It’s amusing seeing all the extroverts going nuts after being isolated for only a few days. Some sort of payback for making all introverts suffer for basically forever.

If the government sends me any checks, I am donating all of it and more to food banks and other worthy causes.

I do not need the money, though I do agree that the government should indiscriminately spray out cash due to the requirement for haste.

Unpopular opinion, but I do wonder exactly where is the inflection point wherein allowing the economy to melt down kills more people over a five-year period (mostly low-income) vs. restarting the economy and accepting some extra immediate deaths.

I say unpopular because most people will interpret me as advocating for the immediate deaths, but I think it’s a genuine question. Where is that inflection point — because there definitely is one — and how do we estimate that?

It’s important to think about, I feel, even if people despise the question. Just because a death happens 3-5 years from now doesn’t make it less important.

Long way from the sentiment that not shaking hands is racist and that Covid-19 is nothing compared to the flu, isn’t it?

Though most will learn nothing, there are lessons here that could in principle be learned: lessons about how complex systems function and then rupture, and about how the measured linearity stressed in education is the least relevant because it leaves you completely unprepared when it truly matters.

Oh, of course no one will allow themselves any edification out of this. They’ll just retrench and then erase it all from memory. But my point is that they could. Enlightenment is available; most just do not want it.

Convincing Boomer Parents to Take the Coronavirus Seriously.

What the fuck is wrong with Boomers? I know, not all Boomers, yada yada, but as a generation they are a total fail train on the way to Failtown. Why?

My guess is that it’s because they’ve largely spent their lives getting nearly everything they wanted and needed — free or nearly-free college, with politicians always catering to their desires, rarely being told “no” or that their yearnings weren’t realistic. They simply cannot conceive of a world that doesn’t revolve around them because they have never experienced it.

So even though Covid-19 is a virus, they just have this idea in the back (and the front, for that matter) of their minds that it’ll also — as all else has — bend to their wills. It doesn’t have to make sense, and it does not. But that is I think what’s going on here.

Ok, I don’t usually find these sorts of things amusing, but this is hilarious:

It’s funny because it’s true.

this is not dystopian. the government preventing people from spreading plague during a pandemic is not dystopian. people lining up for blocks to day drink and the government mandating parents bring their children to school during a pandemic is dystopian. https://t.co/9ugirK2JYs

— Squid o' War (@squid_o_war) March 15, 2020

The cult of libertarianism and liberalism has to go. It’s destroying the world, defunct ideologies digging graves in a necropolis as large as creation.

Fed Flails, Markets Don’t Care.

The Fed can’t do much at all when the problems aren’t monetary in nature. A pandemic and its resultant effects are definitionally non-monetary. There has been and will continue to be a real demand shock in the general economy.

This shock will worsen over the next few weeks and months and monetary tools will do very little (though not nothing). Fiscal tools, however, can do something — but some of those tools are more effective than others. Romney’s proposal to give every person $1,000 a month until the crisis abates would be a very good one to enact immediately, for instance.

Monetary tools can only fight monetary crises. That’s not what’s happening now.