I feel like the public, even in may 2022, just can’t grasp the basic concept of inflation. A better way than dropping cash out of helicopters, or mailing checks, is to give people tax money back in the form of a standard deduction. It’s almost like people have thought about this stuff already.
Any way that you give people more money without also increasing the supply of stuff to buy will generate inflation for those things that those people want to buy. If you target the money to certain people, then the things those people buy will inflate. If you target the money to certain stuff (like education), then that is what will inflate. I don't think changing the mechanism to a standard deduction changes this - except maybe to focus the inflation on taxpayers and what they buy.
Exactly the same incentives problem with EDD. The more fraud, the larger their budget gets and so there is only one metric they care about; increasing the total number of recipients. Similar issue with fake user counts in the tech world. User count = money.
Unfortunately the dominant party also benefits from all of this fraud, so it is ultimately a political problem. Until there is viable outside political competition, there will continue to be zero accountability and wide scale fraud and corruption. User count = money = political power/voters. Mainstream candidates are owned, and so the only solution involves draining the swamp so to speak and it’s pretty clear at this point, the swamp usually wins.
Maybe going all the way to legally accountable is a bit much but the incentive not to waste other people's money is too damn low these days. You see it in every context and it's so frustrating.
Banks can’t give out fake loans. They try to all the time and are rightfully regulated/fined/charged when they do.
Banks giving out bad loans caused the 2008 collapse. Student loans will one day cause a similar problem but it won’t be big banks going bankrupt, it will be us. Hearing that 20% are obvious fraud doesn’t even surprise anyone. Imagine a bank saying 20% of their loans are fraud but it’s “not their job” to check that loans are given to anonymous recipients who don’t bother to provide even a fake name!
It’s a crime. Like the banks, the people at the top are aware but profit off doing nothing. That they work for the taxpayers just makes it that much more criminal, not less!
You should read about inflation. Efforts to fatten up the middle class with free giveaways to certain voting blocks has and will continue to spur inflation and make those same voters ever less wealthy. But voters are myopic, so they’ll vote for free money every time. Eventually you get Venezuela.
A better way would be to protect people by not making policy decisions that reward bad behavior and punish those who avoid debt and save. Rewarding terrible behavior may get you elected but it’s bad for society. Like giving candy to pacify a cranky baby.
But such opinions have become verboten now, and actually censored.
I wasn't suggesting a handout though I can see how that's easy to read. I don't have the answers on how to achieve it, but policy changes to shift more people up the class chain rather than pushing them down is what I was thinking. Raising minimum wage, reducing service burdens on the individual, reducing the cost of housing, adjusting taxes perhaps. Generally freeing up money to be available and spent in the community and not caught up in financial instruments and real estate.
Another manifestation of problems in higher education. It’s not just software.
If you read up on the sociology of professional specialization you’ll learn that most technical complexity in a field is there for competitive purposes. Jargon exists more exclude and obscure than to facilitate.
So one predicts less productivity as competition increases lead to complexification of professions. This is all because higher education is broken. One of the functions of higher education, perhaps it’s most important function, is allocating human capital efficiently. It’s fully derelict in this, preferring instead to sell credentials to labor that labor doesn’t need, at the expense of the debt holders and students, to the delight of corporations. The result is zero productivity going back to the early 70’s.
If anyone were in a position to know whether it’s possible, and how to do it, he’d be on the list.
I think, regardless of his history regarding open source, water under the bridge long ago, he is worth taking seriously if we want to be prepared for the next one, which may come soon.
There was probably a window in time when cases were less than a few thousand or so when such a thing could have been possible. That's the real game in fighting emerging diseases. Early detection, identification of reservoirs and rapid vaccine development and aggressive isolation and ring vaccination if possible.
But I agree, it's absolutely laughable to think enforced social distancing could ever control a fully airborne disease, already so widespread, and with an R_0 over 4, especially now with the current rate of emergence of immunity escaping variants. Check out BA.4 and BA.5 in south africa right now, both of which seem to elude immunity from BA.1 just 6 months after Omicron's emergence.
Sure, it would have originally been rational to try to contain it until widespread vaccination could happen. That was no longer an option as soon as:
(a) Trump decided that his followers should treat it by injecting bleach, fish tank cleaner, and horse dewormer
(b) the WHO and the CDC decided it wasn't an airborne disease because apparently they were still relying on research from 1949 C.E.
(c) the CDC decided not to tell Americans that masks were effective (because they didn't want panic buying)
(d) Biden's COVID czar decided to ostrich the whole thing
Now we're just fucked; everyone will get it, the question is how many times and how bad the next variants. And whether we'll ever develop effective treatment for long covid.
The cat was long already out of the bag at all of those points.
There's a small chance it could have been contained in late 2019 when Wuhan doctors were raising the alarm, but they were silenced and punished by Chinese government officials
That's the thing though. Things like SARS and MERS still exist in the animal reservoirs and could come back at any time. It never hit pandemic or even endemic levels. It's easy to eradicate something in a small geographic area with a small group if people. And you're right, the severity made it much harder for infections to be missed (I think it was less contagious too).
I was just saying that now something has hit pandemic level, it's unlikely we can make it go away. If we're lucky it will end up like the Spanish flu - people build immunity to the current strain during a few years and it mutates to something less severe.
I'm not sure we can, even if we try. At least not for any practical cost. Canada has been trying to curtail, and ideally eradicate, rabies from the wild for the last ~50 years. Rabid animals are systematically culled. There's an oral animal vaccine. There's an ongoing vaccination program where they scatter the vaccine all over the place in edible treat format. The ongoing cost of these programs is considerable, running to hundreds of millions of dollars.
And yet rabies has not been eliminated from the wild. Not by a long shot. The cumulative effect of these programs over the decades is to mostly eradicate it from inhabited areas in foxes, raccoons and other species which are prone to human interaction. Actual eradication of rabies in the wild in North America, is essentially unattainable, even if we scaled current programs up massively. Too many skunks slip through the net. Unless we're going to simply sterilize the outdoors, I'm really not sure we could eradicate animal reservoirs for COVID-19.
Never been pro-ivermectin as a primary tool for Covid, but can you actually back up, “indeed, the argument for ivermectin in 1st world countries has been more or less demolished.”
I read Scott’s piece the day it was published and was over all impressed but don’t buy the conclusion. Westerners are filled with all sorts of parasites and as far as I’m aware we are not universally cleaner in that regard, for example with worms, than other places. That to me suggests that to the extent a significant fraction of the population would benefit from deworming, ivermectin’s widespread use in some of our hospitals during the pandemic was not entirely illfounded and may have even played a part in more than one life saving treatment regimen.
So I would love evidence that says clearly why it doesn’t work here but works in poorer places because somehow Americans are too good for parasites. My experience tells me this is wrong, and many Americans are carrying all sorts of bugs. Go read the Amazon reviews for proguard!
Is this just your feeling, that western countries have just as many parasites as developing countries?
That makes me think you don't have much experience in developing nations. Sanitation is a serious problem in large parts of the 3rd world. Availability of clean water is a problem. Sewage capture and treatment is a big problem. These are not big problems in most of the western world.
I'm sure there are studies finding that most people regardless of where they live have some parasites. But the question is whether you have large amounts of the kind of parasites that make you sick and more specifically, the kinds of parasites that can be treated with ivermectin.
“the question is whether you have large amounts of the kind of parasites that make you sick and more specifically, the kinds of parasites that can be treated with ivermectin.”
It would be a useful study, to the extent Covid remains a concern for public health agencies. If you are familiar with poverty in America, you wouldn’t think sanitation and parasites aren’t issues here. They just aren’t as common.
