CDC declares a federal moratorium on evictions [pdf]

I’d rather live in a society where we can’t be forced to submit to any health mandates. But I’m definitely in the minority.

If it really is "do pretty much anything", its probably also an unconstitutional delegation of Congressional lawmaking power, since one of the three required pieces of a Constitutional delegation ïs that the law must clearly specify "the boundaries of this delegated authority." Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361 (1989), and the rightward turn of the courst since Mistretta may work against the Administration here, because it is the conservative wing of the court that has historically had the most negative view of delegations (In Mistretta itself, which found the challenged act a valid delegation, Scalia was the lone dissenter and would have found it an unconstitutional delegation.)

What if this were a world government decision? Is that still OK?

So if the director of the CDC decided that, in order to protect the public health from an epidemic, everyone of, say, Chinese descent in the US needed to be herded into incinerators and burned, that would be okay?

It's whether a government with such broad, sweeping powers (which aren't among those clearly enumerated) is good for human life.

My lawyer advised me to negotiate rent to an amount my tenant can pay stating, "the only way you'll be able to collect is by a future collection action, and many times those types of judgments are worth about as much as the paper they're printed on."

I say this all to try and drive the point home, a moratorium on evictions is akin to an implicit rent reduction or rent elimination.

Universal lockdown, ignoring constitutional rights for a second, increases the proportion of at-risk individuals who must get sick before herd immunity is reached.

If you have a population of 100 people, the HIT is 20% (assume homogenous mixing), of which half your population is high-risk and half is low-risk, you can enforce universal lockdown and end up with 10 high-risk and 10 low-risk infections, or you can encourage just the at-risk to isolate and end up with like 18 low-risk and 2 high-risk. It should be self evident which course is better.

Unfortunately the world has been tricked into viewing “herd immunity” as a dirty word as opposed to an emergent phenomenom.

How can you make it illegal to work and then demand someone pay rent? Neither is it fair to make landlords be stuck holding the bag.

My point is the government should not make it illegal to generate income and then turn around and say that renters need to pay rent, but neither should they say that landlords must be stuck holding the bag.

Do people understand that landlords aren’t this mysterious class of evil overlords? They’re just people. I’ve taken evil landlords to small claims court before, but that doesn’t mean I think I should be entitled to live in someone’s house for free.

I am absolutely flabbergasted by how “billionaire” and “landlord” are now bad words.

I disagree. When a company goes under for a bad investment, they need to not be bailed out. But when the government comes in and says it’s illegal to work your job period, the government needs to pay all the lost income from that forced closure. That’s all I’m saying.

We do that all the time. Major industries are bailed out all the time by the government with negligible interest loans. We've literally done that in COVID times already.

We should have deferrals up the chain if the government is preventing people from working.

Like, imagine I have a bug in my Production hospital billing system, and instead of looking inwards, I decided to say “there is now a moratorium on car sales — they sell cars which cause accidents which land people in the hospital, to hell with the dealerships — those dealerships are investments and deserve to lose!

Well, I think if you are changing the rules of the game, then you ought to compensate my losses.

The government essentially expropriating your investment is not a part of traditional risk profile.

Unless you can change the reality that rental properties are investments, making them artificially riskier will reduce new housing construction and lead to less affordable housing overall.

As an aside, I wish Jacobson v Massachusetts was never a thing. It opened such a big can of worms. Public health pseudocrises now allow our government to take on full emergency powers in perpetuity.

My point is COVID-19 stands for coronavirus infectious disease 2019. If you have no symptoms you have no disease. You don’t have COVID-19 without symptoms, you have a SARS-2 infection. The distinction is incredibly important.

I believe that lockdown policies worsen COVID-19 mortality. Severe COVID-19 is an immunoregulatory disorder, and lack of vit d / nitric oxide, lack of exercise/sleep, unwarranted fear/anxiety, lack of socialization all make the immune system incapable of regulating itself properly.

So I believe we would have less COVID death amortized over a year without lockdown. Look at New York’s absurd mortality rate, it’s worse than having done nothing. (NY was iatrogenic harm from early invasive ventilation which in retrospect was a horrible idea, plus lockdown depriving people of sunlight and exercise, plus Cuomo’s famous nursing home gambit)

The problem is that if you die and are PCR-positive for COVID, that's a COVID death. We don't use that standard for any other disease because it's the wrong standard.

Once you get infected and recover, you still test PCR-positive for months afterwards even when you have NO viable SARS-CoV-2 inside your body. This is because the rt-PCR cycle threshold is set at 40-something when it should be 30 maximum. This means we're magnifying DNA by several orders of magnitude beyond where we should, and thus hitting on the presence of viral debris.

This is why, for example, George Floyd was PCR-positive despite having recovered from SARS-2 infection weeks or months earlier.

BTW, I also believe that lockdown increases COVID-19 mortality. Meaning if you do get infected you are more likely to die, since you've been stuck inside out of the sun, riddled with fear and anxiety, with almost all avenues for exercise closed down, etc. But like you said, in places that never locked down, like Sweden, there was still excess mortality.

BTW, I wish more people talked about life-years over lifes. Flu is a bimodal distribution; it kills the very young and very old. COVID kills the very old but not the very young. Look at the average age of death. I haven't ran the numbers but each COVID death probably only represents an average of 2, 3, 5 years of life lost. As opposed to a baby dying of the Flu, which would be 70+ years (picking the most extreme example of course).