All actions and purchases at this point are to help us to become more independant from the system. Society and government at large has shown itself to be unreliable and undependable. I am also making longer term plans to move out of my current state.
So good luck everyone with the education system.
I mean, just look at PPE. I understand being a little flat footed when the pandemic first started, but it's been nearly 6 months now. I would have expected mass mobilization to pump out N95 masks, gloves, gowns, face shields, etc. by the millions. I mean, look how many heavy military vehicles the US managed to build during WWII, and then consider we can't even build masks of sufficient quantity.
And this just follows an ever growing set of problems that the US has just oddly accepted without the political will to do anything, things like our totally f'd healthcare system, mass shootings, climate change, etc.
I disagree, though, with the sibling comment that says "Don't give up! Don't withdraw!" It's not like there aren't other functioning societies in the world that are way less broken than the US. Staying behind in some mythical "fight" is just misplaced patriotism IMO. There are other countries that live the ideals that I used to associate with America (real freedom, upward mobility, democracy, rule of law, etc.) much better than the US does these days.
All that being said, your second point seems correct to me, and I doubt anything will be done (as a result of the political quagmire).
Those aren't the only options. Some mask manufacturers could scale up manufacturing as long as they had a medium/long term contract to make the investment worth it. The current administration keeps blaming the previous one for drawing down on the federal PPP supply without replenishing it (dubious claim), so there was exactly zero reason for this[1] to happen.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-d...
The claim is "dubious", so (therefore) there was exactly no reason for this to happen?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dubious - "questionable or suspect as to true nature or quality"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exactly - "in a manner or measure or to a degree or number that strictly conforms to a fact or condition"
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/08/donald-tru...
> One thing the stockpile clearly doesn’t have enough of is face masks. News reports found that the N95 face masks were not substantially replenished after H1N1 in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. (continues)
https://www.dailywire.com/news/obama-admin-allegedly-deplete...
> “The national stockpile used to be somewhat more robust. In 2006, Congress provided supplemental funds to add 104 million N95 masks and 52 million surgical masks in an effort to prepare for a flu pandemic,” Bloomberg News continued. “But after the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/06/828303817/surgical-mask-manuf...
> KELLY: I mean, I have read that since that experience, you have been sounding the alarm. I know you wrote to President Trump. I know you wrote President Obama before him, warning that it wasn't going to be if but when that there would be another...
> BOWEN: I'm not. No. No, no, no. You know, I have been off and on. Of course, I've been selling this message for 14 years, but I'm really not angry. I'm puzzled. And I think what I've been fighting is not the government, not President Obama, not President Trump. I think it's human nature. I think since everybody ignored it - I mean, reporters ignored it. Pandemic experts ignored it. Our government ignored it. Hospitals ignored it. Everybody ignored it. So to me, it's a human nature problem. So I'm over my anger.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XMOzAY...
> “Prestige Ameritech is presently the lone voice warning of the insecure U.S. mask supply,” Bowen wrote to President Barack Obama in June 2010. “Apathy and inertia are our biggest hurdles.”
(Note that this is from The Washington Post)
I don't disagree that there's no GOOD reason for this to happen, other than the unfortunate reality that human beings are not very good at thinking, at least compared to how well we perceive ourselves to think. As far as I can tell, almost all humans are living in some sort of a severe state of delusion at all times, our minds and societies haven't had nearly enough time to evolve to accommodate the massive increase in complexity in the last few hundred years, let alone the last 20.
More importantly, the current president didn't spend the first 3 years in office replenishing the stockpile and didn't take an offer from a former mask manufacturer very early in the outbreak to increase the production rate.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/nation/2020/04/02/trump...
Obama behaved no differently.
The presidents could not differ more in:
- lead time between inauguration and first epidemic reaching the USA (6 weeks versus 3 years)
- seriousness with which the presidential transition team took pandemic response
- the authority given to pandemic response (Obama made NSC responsible while Trump made HHS responsible)
- speed and intensity of initial response once the outbreak was identified
- empowerment medical professionals
- use of Defense Production Act
- treatment of WHO, CDC, and FDA as institutions"the presidential responses to 2009 H1N1 versus 2020 SARS-CoV-2" was not the topic of conversation. The topic of conversation was:
>>> If you want an increase in mask supply, you have to either allow the pricing mechanism to do its job, or force people to make masks.
>> Those aren't the only options. Some mask manufacturers could scale up manufacturing as long as they had a medium/long term contract to make the investment worth it. The current administration keeps blaming the previous one for drawing down on the federal PPP supply without replenishing it (dubious claim), so there was exactly zero reason for this[1] to happen.
>> [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-d....
You are now expanding the scope of your original argument. Before we do that, can we finish with your first point?
Did the Obama administration refill the inventory of masks after they were drawn down, or not? My reading of the evidence is that they did not, does your reading leave you with a different conclusion, are you maybe referring to different evidence than what I posted above?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/hospitals-face-a-whi...
There were three major disincentives for states to do this.
First, without a coordinated response there were dozens of high demand buyers and low supply. The market did its thing and State Governments were being forced to pay very high prices for PPE. States were bidding against each other and bidding against the Federal Government, this drove the price even higher.
Second, even when States could secure PPE, the Federal Government was seizing PPE and testing supplies to send it to Coronavirus Taskforce approved vendors who would then sell the seized goods back to the States at inflated prices. This got so bad that Maryland's Governor, after using his South Korean wife's connections to secure testing supplies from South Korea, placed them under the protection of the National Guard to prevent the Federal Government from absconding with them. https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/maryla...
Third, the State budgets are shot to hell. When the public health crisis started it was easy to say, let's do what it takes to keep people safe. Now a sizable chunk of the citizenry is refusing to wear masks or social distance, and the State coffers are running empty. State leaders are faced with deciding if they want to use the limited funds left at their disposal to try purchasing PPE in the face of a constituency that is going to spread and worsen the public health crisis regardless. It's lose-lose for the decision makers, so they are disincentivized to follow this path. They can spend the last of the treasury on PPE just to watch it evaporate as cases soar.
This doesn't have to be complicated: We can subsidize masks.
If those companies decided that they were going to stop selling their current stock of masks completely until they sold for a higher price, that would be price gouging.
You know, like a global pandemic. That's a pretty desperate time, IMO.
First, production capacity is not available, as the VP of Prestige Ameritech tried to explain to everyone months ago [1]. The equipment required to manufacture suitable PPE is big and expensive and there isn't enough demand to offset the capital or the maintenance costs for the equipment, except when there's suddenly a pandemic and everyone wants PPE yesterday.
Despite this, Prestige Ameritech -- having foreseen this scenario a long time ago and spent over a decade begging different administrations to prepare for it -- offered to ramp up production early this year. The Trump administration said no [2]. The issue has now been made even worse with everything reopening nationally, which has not only caused a huge spike in hospital demand for PPE, but has also caused a huge spike in demand for masks specifically [same article].
And these are just the immediate, short-term, direct issues that should be easy for outsiders to grasp. There are many other related, harder-to-solve problems:
> The blame, experts agreed, goes beyond any single person or agency but is the culmination of decades of change in the nation’s manufacturing capabilities, a worldwide shift in how goods are delivered and the country’s long battle with medical costs. Warnings about how these factors set the stage for shortages during a worst-case scenario went unheeded, leaving the country unprepared for a pandemic.
> By the time the coronavirus arrived, it was too late. The nation was left with massive shortages and a ruptured supply chain that won’t be an easy fix. [3]
Furthermore, prices did rise dramatically, and -- gasp! -- this did not magically fix the supply chain [4].
Allowing unregulated price gouging would not (and did not) change the supply shortage. It would have just been a pinata party in the shape of the US, and would have left front line medical workers without necessary PPE while wealthy people hoarded supplies.
An effective, less corrupt federal government could have dramatically increased PPE supply just by taking the pandemic seriously at the start and putting competent people with relevant expertise in charge of oversight and response. There still would have been shortages, but they would have been far less severe and they would largely have been resolved by now.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/05/8113874...
[2]: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/10/21319960/n95-masks-shor...
[3]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/07/01/coronavirus-u...
[4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/05/21/why-dont-h...
Now, all of this could be turned around quickly with good leadership that could rally the country behind a cause, but we chose someone who is committed to division, who's willing to undermine the efforts of those who work for him, who, even at this time of crisis thinks that nothing other than personal loyalty to him and that he should never make a mistake.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/16/georgia-mayors-bria...
On the federal level, no sane President would go out of his way to force states to give the CDC less information.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/trump-cdc-cor...
“Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.”
AKA how to handle a pandemic for dummies
What did our current administration do? Claim it at first did not exist, and then definitely didn't look at it when they were informed it did exist.
Really, you're not putting any effort in your trolling/cynicism
No US President in my living memory would have screwed this up as badly as Donald Trump has.
Were all of these issues nonexistent under prior administrations?
Or, as for turning it around, are you asserting that Clinton both could have and would have done so? If so, how do you know this?
Ask yourself this, could the current administration's response have been better given what was known at the time? If the answer is emphatically yes, then perhaps another person is better suited for the job.
Sometimes, I really hate the people in this country.
Anyone who comes in with good faith and actually objectively looks at the statistics and response can't possibly come to a different conclusion. The problem comes down to the "good faith" and "objective" parts of that sentence.
@not2b pointed out a number of very valid issues in the United States. No disagreement from me, these are obvious and very important problems.
But then followed it up with:
>> Now, all of this could be turned around quickly with good leadership that could rally the country behind a cause, but we chose someone who is committed to division...
"Now, all of this could be turned around quickly with good leadership" on its own could be interpreted as an abstract philosophical statement, but not when it is accompanied by "...but we chose someone..." implies a specific context (the last election), does it not?
In the last election, there were two choices: Trump and Clinton.
Trump was elected, leaving Clinton as the only other choice of a person who could have "turned this situation around quickly with good leadership that could rally the country behind a cause".
Is: "are you asserting that Clinton both could have and would have done so? If so, how do you know this?", requesting clarification and evidence of the claim, inappropriate in this context?
Is: "Were all of these issues nonexistent under prior administrations?" not appropriate, considering the claim was that a different choice could "turn this situation around quickly"? Is past performance of Presidents not relevant to the epistemic soundness of a claim that something is not just possible, but quick?
I'm thinking: perhaps turning things around in a country of 300 million people of vastly different cultures and ideologies is a bit more complicated than is appreciated by some forum commentators. Just an idea.
> Ask yourself this, could the current administration's response have been better given what was known at the time? If the answer is emphatically yes, then perhaps another person is better suited for the job.
Of course, just look around at other countries. There are surely thousands of people in the Unites States that could have handled this situation better, but we are only allowed to vote for the candidates that are undemocratically offered. And let's not forget, an election isn't about on issue, like "who would handle a pandemic best?". The reality is, each voter is (or should be) considering many thousands of variables, many of which have unknown values and all sorts of messy stuff.
The notion that ~"because President<A> is handling individual issue <x> poorly, therefore it logically follows that Candidate<Y> was the better choice for President" is not strongly logical. The answers to questions like this (or, what the hell is even going on, at any level of significant complexity) are actually not known - it just doesn't seem like it. I happen to believe that this phenomenon may actually play a major role in the underlying cause of the problems themselves.
This is subjective and necessarily highly speculative.
> I despise her but to think that she wouldn’t have been better at handling the pandemic response than Trump is delusional.
Predicting or thinking (about) that is perfectly fine and reasonable. Mistaking subsequent predictions for conclusive facts is what is actually delusional. There are many examples of such delusional behavior on HN every day: mind reading, future predicting (and stating the results as facts), you name it. I think it is fairly true to say that conspiracy theorists (for example) and "smart" people differ more in degree than in kind, although we do not have the means (or ambition, or epistemic skills) to determine the degree to which this is true.
Most of the time, what we consider to be true, is actually unknown.
In leadership not making a decision until you have 100% of the facts, and truly know something to be a fact, will kill your ability to be effective.
Trump didn’t make a decision, instead he called the virus a hoax and prevented experts from providing insight to a situation where we didn’t have all the facts.
On the next sentence I’m going to write, no I don’t have 100% of the facts but I can certainly make an informed statement.
Trump fucked this country up and Clinton would’ve had a better response to this pandemic - regardless of who you identify as how could you not accept this.
We, as a country, screwed the handling of this. It isn't just one person. It is the way our entire system works. How do we fix it?
With great power (like presidency), comes great responsibility (like properly leading the country through a global pandemic) and with great responsibility comes great criticism where said responsibility isn't followed through.
They're not getting downvoted for a political statement. They're getting downvoted by implying that someone else wouldn't do a better job than probably the worst possible response to Covid.
Objectively, the response we've had from the leadership of the country has been terrible, and the effects are evident when you look at # of cases. Also objectively, any other response would have been better. Obviously, I can't tell with absolute certainty what other leaders would have done, but I can assure you it'd have been better than what we have now.
To say otherwise is ignoring the current state of the country and the response that has resulted in said state.
Technically, I'm being downvoted for asking two questions that challenge someone else's political statement (that aligns quite nicely with the general politics of HN).
> I really wish the parent comment kept out the last bit because the conversation then devolves to red/blue, left/right, white/black.
Me too, I completely agreed with the first part. I have this thing about about people dropping dimensions of reality and pretending they are irrelevant, or predicting the outcome of events on parallel dimensions of our universe, and stating those predictions as if they are facts. I consider this sort of rhetoric as part of the problem, but most people seem to overwhelmingly prefer it nowadays, provided the proper claims are made of course.
> How do we fix it?
This seems like the important question to me as well. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be a very popular topic of discussion.
Then, when the water treatment plants break down or the education system is a mess they can privatize it and reap the profits. Or they can establish charter schools that teach creationism, segregate classrooms again, or reduce education to minorities.
This is just one chess move in a long game that has been playing out since the 50s. Within this context, the moves here are not surprising, especially with Betsy DeVos in charge.
Read her bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_DeVos#School_vouchers
I plea that you refrain down voting any comment that advises you to take a look at DeVos's Wikipedia page. I HIGHLY advise reading Betsy DeVos's Wikipedia page.
With no offense intended (truly) I've got the idea that quite a portion of HN users probably don't know just how much of an absolute shitshow the head of U.S. Education is. DeVos is certifiably insane
As far as I can tell, not mentioned on that page.
> private military contracting
Only mention is this sentence: "Betsy DeVos's brother, Erik Prince, a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, is the founder of Blackwater USA, a private military services contractor."
> torturous approach to treating autism and other behavorial therapies
"Betsy and her husband Dick are chief investors in and board members of Neurocore, a group of brain performance centers offering biofeedback therapy for disorders such as depression, attention deficit disorder, autism, and anxiety. The therapy consists of showing movies to patients and interrupting them when they become distracted, in an effort to retrain their brains." Reading that, and the following paragraph, it seems like the efficacy of the treatment is dubious... But torture?
> multi-generational Charismatic Christian hate groups
The wikipedia page mentions a number of christian groups associated with the DeVos family. As far as I can tell, these all seem like bog-standard conservative causes. But, judging by the hyperbole in the rest of your comment, those probably do qualify as hate groups to you.
Overall, not impressed.
Both parties are dysfunctional.
Try to reform healthcare? Nope. Try to cut military spending? No. Establish oversight over federal slush funds? Nope.
Having the government burn tons of money is absolutely playing into the hands of those arguing to weaken government for personal profit. The GOP are completely fine burning cash because they can just blame the Dems and use that as an argument to privatize core government functions.
So once again, much of it comes back to GOP obstructionism.
Then you would expect divergent performance in the D-controlled states (eg. California) vs the R-controlled states (eg. Texas), no? So far, I see all types of states having similar outcomes.
> ... good leadership ... but we chose someone who is committed to division, ...
I'm no fan of our current leader, but let's be honest Obama failed to properly launch a simple website for his signature initiative[1]. The problem is much deeper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#Issues_during_l...
Maybe if it were also possible to lock down borders between states, making them truly separate sovereign nations.
A lot of states had a declining infection rate and looked to be getting things under control, then people traveled to other states and brought back the virus with them.
There are still things only the federal government can do or coordinate.
This strikes me as a pretty passive-aggressive argument style.
Who, in your opinion, is the better leader? Which of Obama or Trump do you think would handle this pandemic better?
You are picking out one mistake, and kind-of-sort-of implying that makes them both the same, except you don't have the courage to directly state that. If you have a point to make, make it.
My point - a solo good leader is insufficient in the US because the systemic rot is deeper and bipartisan. (FWIW, Obama was an okay leader, though vastly better than Trump).
> You are picking out one mistake
Here are a few more: California High-Speed railway, which was being implemented when CA had D-dominated government under a very competent governor (Brown). Did that leadership or unified government control help? Absolutely not.
Another: 2-mile stretch of Second Avenue subway in NYC, which took almost a 100 years and $4-5B. Why? Were all the NYC leaders incompetent for a century? I don't think so.
It’s not so simple in that many states are miniature versions of our polarized country. For example, you have a Democratic governor facing Republican opposition in rural counties in Washington, and a Republican governor suing a Democratic mayor in Georgia.
All of those things lead to what we're seeing now where the average person can't even afford to live on savings for a few months. If the average person can't keep themselves above water, how can they realistically contribute to their community efforts like we did in WW2? And if they're all going broke and risking losing their houses and livelihoods you end up with a massive backlash to anything keeping people away from work.
We need leadership that pushes serious reform initiatives to reduce government bloat and reach goals that actually benefit the people.
> people think the D's and R's are dramatically different
This is so true. Let's ignore fringe topics like Green New Deal or White Supremacy and look at what the mainstream portions of the parties are debating about - abortion, transgender rights etc.
But what are the key differences between tax policy or curtailing corporate powers or entanglements in various wars? You will have to squint hard. And please don't cite Warren or Sanders when it comes to corporations and D's - those two lost the primary handily and when D's controlled all the levers of the powers in D.C., they happily bailed out the Wall Street without punishing a single banker for the crash of 2008.
Sometimes the silence says more than the noise.
> the mainstream portions of the parties are debating about - abortion, transgender rights etc.
I sometimes call these the clickbait issues. They get the most public attention but affect people's daily lives the least. Of course, that statement is going to upset some people because they will not immediately consider the net effect of trans rights legislation in comparison to taxes / corporate lawmaking / warfare / international trade.
Worse, some people take statements like the above and think that I don't want all humans to have truly equal rights, which I do.
> they happily bailed out the Wall Street without punishing a single banker for the crash of 2008
Very true. I've seen many people (including on this forum, which is better educated than average) make statements to the effect of 'democrats are better for the economy' without considering the fact that both parties have been complicit in creating and maintaining the systems that have led to massive government debt and economic collapses.
>Obama failed to properly launch a simple website for his signature initiative
Healthcare.gov was a shitshow, but referring to it here is a very silly false equivalency. It was not time-sensitive in the same way that COVID-19 response is. It involved getting the federal government to exercise new competencies that it hadn't done at scale before; responding to national crises is kind of the number one job of the federal government, and PPE acquisition, distribution, and even manufacturing are not new. It failed for reasons having to do with mismanagement of timelines, not outright fraud; COVID PPE shipments have been hijacked and sold off to the president's cronies.
But sure, both sides technically did something wrong, so there's no difference between them.
I responded to your sibling comment about other examples about how D-dominated governments have failed spectacularly in areas which are supposed to be the core jobs of governments - public infrastructure. (ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23875739).
> both sides technically did something wrong, so there's no difference between them.
I actually don't see much difference in the incompetence of the two sides. Presidents (or Governors) are simply impotent to get anything done in the US systems. At best (in terms of their powers), they can only stop something from happening.
The relevant metric is not "amount of time doing relatively better or worse." You can get all over with quickly like NY did, but they ended up with 8x the deaths of FL. NJ has 3x FL's. AFAICT, "leading responsibly" here means simply having (D) after their names, as these governors' policies were catastrophically bad.
I think the reason the outcome is largely the same is this is a situation where we rely on our federal government to lead the response, and so far they haven’t.
It's very frustrating seeing people continually arguing that because some people screw up, learn from experience, and fix things, that it justifies others going in the opposite direction, ignoring experience, and breaking things.
Even before your metrics show that the destruction has reached a crossover point, the latter is fundamentally different because it's unnecessary. The former is fundamentally sound because there will always be mistakes.
It doesn't matter how bad you think government is, it's not an argument for making it worse.
Personally speaking I'm all good with wearing a mask if they let me out of my house. The Shelter in place thing has been such an overreaction that I'm kind of primed to rebel just because I'm so incensed by the violation of rights...
Wearing a mask is like requiring wearing a seatbelt. Shelter in place is like saying no one can drive except a few exceptionals.
It also has 100% not been an overreaction. It saved countless lives by preventing spread. That whole flattening the curve thing and how well countries that have actually followed through and did not open early should show you how effective it has been.
If we create the false dichotomy of Masks vs SIP I would recommend Masks
Sure, people might still go to the groceries or other essential tasks. Once or twice a week. But if they're otherwise obeying the order and staying at home then just by not travelling to and from the office, going on recreational walks/drives/etc, and in general being isolated with a few people is obviously going to drastically limit the spread. It's not going to cut it down to 0, but it's still far less than the other extreme of living life normally and interacting with random people and surfaces daily.
Why are you even trying to create a false dichotomy? Just stay at home and wear a mask, ffs. It's really not that hard.
Saving lives should not be this grand political issue it's become in the US. It's objectively very simple. Limit contact and limit spread, and you'll have fewer cases. You limit contact by having people stay at home, and you limit spread by having people wear masks. This isn't rocket science or anything.
It is politicized whenever there is a strong disparity of benefits and costs... It's primarily the old who benefit and primarily the young who suffer by closing down the economy
And if people go to buy food, that totally negates lack of contact everywhere else, including restaurants, concerts, offices, schools, sport clubs and so on.
Can you elaborate?
At best it saved a few people who would have died in a couple of years.
Just browse r/covidpositive. There are so many "survivors" who say they still have so much internal organ pain 4 months after being diagnosed, and now they feel hopeless, have suicidal ideation, etc.
And from the sounds of it, a lot of these people are in their 20s-40s and could run a marathon pre-COVID.
This isn’t an ideological point, it’s a bare recitation of fact. Somehow, other federal republics like Germany managed to engage in an effective pandemic response while leaving most of the work to the states. For example, while Germany eventually had a mask order everywhere, the states all implemented them at different times. School reopening was all done on different schedules with different procedures. Merkel didn’t issue a national mask order, for the same reason Trump didn’t: she wasn’t legally allowed to.
This was not a surprise. Nobody thought pandemic response was mainly a federal responsibility. States, particularly New York, were just completely unprepared for a job they knew was theirs.
So I agree ideologies are the problem, but this is a problematic ideology too. Why would people use a pandemic to try and relitigate the basic structure of our government? Why can’t we just work within the system to solve problems?
> In United States constitutional law, police power is the capacity of the states to regulate behavior and enforce order within their territory for the betterment of the health, safety, morals, and general welfare of their inhabitants.
This is not an unusual principle. Germany has a similar principle, which is why Angela Merkel didn’t issue a mask order either.
The federal agencies are best understood as having a coordinating role for when inter-state issues are involved. This CDC PowerPoint (which predates Covid) explains: https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/docs/phl101/PHL101-Unit-5-16Jan09-S...
See the first bullet on Slide 8: “State and local governments carry out most communicable disease surveillance and control under the police power.”
See Slide 10: “Most powers for public health surveillance, investigations, and interventions derive from state and local law.”
The federal government provides “expert public health assistance” and regulates “disease carriers who cross state lines.”
So when we talk about things like tracing protocols, where does that fit? The CDC can provide expert advice about what sorts of testing protocols are effective. But the state governments must actually develop and execute the surveillance and intervention: testing patients, quarantining them, etc. The federal government is supposed to assist insofar as patients might move between states.
This is how everyone has always understood the division of labor in public health to be set up. Countries like Germany have similar legal structures, and have managed just fine. Even countries like Japan, where the central government does have a general police power, still delegates things like testing because the local governments are more nimble.
Only in America would be ignore the clear division of labor that’s in place during a pandemic.
No, it's not. The federal government is, in theory, fully empowered to use any of it's enumerated powers for any purpose not expressly prohibited, which public health is not, and has quite emphatically adopted policy around exercising its power for that purpose, starting at least as far back as the establishment of the marine hospitals in 1798, later, in many steps, reorganized into the modern US Public Health Service.
The reorganization into the US Public Health Service was in 1912, and that’s when it picked up general authority to study infectious diseases. But that era isn’t really relevant to what’s constitutional.
Yes, it does. It may not be explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, but the federal government is absolutely tasked with responding to national disasters, of which pandemics are one example. What is the CDC? What is FEMA? What is the NIH?
>Merkel didn’t issue a national mask order, for the same reason Trump didn’t: she wasn’t legally allowed to.
Even if it were true, that would make this the very first time in his life that legal limitations ever stopped Trump from doing something.
Same thing with FEMA. It’s not supposed to be front-line disaster response. It’s supposed to be a backstop for when a particular state is overwhelmed. That’s why FEMA is legally not allowed to act until a governor declares a state of emergency and asks for assistance. But every state is supposed to be prepared to handle their own disasters. FEMA is a backstop—it’s not supposed to have the resources to help every state at the same time.
The NIH is a research agency. It doesn’t have an operational role in public health.
Even if we overlook what’s “explicitly enumerated” and we look at the structure that exists today by historical accident, the federal government is still relegated to an advisory role, and dealing with travel. But those aren’t the things that went wrong with the pandemic response. Lockdowns are an operational role, and entrusted to the states. PPE, testing kits, having people in place to do tracing and isolation? All of that is operational, and was assigned to the state governments. Mask orders are an exercise of the general police power, and entrusted to the states.
Again, this is not an ideological point about how things should be. (Although, they are this way because that’s how the constitution sets things up.) It’s a point about whose job it was to be prepared. The states were supposed to be prepared for this, and they weren’t. By the time the pandemic hit, there wasn’t much the federal government could do. It could advise states about tracing and isolation protocols, but it has no boots on the ground to actually do any of those things. The states were supposed to be prepared to do all that.
Why exactly is this the states' fault? This seems like something that would be far more effective at the federal level. It's the exact same argument as the parent comment, it shouldn't be up to states to create tracing and isolation infrastructure, test kits, etc.
Putting that burden on the states is exactly how we got to the place we are in. Without effective federal support and direction, no solution will be effective since inter-state travel exists and there's 50 different states that will come up with 50 different solutions, some more effective than others.
It makes zero sense to force states to individually do all this when a single entity would be far more effective.
Because it was their responsibility. The CDC, as well as about 235 years of law, was absolutely clear about this: https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/docs/phl101/PHL101-Unit-5-16Jan09-S... (slides 8, 10).
> This seems like something that would be far more effective at the federal level.
Maybe that’s a discussion we can have for next time. But the point is that we had a very long-standing division of labor that states knew about, but they didn’t prepare. You can’t have a debate about changing the division of responsibility during a pandemic. The idea that someone else should have been in charge isn’t an excuse when the responsibility had been assigned to you. Put differently, the CDC presentation I linked to, which says the CDC is just there to provide “expert assistance” wasn’t a surprise to anyone.
> It's the exact same argument as the parent comment, it shouldn't be up to states to create tracing and isolation infrastructure, test kits, etc.
But it was. Just like it was up to France or Germany to do those things, and not some EU agency. Italy isn’t blaming the eCDC for its own lack of preparation.
> Putting that burden on the states is exactly how we got to the place we are in.
No, we got into the place we’re in because states shirked a responsibility that had plainly been assigned to them. (And in fact, was inherently theirs as a matter of the very structure of our federation).
> Without effective federal support and direction, no solution will be effective since inter-state travel exists and there's 50 different states that will come up with 50 different solutions, some more effective than others.
Canada, Australia, Germany, etc. all managed to do this just fine.
You mean countries with federal-led and coordinated responses? I wonder why they did just fine. Maybe it was the leadership and support that the US so desperately lacks.
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/emergency-pr...
https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavir... and https://www.health.gov.au/committees-and-groups/australian-h...
https://www.bundesregierung.de/resource/blob/973812/1753872/...
The states/provinces within may have been the primary ones managing in certain cases, like Australia, but the entire response in all three countries is federally led and centralized through committees and support from the federal governments. In fact, one of the key parts of Australia's response is specifically
> ensure the response is consistent and integrated across the country
COVID is clearly a national security issue, which is squarely a matter for the federal government. The prior administration made pandemic response part of the national security apparatus (i.e. the NSC). According to public testimony, this continues in the current administration despite a reorganization.
You claim a bare recitation of fact, but in my view that is completely inaccurate. There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. One of the first iterations of our government under the Articles of Confederation didn't have a strong enough government to respond to national security threats and we could have lost the war for it. Having a strong federal government that can accomplish things the states cannot is literally the reason for our government as it exists today.
As I mentioned, by our own government's admission pandemic response is a national security issue. There are two additional reasons why this is clear. First, what if the pandemic was started by a biological weapon? Would we still leave it to the states then? Certainly not, yet it would be the same exact pandemic whether started by terrorists or by accident. Second, COVID is going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. On and don't forget it literally took a nuclear powered aircraft carrier off the battlefield. It is then by definition a national security issue because of how weak it makes our country.
I generally enjoy your writing on these issues but I think you have the basic structure of our government completely reversed. We threw out the Articles of Confederation and created a stronger federal government because disjoint states did not have the ability to respond to massive threats at the scale of COVID.
One you throw out your designation of COVID as a public health matter and recognize it is an issue of national security (again by our government's own admission) I think a lot of your other arguments do not hold up. Some things that you mention as a matter of law are clearly correct with respect to masks. But the idea that "nobody thought pandemic response was mainly a federal responsibility" is completely false and counter to the ideals of our government after the Confederation Period.
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.brookings.edu/wp-co...
Just going to respond to this. The US used to be a paragon of upward mobility. That is no longer the case: https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s... . That is just one article, but you can search "US upward mobility ranking" and find lots of articles and evidence how many other countries now do much, much better than the US in this regard.
The pandemic payouts are a wonderful example of the government going out of its way to make helping its citizens as painful as possible. Millions of people still haven’t received their one-time payment of $1,200. Meanwhile in Canada, it took their government only two weeks to develop the infrastructure to send monthly payments of $2,000 to every Canadian.
The incompetence displayed by the American government isn’t because they can’t do better - it’s because they don’t want to do better. The same government was able to send massive financial assistance to huge corporations with very little delay.
It’s become totally evident that the United States government exists solely to serve its corporations, not its citizens. Anything it does to actively help it’s citizens is, at best, incidental.
To your comment about WWII. We had a common enemy and a common effort. This "wartime" economy pretty much envolved the entire economy and I would argue wasn't much different than what communism would be. Meaning that the central government pretty much controlled the means of production.
I bought 50 for $30 at Newegg in mid May. I just ordered another 200 from there at $15 per 50. There are similar offerings immediately available on Amazon.
Same for face shields.
I am mid twenties, and was homeschooled my entire childhood. My father owned a technology company, and brought me to work with him most days. People talk about homeschooling being damaging due to the lack of exposure to the "real world", but I have had more exposure to reality than most, due to the constant exposure to actual working life.
Don't be afraid of "sheltering" your children by not having them be part of the system. There is so much more out there than the system. Your kids will turn out weird vs other kids raised in the standard environment, but its a good kind of weird.
My family was very involved with the homeschooling movement in our state, so I am more exposed than most to the sub-culture. Feel free to ask me any more specific questions.
I understand that many good online courses exist but they are not full substitutes of in-person discussions and personalized feedback for essays, for example. It can take quite a bit of time to understand or even review materials. Some families might not have the necessary background as well.
But that is school.
My father taught math and programming. We did a mix of typical tutoring, and self study. Lots of self study since I had a natural aptitude for it.
From my experience, the horror stories you hear about kids being stuck in the middle of nowhere with only a bible to read are not the norm, and not what most "homeschoolers" advocate for. Even the word homeschool is a misnomer, a large amount of my time was spent at a local co-op with other "homeschoolers". My wifes youngest brother spends 4 out of 5 days split across two local co-ops. Her eldest brother is in a PhD program after the same experience. Most of the homeschoolers I know are more than able to function in modern society. Homeschooling simply allows for a much more tailored and less systematized schooling experience, making each family educational experience more akin to a startup in its ability to be nimble and respond to individual needs.
This isn't guaranteed.
A counterexample is Tara Westover[1] who grew up in an extremist version of what you are describing. She ultimately became successful but it was mostly despite her parents isolation from "the system", not because of them.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/02/20/587244230/memoirist-retraces-...
The story you linked to is pretty interesting, but she clearly states she was allowed to learn (just not forced to), she obviously understood what a university was, and had the desire and ability to apply and be accepted to university at an age when her parents would have had the legal right to stop her if they so wished - they obviously supported her application. Her outcome was clearly a lot better than many students who go to public school.
Suffices to say, millions would fail under similar conditions, where she succeeded. Odds in normal education are much better than that.
Also, yes Tara was given lots of autonomy early in her education, but she was completely unprepared for the world even at BYU (her undergraduate university), she struggled through many years of therapy, and she claims she was admitted to Cambridge because of luck (on top of lots of talent and hard work) because she still needed lots of remedial coursework to catch up. One interesting quote from a (TED?) talk she gave is that her early childhood was spent reading early Mormon scripture, so she spoke and wrote with the character of a mid-19th century LDS prophet when she arrived at university.
I think the view that homeschooled kids are weird is caused less by homeschooling and more by the fact that weirdos are more likely to homeschool.
Let's say the kid turns out a little weird. Would they have turned out better going through the public school system?
It's not necessarily fair to blame the homeschooling if the kids come out different. What were they at the start?
The people you have met are probably not a representative sample of the population you would like to generalize to from your experience.
>They just choose to not settle for the mediocrity, nor accept the indoctrination pushed by the education system.
Most people I know who went to public schools came out fairly well. I refuse to share this elitist/ideological attitude towards them. What indoctrination? Don't you think that's a rather general and blanket statement considering how varied each school district is? Maybe that's more of a criticism of how schools are run in your area.
That's exactly what someone who has been indoctrinated at a public school would say!
/s
Is the Pledge Of Allegiance still a thing at schools?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
As far as homeschooling is concerned. I spent 20 years in the military and the only thing that I observed that was a little awkward about the people that were home schooled was how they were around "authority". Meaning that they weren't as submissive to authority like everyone that went to a normal public school.
I think you are really underselling how awful life has been in the past.
Just look at things like child mortality rates.... historically, nearly HALF of all people died during childhood. That is insane. The global rate is now about 1/10 of that.
Similar changes have been made to starvation and malnourishment, with today's rates so much lower than historically.
This would not be possible without the improvements in efficiency over the years. Because we need so few people to grow enough food to feed everyone, we can spend the resources on medical research and advancements that have allowed our health outcomes to improve so much.
Are the gains of an efficient society unequally distributed? Of course. But let's solve the inequality problem by sharing the gains, not destroying the gains.
Yes, if we got rid of our efficiency gains, we would be more equal... because everyone would be much poorer.
We would still have people exploiting others, though. That happened way before we were efficient.
Starvation and malnourishment are drastically lower due to industrial farming. But that was to the detrement of destroyed ecosystems, pollution, and greater government regulations. Heck, I believe that I was Michigan that was trying to prevent people from purchasing seeds to plant their own gardens.
Don't worry. I'm not actually all doom and gloom. I just don't think we are on the right track and we are heading of course. And this has been going on for a lot longer than 2016.
That is to say, the problem is not, conceptually, "society and government", but instead, the American society and American government we have today. Don't give up! Don't withdraw! Organize and fight to improve the systems that are exacerbating this crisis.
That is mostly what I mean.
The alternative is having the basic needs (food, water, shelter, warmth, clothing) be met by being a participant in the ecology. Where these things can be provided through decentralized means as part of regenerative processes. When these things are provided by regenerative cycles, families can live off of that across many generations provided that they are wise stewards of the land. This is better than Universal Basic Income. You can't eat money, and UBI still relies on the fragile global supply chain to meet basic needs.
Furthermore, because these systems are decentralized, it does not require collective action. It does not require organizing, or fighting against the system. It does not require waiting for leaders to Do Something About It. It is more like letting the weeds grow. Pioneering into depleted soil with tenacity and resilience. It requires a mindset shift, and connecting with the local ecology and local community.
> Our civilization and systems are set up for failure.
I mean, it's succeeded so far. There have been and will be growing pains, but so far the standard of living has increased over time. To declare failure is just speculation.
> fragile global supply chain
Fragile compared to what?
> Every one of those require money and participation in the economy.
Sorry, but this is just the reality of being a living creature. You can go fully off the grid if you want and make all those things for yourself, but most people don't do that, because, spoiler alert, it sucks. It's more work than participating in an economy.
> There is no fixing it, as every single possibility moves us towards eventual collapse.
Citation needed.
You can point out problems with economies, government, etc. all day long, but if the system you're comparing it to is pure fiction, then what's the point?
Industrialized society has been reducing the long-term carrying capacity of the earth for over a century. These effects, until recently, have been masked by intensification i.e. continually increasing consumption of resources for use as inputs of various processes (e.g. agriculture) that improve the standard of living. In the absence of infinite resources this method eventually reaches hard limits. Also, in a closed system negative externalities can eventually reach levels where they negatively affect carrying capacity.
> Sorry, but this is just the reality of being a living creature. You can go fully off the grid if you want and make all those things for yourself, but most people don't do that, because, spoiler alert, it sucks. It's more work than participating in an economy.
Hunter-gatherer societies have routinely been found to be happier and involve significantly less work than industrialized societies. The accelerating Holocene extinction, ongoing for millennia now, has obviously made this harder. Climate change is making this considerably harder as biomes, generally, shift poleward at rates that negatively impact biodiversity and hence carrying capacity.
> Citation needed.
Not sure what the other poster had in mind here, but the CMIP6 models taking into account cloud dynamics (which also happen to most closely fit historic data) show climate sensitivity of 5-7C, i.e. doubling preindustrial CO2 levels will entail to global average warming of 5-7C. Do you think warning in this range unlikely to occur because you see the necessary immediate societal change as likely? Or do you think that given that degree of climate shift occurs it is unlikely to entail a societal and/or biosphere collapse?
Yes, grasshoppers are typically happier and less hardworking than ants. There's an old fable that comes to mind...
I am going to add, what I have in mind isn't a move backwards towards hunter-gatherer, but a move forward, into a post-industrial sociey. And I think post-industrial means becoming decentralized, and in alignment with natural processes, and one where people largely follow ethical principles to live within the ecology.
Food forests are a good example. They can be created with perennials or self-seeding annuals that regenerates itself, even when harvested by the residents.
Family sizes will probably have to increase, or at least, we may be talking about pooling the resources at a neighborhood level. A nuclear family alone doesn't have the time or resources to really pull this off well, but a nuclear family is also the product of the industrial idea of "success" and "wealth".
Careful use of technologies can make this a much different experience than hunter-gatherer, or even horticulture. Among the biggest difference is the presence of the Internet -- specifically, allowing people exchange practical information and barter for things from beyond the local area. (So I am not talking about the current Internet dominated by Big Tech and aggregators, but more of what Tim Berner-Lee had in mind with permissionless architecture, and Richard Stallman's views of Free Software).
The biggest thing we'd have to give up is this notion that wealth comes from extracting resources from the ground and controlling access to them. As long as we continue to use that as a means to rank ourselves against other people, we will continue to perpetuate a mindset that takes resources beyond our fair share, without regard for the earth or for the people. That one mindset is harder to give up than the extra cars, eating out, cheap fossil fuels, indoor plumbing, because we feel that we are entitled to all of it, and we get jealous when we see others have when we don't. Wealth inequality is intrinsic to this model of wealth. It will always be there, no matter how much resources we keep extracting.
So is it a coincidence that 99.9% of hunter-gatherer societies have chosen to industrialize?
> Or do you think that given that degree of climate shift occurs it is unlikely to entail a societal and/or biosphere collapse?
My guess is that society wouldn't collapse, but again, this is so speculative.
I don't think there is much evidence of this. Would you say that hunter-gatherers in Australia, Africa, or the Americas chose to industrialize? It seems more that agrarian society was forced upon them. Likewise, industrialization isn't much of a choice once you are already in an agrarian society as failing to adapt to it will see you outcompeted and displaced or extirpated.
Your question is like asking "why do 99.9% of people choose to have sex with me if I hold a knife to their throat?" It takes some serious mental gymnastics to construe that as them wanting to have sex with you.
But if you really want some case studies, the best one I have come across is this: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/cubas-urban-farm...
After the fall of the USSR, Cuba had trade sanctions, cutting them off from the global supply chain. Locals had to come up with something to survive, and they started building a number of local, decentralized food systems. This was all grassroots, though they were eventually supported at the policy level. These were the same people who developed a sneakernet, passing contraband information from the Internet via disks and thumbdrives along the gossip channels.
So no, this system is not pure fiction. There are working examples. There are practices in place that people have been developing for 50 years now. There are people who are living that way.
More to the point, I am already implementing these things at my house and working my way towards that. I don't need to convince you. I'm not here pointing out problems with economies and governments. I have come across solutions, and they don't require large scale changes in policy for me to start taking action.
> Sorry, but this is just the reality of being a living creature. You can go fully off the grid if you want and make all those things for yourself, but most people don't do that, because, spoiler alert, it sucks. It's more work than participating in an economy.
No, it is not the reality of being a living creature. We can do better than that and we have the technologies and practices developed. There are some conveniences we have to let go, but there are a lot of the "work" is not as hard of a work as you think. It does not require a sudden change in going completely off the grid either. Small changes, over time is the way to go, one that works with the social customs and culture of the people involved.
You mean how the tax authority distributes the work to Intuit and HR Block?
How housing is distributed to private owners, financiers, and realtors?
The problems we’re experiencing are due to the opposite of centralization. Arguments against it are ideological conservatism.
Post office was a model of efficiency and distribution for an org that size until the GOP saddled it with debt.
In fact MOST human need centric social services in the US historically did great work on a dime budget.
And consider how much duplication of effort we get instead. Instead of NOAA sharing accurate weather data, we get Accuweather who takes NOAA data and wraps it in story mode for the innumerate masses who still believe in literal human hierarchy dictated from top down.
Utilitarian centralization of needs can and has in recent history, worked fine.
It’s limbic systems riddled with memes of the past, that can’t express motor agency outside a restricted norm that are the problem.
The concepts themselves are just that.
Connect to the mindset of local and you’ll see central shared effort is how local thinks. It’s where those broader ideas of federal centralization grew from!
Centralization can work. What we have is a terrorist political organization fighting against the end of their ideology in the form of Republicans and Democrats who prefer fealty to the past story they know and read about all day. Not the emerging one thanks to shifts in technology and social agency.
Imagine just getting a slip of paper in the mail with taxes owed?
Or not pricing 5 different package carriers?
This uncentralized waste playing ideology whack a mole is infuriating. It’s to prevent the centralized work habits, to enable authoritarian desire to grift on our work and game our agency.
“If the public were allowed to collectively build agencies that were successful, I might not be a rich important person!”
Let's start with housing. We have this idea of property laws and property rights. Before the rise of civilization, we didn't have such laws. People squatted and lived off of the land as needed. There are also blended model. The Homestead Acts allowed people to claim territory, which, after certain requirements are met, would pass into their hands as legal ownership.
Property, then, is an example where the registration of ownership is centralized to the legal mechanism of the government.
Or, let's take a tomato. Like the kind I can get from Wendy's. That tomato probably came from California or Mexico. (Or during the winter, from the hothouses in Canada). It is grown there and then shipped unripen across country. There are multiple actors involved. You can argue that, because the government is not involved, this is not centralized.
The kind of decentralization I am talking about is a tomato that I grow in my backyard. That can be watered from rainwater harvesting. That can be fed by compost from other parts of my garden. Whose seeds I can save, and I can replant. Every generation, those tomatoes become more adapted to my biome (low desert). After the initial setup, there is no money involved to intermediate between me and the tomato. It is between myself and the land, and the local ecology.
> Connect to the mindset of local and you’ll see central shared effort is how local thinks. It’s where those broader ideas of federal centralization grew from!
I have no idea what you mean by this. I don't consider shared effort at the household or neighborhood level to be that centralized. That speaks more about coordinating efforts, and cooperating together.
I made a video about that about a decade ago: "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
Hoping more people understand that over time.
Not yet. It ain't over yet though, even though it might seem like it elsewhere. Basic facts are: herd immunity is prohibitively expensive from the fatalities perspective (although it may be our only long term option), a vaccine is not guaranteed to ever exist, and C19 is now endemic, so it will come back. Oh and also, for the society to function people must be able to work.
To poster below who said that no vaccine == no herd immunity. That's actually not true. For a vaccine to be approved it needs to be safe. Herd immunity will just happen eventually, no approval needed as the virus itself doesn't care if it's "safe" or not. Paradoxically, the society will likely prefer to tolerate higher body count due to not having a vaccine at all, rather than smaller body count for a vaccine that is unsafe in a small, but not completely negligible percentage of cases.
I read it has been eliminated in New Zealand, so elimination is possible with good government: https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/new-zealand-coronavir...
Good government, plus living on a small island that can close itself from the rest of the world. Most countries aren't in that situation.
The US did not do so, because it was too disruptive to business, and because good, sober governance has been an explicit non-goal for the past few decades, on both state and federal level - but especially in the last few years.
Extensive use of the subway is what sets NYC apart from all other cities in the US, and it was the main vector. NYC should have been much more diligent about cleaning the subway and limiting concurrent access. I understand due to the sheer volume and necessity of subway use the chosen policies may have been the best. But the subway has been overcrowded and near the breaking point for years and little was done to maintain the system before COVID.
And remember, if the subway capacity was increased, subway ridership would likely increase as well, as it becomes a more appealing mode of transport.
What NYC really should have done is shut down businesses on March 1 instead of March 15. But... I don't know, I think that's a lot to ask of politicians. The public would not have responded well to schools being closed and restaurants being shuttered. We needed a wake-up call.
By contrast, I feel like Florida, Georgia, etc have really had that wake-up call, and have chosen to flout it anyway. I don't have much sympathy.
You have other countries where subways service are still running with no major breakouts. ny has resumed service, and no major breakouts either.
My diagnosis:
- Hyper-partisanship is causing politicians and the electorate to harden into uncompromising tribes. This hyper-partisanship also serves to increase the size and scale of the fringe wings of both parties, leading to events like the infamous white-supremacist Charlottesville rally.
The cause(s):
- 1. News as a business, particularly if that business is publicly traded, is not in the 'truth-telling' business. It is in the 'maximizing profits' business, as all (publicly traded) companies are.
- 1.1. Therefore, truth is ancillary to any for-profit news business. This will manifest itself in different ways depending on the monetization scheme of the business.
- 1.2. In the case of 24-hour news networks, like Fox and CNN, they are advertisement driven and therefore seek to maximize 'eyeballs'. Therefore, a constant stream of engaging content must be produced: for both Fox and CNN, the result is hyper-sensationalism. The creation of outrage, controversy, and even facts that don't exist. Further, because Fox is so partisan, it has effectively forced CNN to become partisan too.
- 1.3. The above is also true, and *especially* true, for ad-driven online news sources. Clickbait is a well-known phenomenon for, again, maximizing outrage and controversy for ad impressions. Visit an average article on CNN, Fox, or Breitbart and count how many ads you see. Now ask yourself: is it *really* in their best interest to be partial and nuanced?
- 2.1. The 'like' and 'share/retweet' mechanisms incentivize divisive, emotional, and simplistic posts/tweets.
- 2.2. And given that a small subset of users actually tweet or comment or post, those that do tend to be more radical, which lead people to believe that the majority opinion for ${POLITICAL_PARTY} is reflected in the comment section. This leads to a true 'Overton shift' for those in ${POLITICAL_PARTY} and opposite polarization for ${OTHER_POLITICAL_PARTY}.
100% agree...a crowd-sourced website that does this and a whole bunch of other things is desperately needed.
I believe with strong certainty that the current state of affairs (in Western countries at least) is that our political, corporate, and media structures, combined with the "collective consciousness" of our population, have basically brought us to a point from which these same organizations haven't a hope in hell of undoing the mess they've put us in. I think something outside the current system, a completely new grassroots approach to decision and sense making is required to get us back onto a sustainable path.
How might we get such an initiative underway?
Was the response perfect? Certainly not. Did some other countries do better? I'm sure we could find a handful. Does this make the US a "totally failed shit-hole state"? HELL NO!!
And in case you think that the US is indeed one, it just means that you have only been exposed to Scandinavia and/or Singapore, or you have consumed too much of biased media which wants to maximize your anxiety and partisanship for their profits, or you are just trolling here to intentionally sow divisions. Assuming you are not in the last category, please go and learn about how things are in Brazil or India or sub-Saharan Africa. You will realize that the US is in a much better shape and things are handled far better than the media narratives.
Which countries are doing a worse job than the US in handling Coronavirus, in your opinion?
Oh, and the government successfully managed to use the epidemic as a cover-up for heretofore unseen levels of electoral fraud in the not-really-referendum on constitutional amendments.
No, it was not perfect. According to [1] the US has 27% of all cases of COVID-19, 24% of all COVID-19 deaths and 29% of new cases yesterday. For comparison US has 4.3% of world's population [2].
> Did some other countries do better? [...] it just means that you have only been exposed to Scandinavia and/or Singapore
Did some countries do worse? Italy is often cited as a badly hit country (and is not Singapore nor in Scandinavia), but if you look at their total cases curve [3] you'll see it has become nearly flat and new cases have been suppressed to near ~200/day from the peak of ~6k/day. For comparison, the corresponding plots for the US show a bungled attempt to flatten the curve followed by renewed exponential growth [4]. Daily new cases were only suppressed to ~1k/day from the peak of ~2.7/day.
> Does this make the US a "totally failed shit-hole state"? HELL NO!!
Well, what are the inclusion criteria? I'm asking, because when it comes to COVID-19 the US is doing so badly that now only 26 other countries have had more cases of COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic than the US added yesterday (73,388) [1].
[1]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
[3]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
has 27% of all the known cases - FTFY! Do you honestly believe the reported number of cases from the populous developing countries known for their corruption and a lack of functioning systems (I come from one, so I know first hand how they work)?
> I'm asking, because when it comes to COVID-19 the US is doing so badly...
so badly in terms of what? Reported number of cases, which is miserably under-reported due to a lack of testing / credible systems in the majority parts of the world (at least by population)? I know that people are losing jobs in the US, businesses are bankrupting but where I come from, people are starving and a 12 yo was begging for food when my sister went for grocery shopping, since his family hadn't had enough food in 2 days.
If you are in the US and haven't experienced a poor society first-hand (beyond a 2-3 week vacation in the tourist spots in such places), please count yourself lucky and appreciate what you've got!
Take a look at the covid19 infection rates in the country a little north of you.. as others have posted, not all governments / society has failed.
You need to ask why you have so many people who are proud not to wear a mask simply because it limits their "Freedoms"??
Maybe if they wore a mask, and excersized social distancing things wouldnt be this bad?
Just sucks to not have a solution for people who spend their lives teaching (and babysitting, managing, mentoring, and more) our youth.
Social distancing has its obvious social costs, and my feeling (I couldn't definitively call it understanding) with masks is that it's more about protecting people from you, and not the other way around.
I think no matter how you break it down, the USA has proven so far it's poorly suited to do carry that out for each other.
The social contract theory has failed, and we're preparing now for a future without it.
Albeit, I'm not a single family (we have two parents) but...I'm an advocate for homeschooling. I have been for about a decade now. I've noticed a lot of different parenting styles growing up and education matters tremendously but not just book smarts, but emotional intelligence, dealing with various people, skills, and even high valued skills.
As I've lived my life and looked into multiple system, I feel the American education has failed it's students for well over 30 years. The student that succeed? The ones that knows that school is more than 9am to 2pm (or whatever depending on the age). I feel it's best taught in the home.
As the child ages and more skilled studies are required, yes they'll learn from teachers but parents can get very far with a child, if you encourage them to learn and foster their curiosity.
Finally, I'll conclude with this. I feel very grateful for this covid19 because this will now help more resources to improve the quality/efficiency of homeschooling. I look forward to using these new resources that will rise up.
https://www.econlib.org/emergency-homeschooling-a-how-to-gui...
There's a video interview where he talks about social aspects as well:
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-cant-america-handle-t...
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-new-york-city-is-on-t...
There has been a concerted effort by some to make the government unreliable. There are vested interests in getting the government out of many things it does, and lots of profit to be made taking over what the government provides. The right has, for awhile, been ideologically opposed the government funded education, for example.
If the government is unreliable, it's because the US has elected people that make it so. Government works fine in many countries around the world. Canada, Europe, Australia... all seem in far better shape. We're just intentionally crippling it for ideological and profit reasons.
US voters who voted Trump into office are also largely to blame. No one to blame but ourselves. Projecting anger onto "the system" is missing the picture. To put it another way, if you want your government to work for the people, stop voting people into office who are very obviously breaking the government because they are zealots or greedy.
Now those assumptions are being challenged. And of course a lot of people, rather than change and give up their cherished "identity", would plow ahead blindly, consequences be damned. Everyone who is protesting masks, I am looking at you and your beliefs.
This has happened many times in history. Societies get their beliefs challenged by reality. Some adapt, fix their stuff, and go on. Some don't.
There is still time to change. But not much.
https://www.history.com/news/1918-spanish-flu-mask-wearing-r...
Also, they didn't have government leadership publicly questioning the wisdom of mask wearing.