It’s possible that a major shakeup adjacent to one’s org and uncertainty about the future could affect sleep and concentration. So while it may not be directly causal, it may not entirely be a coincidence either.
Love that fact check. People should really take whatever Trump, Musk or the right in general say with huge grains of salt. That Gaza condom thing being a great example.
The fact check posted by GP and the discriminatory practices detailed initial post are about completely different things. The initial post details racial discriminatory practices started during Obama's presidency; the fact check posted by GP is Trump's claim about people with mental disabilities working at FAA.
As far as I can tell, GP did not refute the initial post.
I don't think it is different. The point is, the same people who did not complain about Obama's policies in 2016 are finding issue with the same policies in 2024. So the motive is purely political and improving FAA hiring practices has nothing to do with it.
Your reply is borderline mis-leading. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and direct you to the article. You will see people did not know about this situation until recently. It took a lot of effort to find this - including FOIA requests.
> Understaffing due to discrimination was a factor
I'm baffled by this defense.. Understaffing safety correlates with what aspect of its causation? The FAA isn't exactly the same as running the worlds sleaziest real estate firm or social network. If it were, you could apparently fire people because its Tuesday, go home, rape your wife and then maybe take some ketamine and as long as you didn't hire some black guy you aren't the kind of jerk who gets into that dangerous kind of understaffing so of course your organization is going to be fine.
But basically Obama administration changed the rules for admitting FAA air controllers. Admission started to take race into account, lower the bar for air controllers as well as disrupting the then-existing pipeline.
Disrupting the then-existing pipeline probably had the largest effect - as students that already int the pipeline found out that they had to start over. Then-recent graduates from the pipeline also had to start over their FAA air controller certification. (that was the cherry on top!!!!)
Who cares about how Obama reduced costs? Someone who has an objective besides reducing costs and scum who rise to the top on negligence and then lie about their priorities.
Tesla's full self driving is a negligence scam that kills people. If he got to the low investment he made in it through not hiring the people he didn't hire based on a lack of diversity in the PhD programs then the deaths would matter?
By the standards until 1980 (including even Nixon), I would judge Obama very harshly as a President. Compared to these new clowns, he is capable of analysis of the risks he is taking and not following a sentiment he picked up on a porn site previously known as twitter.
It took about two years for the world to more or less return to normal when COVID struck. Instead of conservatives learning a lesson about that, they instead just declared COVID as fake, lied about vaccines, and reelected the demagogue that's partly responsible for the virus's wide spread in the US in the first place.
Frankly, it's tiring. I don't know why about half the country wants this.
We still have at least two more years of this crap. It hasn't even been a month and I am already exhausted. I guess that's kind of the point, so at least they're doing one thing right.
Voting for either Kang or Kodos does not mean that you agree with whoever you voted for. And not voting does not mean that you do not care at all about the issues.
Of those who didn't vote, why would they choose to vote next time?
None of this is a surprise. It's not even like 2016, where people could say "I figured he'd be less bad than he said he would be" with a straight face.
Whatever excuse they found to not vote for the Democrat in 2024, will still apply in 2026 and 2028. Or they'll find a new one.
And turnout in midterms is even worse than in Presidential years. I don't see those non-voters suddenly taking an interest then.
It would be fantastic if somebody learned some lessons. But I think 2024 proves pretty definitively that people don't learn lessons.
> Of those who didn't vote, why would they choose to vote next time?
My recollection is that non-voters tend to be reliably lazy, but I can’t find a good source.
The system almost relies on it. If you can identify a non-voting bloc, in primaries or ideally even generals, you can tax them to give goodies to citizens.
It's especially frustrating because it's always a self-righteous and sanctimonious rationalization to why they never vote.
It's maddening, they complain about Trump, and when I mention that they didn't vote they say "YOU THINK KAMALA WOULD BE BETTER??? YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO FIX THIS PROBLEM BY VOTING LOL!!". And of course, they never define what "the problem" is, so there's actually no way to solve it, so they never have to actually vote.
In my experience they can usually cite something that they don't like about the candidate. In the case of Harris I often heard her position on Gaza given. And they'll always find something, since we're talking about an office with life and death on the line.
I'm not sure I was a huge fan of Harris's take on Gaza either, but I didn't think for a second that Trump would be better than her on it either. I guess it's just a mentality I don't really understand.
Well, not that I like the mentality but it's a hardline one.
By not voting for Harris and making her lose it means next cycle people have to care about your opinion to get elected. It's the opposite of when Progressives don't like a Democrat's proposal but still vote for it; it means the Democrats don't have to negotiate with them because they're getting the vote anyways.
Sure, I guess what frustrates me is that they're effectively saying that having Trump is office than having another Democrat, because of some abstract "long game" that they think will happen.
It's honestly pretty fucking dismissive of people who are affected by Trump's regressive policies. "It sucks that you got deported but maybe in fifteen years you'll thank me because we will have a proper progressive in office to fix problems that are really important but apparently impossible for us to actually enumerate with any kind of consistency".
> It's honestly pretty fucking dismissive of people who are affected by Trump's regressive policies
Like the Gazans!
The American Palestinian movement has been 100% about the protesters themselves. Not the Palestinians. The Defund the Police and Chesa crowd found a new cause to ruin. Folks who have never been to both countries confidently redrawing borders on another continent, the new Sykes and Picot.
> By not voting for Harris and making her lose it means next cycle people have to care about your opinion to get elected
No? It makes you electorally irrelevant. Possibly toxic. Trump has carte blanche with Gaza because it’s not an issue any senior Democrat is willing to fight for after the Palestine vote proved both mercurial and unreliable. Hell, I’m experiencing some schadenfreude with the whole thing.
The way to play it is to bloc vote in primaries and then reliably turn out in generals. See: the NRA.
Remember when Time Magazine did a Person of the Year that was just a mirror? That's where we are, even harder as (corporate) social media has ramped up. Simplistic conspiratorial "theories" play to people's egos. It's basically the populist outrage playbook the Republicans have been running for the past three decades (while keeping their monster contained in a cage and only feeding off the energy), gradually building more and more steam as they repeat the same tripe (eg myopic nonsense about the "deficit"), and now it has escaped.
One of the first steps to righting this ship is to get our terminology straight and stop calling them conservatives. Conservative is not a synonym for Republican. Conservatives respect institutions, America's contribution to the world, fiscal responsibility, want to slow gradual change, etc. In the last election, the conservative option was squarely the Democrats. The modern grassroots Republican parties are populist reactionaries, and the people they've elected are (neo)fascists. The probable landscape is that they are just working for China to destroy this country and sell off the pieces.
The problem with your analysis is that you don't have the power to define what conservatism is; if enough populist reactionaries wrap themselves in the mantle of conservatism (which they absolutely have) then they gain effective ownership of teh term and ruin it for everyone else. I agree with your general thesis but think the rot goes back longer than 3 decades, although it got markedly worse after Newt Gingrich became speaker, around the same time that Fox News started on cable.
As an example, consider Phyllis Schlafy's 'Eagle Forum'. Founded in 1972, its always been a reflection of its late founder's strident reactory outlook, to the point that their periodic rants about communism seem quaint and anachronistic. You could be forgiven for thinking it was relevant for political scientists studying the American right in the 20th century...except the US attorney for DC (a guy named Ed Martin Jr) is an Eagle Forum veteran, and a glance at his X timeline shows he's still all in on la Schlafly, doing official government business through his X account (eg publishing documents ther and nowhere else), and generally living down to the stereotype of a wild-eyed ideologue.
In short, I don't believe terminological exactitude isn't going to get us out of this. The famously cranky Samuel Johnson, writing disdainfully of a British Prime Minister in 1775, commented 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'. His point was that any concept invested with general-purpose social value - patriotism, love of nation, belief in community, conserving the body politic - can be exploited for short-term political gain to the detriment of long-term well-being. It's a perennial problem.
I'm certainly not trying to no-true-Scotsman the term conservative. The word does mean something, effectively the opposite of the vandals currently in power. For example I've gotten more conservative with age, but definitely do not consider myself "a conservative".
The thrust of my comment was exactly that we need to stop letting them wrap themselves in the cloak of the flag and conservatism, when their actions demonstrate the complete opposite agenda. Anybody cheering on the current destruction yet calling themselves a conservative (likely to absolve themselves from what they're actually supporting) needs to be solidly mocked.
>the medical establishment has suffered a severe blow to their credibility because the government used their work in vain.
It doesn't help that the medical system has been gamed to concentrate wealth. Doctoring pays well, but doctors are much lower on medicine's economic dogpile than insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
I think Medicine became an important jobs project in the post-NAFTA era because it's an industry that can't be outsourced. The amount spent on medicine has gone through the roof, but the outcomes are the same as they've ever been.
I expect that the high spending on ineffective care is a wealth effect rather than something more indirect. The money is there, so people use it. Veterinary care is sort of similar (spending has skyrocketed as disposable income has increased).
There's also probably technology/knowledge effects, new things that are worth paying a lot for, people staying relatively healthy but getting fragile in the process, etc.
I've lived through two major crises as a technical professional: Y2K, where I spent thousands of hours updating date systems, and COVID-19, where I developed pandemic surveillance systems. Something striking connects these experiences: In both cases, the people who worked to prevent disaster were later accused of overreacting, precisely because their preventive efforts succeeded.
When Y2K passed without incident, it wasn't because the threat wasn't real - it was because thousands of us worked tirelessly behind the scenes to avert it. Similarly with pandemic surveillance - the data systems we built helped inform decisions that saved lives. Those decisions were often described as authoritarian overreach by people who pointed to the mortality they averted as evidence.
The irony is painful: The more effectively we prevent a crisis, the more people claim there was never a real threat. Those who dismiss these efforts as authoritarian overreach are enjoying the very safety that our 'overreaction' provided them.
Analyst visits his lumberjack cousin one Christmas at his cabin. Notices the cousin puts an amount of fire in the fireplace, which is correlated with the outside temperature, while the inside temperature remains constant (uncorrelated with firewood or outdoor temperature). Analyst wonders what his cousin is wasting all his wood for.
The thing is if we quiz Friedman's cousin he can justify his actions, we can test his beliefs and then deduce that he is acting in a reasonable way.
Whereas with COVID we don't have that. Particularly since the controls in place were almost all things that people could have done voluntarily so the compulsory aspects are quite hard to justify. Eg, if a fellow want to live as a hermit they can just do that. The government doesn't need to shut down big chunks of the economy for them to go into seclusion.
And then there were all those vaccine mandates where people were just spreading plain misinformation that they would have an impact on transmission numbers. Turns out they didn't. Without that, the justification for a mandate is flimsy even assuming that there is good medical evidence.
The medical establishment should have been championing against these measures and, charitably assuming they were, they really weren't visible enough in their opposition. I can imagine a lot of voters in the US would be asking "why do we fund these people?".
> since the controls in place were almost all things that people could have done voluntarily
The useful part of quarantines was to protect hospital capacity. We don’t have a form one can sign that says you get to take risks but are put at the back of the line for healthcare access under certain circumstances. (I think we should. Particularly with vaccines. Modelled off the Arizona stupid motorist law.)
> vaccine mandates where people were just spreading plain misinformation that they would have an impact on transmission numbers
Do you have a medical source that claimed this? It seemed to mostly be right wingers who didn’t understand the polio vaccine was also non-sterilising. (In some forms, negatively so.)
No, I just observed that everyone I know got vaccinated, then got COVID.
But if you want me to throw a PDF at you, "the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people" & "Indeed, there is growing evidence that peak viral titres in the upper airways of the lungs and culturable virus are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals" - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Which matches pretty closely what I see in real life. Before vaccinations, everyone was going to get COVID. After vaccinations, everyone ... got COVID. No change in transmission profile.
> We don’t have a form one can sign that says you get to take risks but are put at the back of the line for healthcare access under certain circumstances.
Yes, people should be able to take responsibility for their own health rather than have the economy burned down around their ears. Maybe the CDC should have been pointing that out? Something COVID-like is going to happen in the future, it isn't that unusual an event. A respiratory pandemic is probably a 1:50, 1:20 year style event given how interconnected the world is now.
If it's worth anything, my family and I got vaccinated and boosted and none of us got Covid.
Or at least, we never tested positive, and had no mysterious flu-like ailments that struck us down for days or weeks. Either we were exceptionally lucky, or the vaccine worked.
As you seem to imply, Covid is a new class signifier. The socioeconomic divide in this incidence is my point. (Years ago we saw the same with football concussions. Everyone wanted a college-football intern. Less so someone on the full-time cost roll.)
There is a similar justified mechanical model with vaccinations. A toy version is that vaccinated people are X% less likely to get infected and Y% less effective at spreading the disease if they get infected. If compliance with vaccination policies and other mitigation measures is at least Z%, then the outbreak will be contained before most people get infected.
With novel diseases, it's usually impossible to have accurate enough estimates of the numerical parameters in advance to determine if lockdowns and vaccine mandates are going to work. And the compliance rate is fundamentally political. A few key individuals, such as politicians and judges, can have an outsized effect on it. Containment that would have worked otherwise may fail due to the actions of those individuals.
I think that we should start to take more seriously that the people who do what you say are not just misguided ... there is political goal behind it. They do intentionally lie and we should stop awarding them benefit of doubt.
I mean, it is probably too late for that, but the mandatory naivity with which these people were treated were contributing issue.
> The more effectively we prevent a crisis, the more people claim there was never a real threat.
Best exemplified by the anti-vax movement. They don't see measles anymore, so they think measles isn't a threat, and then they read some "alternative" health site saying that vaccines cause autism, and they don't vaccinate their kids.
Bro, if there hadnt been a lockdown, the agitator class that seeded groups to rally against lockdowns would have instead seeded groups to rally people in favor of what the rest of the world was doing at the time.
The right is one giant field of astroturf, paid for by hidden billionaires, acted out by bots and the easily duped, and disseminated over social media
This. It does not matter what the goverment would do, the exact same people would fault them. If the goal is to destroy someone and you do not care about the truth, it does not matter what they do.
No need. We’re seeing increasing class segregation in where people live [1] and with whom they interact [2]. Rich people, broadly, get good healthcare. (Marin County being a famous exception of rich, educated nutters.)
This administration is a wealth transfer from the poor and middle class up. If your doctor won’t call you when a pandemic emerges, you’re a net payer.
According to meta studies done on Covid, the most effective early response that countries did was actually authoritarian lockdowns, but just not the ones that people remember. It was the shutdown of borders, airports, trains, and busses that had the best effect in reducing spread.
Doing so limits trade and restrict peoples free movement, but those costs were minor compared to the pandemic. The costs were also smaller than initially expected, a lesson that future leaders should remember.
That isn't really "authoritarian", just extreme. Authoritarian policy is where one group gets serious about enforcing their opinions on another group in the polity without having to justify them or respect basic social contracts like freedom of speech or religion. Sealing the border is no minor thing, but it is more xenophobic than authoritarian. Not running trains and busses isn't an issue for any ideology I'm aware of.
For example China is authoritarian but has busses, trains and an open border (I've been to visit, I wish we could handle that sort of industrial excellence in the West).
Restricting the freedom of movement is usually associated with authoritarian, as would be xenophobia. However in term of effectiveness to combat a pandemic, restricting movement in places of high population density is a very effective measure. A specific issue with covid was also that the virus survived and distributed well in places with air recycling, such as planes, trains and buses (as well as trams and subways). The initial theory that spread were limited to droplets from infected individuals was found to be completely false. Sadly, this fact of the virus was mostly forgotten in the following political discussion. It is also why virus researchers view on masks was different (and generally ignored by everyone) compared to the two political camps. If you want to prevent an airborne virus, you got to either separate the air or have good enough filters, and studies done in the Swedish Karolinska medical university showed that even their hospital filtered AC system was not able to kill the virus. Live virus particles could be detected in every place where the AC system was connected.
One can hope those kind of lessons will carry over to future pandemics if they are of similar nature as covid.
- "EIS officers are hired under Title 42, a mechanism that allows the federal government to bring in the best and the brightest, in some cases paying them at rates higher than the typical public sector wages. It offers workers fewer job protections, however, making Title 42 workers easier to fire."
I'd guess this is the main reason DOGE targeted this particular agency for extreme cuts (other sources reporting 50% [0]). It's the same reason DOGE is wiping out all the fed's new hires—because those are probationary, it's possible to fire them with less administrative work. It has zilch to do with competence or efficiency. It's outright anti-aligned with competence, in this case: this agency (EIS) hires–per that quoted paragraph–highly-skilled outsiders at far above public-sector wages. That they're easy to fire means there was a lot less dead-weight, to begin with, in this subgroup relative to the rest of the federal bureaucracy.
(Perhaps it's a good time to read up which other federal agencies hire under this Title 42).
These people are much more interested in creating a shallow facade of efficient small-government, than in putting in the actual hard work towards building one. Because this isn't efficiency; this is vandalistic looting!
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadI do believe Trump's attacks on our regulatory agencies are going to kill people...
But it does seem implausible that firing the FAA director, an advisory committee, and a ATC hiring freeze could result in a crash 9 days later.
As far as I can tell, GP did not refute the initial post.
[edited typo-sorry I am on mobile]
I'm baffled by this defense.. Understaffing safety correlates with what aspect of its causation? The FAA isn't exactly the same as running the worlds sleaziest real estate firm or social network. If it were, you could apparently fire people because its Tuesday, go home, rape your wife and then maybe take some ketamine and as long as you didn't hire some black guy you aren't the kind of jerk who gets into that dangerous kind of understaffing so of course your organization is going to be fine.
But basically Obama administration changed the rules for admitting FAA air controllers. Admission started to take race into account, lower the bar for air controllers as well as disrupting the then-existing pipeline.
Disrupting the then-existing pipeline probably had the largest effect - as students that already int the pipeline found out that they had to start over. Then-recent graduates from the pipeline also had to start over their FAA air controller certification. (that was the cherry on top!!!!)
Tesla's full self driving is a negligence scam that kills people. If he got to the low investment he made in it through not hiring the people he didn't hire based on a lack of diversity in the PhD programs then the deaths would matter?
By the standards until 1980 (including even Nixon), I would judge Obama very harshly as a President. Compared to these new clowns, he is capable of analysis of the risks he is taking and not following a sentiment he picked up on a porn site previously known as twitter.
As much as Trump’s cuts.
The FAA is one of the world’s most-successful bureaucracies. Anything they’ve been doing should be replicated across government.
The root cause of the crash is Congressmen overloading the airport [1]. (The proximate, the Army flying green pilots in congested airspace [2].)
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/31/defazio-pl...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/helicopter-crew-may-not-have-hea...
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
It took about two years for the world to more or less return to normal when COVID struck. Instead of conservatives learning a lesson about that, they instead just declared COVID as fake, lied about vaccines, and reelected the demagogue that's partly responsible for the virus's wide spread in the US in the first place.
Frankly, it's tiring. I don't know why about half the country wants this.
If the current administration doesn’t prove their value, the people will start to have a say in another 2 years at the house level.
None of this is a surprise. It's not even like 2016, where people could say "I figured he'd be less bad than he said he would be" with a straight face.
Whatever excuse they found to not vote for the Democrat in 2024, will still apply in 2026 and 2028. Or they'll find a new one.
And turnout in midterms is even worse than in Presidential years. I don't see those non-voters suddenly taking an interest then.
It would be fantastic if somebody learned some lessons. But I think 2024 proves pretty definitively that people don't learn lessons.
My recollection is that non-voters tend to be reliably lazy, but I can’t find a good source.
The system almost relies on it. If you can identify a non-voting bloc, in primaries or ideally even generals, you can tax them to give goodies to citizens.
It's maddening, they complain about Trump, and when I mention that they didn't vote they say "YOU THINK KAMALA WOULD BE BETTER??? YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO FIX THIS PROBLEM BY VOTING LOL!!". And of course, they never define what "the problem" is, so there's actually no way to solve it, so they never have to actually vote.
By not voting for Harris and making her lose it means next cycle people have to care about your opinion to get elected. It's the opposite of when Progressives don't like a Democrat's proposal but still vote for it; it means the Democrats don't have to negotiate with them because they're getting the vote anyways.
It's honestly pretty fucking dismissive of people who are affected by Trump's regressive policies. "It sucks that you got deported but maybe in fifteen years you'll thank me because we will have a proper progressive in office to fix problems that are really important but apparently impossible for us to actually enumerate with any kind of consistency".
Like the Gazans!
The American Palestinian movement has been 100% about the protesters themselves. Not the Palestinians. The Defund the Police and Chesa crowd found a new cause to ruin. Folks who have never been to both countries confidently redrawing borders on another continent, the new Sykes and Picot.
No? It makes you electorally irrelevant. Possibly toxic. Trump has carte blanche with Gaza because it’s not an issue any senior Democrat is willing to fight for after the Palestine vote proved both mercurial and unreliable. Hell, I’m experiencing some schadenfreude with the whole thing.
The way to play it is to bloc vote in primaries and then reliably turn out in generals. See: the NRA.
> By not voting for Harris and making her lose it means next cycle people have to care about your opinion to get elected
What actually happens:
The party rationally writes off this flaky voting bloc as not worth the effort, and instead goes further to the right.
One of the first steps to righting this ship is to get our terminology straight and stop calling them conservatives. Conservative is not a synonym for Republican. Conservatives respect institutions, America's contribution to the world, fiscal responsibility, want to slow gradual change, etc. In the last election, the conservative option was squarely the Democrats. The modern grassroots Republican parties are populist reactionaries, and the people they've elected are (neo)fascists. The probable landscape is that they are just working for China to destroy this country and sell off the pieces.
The problem with your analysis is that you don't have the power to define what conservatism is; if enough populist reactionaries wrap themselves in the mantle of conservatism (which they absolutely have) then they gain effective ownership of teh term and ruin it for everyone else. I agree with your general thesis but think the rot goes back longer than 3 decades, although it got markedly worse after Newt Gingrich became speaker, around the same time that Fox News started on cable.
As an example, consider Phyllis Schlafy's 'Eagle Forum'. Founded in 1972, its always been a reflection of its late founder's strident reactory outlook, to the point that their periodic rants about communism seem quaint and anachronistic. You could be forgiven for thinking it was relevant for political scientists studying the American right in the 20th century...except the US attorney for DC (a guy named Ed Martin Jr) is an Eagle Forum veteran, and a glance at his X timeline shows he's still all in on la Schlafly, doing official government business through his X account (eg publishing documents ther and nowhere else), and generally living down to the stereotype of a wild-eyed ideologue.
In short, I don't believe terminological exactitude isn't going to get us out of this. The famously cranky Samuel Johnson, writing disdainfully of a British Prime Minister in 1775, commented 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'. His point was that any concept invested with general-purpose social value - patriotism, love of nation, belief in community, conserving the body politic - can be exploited for short-term political gain to the detriment of long-term well-being. It's a perennial problem.
The thrust of my comment was exactly that we need to stop letting them wrap themselves in the cloak of the flag and conservatism, when their actions demonstrate the complete opposite agenda. Anybody cheering on the current destruction yet calling themselves a conservative (likely to absolve themselves from what they're actually supporting) needs to be solidly mocked.
Concretely, how do you do this when you don't know much about the pathogen?
> the medical establishment has suffered a severe blow to their credibility because the government used their work in vain
Eh, I think the propaganda machine did more damage than any actually poor decisions.
It doesn't help that the medical system has been gamed to concentrate wealth. Doctoring pays well, but doctors are much lower on medicine's economic dogpile than insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
I think Medicine became an important jobs project in the post-NAFTA era because it's an industry that can't be outsourced. The amount spent on medicine has gone through the roof, but the outcomes are the same as they've ever been.
There's also probably technology/knowledge effects, new things that are worth paying a lot for, people staying relatively healthy but getting fragile in the process, etc.
When Y2K passed without incident, it wasn't because the threat wasn't real - it was because thousands of us worked tirelessly behind the scenes to avert it. Similarly with pandemic surveillance - the data systems we built helped inform decisions that saved lives. Those decisions were often described as authoritarian overreach by people who pointed to the mortality they averted as evidence.
The irony is painful: The more effectively we prevent a crisis, the more people claim there was never a real threat. Those who dismiss these efforts as authoritarian overreach are enjoying the very safety that our 'overreaction' provided them.
Analyst visits his lumberjack cousin one Christmas at his cabin. Notices the cousin puts an amount of fire in the fireplace, which is correlated with the outside temperature, while the inside temperature remains constant (uncorrelated with firewood or outdoor temperature). Analyst wonders what his cousin is wasting all his wood for.
http://bactra.org/weblog/1178.html
Whereas with COVID we don't have that. Particularly since the controls in place were almost all things that people could have done voluntarily so the compulsory aspects are quite hard to justify. Eg, if a fellow want to live as a hermit they can just do that. The government doesn't need to shut down big chunks of the economy for them to go into seclusion.
And then there were all those vaccine mandates where people were just spreading plain misinformation that they would have an impact on transmission numbers. Turns out they didn't. Without that, the justification for a mandate is flimsy even assuming that there is good medical evidence.
The medical establishment should have been championing against these measures and, charitably assuming they were, they really weren't visible enough in their opposition. I can imagine a lot of voters in the US would be asking "why do we fund these people?".
The useful part of quarantines was to protect hospital capacity. We don’t have a form one can sign that says you get to take risks but are put at the back of the line for healthcare access under certain circumstances. (I think we should. Particularly with vaccines. Modelled off the Arizona stupid motorist law.)
> vaccine mandates where people were just spreading plain misinformation that they would have an impact on transmission numbers
Do you have a medical source that claimed this? It seemed to mostly be right wingers who didn’t understand the polio vaccine was also non-sterilising. (In some forms, negatively so.)
No, I just observed that everyone I know got vaccinated, then got COVID.
But if you want me to throw a PDF at you, "the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people" & "Indeed, there is growing evidence that peak viral titres in the upper airways of the lungs and culturable virus are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals" - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Which matches pretty closely what I see in real life. Before vaccinations, everyone was going to get COVID. After vaccinations, everyone ... got COVID. No change in transmission profile.
> We don’t have a form one can sign that says you get to take risks but are put at the back of the line for healthcare access under certain circumstances.
Yes, people should be able to take responsibility for their own health rather than have the economy burned down around their ears. Maybe the CDC should have been pointing that out? Something COVID-like is going to happen in the future, it isn't that unusual an event. A respiratory pandemic is probably a 1:50, 1:20 year style event given how interconnected the world is now.
Or at least, we never tested positive, and had no mysterious flu-like ailments that struck us down for days or weeks. Either we were exceptionally lucky, or the vaccine worked.
With novel diseases, it's usually impossible to have accurate enough estimates of the numerical parameters in advance to determine if lockdowns and vaccine mandates are going to work. And the compliance rate is fundamentally political. A few key individuals, such as politicians and judges, can have an outsized effect on it. Containment that would have worked otherwise may fail due to the actions of those individuals.
I mean, it is probably too late for that, but the mandatory naivity with which these people were treated were contributing issue.
Best exemplified by the anti-vax movement. They don't see measles anymore, so they think measles isn't a threat, and then they read some "alternative" health site saying that vaccines cause autism, and they don't vaccinate their kids.
The right is one giant field of astroturf, paid for by hidden billionaires, acted out by bots and the easily duped, and disseminated over social media
This administration is a wealth transfer from the poor and middle class up. If your doctor won’t call you when a pandemic emerges, you’re a net payer.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/growing-economic-segregat...
[2] https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soc4.128...
Doing so limits trade and restrict peoples free movement, but those costs were minor compared to the pandemic. The costs were also smaller than initially expected, a lesson that future leaders should remember.
For example China is authoritarian but has busses, trains and an open border (I've been to visit, I wish we could handle that sort of industrial excellence in the West).
One can hope those kind of lessons will carry over to future pandemics if they are of similar nature as covid.
I'd guess this is the main reason DOGE targeted this particular agency for extreme cuts (other sources reporting 50% [0]). It's the same reason DOGE is wiping out all the fed's new hires—because those are probationary, it's possible to fire them with less administrative work. It has zilch to do with competence or efficiency. It's outright anti-aligned with competence, in this case: this agency (EIS) hires–per that quoted paragraph–highly-skilled outsiders at far above public-sector wages. That they're easy to fire means there was a lot less dead-weight, to begin with, in this subgroup relative to the rest of the federal bureaucracy.
(Perhaps it's a good time to read up which other federal agencies hire under this Title 42).
These people are much more interested in creating a shallow facade of efficient small-government, than in putting in the actual hard work towards building one. Because this isn't efficiency; this is vandalistic looting!
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-disease-detectives-doge-cut... ("CDC's "disease detectives" halved as part of DOGE cuts at health agencies")