ryankemper

That being said, I think it does make sense to account for positive externalities. Can you think of others that are lockdown-specific? The classic ones right now are pollution.

> Or look at one of the following sections "General vaccination on the decline". This is a wonderful example of the only looking at negatives.

I'm not sure if that is a great example of only looking at the negatives. This is one dimension where the effects of the lockdown are basically exclusively negative as opposed to being a mixed bag. So this feels like something that absolutely _should_ be mentioned. Particularly when factoring in the irony of it increasing mortality from other non-COVID-19 infectious diseases.

> Imagine that flu vaccination dropped 90% and that flu cases dropped 99%, this thing would report that as a negative because, "hey, look at how many people aren't getting vaccinated".

I don't think this is at all fair either, but I must admit I chuckled a bit. It is a funny thought.

> And then when actually looking at it, it's full of pleas to emotion and claims without any data backing them. Take "Addiction and Overdose", there's no real data discussed (other than historical data about deaths unrelated to lockdowns or distancing or economy). Is there no data that supports the implication (if not outright claim) that lockdown will increase the cost or deaths from addiction/overdose? For anyone reading this, if it feels like it's a good, thorough examination you should absolutely discount any points like this where there's no supporting evidence presented.

So, this is the biggest hole that I personally see in my argument, so I very much agree here. The trouble I ran into is, this is such an unprecedented situation that it would have felt ridiculous if I just started making up mortality predictions. So it felt like a good balance to highlight the _potential_ for increased mortality. I do think that means I likely need to soften the language around lockdown causing more mortality to accentuate the fact that it's merely _likely_ that it does.

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Is there anything else you can think of? Thanks for the feedback.

I'm looking for people to poke holes. And so far I've just heard a lot of, well, that.

Which I agree with, I am not an expert, and have not (I hope) pretended to be one.

Not sure if it's faux pas to drop a link in a different thread than the original submission, but my thoughts on the "shelter-in-place" orders are captured here:

https://www.ryankemper.io/post/2020-04-29-the_case_for_endin...

A few select pieces:

> There is an ironic parallel to the concept of cytokine storm. Just as our immune systems sometimes get overzealous and destroy the body, so too has our response to COVID-19 ironically ended up damaging the stability of our economic and socioemotional systems and made us less resilient in the face of future crises.

And

> We as American citizens need to fight against this worrying trend of censorship and mass surveillance. Other countries do not even have the concept of freedom of speech/assembly embedded into their founding documents. Thus we are in a unique position where we are fighting not just to save lives, but perhaps more importantly, to save the soul of our country.

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Focusing on what Elon said:

> "Frankly, I would call it forcible imprisoning of people in their homes against all of, their constitutional rights, in my opinion," he said. "It's breaking people's freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why they came to America or built this country.

I agree with this, although I would probably soften the language around forcible imprisonment slightly.

Along that same vein:

> "If somebody wants to stay in their house, that's great and they should be able to," he said. "But to say they cannot leave their house and that they will be arrested if they do: that's fascist. That is not democratic; this is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom."

Yup, no argument here.

Author here. That's a mischaracterization of what I said. But yes it is true that overall mortality is similar to the flu. I settled on COVID-19 being 3x as deadly, but that figure is up to debate.

The important thing to understand is the varying risk profiles. The flu kills the very young and very old, whereas COVID-19 primarily kills the very old.

> Does the flu leave bodies in trucks, apartments, and bagged on the streets?

Yes, pandemic flu absolutely does.

> Does the flu kill dozens of workers in meat processing plants every year

Yup. Pandemic flu absolutely would.

> Does the flu take more than ten years of life from the average person it kills?

Could you clarify this point? I don't quite understand what you're saying. The flu takes away more wellbeing-years per death because it kills infants and young children whereas COVID-19 almost never does.

Specifically this part:

> People who assume that they are immune to a second infection because they have received a positive test result may ignore public health advice.

So, first of all, I think the concern is on its face totally unwarranted because people likely do have immunity to reinfection for several months, but regardless the presence of the immunological memory (provided they avoid getting infected with Measles which causes immunological amnesia) means that the second infection will be really not very bad and unlikely to transmit easily.

But more importantly:

Our public health organizations (and the media) have adopted the following belief: It is worth it to either mislead the public or to outright lie in order to achieve compliance. If it's not clear from the article, I find such a position detestable, not only on ideological grounds but also because functionally it causes people to endanger their health by engaging in superstition.

This is my theory on why we've seen so many articles from previously-respectable organizations like CNN that seem to focus on the narrative that young people are dropping like flies from this. Why? Because they believe that if young people are not scared shitless for their personal health, that they will not comply with the lockdown measures.

So, the WHO is really not trying to hide their motivation here.

Now the irony is I oppose immunity passports on ideological grounds, at least when used _within_ a society. As far as being used as a literal passport, that's fine by me. If the rest of the world wants to practice containment, it's welcome to do so, but I think from an evidence-based perspective, containment seems like an incredibly dangerous proposition.

My position is that the cost of lockdown massively outweighs the cost of COVID-19 itself, and furthermore I am suspicious of the belief that we can effectively contain it without boarding people in their houses.

> The reason for the lockdown is to maintain healthcare capacity in the face of a virus that is highly contagious.

And yet the lockdown has, overall, scaled _down_ our healthcare capacity amidst the most serious pandemic in a century. Why is that? I can already foresee an argument of "oh well, the lockdown is fine, we just need to pass government regulations that pays hospitals to maintain this extra capacity". And my argument to that is, beyond a general distrust of government incompetence, paying somebody to sit around will not maintain their skills in the same way as paying them to actually perform the preventative care that we hired them for in the first place.

> The OP provides no suggestions on how lockdown might end

But I literally provided a proposal. The proposal is to have at-risk members of population - and yes, we can identify who is at risk really quite easily with the data we now have - quarantine as we've all been doing. Meanwhile, the rest of society is no longer forbidden from transacting and producing value.

Again, if you look at the fatality rate data, you will see that if we can just protect everyone over 60 - and especially everyone over 70 - we will mitigate probably 80% of the deaths. Unfortunately, even _with_ the lockdown, we have utterly failed to do so thus far in many parts of the country.

In particular, I strongly oppose the moral panic around people going to the beach, public parks, etc. Unlike our politicians, I strongly believe that these activities can be done safely and that there is insufficient evidence to show that they were ever a serious transmission vector in the first place.

I'll see about doing so after I take a break to eat some food. (As an aside, I'm pretty comfortable writing and can write pretty quickly but as you can imagine just getting to this first draft took a lot out of me.)

That, in fact, is why I have an initial section that's just about these deceptively simple concepts that we all need to understand. I wish our leaders had actually metaphorically sat the American people down and explained the basics. The average person really does not know what a virus is, or how diseases are transmitted.

So, I actually entirely agree with the position that this is something that relates to epidemiology. Where I differ is that I don't believe in gatekeeping, I think if someone has taken the effort to synthesize research into a policy proposal, however poorly, it seems at least worth debating the ideas on their merits. The experts who know more than me (and they do, at least some of them) should be able to convince a rational/reasonable person that their position is the correct one without resorting to credential-waving.

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BTW I do read quite a lot of research papers, but I don't naturally have much interest in epidemiology. Just to give you an idea, I usually end up reading papers about stuff like: moist wound healing, and the role of red light therapy in fibroblast differentiation, and more broadly the role of electromagnetism in wound healing and neuronal galvanotropism. Weird stuff like that that's connected by invisible threads.

So, why did I read a bunch of epidemiology/COVID-related research papers? Well, the state of discourse here in the US, and also globally, has hit such a level of insanity that I decided that I needed to figure out what the facts were. (I'm not saying I have "figured out the facts" perfectly, or even at all, just that I am trying to) Honestly, it might sound ridiculous, but the turning point for me was reading that Venice Skate park was filled in with sand to prevent people from skating there. That is what informed my intuition that we are collectively being driven by superstition, and therefore what motivated me to read a bunch of research papers and reach my own conclusion about what's going on.

My ultimate conclusion? Well, the writeup is pretty clear on that one.

So...do you have any feedback about the content here?

I considered going for a deeper debunking but held off for the initial draft. I might circle back if people feel it's valuable. Let me take a quick stab though:

When we talk about immunity we need to realize the term is used imprecisely by laypeople (btw I'm totally a layman if it's not already clear).

I think of it simplistically as two components:

(1) The presence of actively circulating antibodies in the bloodstream. This is what the (oddly controversial) serology studies are measuring. It is thought that having a significant quantity of these antibodies prevents infection - i.e., what most people envision when they talk about immunity.

(2) Even after the antibodies have faded, there are still Memory B Cells, which lay dormant up to decades, waiting for exposure to the characteristic antigen (in this case, an antigen telling them that they have encountered SARS-CoV-2), at which point they resume and rapidly scale up production of antibodies.

The thinking here is that reinfection is likely possible after a sufficient length of time - whether that's a couple months or a couple years isn't yet known - but when you do get infected, your immune system will respond sooner, more strongly, and thus you will achieve a far lower peak viral load meaning a less serious infection with reduced transmisibility.

This is a robust mechanism that we see across tons of disease, including common cold coronaviruses. In my completely uncredentialed opinion, this effect is so common and well-supported that we should essentially assume it happens until we really have proof that it doesn't. I know that might sound backwards, but it really is such an enduring mechanism.

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Here's another argument you might prefer. We know that at least hundreds of thousands of people have successfully recovered from COVID-19. Loosely, we can divide the immune system into the "non-specific" and the "adaptive" subsystems. Given that we have seen extensive recovery from this illness and that those who have recovered have detectable levels of antibodies, and furthermore that there is a case of a women who could not manufacture antibodies due to a rare auto-immune disorder who failed to recover, it stands to reason that the same mechanism that provides medium-term immunity is the mechanism responsible for recovery.

That is to say, that it's very farfetched to think that people are recovering purely from non-specific immune responses and that the detectable presence of circulating antibodies is just a red herring. But I suppose you could try arguing that if you wished.

I'm just a dude that likes to read research papers. As an aside, there is totally an archetype of the software engineer that thinks they're equipped to dive into unrelated fields, and I definitely match that trope. I will say in my defense though, that I try to build simple mental models and take them to their logical conclusion, which is a quality that I see in people I admire, and conversely a quality that I find lacking in people that I feel don't have a lot of insight.

Many might disagree but I am a very strong believer that arguments should be evaluated on their merits, rather than credentials. Indeed having credentials makes it that much easier to fall prey to cognitive distortions.

I chose to use "we" both because it fits with the semi-formal tone better, but more importantly because I want to give others a chance to open PRs if they choose to do so, so I was basically future-proofing for a possible scenario where I wasn't the only contributor.

I have no affiliation with Gitlab whatsoever.

This is my personal blog that I made when I quit my previous job a couple months ago. I ended up repurposing the blog because I couldn't figure out how to get a table of contents working on a generic markdown file (i.e. I originally was just going to link to plain markdown in my git repo), but I was able to quickly figure out how to get it working with hugo. I used Netlify / Hugo via Gitlab to do so, so the Gitlab logo just happened to be part of the default theme. I'll look into removing it for clarity later.

The intent is to be a fairly comprehensive coverage of what we know about COVID-19 and what it means for our policy. Note that the article is written from a US-based perspective although I suspect it's relevant to a broader audience.

In general, I believe that the case against lockdown has been highly stigmatized and thus many people have not been exposed to a convincing argument of why some of us feel that our response has actually made things worse.

I encourage any pull requests (see the very final section).

If you're short on time, I'd recommend at least reading https://www.ryankemper.io/post/2020-04-29-the_case_for_endin..., which has a readability score (Flesch-Kincaid, etc) of around a middle school level and is extremely brief and to the point.

For those who have a bit more time but still not enough for the whole article, I'd recommend at least reading https://www.ryankemper.io/post/2020-04-29-the_case_for_endin.... In particular understanding the age-stratified risk distribution, and how it differs from Influenza, is super important. Finally I'd also recommend checking out the proposal, which ironically is the shortest section: https://www.ryankemper.io/post/2020-04-29-the_case_for_endin...

Thanks for any feedback.

This is a complete farce. 1-2% of dying in not-at-risk individuals? We know that the diamond princess, the cruise where we tested everybody, had around a 1% mortality rate, and that was with a bunch of at-risk individuals (the elderly, in this case). That basically gives us an upper bound IFR, and other data coming out from places like Germany is putting us closer to .2-.6% IFR.

But yes, if someone has extreme anxiety that they are going to die from covid, even despite evidence to the contrary, they should absolutely stay at home. No one should be forced to go outside, but unfortunately in many parts of the world people are being forbidden from going outside practically at all.

The important thing here is the individual needs to be empowered to make an informed decision based off their personal risk tolerance. If someone decides that the unknowns are too overwhelming and they want to remain at home until a hypothetical future vaccine is hypothetically released, that's totally fine. But critically, I don't want to be living in a society that is forcing me to stay inside for reasons that are not based on evidence-based public health policy. And unfortunately so much of what we've seen (e.g. closing public parks, banning jogging, disallowing drive-thru church meetings until the decision was overturned) is not grounded in sane policy, but instead in panic-driven reactionism.

Absolutely.

> I wonder if you are giving any consideration of the economic consequences of the virus? Those are going to happen regardless of imposed lockdowns. There's a tweet about reservations at restaurants in Seattle declining 60% prior to the lockdown. That's plenty.

Yes, I have given consideration to that, and I think your point is an important one. Basically, I draw a distinction between unavoidable economic impact due to covid itself (your example with restaurant reservations) versus self-inflicted economic damage (forcing closures rather than letting businesses decide for themselves, discouraging elective surgery in areas without a huge outbreak which has led to incredible job loss/furloughs in the medical sector)

> BTW, New York is nowhere near herd immunity. If you assume 1000 cases per death, they would have ~1 million people that have been infected. For a virus this contagious, you want 50-60% for herd immunity, not ~12%.

Right, hitting the "herd immunity" threshold is great, but the important point is that any marginal increase in recovered cases leads to reduced transmission, even if it does not lead to containment the way "full" herd immunity does.

Per your point, if we stick with that 1000:1 estimate (which honestly I think is within an order of magnitude of the true number), that implies we're only 2, maybe 3 "doublings" away from herd immunity in New York. (Let me know if you see an issue with that logic).

By comparison, in my home state of California, we currently have 1000 deaths which we would expand to 1 million cases using that same 1000:1 ratio, whereas our population is about 40 million, so we have an implied 2.5% herd immunity

Please define "peaking". Really what you mean is that the curve of new infections is starting to flatten, but by definition, we are going to hit a new, higher peak if we lift the lockdown, because we haven't exposed enough of our population yet.

It is very important that we either agree on the 3 postulates I provided, or can convincingly explain to each other why we disagree on point (3). The vast majority of the globe will be exposed to this.

> We didn't all get Ebola or HIV, which were similarly novel. The world never acquired universal herd immunity to polio either.

Hmm. This is just incredibly wrong. It's not the "novelness" that determines whether the majority of the globe will be exposed. You have to look at how the disease is spread and how fast/easily it spreads. HIV is not a respiratory infection. So it's a total red herring. Same thing with polio. It should be really obvious that a disease where you need to be exposed to semen/blood/other fluids of someone infected (HIV), or exposed to fecal matter entering your mouth (polio), is going to behave differently than a disease that spreads via respiratory droplets (covid).

Look, the entire world agrees we cannot eradicate influenza, and we also agree that the majority of the world has some level of immunity to these diseases. Whereas with a completely novel virus, we do not have widespread immunity.

Any infection that spreads easily enough (which tends to exclusively be respiratory infections since they spread the most) is impossible to eradicate, doubly so if there are natural animal reservoirs as their are with H1N1 and sars-cov-2.

> So it maybe made sense to let one spread where we want to contain the other.

We cannot contain either of these diseases. It is infeasible. This is another point we really need to agree on to be able to have a productive discussion. Tell me, is there any respected health organization that is advocating a policy of _containment_ towards covid? I am asserting that there is not.

Containment has virtually nothing to do with lethality of the disease, except insofar as a disease with a 50% mortality rate will tend to burn itself out. It's all about the transmission rate.

I agree that details matter. Which is why I think when the facts of how this virus operates are examined, it is extremely clear that we will neither contain nor eradicate the disease.

The approach you are advocating for will lead to the so-called "second wave" that will crush us, and we'll have to close our economy down again to avoid widespread infection, except (a) we won't be able to because we already damaged it too much to have that headroom, and (b) as I believe this "first wave" will show us, economic shutdown is just a bad policy across the board except in areas where we are near peak hospital capacity.

Not sure if you're interested, but my thoughts on a "second wave" are that it's an indication that a society totally mishandled the initial outbreak. We need to try to maintain a steady rate of new infections, such that we are near our capacity but not exceeding it. Now, due to how exponents work, it is really easy to mess up that balance. But we have to work towards herd immunity. (BTW, it's not something that you have to "work" towards, it's really a natural process that we can only interfere with by trying to foolishly contain rather than practicing targeted mitigation.

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> Do you have a specific policy you're trying to advocate for?

Yeah, I'll give you one to chew on. All at-risk individuals are encouraged to voluntarily self isolate, and hunker down until we have a possible vaccine. Those who are not at risk live life as normal, minus some large gatherings. While those at-risk quarantine, everyone else is developing herd immunity. BTW, it saddens me that "herd immunity" has been turned into a dirty word. It is a natural consequence of the way immunity works in a population, and so the idea that building herd immunity is "callous" or ineffective is just a total disregard of reality.

We need to build immunity in as much of the population as possible. That's the only way, and it's what we've done for every Influenza outbreak, because herd immunity isn't even something you can avoid developing without containment. But what we can do via misguided lockdowns is needlessly delay the formation of herd immunity while also destroying our economy (I am using strong language but if you look at the jobless claims, medical workers being furloughed, etc, you realize we are truly _destroying_ tremendous sources of value).

This is sort of the pareto principle. We get 80% of the benefits of a mass lockdown, with only a small increase in costs. In fact, I would go one further and say that any policies that prevent the development of herd immunity are actively causing harm since we're postponing the reconciliation into the future while damaging our economy in the present

Oh, and just to be clear, I advocate total lockdown in any areas that are nearing medical capacity. New York is the quintessential example here.

BTW, New York will be a great example of herd immunity. Their death toll is staggering right now, because massive quantities of people have been exposed. It's hard to know how many, particularly given that the death figures are a little untrustworthy, but I would assume that every death has something like 200 corresponding infections (somewhere around a .5% IFR). Give it another month, and we will see a dramatic dropoff in infection, even if we lift the lockdown, because there won't be many vectors left for covid to spread through.

Last thing I'll say is, it's very telling that you have not made any references to the economic impacts of lockdown. A rational decision requires comparing the benefits of lockdown with the costs to our economy, and by not even mentioning the latter, it seems to imply that you're not performing a rational cost/benefit analysis here, but rather are relying on very dubious reasoning.

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I guess, my question is, can you point to some actions that the Obama administration took, relative to the timeline of when the WHO issued the warning, and compare that to the Trump administration's coronavirus response?

(BTW, it's not relevant, but I will say that I do agree that Trump is a total idiot and will put his ego before...well, everything. He has completely mischaracterized our testing capacity, along with tons of other issues. But I'm suspicious of blanket claims that administration X did a better job without a little more substance than you provided)

How do you feel about the citizens united ruling, which (I am paraphrasing, perhaps poorly) found that by disallowing one to spend money on poltiical speech, that freedom of speech was impacted?

I think it's actually quite a sensible point. Speech costs money. Therefore limits on the money an organization can spend is necessarily a limit on speech.

("Overturn citizens united" is the classic liberal/democrat view, but I really question how many have thought deeply about the implications of what they are proposing).

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BTW, as you probably know, regulations quickly get co-opted by corporations/lobbyists for their own ends. So, if there is a true desire to funnel money to politicians, they will find a way. Now, that does not mean that we shouldn't try to make that harder, if that's what we think is the right move (I think Citizens United was a great ruling. I assume you disagree based off of the above)

That's just speculation, of course. But if you look at someone like Trump, I don't claim to understand his thinking super well but he seems like the type of person that would be extremely opposed to a lockdown, not because of the economic impacts themselves but because the impact on the stock market. So, the fact that he accepted the recommendation to lockdown basically implies to me that he saw the level of panic and saw that, if he shutdown, very few would blame him for following advice of medical professionals, whereas if he didn't shutdown and we really did have 2 million deaths, that would absolutely be held against him. So really just some basic game theory.

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Also, I totally agree that the cure is absolutely worse than the disease. (Or more accurately, I am not sure but am highly confident, and will be following the data over the next months)

I dislike citing news articles, I'd prefer to cite real research, but here's a crappy source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/02/corona...

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When I first started hearing about the Coronavirus and figuring out the situation, my initial reaction was that we need to foster herd immunity, and avoiding exposure is near-impossible over the long run therefore we should just "get it over with" - not going out of our way to get infected but also not hiding.

Then as we heard about Italy, France, etc, my view shifted, and I viewed the lockdown as a necessary evil.

I've now swung back the other way. Time will tell, but I really think that subsequent research we'll show that we took a huge problem - a covid pandemic - and turned it into two huge problems - a pandemic along with significant swaths of our economy getting destroyed.

The argument to flatten the curve, beyond preventing exceeding hospital capacity, which is absolutely a critical goal, was also that those of us who are not at serious risk could spread to those who _are_ at risk, and therefore everyone needs to act in lockstep. Well, if you take a systems-level view, absolutely the best thing a non-at-risk person can do is get exposed to covid, fully quarantine themselves, and then return to daily life. Having a huge swath of the population with immunity is the best way to protect our at risk population. (In a perfect world, we could culture sars-cov-2 and voluntarily expose ourselves - basically a vaccine except you're exposing yourself to the real deal and not a virus rendered inert)

Also, back on the "exceeding hospital capacity" point, it is precisely those at-risk who are filling up hospitals and needing intubation or ventilation. So we can have a huge portion of the population who is not at risk still living their lives (with some adjustments), and the effect on hospitalizations would really not be that bad as a result.

I'll be closely following Sweden's data over the next months. I'm very curious how their strategy pans out.

> we have effectively zero buffer in many areas. A sudden increase in cases (which is what "easing up" means!) would push us right over the edge.

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I think that this is not the best way to think about it. We need to contrast the benefit of lockdowns (decreased transmission of the disease) with the economic costs. And just to be clear, this isn't about investment returns, the stock market, etc, it's about the very real fact that poverty, stress, and economic uncertainty all eventually lead to deaths in their own right (either indirectly due to being reluctant to seek medical care, or directly through suicide).

If you're willing to discuss further, can we see if we agree on these points?

(1) This is a highly transmissible respiratory virus, and thus eradication is impossible

(2) Given (1), the purpose of lockdowns and other measures is primarily to prevent us from exceeding our hospital capacity, at which point the number of deaths would go up dramatically

(3) The vast majority of the globe will be exposed to this. Avoiding that is not possible, so it's just a matter of when

Therefore, we should work to mitigate the _impact_ of Covid (NOT with the goal of eradicating it, which is impossible), but there is a point where the economic damage will far exceed the cost of lifting lockdown.

BTW, it's not like ending lockdown means everything goes back to normal. We would still be banning large gatherings, at least for a short length of time, and we would still be advising at-risk individuals to self-isolate (and for a country like the US, I don't have any hard numbers here but that could easily still be 30-50% of the country who's considered at risk).

Last point I want to make. Many of us here work jobs that allow us to work from home, and so we kept our jobs during this. We need to recognize that not only have tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, but a significant chunk of those jobs will not be "coming back". Real value was destroyed. And those who lost their jobs are exactly those who are likely to be in lower socioeconomic classes and thus are much less equipped to weather events like this.

(Sorry, the above was pretty rambly, so I hope there's still some value you can get out of it :P)

Like many in tech, I made a blog when it was time for me to find a new job. And in typical fashion I paid for an overpriced .io domain instead of the equivalent .xyz or .dev. The blog only has one post and will probably only have one post for the foreseeable future (until I leave for my next job, I imagine).

I think there are parts of the above article that could use some work, but overall I'm actually quite happy with it. But, as you might expect, actually writing the blog post did not make a huge difference in my job search.

Given that my blog will only sporadically have content, the timing of that content corresponding to career moves, I would not recommend reading my blog since there won't really be much to read.

But hey, at least I've taken part in the time-honored tradition of the "oh shit I need to find a new job, better create a blog"-blog.

My $.02: If the only thing that made you a better candidate than your competition in East Asia is that your company mandated working within an office, then you probably don't have a valuable skillset in the first place, right? There's some really smart people in those parts of the world, but the average candidate they're gonna get is just not gonna be even in the same ballpark. Now that being said, we all know that management is not perfectly rational (or for many of us, is almost pathologically irrational), so that doesn't mean a myopic suit might not erroneously decide that they might as well hire cheap labor overseas. Still though, it's really not something I spend any time worrying about.

What I do find interesting, and you alluded to this a bit, is the set of companies who do not allow work-from-home (or, allow work-from-home but do not allow truly remote employees - this seems to be so common these days), may collectively realize "wait a second, we all worked from home during this massive global pandemic and things didn't grind to a screeching halt, maybe remote work isn't something to be afraid of". That would be a really interesting development.

To make an analogy to software, a common pattern is to have a monolithic repo with many different "personalities" (codepaths / configurations) that utilize different subsets of the monolith. DNA seems to work under a similar principle, a given cell will preferentially transcribe parts of the DNA based on epigenetic factors.