How ‘One Day at a Time’ Came Back From the Brink.

I don’t know anything about this show, but I love seeing those lighting setups and the revealed artificiality of productions of any type. Amazing so many actors can act naturally with all that artificiality. That is quite an underappreciated skill.

USA is a "rich but poor" country, you dont realize it till you travel abroad and live in different places

— Alexander J.A Cortes (@AJA_Cortes) March 24, 2020

One of the reasons so many Americans are all “USA! USA! USA!” is because most never travel overseas.

Do that, and it’s like jumping 50 years into the future. Most Americans have no idea just how far behind the US compared to much of the rest of the world.

About the economy, the Republicans are accidentally correct for selfish reasons. All they care about is the stock market and their wealth, not deaths or helping anyone.

But the “liberals” are awfully fucking wrong because they have no idea how the economy works, nor do I have time or inclination to educate them here. Yes, I do own stocks, but I don’t care about that very much. The idea, though, that we’ll suddenly and radically re-order the economy in a few weeks or months to prevent the worst is just utterly delusional.

The world always presents difficult choices. That liberals want to pretend that isn’t the case so they can posture as righteous at the moment doesn’t mean that’s less true. It just means they care more about moral preening than they do about making tough decisions.

Unfortunately, now is the time for difficult decisions — and since the liberals seem only to care about wailing on the ground like contumacious children rather than making those choices, other will (as usual) do it for them.

Seeing all these people on Twitter thinking we can just pause everything for a year or 18 months — just wild, like people believing they’ve been abducted by aliens. Most of them will be dead in a year or two if we do that — and not of any virus.

I wish economics in general weren’t in such a poor state, as more people really need to learn something about it.

The choice is not

a) everyone stays home, economy hurt
or
b) everyone goes out again, economy fine

it's

a) everyone stays home, economy hurt
or
b) everyone goes out again, millions die, hospitals collapse, social chaos, economy hurt just as bad if not worse

— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) March 24, 2020

I don’t think these are the choices. False dichotomy. Covid-19’s fatality rate, while higher than the flu, is probably overstated. More and more evidence is pointing that way. I disbelieved this at first but the evidence is becoming more clear.

Germany for instance has reported 24,000 cases with a death rate of 0.4 percent. Chances are very high as well that there are loads more barely-symptomatic or asymptomatic people out there so my guess is that the fatality rate in Western countries will be somewhere around 0.2-0.3 percent when the final tally occurs.

Note that the death rate in Italy is so high because they only test when symptoms are severe, etc., meaning they miss most infections.

The real solution is nearly-ubiquitous testing, tracing and social distancing/quarantine for those positive or confirmed exposed.

Otherwise, there will be many millions dead as the economy utterly collapses in 2-3 months, as that is exactly what will happen. The people who disbelieve this have zero understanding of how the economy works or what its weak points are.

I’d suggest we practice social distancing for another 2-3 weeks until testing ramps up, get masks distributed (yes, they do work), do test and trace and then start up the economy again. Otherwise, we’re going to have 20-50% of the population starving in the streets.

And you think the pandemic is bad now, wait till we have 500,000 people living in Central Park in tents or rougher than that. Baby, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet compared to that.