GDP spending on health care was allowed to stay near the same, or in more likelihood, go up.
With enterprises such as health care being run by a monopoly government system we should not expect any major innovations or improvement in the delivery of these services. Even with all the limitations of the government involvement in and regulation of our current system positive changes are being made.
There are changes that could be made to make our current system more efficient like changing regulations that limit the supply of doctors and other health care workers, allowing considerably more of a doctor’s work/duties to be performed by lesser trained associates, allowing insurance groups to be formed more readily to share risks over larger numbers, allowing insurance to operate across state borders, fixing tort law that causes medical practice insurance to cost dearly and if it is judged that third party payments make health care more expensive get rid of the tax deduction of corporations for health care insurance.
There are issues in the US that cause poorer health outcomes than in other countries independent of the health care system like the prevalence of obesity in the US and other bad habits and addictions. In a relatively free society those problems need to be addressed along the lines of individual responsibility and with inputs from family and other private organizations. Consider how likely a government official or politician is going to tell someone or a group of potential voters that they eat or drink too much.
HaroldW,
“…both R & D are willing to invoke governmental control of health care, at least with regard to coverage of pre-existing conditions.”
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Sure, but there is a very large potential range of that control. Demanding that people purchase heath insurance (and coercing them to do it) is not required. I think the underlying conflict is a common thread we see across a range of public policy disputes between right and left: shall a citizen have the right to conduct their life as they wish (avoiding criminality, of course) and be held responsible for their choices, or shall that citizen conform to the demands of the majority, whatever those demands are…. while being held responsible for virtually nothing, thus ensuring equality of outcome? The right adheres to the former, the left to the later.
Medical care is a very special case and this legal chicanery will only be used for items of utmost social importance. A pretty seductive argument for anyone who hasn’t watched rights and liberty get shredded once the finger is removed from the dike. Speech will only ever get restricted for the real Nazis, right? That’s what YouTube and Twitter promised. Apparently the NY Post is the 3rd Reich. I am very, very distrustful of “just this once” arguments from anyone, especially the activists.
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The Constitution can very much be a living document, it has intentional high hurdles to make legal changes to it. Anyone who simply wants to reinterpret it needs to be stopped, and for the most part, they have been.
Kenneth,
“In order to have Medicare for all would require government rationing of health care services unless the percent of GDP spending on health care was allowed to stay near the same, or in more likelihood, go up.”
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Of course. Rationing of care is always part of a single payer plan. It pretty much has to be. The more true cost of care and benefits of care become disconnected, the greater the demand for ever better care. In a single payer system without rationing, costs will explode, almost without limit.
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If they don’t have to pay for it, everybody wants the standard of care Trump got with his covid infection; but that is just not possible.
Perhaps you heard that “Death Panels” weren’t very popular? It is sad that limitations on care due to cost and stratification of benefits depending on what you can pay can’t be discussed like adults in the media and politics. My view was always of course there will be death panels, there have to be, every single payer system has them. Instead politics and the media deviate into some fantasy land that is irrelevant to even listen to.
A piece on just how deep the swamp of federal bureaucracy is:
https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/30/what-i-saw-inside-the-dc-swamp-proved-trump-needs-four-more-years-of-draining/
Not surprising, but still shocking.
This is weird. In spite of the huge surge in Wuhan virus positive tests, not enough people in the vaccine trials are getting sick. They are falling way short of expectations.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/10/29/it-may-be-time-to-reset-expectations-on-when-well-get-a-covid-19-vaccine/
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Do people in the trials get tested regularly? Or do they have to report that they are sick to get tested?
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And this seems to me like good news (although lucia won’t think so): The FDA is getting cold feet about issuing an EUA for a vaccine.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/10/23/fda-shows-signs-of-cold-feet-over-emergency-authorization-of-covid-19-vaccines/
Mike M,
Most of the people who would get the emergency approved vaccine will be elderly elderly who are the greatest risk from covid-19; hard for me to see that any unexpected long term negative effects will outweigh the benefits of greatly reduced risk of death. By the time the vaccine is reaching the remainder of the population there will be many months experience (and many millions who have received the vaccine). I just don’t perceive there is very much risk in the emergency approval.
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WRT to testing vaccine trial volunteers: My understanding is that they are supposed to report any symptomatic illness and get immediate testing/evaluation, but in addition there is regular follow-up and testing, including blood samples to monitor how the immune response to the vaccine evolves over time. If I remember correctly, there are four or five follow ups for all volunteers.
This comment went to moderation, so I am posting a second time.
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Mike M,
Most of the people who would get the emergency approved vaccine will be elderly elderly who are the greatest risk from covid-19; hard for me to see that any unexpected long term negative effects will outweigh the benefits of greatly reduced risk of death. By the time the vaccine is reaching the remainder of the population there will be many months experience (and many millions who have received the vaccine). I just don’t perceive there is very much risk in the emergency approval.
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WRT to testing vaccine trial volunteers: My understanding is that they are supposed to report any symptomatic illness and get immediate testing/evaluation, but in addition there is regular follow-up and testing, including blood samples to monitor how the immune response to the vaccine evolves over time. If I remember correctly, there are four or five follow ups for all volunteers.
SteveF, I did read the opinions. I believe I discussed them here at the time.
The dissents specified only that ‘the bill doesn’t say it’s a tax; it is not a tax’. No mention that passing it as a tax would make it unconstitutional.
I do not remember anything like 4) appearing in the opinions. However, I believe Jonathan Turley has such a lawsuit against ACA. There are other tax provisions that would meet the same objections. Harry Reid took a random bill passed by the House, stripped out everything but ‘be it enacted’ and pasted this bill into it.
Sounds like the FDA wants to continue to let people die so they can do more “science”. Wow!
According to the link I posted above (Comment #192895), Pfizer has not yet reached the first interim assessment which is to take place once they have 32 cases. They expected to reach that by the end of September. Either I am doing my math wrong, or that is bizarre.
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32 cases among ~15K in the control arm would be 0.2%. I estimate ~200M susceptible people in the general population (excluding children and people who have already had the virus). 0.2% of that is 400K. That would take 10 days at the mid-September rate of new positive tests and less than 6 days at the present rate. Yet they have not achieved that after ~40 days. And that is not making any allowance for the fact that most cases in the general population are never detected.
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It seems like either they only recruited in places that had already had a lot of cases and now have few cases or the placebo provides protection against the virus. Is there another possibility?
Mike M,
They may have selected places with lots of confirmed cases…. expecting, like the CDC, that very few people have existing resistance, so there should be plenty of new cases in those places. If those regions actually have very few susceptible individuals remaining, that would explain the lack of cases among volunteers. I think we can be reasonably sure placebos don’t offer protection.
SteveF,
The bit about the placebo was facetious.
The U.S. as a whole has about 180 cases/day/million. I think the only states with less than 60-80 are Maine and Vermont. New York has about 100/day/M and New Jersey has about 150/day/M. So it is strange that the placebo group is under 50/day/M. Especially since they should have a higher detection rate.
Mike M., your calculations about infection rates seem to be correct. We’ve seen articles about the high, possibly excessive, amplification cycle counts (=low threshold) for general Covid tests. Perhaps Pfizer is using a higher threshold in order to be certain there’s an adequate virus load. That should translate into a lower detection rate.
HaroldW (Comment #192908): “Perhaps Pfizer is using a higher threshold in order to be certain there’s an adequate virus load.”
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Interesting. But that does not seem to be the case. From the protocol:
NAAT means “nucleic acid amplification–based test” which I think means PCR. And “local testing facility” implies a standard test.
The test is a comparison of the sample with the vaccine versus those with a placebo. If the test is looking for an effectiveness of the vaccine that is less than 100% and perhaps closer to 50%, the rate of infections in the test group would come into play in attempting to show some degree of statistical significance of the difference in the two groups. If the infection rate in both groups is exceptionally low it become more difficult to determine a statistical difference.
If the tests are completely blind to everyone doing the statistics, the overall infection rate for the combined groups would come into play in determining when a reasonable statistical significance could be derived. Are these tests blind to those doing the statistics?
I would suppose that if the combined results for both groups is exceptionally low it would also make the significance difficult to determine. Are the numbers of people being tested increased throughout the testing period and does it have an indefinite end point?
Kenneth,
“ I would suppose that if the combined results for both groups is exceptionally low it would also make the significance difficult to determine.â€
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That is exactly the issue. The Pfizer protocol(already published by Pfizer) lays out how the significance will be calculated. They say they are waiting for a certain number of total cases based on their expectation of the range of efficacy…. the earliest analysis will take place when the total number of cases reaches a number where a very effective vaccine would be expected to show statistical significance between number of cases for the vaccine and control groups. If the difference is not statistically significant at the first checkpoint (either way: clearly effective/clearly not effective) then they will not announce results, but will wait for later check points with more cases to evaluate effectivity.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #192910): “If the tests are completely blind to everyone doing the statistics, the overall infection rate for the combined groups would come into play in determining when a reasonable statistical significance could be derived. Are these tests blind to those doing the statistics? ”
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The people doing the analysis can’t be blinded. But the decision as to when to do the analysis is blind. Assessments will be done when they reach certain numbers of total cases (32, 62, 92, 120, 164) among all participants. So if people in the test group get sick, they will reach those points sooner.
SteveF (Comment #192911): “If the difference is not statistically significant at the first checkpoint (either way: clearly effective/clearly not effective) then they will not announce results, but will wait for later check points with more cases to evaluate effectivity.”
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That would slow down application for approval. But the Stat story says that the first checkpoint has not been reached:
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I suppose it is possible that the guy writing the story got it wrong.
Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (the earliest to likely be approved) are based on injecting messenger RNA contained in lipid vesicles, which leads to normal cells mimicking (immunologically) cells actually infected with virus. Seems to me likely that if one is effective so will the other (or both ineffective). From everything I have read, the messenger RNA approach seems to elicit the broadest immune response: multiple types of T-cells as well as antibodies to the proteins the RNA codes for. It is quite different from conventional vaccine approaches. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next 6 months.
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I expect that the second dose reaction to this type of vaccine would likely generate significant symptoms for a short time, and so may be not so pleasant. After all, T-cells are going to attack and kill perfectly normal cells which have been “infected†with the messenger RNA… which is the normal response to a real infection.
Mike M,
I did not mean to imply they had reached the first checkpoint; it appears they have not. Everything Pfizer has said suggests the number of cases has not yet reached a checkpoint number. Of course, they could be lying out their behinds to avoid negative publicity of the vaccine failing to show good efficacy at the earliest checkpoints.
Maybe it IS a placebo effect. Two possibilities.
(1) Maybe people who think they have been vaccinated are less likely to panic at the first hint of a cough or sore throat and therefore less likely to get tested, in comparison with the general public.
(2) Maybe the people who volunteered are especially concerned about catching the virus and thus are being very careful about activities that might lead to exposure, resulting in a very low rate of infection.
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The second seems much more plausible.
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p.s. – I guess the second is not actually a placebo effect, it is a selection bias.
Mike M,
I agree, your 2) seems more likely. What the drug companies need to do is offer enough money for enrolling to induce young ‘deplorables’ to get the vaccine…. bar-hopping 20-somethings, not worried about grandma, are more likely to catch the virus. Even $1000 a head for enrolling is small change compared to the trial cost. Those most likely to enroll: good citizens, practicing social distancing and mostly staying home, are not going to catch the virus very often. Just sayin’.
MikeM
That’s my guess.
My county in Florida (~155,000 total population) has a total confirmed case rate equal to about 1 in 30 people, and a death rate equal to a bit over 1 in 1,000 people. The confirmed cases are dominated by a Hispanic minority: ~15% of population, but ~45% of cases where ethnic identity is reported, even though a disproportionate number of deaths appears associated with assisted living/nursing home care… probably not Hispanic people.
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I would bet a lot of money that the vaccine trials have not enrolled a large number of Hispanic people in my county. At this point, it may not matter: there are very few additional cases and almost no additional deaths in the county. A general guide for vaccine trials: Do not hunt for rabbits where there are none.
SteveF (Comment #192917)
(2) would have been my choice, but I also think that we are probably not on the correct path – sounds too easy. Would not the people responsible for the testing be aware of all the psychologies involved.
Don’t pay the volunteers a lump sum of cash but rather pay their bar and restaurant bills up to some limit – maybe even throw in payments for dancing costs pro rated on crowd size.
(Please pardon the random interruption)
Does this sound like satire to anyone else? Except it’s not the Onion or the Bee, this is the Federalist.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/31/5-big-questions-over-spacex-declaring-martian-independence/
(this concludes my random interruption)
SteveF (Comment #192917)
“What the drug companies need to do is offer enough money for enrolling to induce young ‘deplorables’ to get the vaccine…. ”
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I doubt you mean an over representation of youth in the covid-19 vaccine trials. Protection by and reaction to a vaccine may differ by age, something important to find out.
Actually, most covid-19 vaccine trials exclude the elderly, those 70 and older as I recall. The authors of the linked article think that could be a problem.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2771091
Kenneth,
” Would not the people responsible for the testing be aware of all the psychologies involved.”
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I assume little beyond that the bureaucrats I have encountered (government or corporate) are incredibly stupid and incompetent.
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“Don’t pay the volunteers a lump sum of cash but rather pay their bar and restaurant bills up to some limit – maybe even throw in payments for dancing costs pro rated on crowd size.”
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Lucia would maybe enroll if dancing were paid for. 😉 But putting your sarcasm aside: no, that would be encouraging risky behavior. A lump sum payment to enroll, with suggestions to avoid infection, would leave them free to do what they think is right. Besides, the people you most want enrolled are the potential partying “superspreaders” not the say-at-home-wallflowers, and preferably superspreaders who are not going to die if they don’t follow good advice and the vaccine doesn’t work.
Based on all the info presented here might it not be that the first checkpoint is generally not a predicted date and that the expectation of it occurring some time soon is merely a possibility looking at tails of the expected distribution of possible cases?
Kenneth,
Yes, it is possible the trial is just especially ‘unlucky’, falling on the tail of the distribution, so hasn’t reached the number of cases needed to evaluate efficacy. But I think more plausibly, the trial enrolled a population that is at significantly lower risk of infection and/or enrolled people in regions with significantly lower regional risk of infection.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #192920): “Would not the people responsible for the testing be aware of all the psychologies involved.
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SteveF (Comment #192923): “I assume little beyond that the bureaucrats I have encountered (government or corporate) are incredibly stupid and incompetent.”
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Indeed. Even more, they are unimaginative. So they assume that this case is the same as previous cases; like generals preparing to fight the last war.
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But this virus is not like previous viruses. The level of fear is far beyond what is justified by the actual risk. Transmission was highly overdisperse to begin with and has been made even more so by fear and restrictions. The psychologies involved are unprecedented. So it is not at all surprising that the experts fail to take that into account.
I very much doubt that the trials have been merely unlucky. It seems that their expectations are off by a factor of at least 5.
OK_Max,
“I doubt you mean an over representation of youth in the covid-19 vaccine trials.”
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No, that is what I mean. Bar-hoping 20-somethings are not going to die from covid-19, effective vaccine or not. And even if you say, “Well, you have to test on the most vulnerable”, I would suggest that while that is true, knowing for certain that the vaccine is effective and safe for younger people means you can establish herd immunity…. and reduce the risk of infection for everyone…. even if the vaccine turned out to be less effective and/or more dangerous for the elderly. I think we need to focus on the prize: reduce the total number of QALYs lost by the time herd immunity is well established.
Mike M,
“The level of fear is far beyond what is justified by the actual risk. Transmission was highly overdisperse to begin with and has been made even more so by fear and restrictions.”
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Yes, and my experience is that it has gone way beyond just crazy. You have perfectly healthy 20-35 year olds acting like their lives are in constant danger, and worse, that the lives of their 2 to 10 year old kids are even MORE in danger. It’s all nuts, and it is driven by 100% irresponsible reporting of risks. Nobody in the MSM will ever state the obvious: if you are healthy and under 40, you are far more likely to die in a car accident than from covid-19. And kids? More likely to die from a lighting strike. With covid-19, people make personally destructive decisions based only on fear that is not supported by reality.
Given the latest virus blowouts in the US and Europe I will once again beat my dead dog. Not doing challenge trials for the vaccine due to .. ahem … “science ethics” is insanity. It baffles me that this is not even controversial. I guess I must be some kind of Nazi prison camp doctor or something, ha ha.
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The vaccine is likely to not work as well in the elderly if it follows normal trends is my understanding. This group can be more susceptible to the virus and the vaccine’s side effects. Ironically because of this they tend not to enroll lots of elderly people in vaccine trials.
SteveF (Comment #192928)
“knowing for certain that the vaccine is effective and safe for younger people means you can establish herd immunity…. and reduce the risk of infection for everyone…. even if the vaccine turned out to be less effective and/or more dangerous for the elderly.”
_______
I hope you are right, but if the first vaccine is not effective or safe for older people, many will choose to do without it. The risk here is a partially effective vaccine could reduce public confidence in better vaccines in the future, and thus increase the amount of time needed to reach herd immunity. That’s why I would prefer all age groups in trials for the first vaccine.
Tom Scharf,
“Not doing challenge trials for the vaccine due to .. ahem … “science ethics†is insanity. It baffles me that this is not even controversial. I guess I must be some kind of Nazi prison camp doctor or something, ha ha.”
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I thought you were Jewish. 😉
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In any case, challenge trials are being considered, but only to define infection/dose relationships and how risk of infection varies with exposure conditions. I do not see they are being anywhere considered for vaccine trials. Like you, I find it beyond bizarre. It is the kind of study that gives rapid and very definite results. Come to think of it, that could be one of the objections. Like with the heroic Fauci, ending the pandemic is not exactly in everyone’s professional interest. Where is the glory if the pandemic ends? I think there is none. Compensate people for the risk they take for any trial, and be 100% above board about the size of that risk… I don’t see how that is unethical. I am clearly in the minority. But I don’t think I am a prison camp doctor.
OK_Max,
If it’s not safe for my age group, I would avoid it. If it’s just less effective I’d take it in a heart beat. I’d take it if it reduced my chances 10%. This is a shot, not a leg amputation. For heaven’s sake!
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Having a vaccinne that is known to work on the young and given to the young would be great for me. I can’t think of a single good reason why we shouldn’t bias the test toward having more young and rolling out for more young especially since they tend to be circulating more and getting exposed more.
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Given the way the stories about the virus have been promoted I think plenty of young people will be happy to take the test if it works for them.
OK_Max,
“That’s why I would prefer all age groups in trials for the first vaccine.”
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Suppose the vaccine trials show near 100% effectiveness for people under 60, with few side effects, but a rapidly rising risk of serious side effects (including a significant chance of death) for those over 65. Would you not want all those NOT at risk from the vaccine to receive it? Seems to me that would be a good way to minimize risk of death for the entire population.
Lucia,
“This is a shot, not a leg amputation. For heaven’s sake!”
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Yes, but even more to the point, covid-19 illness is for everyone under 20, virtually everyone under 30, and almost everyone under age 50, nothing more than a cold…. with increasing risk of severity as age increases. We have nearly turned the world inside out over what is for a large majority of the population less serious than the flu. The panic and the rest are things I doubt I will ever understand.
The fear of the vaccine is mostly unknown unknowns, especially with the ones using new biotech. Symptoms or increased prevalence of different diseases that show up decades later. Increased susceptibility to new contagions, etc. I’m no expert on these things but that is the greatest fear, and there is simply no way to reduce some of this fear or determine if it is just paranoia. How do we reasonably know it won’t cause even more damage later? Well we don’t, and somebody has to grow a pair and make the decision.
SteveF (Comment #192929)
“You have perfectly healthy 20-35 year olds acting like their lives are in constant danger, and worse, that the lives of their 2 to 10 year old kids are even MORE in danger.”
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StevF, your neighborhood is not like mine where mostly the older people, not the younger ones with kids, are cautious because of Covid-19. I doubt all the latter have already had the disease.
Anyway, if the first vaccine being developed is not suitable for older people, who are most affected by Covid-19, I’m not sure how to get enough young and middle-aged people, who are least affected by the disease, to volunteer for vaccination to assure herd immunity.
OK_Max
I think at least half of them will line up to get it. They are tired of home schooling. Young teachers are paranoid about getting it. (Source: I read reddit.) Parents want their kids in school. Parents think kids can get it. (They can… actually… just less frequently.) Parents think their kids can bring it home. Lots of parents think they can give it to their kids (they can. But even if they can’t…. still motivated to spend 30 minutes driving to clinic to get a shot.)
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Lots of these people will march up to get the vaccine.
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Perhaps it won’t be enough to achive herd immunity… but.. So. Freakin’. What? Having 50% of people between 20-50 immunized would reduce the effective R. That may not be “perfection”, but it’s a heck of a lot fewer people dead each year. And if the ol’ farts get immunized and reduce their chance of getting sick by 50%, that’s icing on the cake.
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It is a little funny to read one person (OK_Max worrying that no one will get the vaccine while someone else worries to many will (and so risk the side effects!!)
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It’s either one, the other or neither… but it can’t be both!
lucia (Comment #192933)
October 31st, 2020 at 2:47 pm
“Given the way the stories about the virus have been promoted I think plenty of young people will be happy to take the test if it works for them.”
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I hope so, but then I recall a report that about one-half of Americans said they wouldn’t get a vaccine when it first became available. (Maybe not as much as one-half, but a large proportion.) It might be a lower proportion of young people.
Stephen Fitzpatrick (Comment #192934)â€
Stephen Fitzpatrick (Comment #192934)
October 31st, 2020 at 2:48 pm
Suppose the vaccine trials show near 100% effectiveness for people under 60, with few side effects, but a rapidly rising risk of serious side effects (including a significant chance of death) for those over 65. Would you not want all those NOT at risk from the vaccine to receive it? Seems to me that would be a good way to minimize risk of death for the entire population.
_____
I haven’t seen reports of a vaccine that promises to be that effective, but anything close would be great
OK_Max
Sure. Whether or not it’s safe or effective. My guess is that those who plan to take it will take it; those who don’t…. it will take a while.
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Did your statistics say young people were less likely to take it? (Real question.)
lucia (Comment #192938)
Lots of these people will march up to get the vaccine.
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Perhaps it won’t be enough to achive herd immunity… but.. So. Freakin’. What?
_____
I would agree. Better than nothing, unless it ends up causing lots of even worse health problems much later. See Tom Scharf (Comment #192936)
OK_Max
I agree we may not reach the perfection of herd immunity. I’m happy with “better” than the current state.
If the vacinne isn’t save, that’s a problem.
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No one can ever know that at the time an urgently needed vaccine is introduced. They didn’t know it with Jenner’s cowpox vaccine.
lucia (Comment #192942)
October 31st, 2020 at 5:14 pm
Did your statistics say young people were less likely to take it? (Real question.)
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No, somewhat more likely. About 56% of 18-29 year olds said they would get a covid-19 vaccine if available.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/09/17/u-s-public-now-divided-over-whether-to-get-covid-19-vaccine/
mark bofill (#192921) about Martian independence –
I recently read “White Mars; Or, The Mind Set Free” by Brian Aldiss.
(Available online via my local library’s association with the “hoopla” service.) One of its themes is that the colonists progressed more when out of contact with Earth’s powers. I enjoyed the book.
OK_Max, If 56% percent of younger people get the vaccine, that will go a long way to reducing vulnerability. They will be able to circulate with a greatly reduced chance of catching or passing on the vaccine.
Those old people who are willing an able to continue self-isolating can do so. If that’s their way of protecting themselves, so be it. Or if they just want to risk it…. so be it. That will then be their choice not mine.
I’ll get the vaccine. I know it might not be perfect, but deaths will go down. I greatly prefer that way of reducing my risk of illness and death to self quarantining for the rest of my life.
The thing is: once a decent vaccine is available, the decision of how to best protect oneself and/or to be at risk or not at risk will become individual. There will be no need for a country to decree and enforce rules to protect those who just don’t want to get the vaccine. Yes. They might die. But we let people do all sorts of things where they might die from sky diving to hiking in places where there are rattle snakes to doing balance beam routines and so on.
Those who can’t get a vaccine, or for whom it doesn’t work…. well…. I will feel sorry for them. But there are somethings that are “just life”. There have always been more vulnerable people and less vulnerable ones. We can’t make life perfectly safe. We must balances. And with a vaccine– even one that is only 50% effective and which only 56% of people taking it, we will go a long way to improve the current situation. I’ll be in the 50% who take it. If my current risk is Y, my risk should be reduced by quite a bit more than the 50%Y the vaccine gives me because the number of actual infectious people out there at any given time will be reduced by more than 56%.
Thanks Harold, I’m always on the lookout for a good read. I’ll check it out.
Lucia, this old fart intends to get vaccinated if a vaccine is available and my vaccination doesn’t take from a more needy and deserving population. Let us see if you young whippersnappers do the right thing.
Seriously though I would not want to hazard a guess how the general population in the US will react to an available vaccine. What they tell a pollster now and what they finally do could well be two different things. Based on other reactions I see to Covid-19 I would not expect to see the reactions for the most part being rational. Something anecdotal played out of proportion by the MSM or said by a scientist with an agenda could change a lot of minds.
In my thinking about the possibility of the winter surge and the government reacting with draconian restrictions into the time when vaccines are available, I see 2 opposing reactions to being vaccinated. If the number of cases and deaths are greatly diminished will that make people consider the unknown risks of the vaccine a greater danger than continuing to exist under a lockdown. I see a lot of people in my locale who are just fine with lockdowns and consider them in line with it being a patriotic duty. I judge a number of them are convinced that the Federal government will come to their economic rescue by printing and spending huge amounts of money and the effects of that action on future generations be hanged – or at least forgotten and not discussed. The opposing view on this would be those people suffering greatly under the lockdowns for a multitude of reasons who would find the vaccination risk well worth it if it meant getting a reprieve from the lockdown hell. They would, I suppose, need to be convinced that sufficient others like them would feel the same in order to reach herd immunity and at least have a notion of what herd immunity is.
This whole process could be made more rational by the government and the MSM concentrating on explaining the risks involved without any agendas or politicizing and sensationalizing in delivering the needed information. By their very nature politicians would not be good agents in this delivery and should just shut up or better be ignored by a public wanting to know the facts. Based on what I have seen to date in these matters, my view here is probably more a thing of dreams than reality.
Lucia,
One of the great puzzles of the covid-19 vaccine development is the clear declaration that the FDA will not approve a vaccine unless it is at least 50% effective. That is just bizarre. First, the FDA routinely contracts production of flu vaccines that often turn out to be under 50% effective. Second, 50% minimum effectiveness flys in the face of all reason… or even sanity. If a 40% effective vaccine becomes available, why on Earth not make that available to the public? It would save a huge number of lives, and as you said, widespread use of such a vaccine would reduce the Reff value, making future spread of the virus less likely across the whole population. I do believe those at the FDA who are setting a minimum requirement of 50% have all suffered a severe case of RCI combined with their longstanding TDS.
(FYI: recto-cranial inversion)
Kenneth,
I very strongly suspect that by the time a vaccine becomes commonly available (mid-late 2021) the pandemic will be mostly over everywhere. In Florida the running 7-day reported deaths have fallen to under 50, in spite of gradually rising “confirmed casesâ€. There may some future ups and downs, but eventually there will be too few vulnerable people to sustain a high rate of infection.
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The danger (of course) is that fear will continue to command public policy, and even with very few cases and very few deaths, those in fear will howl in rage at any suggestion things return to normal. We can already see this in places like NYC, where rates are extremely low, but there is zero interest in allowing all the many activities that have been prohibited…. along with required masks everywhere and forever. Some places (mostly with Republican elected officials) will allow normal activities, but if you look at a map of states Biden is expected to win by huge margins, that same map accurately describes where any return to normal public behavior looks essentially impossible. I find it very discouraging.
SteveF,
Yep. I read all sorts of people warn about potential “flaws”.
* It might not be 100% effective. Uhmmm masks aren’t 100% effective. Neither are many vaccines. A shot is so trivial I’d take it if it was 10% effective. I would understand others making a different decision, but I don’t see 10% effective as a reason to not allow me to take it! It would sure be a nice supplement to the mask. . .
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* It might only protect 6 months. Take two shots a year. . . (Heck, my diabetic cat took 2 shots a day. Lots of people take various injected medications regularly. Big whip!)
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* It might protect one group more and one group less… This is typical of all vaccines. It would still protect the group it protects.
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* We might not reach herd immunity. I’m pretty sure we don’t have “herd immunity” for tetanus. I don’t even think it’s possible given they way it exists and transmits. This is not an argument against getting the vaccine. (For that matter, we have temporary lapses in herd immunity for measles. That’s generally seen as a really good reason for people to get the vaccine, not the opposite.)
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* We might not totally eliminate the virus. We haven’t eliminated measles. No one thinks that’s a reason to not develop or encourage vaccine use. In fact: it’s generally seen as a reason to continue to use it. (We have stopped using the smallpox vaccine because the virus is gone.)
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Of course, if it’s not safe that’s a different matter. I do want safety testing which is happening.
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But I’m ok with the idea that we can’t know there are no side-effects that pop up 10 or 20 years from know. (We also can’t know if there are unforeseen benefits that pop up 10-20 years from now. Enbrel might reduce the chance of Alzheimers. https://www.beingpatient.com/pfizer-coverup-enbrel-etanercept-alzheimers/ )
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I don’t want to wait 10 years for a trial to see if side effects pop up 10 years from now. If the vaccine is effective I’m willing to risk that.
Kenneth,
Agreed. Should the vaccine turn out to confer long term immunity, some people might change their mind… get the vaccine and that’s done. Even if someone convinces them it was somehow “wrong†and they shouldn’t have done it, it will be done.
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But even short term immunity would stem things and those who want vaccines will be able to protect themselves by being re-vaccinated.
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Or anywhere…. This will happen.
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Yep. I’m pretty sure this is why the number who say they will take the vaccine has dropped. Some people are anti-vac generally. They likely won’t change. But most people do balance risk vs. reward.
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Yep. My dance teacher is sort of anti-vax. But if push comes to shove and *either* his boss says you MUST be vaccinated to teach here or competitions end up requiring certifications of vaccination status from competitors, he’s going to do it. He’s be really grumpy about the former and… dunno if he might not look for a different boss. The latter would definitely work. He’d be grumpy….. but he’d get the vaccine (or perhaps fake papers!!)
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He said something about not wanting the vaccine when another student I and were there. Lisa, the other student looked shocked— but I’d heard this anti-vax stuff from him before– preCovid. (He’s just convinced he has super immunity… Perhaps he does.)
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Anyway, when I saw Lisa’s face, I told him don’t worry…. we’d protect him from us. 🙂 Lisa laughed. Obviously, when the time comes, customers will also make decisions for themselves.
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Right now there is no point in arguing with anyone. There is no vaccine. When the time comes, Vlad may change his mind. Someone he knows in the dance community getting very sick could do it especially if it’s someone Vlad identifies with. If someone known does get sick the story will go around.
Lucia,
“He’s just convinced he has super immunity… Perhaps he does.”
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Maybe, but at least we are certain he can dance very well; perhaps there is a strong causal relationship between dancing and immunity… and perhaps not. 😉
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People think crazy stuff is true all the time.
Lucia,
Short term safety testing was already done….. we know for sure the vaccine is not going to kill very many in the short term. In the long to very long term? Impossible to say for sure, but experience with other vaccines indicates it is not common… dengue vaccination is the only example I can think of, and even that is not a simple case of the vaccine harming you in the future (if you get booster vaccinations for dengue to keep antibody titre high, you are protected from future reinfection). So I expect the long term risk of the vaccine is very low; not zero, but very low…. and certainly lower than the risk of covid-19.
I predict that the MSM and Twitterati will see the light and start moralizing heavily on taking a vaccine. I predict the random date that will start happening to be … oh … somewhere near Nov 4, 2020. Further I think a certain out group will be clearly identified as the road block to a glorious virus free future if they would only listen to science. Anyone deviating from a “vaccines are 100% safe” viewpoint will be rightfully banished from polite company. All the previous stated history of a hesitancy to take a vaccine will be scrubbed from the Internet and banned from being shared by the contextualizers and fact checkers. In summary, they will over do it and further reduce their credibility.
SteveF
And those people continue to exist, so the term for observatin is increasing while efficacy tests continue.
Once enough people are vaccinated, I suspect there will be little discussion in polite society. I didn’t hear people discussing vaccination at my dinner dance events pre-Covid. It was a non-topic; if world wide Covid deaths drop below flu everywhere and remain there for a year, it will be a non-topic at most dinner tables.
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But I do agree there will be outlets who over do claims of efficacy and safety. There will also be outlets who over do claims of harm. This will be no different from outlets discussion of effects of pollution, past vaccines, and so on and do on. It’s what our outlets do.
SteveF (Comment #192951): “the FDA will not approve a vaccine unless it is at least 50% effective. That is just bizarre. First, the FDA routinely contracts production of flu vaccines that often turn out to be under 50% effective.”
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I think that you are conflating different things. The low effectiveness of the flu vaccine is, I think, due to two things. There are many different strains of the flu; the vaccine can not protect against all of them (so it is impossible to be even close to 100% effective) and there is sometimes a mismatch between the strains circulating and the strains the vaccine is designed against (leading to really low effectiveness). The second is that the real world effectiveness is lower than the effectiveness in testing since the most vulnerable (people with poor immune function) are not used for testing. The first is not an issue with a Wuhan virus vaccine but the second will be an issue.
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SteveF: “Second, 50% minimum effectiveness flys in the face of all reason… or even sanity. If a 40% effective vaccine becomes available, why on Earth not make that available to the public?”
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So where do you draw the line? 10%? 1%? Real question. Without a quantitative answer to that question, it is silly to complain about the exact level of effectiveness that should be required.
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SteveF: “It would save a huge number of lives”
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Really? How? A low effectiveness vaccine is unlikely to provide any direct benefit to the most vulnerable. Once you take them out of the picture, the virus is not very dangerous, especially with proper treatment.
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SteveF: “widespread use of such a vaccine would reduce the Reff value”
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Maybe, but it is not obvious that it would much matter. If half the population gets a 40% effective vaccine, that reduces Reff by 20% at best. At best because it is not certain that immunity will stop a person from spreading the virus. It might still circulate as a mild upper respiratory infection.
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Remember that for a virus with highly overdisperse transmission, the herd immunity threshold for a vaccine is much higher than for naturally acquired immunity.
SteveF (Comment #192957): “we know for sure the vaccine is not going to kill very many in the short term. In the long to very long term? Impossible to say for sure, but experience with other vaccines indicates it is not common… dengue vaccination is the only example I can think of”
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Dengue was the only approved vaccine to do that. It is rare in approved vaccines before reasonably long term testing is done before approval. Vaccines causing a subsequent infection to be worse has happened with a RSV virus in the 60’s and with at least two coronavirus vaccines in animal trials.
——–
Addition: By “reasonably long term” I mean long enough to know what happens after the antibody level drops.
A low effectiveness vaccine could increase Reff. The introduction of a vaccine will cause behavior to return towards normal. Behavioral constraints are surely having some effect on transmission, so relaxing those constraints could overwhelm any benefit of the vaccine.
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To me, the main benefit of a vaccine will be to provide an excuse for life to return to normal. As such, it will be not so much a vaccine against the Wuhan virus as a vaccine against stupidity and fear.
Well…. sure. Which would increase Reff relative to everyone bunkering down in their houses…. But even a low effectivness vaccine would reduce it relative to that natural value.
MikeM,
It doesn’t look like that was a long term effect. It was something caught in the ordinary effectiveness trials. Those who got the vaccine got sick at a higher rate than the control.
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It is an example of something that not only didn’t work but made things worse. But it is also an example of something that should be caught by the Covid vaccine trials at hand. That outcome would be a spectacular failure but detected in the short run.
https://academic.oup.com/aje/article-abstract/89/4/422/198849?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Mike
I draw it at 10%. Real answer. 🙂
It would provide it direct benefit to me.
Which is great! If we go from 60% of the population needing to get infected to 40% being infected, that’s 20% fewer Americans who need to get sick. That would be a wonderful outcome.
20% getting it more mildly instead of risking death is a wonderful outcome.
Or not.
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Anyway, herd immunity doesn’t mean the disease is gone. If I haven’t had it and I’m not immune due to vaccine, then I could get it even after we reach herd immunity. That it’s “overdisperse” doesn’t protect me if I got to a wedding, dance event, fireworks display and so on and so on where a super-spreader appears.
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So I would take an only moderately effective vaccine.
Mike M,
I draw the line at ~10-15% effectiveness. Lower than that, and there is a lot of cost for the vaccine considering the benefit. If you have to get a vaccination every 3 months for a vaccine to be effective, then maybe we need more than 15% to make it worth while. It is a cost/benefit calculation, not a fear/benefit calculation.
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I *REALLY* don’t understand your worry about the safety of the vaccine. If any of the vaccines already past phase 2 testing were very dangerous, then we would already know that. If there turned out to be a weird negative response to re-infection with covid 19 after vaccine generated immunity has fallen over time, that would be bad, but the chance of it happening seems to me low. After all, everything we know suggests exposure to related human corona viruses in the (relatively) recent past makes people resistant to infection, not more susceptible. I think you once estimated people get a corona virus cold every decade or so, which is consistent with cross-reactive t-cell resistance in a significant fraction of the population. In any case, by the time a vaccine is being offered to the general public in ~10 months, I expect any negative like that would be identified.
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” A low effectiveness vaccine is unlikely to provide any direct benefit to the most vulnerable. Once you take them out of the picture, the virus is not very dangerous, especially with proper treatment.”
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Ummm….. because increasing the overall resistance of the population will reduce the probability of the most vulnerable people becoming infected. Besides, even if it is shown a vaccine is less effective for the elderly (like me!), but still infers some resistance, then that ought to reduce deaths, independent of herd immunity effects from younger people getting the vaccine.
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Since you are worried about the safety of any new vaccine, I urge you to not get vaccinated until you are completely confident the benefit outweighs the risk.
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But I hope you will recognize that many other people neither share your worries nor are interested in waiting years for a vaccine to become available.
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Do you dance particularly well?
Mike M,
How many times have you watched I Am Legend?
SteveF,
I’ve never watched that!!
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I love it: Exactly one person is immune to the virus. That person has the skills to even try to develop a vaccine.
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Then… not only do other humans become mutants (as opposed to just crippled, scarred or something like that) but they are also hostile to him.
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Ok… so I’m reading wikipedia… he does get rescused by other non-mutants. So more than 1 person may be immmune… or at least some people survived.
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Oh… he draws a vial of blood from one woman and gives it to another woman. I guess blood types aren’t an issue. . .
Lucia,
In the film, think a couple % are supposed to be immune, and another (much larger) fraction become monsters who can’t tolerate sunlight. Will Smith plays the (immune) scientist who developed the vaccine that killed most people and turned most of the rest into monsters.
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He didn’t inject the woman with blood from a monster, he gave her a vial with the blood in it, along with the chemical structure of the compound that appeared to ‘cure’ one of the monsters…. a teenaged girl (monster) that he had drawn a blood sample from. Before he could get away, dozens (hundreds?) of monsters caught up with him (also before the teenaged girl was fully cured). He sends the woman (and a little girl) away to find a camp of people uninfected by the monsters, while he stays behind to hold off the monsters…. and die as he does.
So even though Will Smith kills almost everyone on Earth with a vaccine with a few unexpected ‘side effects’, he redeems himself by finding a cure before he gets killed.
SteveF
Which…. evidently.. is then supplied to a survivor colony in the form of a perishable blood sample. Let’s hope the woman gets there quick and the colony has a virologist and equipment to reverse engineer the cure from the vial of blood!!!
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I’m guessing they will be dead as doorknobs. (Unless herd immunity has been reached. But it at least seems the entire colony is unexposed. So. . . )
Lucia,
IIRC, the closing scene is the woman and little girl (blood vial and chemical formula in hand) arriving at the camp of the surviving normal people. No discussion…. they just are welcomed and safe. I don’t know if they ever discussed herd immunity, or the potential risks of the newly discovered cure.
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Come to think about it, the movie reminds me a little of what might happen if the Dems gain control of both houses of congress and Kamala becomes president.
If I was one of those people…. I’d be like… “Oh. A vial of blood…. A chemical formula….” I guess maybe I should put the blood in a fridge if there’s one around?!?
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Then I see what I can do for the woman and girl. Perhaps find them a nice hot bath, soap and some food. Only after that do I try to find someone who might have clue 1 what to do with the vial and chemical formula. . .
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(One would imagine its a rather complicated formula. Moreover, synthesizing a complicated molecule is something outside my wheelhouse.)
Lucia,
I remembered wrongly, it was a little boy not a little girl.
Sounds like the camp of surviving normal people also didn’t discuss whether she and the boy might be contagious. We know she and he had been exposed to Zombies. The blood came from a Zombie who may or may not have ultimately been cured.
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I guess the audience is to assume the survivors had studied the disease and learned you were only contagious after becoming a zombie. But in that case, you’d think they might quarantine the two in some sort of isolation chamber for a period that would allow them to see if these two people would become zombies.
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I’m still hoping for the Covid vaccine. I’m not to worried about becoming a Zombie.
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Anyway, maybe Zombies are happy. Just because they didn’t like Will Smith (who turned them into Zombies and caused the deaths of many of their loved ones) doesn’t mean they couldn’t live rich full lives in a new Zombie society. Sounds like there might have been a lot of fun night life!
I am beginning to think that Trump has got this. Three reasons:
(1) It looks like turnout will be huge. Texas and Hawaii will set records even if nobody goes to the polls tomorrow. Many other states are not that far behind. That means lots of usual non-voters turning out. It seems to me that requires enthusiasm and Trump is so far ahead on enthusiasm that it ain’t funny.
(2) People say they are better off than four years ago and rate Trump higher on the economy and leadership. Surely those outweigh tweets.
(3) The polls show a very strong trend to Trump. I think that represents people changing their responses from “I don’t like Trump” to “Trump is better than Biden” as they shift from opinion to decision.
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The main counterargument would be the polls. But the polls might well contain large systematic errors. Of course, my opinion is strongly influenced by the fact that I just can’t believe that the people will choose a senile old fool.
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I won’t be shocked if Biden wins. And I won’t be shocked if Trump gets more electoral votes than Obama did 8 years ago. Nothing to do but wait.
I think Pennsylvania may have a lot to do with who wins this time around.
Mike,
Me too. I know better; we’ve all seen many times how stupid people can be. But I can never bring myself to believe down in the core of my being that people are going to behave stupidly in the future. I feel like if I can someday get past this idealism I’ll have come a little closer to being a person who has some modicum of wisdom.
Mike M,
I think there is one other factor: the “Wait….. Biden really is corrupt†reaction of people seeing clear evidence of Biden’s family pocketing $6 million from China based on nothing but influence selling.
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But I don’t know if any of it is enough to overcome the visceral loathing Trump inspires in so many people…. his behavior has too often been childish and vindictive, not to mention that his stupid tweets are usually offensive, even to plenty of people who support his policies. Does Trump fatigue make him lose the election to a corrupt, elderly career politician suffering the early stages of dementia? It is not clear, but I still don’t put Trump’s chances much higher than the betting markets: ~35% – 40%.
Remember the slogan ‘Love Trumps Hate?’
We’re going to see if ‘Hate Trumps Trump’ this time around.
mark bofill (Comment #192980): “I think Pennsylvania may have a lot to do with who wins this time around.”
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Indeed. I think that *if* it is a nail biter it will more likely than not come down to Pennsylvania.
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The conventional wisdom is somewhere between an easy Biden win and a very narrow Trump win. Where I differ from that is that I think that an easy Trump win is in play. The polls create a false sense of knowledge.
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mark bofill: “We’re going to see if ‘Hate Trumps Trump’ this time around.”
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🙂
Crowds at Trump rallies have been chanting “we love you”.
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Didn’t the Mitchum character in “Night of the Hunter” have the “love” tattoo on his right hand with “hate” on the left?
And you might be exactly right. I really really don’t feel like I have a good sense of what’s going to happen. Trump might win by a comfortable Electoral College margin. He might eek out a win. He might lose.
As you say, not much longer to wait (thank goodness).
I am wondering whether, with an obviously crazy orange man against a mentally fading and silly one in this election, that voters might be more attuned to political philosophical differences – at least as much as the mainly unsophisticated voting public is able to determine.
Unfortunately, I have seen a leftward swing in that sentiment over the past decade that might well be culminating in this election. Biden had a 13 point lead over Trump in mid October polls and that lead is currently 10 points from the last polls before election. I believe the polls had the popular vote nearly correct in the 2016 Presidential election but not the electoral part. Could a candidate win the electoral majority with a 10 point popular deficit? What might be the MSM and public reaction to such a development in terms of getting rid of the electoral college?
Lucia, you are my kind of movie reviewer.
Kenneth,
Thanks. I clearly need to think of a new career. Perhaps I can run Netflix movie reviews as the opening to my open threads. . .
I watched Once Upon a Time In Hollywood this week. Weird, clunky stylistic transition at the end. (I don’t mind the counter-version of history. But the style thing. Weird.)
My one correct prediction about the election: I will stay up to watch election results. I always do… so I’m sure I will.
My prediction: the polls are totally FUBAR.
Lucia,
“I will stay up to watch election results. I always do… so I’m sure I will.”
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This year you may have to go weeks without sleep if the “mail-in-ballot-fraud-wars” end up determining the outcome. 😉 I hope that doesn’t happen, but you never know. I remember the legal frenzy of the hanging chads in Florida.
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l’ll probably go to bed relatively early if either:
1) It looks like Trump will win for sure, or
2) It looks like the Senate will for sure stay in Republican control.
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In either case, I won’t have to worry so much about the patients taking over the insane asylum in Washington DC (AKA complete control of the Federal government by Democrats, with a multitude of very bad consequences).
If Trump does manage to win, the many videos of tears, hair pulling, and teeth gnashing by the woke ‘journalists’ in the MSM will have almost priceless humor value.
Wow, talk about a glass half full crowd, ha ha.
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“I think Pennsylvania may have a lot to do with who wins this time around.”
The WSJ ran an article that the Pittsburg Post Gazette actually endorsed Trump. That’s where media endorsements are at this point. Pennsylvania is starting to shift some because of Biden’s dithering and misinformation on fracking support.
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Watching the performative wailing and faux distress from the usual suspects would be a sight to behold if Trump actually won twice. Minorities were expected to be beaten in the streets last time around (for real). I expect Trump to lose and for there to be equally expressive performative gloating as history is once again set on the right course and other such silliness. The MSM will be “surprised” that civil war doesn’t break out and everyone just moves on with their lives. Lose with dignity people, ha ha. The home team is going to lose occasionally.
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Overt displays of politics is still pretty low in my area, even with both candidates visiting in the past couple days in a serious 50/50 battle. Not a single sign in my neighborhood, or hardly anywhere. Somebody was shot over a yard sign incident, so I think everyone is just keeping their heads low and wishing it was over already.
WSJ: Covid-19 Burden Falls Heavily on Middle-Aged Men
Men’s underlying health problems, weaker immune systems might be fueling higher mortality
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-burden-falls-heavily-on-middle-aged-men-11604313002
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I dismissed this as a statistical anomaly early on, but it is apparently real. Men are dying at nearly a 2:1 ratio for most age groups. It is only because the over 70 group has so many more women (they live longer) and that group dies at a higher rate that the stats even up somewhat overall.
Good piece by Byron York on shy Trump voters:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/yes-there-is-a-hidden-trump-vote
Mostly the usual, but a lot of anecdotal evidence on people who have not voted for years who are planning to vote for Trump. An this, with an obvious warning of consider the source:
The locking of the NY Post’s Twitter feed finally ended a couple days ago and lasted for two weeks leading into an election. This was a pretty comedic series of events.
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The initial freeze was due to the Biden story and officially due to reporting on “content obtained without authorization.â€. This eventually collapse under its own weight as media outlets routinely report on these thing (Trump tax returns, etc.).
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Twitter then changed it’s policy on this but hilariously stated the NY Post’s account would remain locked because the story was released before the Twitter rule change (it was grandfathered out). The NY Post refused to delete the offending tweets.
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A few days later Twitter changed again and said “Decisions made under policies that are subsequently changed & published can now be appealed if the account at issue is a driver of that change.â€
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All pretty humorous and exposes the typical end results of attempting to censor political speech. The NY Post becomes the same as Alex Jones within just a couple months in the eyes of unbiased judges. Known false information and “unverified” information damaging to one’s home team become the same thing.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #192986)
November 2nd, 2020 at 8:39 am
Could a candidate win the electoral majority with a 10 point popular deficit? What might be the MSM and public reaction to such a development in terms of getting rid of the electoral college?
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Good question. Winning a presidential election with a 10 point deficit in the vote may not be possible, but wining with any deficit seems unfair. I would like to see an end to the electoral college because it does mean votes from some States count for more than votes from other States. My vote should not count any more or any less than another person’s vote.
The MSM and the more lightweight social media venues like Twitter and Facebook should quit hiding behind the facade of neutrality. Are there really potential customers out there who think these outfits do not have a political bias? And would it make a difference to very many customers? Real questions.
I can no better stomach the TV coverage of election night than I can the debates or a lot of what is spewed from the politicians’ mouths. In 2016, as usual, I went to bed without watching any of the election results coverage. In the middle of the night I was awakened by a neighbor honking their horn for what seemed like 1/2 hour continuously. I thought then that it was probably a crazy Hillary supporter and it was not until morning that I find out it must have been a crazy Trump supporter.
OK_Max,
“I would like to see an end to the electoral college because it does mean votes from some States count for more than votes from other States. My vote should not count any more or any less than another person’s vote.”
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I invite you to work toward the constitutional amendment that change would require. Even if passed by the required 2/3 majorities in both houses of Congress, any such amendment is not likely to get the number of state legislature approvals (38) required. The thing to remember is: the electoral college and the structure of the Senate (both explicitly not guaranteeing identically weighted individual votes) are what allowed the country to form. Without them, the lower population states would have refused to joint the Union.
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I note that ‘fair’, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Is it “fair” that a majority is allowed to completely silence someone with an unpopular opinion (under penalty of prison)? The Europeans mostly think that is OK, and they have lots of laws which do that. The US Constitution says otherwise. Fair or not, you can’t stop someone from speaking their unpopular POV in the States, and you can’t make every vote for a senator… or a president… equal in weight.
OK_Max (Comment #192997)
Maybe, Max, you are forgetting we have a Constitutional and Republican form of government where minority rights right down to individual rights are supposed to be protected. We recognize states and states’ rights.
Of course we could get closer to a true democracy like probably a lot of citizens think would be more “fair”. We could rename the country Democracy of America.
Or better yet we could let individual states secede from the union. I do not think that process has been ruled out for all time.
Tom Scharf,
Twitter, Facebook, and Google should just be given a choice: you either don’t control what content is published on your service, and have no liability for what is published, or you do control what content is published on your service and you are legally responsible for that content…. and its accuracy. They shouldn’t have the option to censor, but at the same time face no responsibility for that censorship.
Kenneth,
“we have a Constitutional and Republican form of government”
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Or as Ben Franklin is said to have replied when asked about the form of the new government: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
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Neil Gorsuch recently published a short book with the same title. Which bodes well for the kind of justice he will be.
MikeM,
I guess we’ll see soon enough whether there are any appreciable numbers of shy Trump voters and if it makes any difference.
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The demographics of who votes could be wild this year.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #193000)
November 2nd, 2020 at 1:13 pm
OK_Max (Comment #192997)
Maybe, Max, you are forgetting we have a Constitutional and Republican form of government where minority rights right down to individual rights are supposed to be protected. We recognize states and states’ rights.
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Oh I know all that, Kenneth. Tell it to IRS. Tell it to draft boards, if we ever have those again. Citizens whose votes count for more should be taxed more, and serve more time in the armed forces. If these “more than equal” citizens don’t like it, they can move to States where they are less than equal in the vote for president.
Max,
This has come up before.
There are many citizens who are taxed more who’s vote counts no more than anybody else’s. Do you truly want Bill Gates’s vote to count proportional to his taxes? He says he’s paid over 10 billion in taxes. It doesn’t seem like a very progressive viewpoint, weighting the votes of the rich so heavily.
OK_Max
We have an all volunteer army. Unless you are going to reinstate the draft, I don’t think there is any way to force those in states with a larger number of electors per capita to serve in the military longer than those from states with a smaller number of elector per capita.
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As for the income tax suggestion: I guess you must be against a progressive income tax. Or alternatively, you think the rich who pay more in income tax (and real estate tax for that matter) should get more votes than the poor who might be on welfare. Or you mean… something mysterious.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #193000)
“Of course we could get closer to a true democracy like probably a lot of citizens think would be more “fairâ€. We could rename the country Democracy of America.
Or better yet we could let individual states secede from the union. I do not think that process has been ruled out for all time.”
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Kenneth, my previous rant didn’t address those points.
“Democracy of America” would be an ok name if the abbreviation “DOA” didn’t mean Dead on Arrival. I would stick with USA.
I haven’t thought much about States seceding, but it could make for a weaker union. Depends on which States secede. For example, California, Oregon, and Washington leaving would be be more important than Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas leaving.
OK_Max,
A friend of mine in Brazil once (jokingly) suggested the most fair electoral system would be one vote for each thousand dollars (in his case, Brazilian Reis) paid in Federal taxes….. Combine Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes, divide by a thousand, and that is how many votes you get. ‘Fair’ is always in the eye of the beholder.
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As for a military draft: say what? Do the states get a ‘credit’ for the number of people who already volunteer? I am reasonably sure the armed forces are staffed more from low population states than from high, but you can correct me if you can show I’m wrong.
SteveF,
I always thought per Capita, a larger fraction of young people in rural states volunteer for the military. But… dunno.
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I’ve never thought that was the justification for the electoral college.
Southern states clearly aren’t being fairly represented in our current system:
https://www.facingsouth.org/2020/01/understanding-souths-unequal-contribution-military-recruits
We need more electoral votes down here.
[sarc tag]
lucia (Comment #193009)
As for the income tax suggestion: I guess you must be against a progressive income tax. Or alternatively, you think the rich who pay more in income tax (and real estate tax for that matter) should get more votes than the poor who might be on welfare.
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No, I’m not against a progressive income tax or for giving voting power based on the amount of tax paid. Nor am I for giving some citizens more voting power in presidential elections because they reside in particular States.
BTW, I know we no longer have the draft, but it could come back.
When it come to renaming the country after OK_Max gets to change the Constitution as he wants, I suggest “Federal Union of Beneficent American Republics (or FUBAR).
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Sounds better, and may be a more accurate description than something like PRA (People’s Republic of America) or CRA (Communist Republic of America).
SteveF (Comment #193011)
As for a military draft: say what? Do the states get a ‘credit’ for the number of people who already volunteer? I am reasonably sure the armed forces are staffed more from low population states than from high, but you can correct me if you can show I’m wrong.
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You might be right. Data on home State of volunteers should be available.
I am shocked (shocked!) by the relative enlistments rates across the country (as of 2014): https://www.businessinsider.com/us-military-is-not-representative-of-country-2014-7
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I didn’t see anything more recent. Since I live in Florida, with lots of enlistments, I should clearly have my vote count double that of the weasels in Massachusetts, not less than votes in Massachusetts (which is the actual situation).
OK_Max: “I haven’t thought much about States seceding, but it could make for a weaker union. ”
Although I think it’s extremely unlikely for secession to occur, it might make for two *stronger* unions. Say one group of states coalesces around NY & CA, and another around TX. The respective Constitutions, newly established, would outline their values and provide their views on the rights of individuals and limits to the power of state and federal governments. The remaining states would gravitate toward one or the other point of view, resulting in less internal contention ultimately in each federation. As for names, I suggest the Democratic States of America and the Federated States of America.
SteveF (Comment #193015)
When it come to renaming the country after OK_Max gets to change the Constitution as he wants, I suggest “Federal Union of Beneficent American Republics (or FUBAR).
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I didn’t know the Constitution says voters in some States must count more than voters in other States in presidential elections.
Oh well, the Constitution allowed slavery at one time, so I shouldn’t be surprised at it being unfair on voting.
OK_Max,
“so I shouldn’t be surprised at it being unfair on voting.”
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‘Fair’ is in the eye of the beholder.
” The Constitution never specifically allowed slavery,”
In a college history class, we were split up into teams to argue for and against adoption of the Constitution. I got our anti-group to do a lot of damage wen I surprisingly discovered some language similar to the Fugitive Slave Act.
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
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