CR: COVID-19 --Political Talk

[Francisco 2.0 32347]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23364]

We, the people, are responsible for our own government, the problem is we’re horrible employers.  We let our employees get away with genocide and worse sometimes.  We are a failed society. 

[ndawg 1242]

1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

Yes. modern inventory control and supply chain management techniques are the product of evil capitalism.  🙄

I mean, I hate to say it, because I like to think the best of everybody (excluding the truly lost souls on the far right), but I think that's what his stance boils down to.

To whatever extent there's lean production still being done in the medical industry, I'd bet money it's only increasing the industry's ability to adapt to the crisis. Mass production -- where the Rust Belt still seems stuck in -- is absolutely shitty at adaptation by comparison.

I'm pretty far left, and even I don't see how anyone could not have an appreciation for the industrial advances of the last 80 years -- and a lot of stems precisely from how the US tooled up for WW2, which is fascinating because we're facing a somewhat similar crisis now. To suggest we erase all that advancement because some hospitals appear to be doing stupid shit seems short sighted.

It's obvious to anyone paying attention that we win this shit by getting people to take responsibility and fucking cooperate. What everyone who has practiced and studied management knows is just how hard that is to pull off in an organization of any real size. It bothers me greatly that in our political climate, the GOP brand themselves as the "capitalists," but they fucking suck at actual management.

Anyways, I'm way off tangent here. Social distancing and the overall stress is taking a toll, and I'm finding it hard to withstand the impulse to start barking about everything that's wrong with the world. I wish there were good managers in government right now.

[cactusflinthead 27595]

It's CR bro. If you can't holler here then there's no place remaining for it. 

[cactusflinthead 27595]

 

[HenryJames 65909]

19 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

"Hope to have you back"

Bwahaha! Yeah, I bet you do.

 

Shaking his head the entire time she was talking.

[pyrohornIII 4812]

 

2 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

IT IS THE FAULT OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FOR NOT BEING PREPARED TO DEFEND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE FROM THIS SHIT.  

China sucks but just imagine how vulnerable we are to a real biological weapon that behaves in a similar way as COVID-19?  Like, we should totally have our bases covered on that regardless of Chinese government efforts in misleading or covering-up.  It is on US to defend ourselves and this episode has been a total fucking fail. 

But Space Force!

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

23 minutes ago, ndawg said:

It bothers me greatly that in our political climate, the GOP brand themselves as the "capitalists," but they fucking suck at actual management.

Feel free to say that really really loudly.

Best boss I ever had was very matter of fact Democrat that didn't brook idiots, but big on win-win situations for employees and company alike. Ran long on hours with fewer employees, but we were well compensated and appreciated.

[Pancho 44533]

 

[WBT 20440]

Fauci's been getting death threats from people he's trying to help since the 80s.  No good deed...

[WhatTheBuck 28720]

5 minutes ago, WBT said:

Fauci's been getting death threats from people he's trying to help since the 80s.  No good deed...

Link?

[yoladu 4072]

1 hour ago, cactusflinthead said:

"Hope to have you back"

Bwahaha! Yeah, I bet you do.

 

"thank you, i hope you will come back.".. lulz

no way in hell he will be seen on FoxNews again.

Edited April 2, 2020 by yoladu

[yoladu 4072]

i am generally not a conspiracy theorist, but why do I have this creeping feeling that our government has known all along that it would be beneficial having the general public wear masks, AND they kept that from us, because there is no way they could ensure the public would be able to get access to them.

They cant even get them to hospital workers.

I havent been looking, but i would imagine John Q Public cant walk into a store and buy a mask or order one online at this point.

They are ubiquitous in Asia and those countries have been far more successful in flattening the curve.

Edited April 2, 2020 by yoladu

[Mdhorn 5912]

1 hour ago, Cairn Horn88 said:

I’m afraid that if this had been a nuclear attack, that we’d all be dead.  Seriously.

wtf are we going to do if a large salmonella outbreak happens?  I mean DOTARD did cut food safety regulations and currently, the US is getting hammered by COVID .  

[cactusflinthead 27595]

I remember a different Michael Steele. 

My how things have changed. 

 

 

[triplehorn 2664]

35 minutes ago, yoladu said:

i am generally not a conspiracy theorist, but why do I have this creeping feeling that our government has known all along that it would be beneficial having the general public wear masks, AND they kept that from us, because there is no way they could ensure the public would be able to get access to them.

They cant even get them to hospital workers.

I havent been looking, but i would imagine John Q Public cant walk into a store and buy a mask or order one online at this point.

They are ubiquitous in Asia and those countries have been far more successful in flattening the curve.

It’s an open secret that the fed messaging to downplay the need for, or benefits of, public mask wearing is intended to reduce hoarding and diversion from health care.

after its covid outbreak started, within a couple weeks Taiwan generated the national capacity to make 13 million masks per day.

it’s an absolute failure that we don’t have a nationalized emergency manufacturing effort underway.  In so many ways it feels too late, but every day we wait makes it so much worse than acting now.

Edited April 2, 2020 by triplehorn

[Party_Taco 3681]

 

The fuck? What’s the story here?

[kopp0e 1135]

2 hours ago, henrygandorf said:

something tells me this tweet will not age well.

nevertheless.

Yeah, she may not have noticed this tweet at the time:

 

[washparkhorn 9935]

facebook and Fox are agents of death. 

[Jhawkmvp 1489]

11 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Actually, there are two big issue that makes wet markets different:

1 -- the conditions in which the animals are kept and slaughtered.   Stacked on top of each other to insure cross-contamination (and inter-species mutations and transfers of pathogens), stressed beyond belief so as to make them more susceptible to infection, and slaughtered in a manner that allows for cross-infection with humans.

2 -- bats.  Bats are a particularly dangerous animal when it comes to dangerous pathogens that can make the inter-species jump.  The hypothesis is that bat immune systems are so strong that they actually harbor only the strongest of pathogens, AND, they don't succumb to them -- so they are great carriers.  Bats are the source of Ebola.  The best thinking is that they are the source of MERS, SARS, and COVID-19.  Man needs to stay the fuck away from bats.  All bats.  Always.

I shudder to think about what those poor bats are being exposed to at Kyle Field.

[Jhawkmvp 1489]

In South Korea school is being delayed again until Mid-April. When it starts it will be online for the foreseeable future. 

My employer added another requirement besides masks. Now we have to get our temperatures taken twice a day. If your temperature is over 37.5 degrees C (99.5 degrees F), you have to go home and get tested before you are able to return to work, if the test is negative.

[DixonHur 11236]

2 hours ago, yoladu said:

i am generally not a conspiracy theorist, but why do I have this creeping feeling that our government has known all along that it would be beneficial having the general public wear masks, AND they kept that from us, because there is no way they could ensure the public would be able to get access to them.

That would be a pretty stupid reason, since you can make them yourself.

We've had to wear masks, or something that covers your face, for weeks.  Even before the order was given, there were no masks available, so people have improvised.  Lots of people, including myself, used scarfs, others used bandannas, t-shirts, etc....I have yet to see anyone without a face covering.

Then they set up a website (www.damerousky.cz)...literally 'we give masks'...with a map of people sewing cloth masks at home and offering them to the public.  They set a cap of ~$1.60 per mask, so it's really just people helping people.  

[GRHorn 105]

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

History is replete with—even shaped by—those improbable and individually unpredictable events of disastrous import that nonetheless do periodically occur. While the frequent occurrence of the improbable may seem like a paradox, it makes perfect sense: history’s sampling of the relevant random variables is very large. Nassim Taleb has made a career of exploring the manifold implications of this phenomenon in popular books, detailed mathematical treatises, and outrageous rants on social media.

An important point which Taleb has made as of late is that pandemics are not black swans, the most popularized concept in his work. Since pandemics are predictable as events, they are white swans. Notably, another characteristic of white swan events is that they tend to be explained, after the fact, as human error: a gaggle of pundits rushes forward to explain how we, as a society, have been very foolish these past several years. Their favorite reproach is a morality tale centering on preparation. “We were warned again and again that this would happen,” the pundits cry, “and yet we didn’t prepare!” In their telling, we are the lazy grasshopper in some catastrophic version of Aesop’s fable.

The pundits are not entirely wrong. Just four years before COVID-19 broke out, Bill Gates gave a TED Talk warning of a coming epidemic, and U.S. policy changed little in the intervening years. Likewise, with 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis, there were voices in the preceding years that clearly warned of such events.

Yet this response, berating our lack of preparation, is not quite apt. If we examine the countries that have responded best to COVID-19 (especially, the small Asian nations of the Pacific coast), we see that the factor that distinguishes them is competence. This concept is largely orthogonal to “preparation” as it is usually interpreted in the U.S. In an American policy context, preparation connotes warehouses filled with large stockpiles that “adequately funded” agencies plan, regulate, select, and—when the unfortunate happens—distribute. We might call this the Maginot Line mode of preparation; it is very attractive to those whose livelihoods rest more on the preparation than its results. While certain kinds of preparation do directly support competence, this seems to be largely untrue in the American context. The FDA’s poor performance has little to do with insufficient budgets, and everything to do with its unwillingness to adapt its regulatory norms to the crisis at hand.

The countries with the most effective responses to COVID-19 did not “prepare” in the Maginot Line manner. The policies they used—a mix of mask-wearing, testing, contact-tracing, and targeted quarantine—were directed early and vigorously by the state and amplified by a strong and cooperative community response. Taiwan, for example, has relied on a decentralized set of quickly developed digital tools, coordinated by its DIGI+ digital ministry but developed on the fly by private citizens. One tool is an online Face Mask Map to facilitate distribution of masks to the public. Another is a virus-exposure platform that collects voluntarily supplied symptom-reports and collates them by location. Citizens employ a mobile app to determine if their location histories intersect with the virus reports, indicating a possible exposure.

Just as important as the positive responses of these countries has been what they did not do. None of these countries allowed their equivalents of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to block virus-testing and the production of masks. In the U.S., the FDA possesses exclusive authority to approve tests once the Department of Health and Human Services declares a Public Health Emergency, which it did on January 31, 2020. The FDA proceeded to grant such approval only to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In February, the CDC developed a test on its own and distributed it to state labs. But the test kits had a bad reagent and did not work. During the entire month of February, as the virus continued to spread, the FDA granted no private lab approval to test. The first approval for a private lab was only issued on March 2, 2020.

This pattern of impedance is not unique to testing. Why have common surgical masks (and not only the higher-grade N95 masks) run short during the pandemic? Surely they are easy to produce. The answer is that, while they are physically easy to produce, the FDA treats them as regulated medical devices and requires extensive risk analysis and testing before they can be legally sold, making them difficult and time-consuming for a company to legally bring to market.

The syndrome at work here is clear. The American institutions charged with protecting public health are embedded in a bureaucratic culture that values turf-centered gatekeeping and control over effectiveness and outcome. Some might protest that the FDA’s manner of regulating is needed for public safety, but the small Asian nations have refuted this argument, showing that it is competence, not bureaucratic control, that protects the public.

The emphasis on preparation goes awry for a second reason. The event on which the public is now focused is, very naturally, a pandemic, but the number and kinds of identifiable events—black, white, or grey swans—for which we might prepare is essentially unbounded. A cottage industry has arisen around enumerating and urging preparation for a large range of “existential risks.” Many of these risks can be as large as we choose to imagine, ranging up to a massive asteroid strike. Indeed, professional study of risks often leads to a kind of imaginative “hunting” for them. Were we to “prepare” for each of them as their respective advocates deem appropriate, we might well have resources for nothing else.

Nations and states are complex systems inherently subject to both systemic and systematic risks. In the face of such risks, we should seek to make these systems as antifragile as possible. A high level of general competence, in both public and private sectors, is the greatest contributor to antifragility, much more than event-specific preparations. Competence comprises both the ability to act effectively and the will to do so, preferring outcomes achieved over bureaucratic process and control.

Many Westerners may resist the insight, but competence rests not so much on well-planned systems as on virtue, beginning with phronesis (φρόνησῐς), or practical wisdom acting in the world. Government planning in Western nations too often rests on an overextension of episteme (ἐπιστήμη), or rationally grounded knowledge, to areas of human life and organization in which it serves poorly. The future, more often than we wish to admit, is unknown and unknowable, and the effort that we might expend preparing for it is better spent preparing ourselves.

 

[RomaVicta 29811]

I perhaps falsely assume that the above is intended to somehow make the president's performance not seem so bad. 

The criticism of the administration is partly lack of paying heed to warning. More of it is about dismantling government instruments that could have sped our response. Most of the criticism is about the absurd denial that the plague was on the way. This was made worse by saying the plague wasn't worse than a cold or the flu. The colossal failure is in responding at all to needs that, had they been met, lives in the tens of thousands could be saved. The ongoing failure of leadership is stunning to behold.

Forgive me if I mischaracterize your apparent thesis. 

[GRHorn 105]

25 minutes ago, RomaVicta said:

I perhaps falsely assume that the above is intended to somehow make the president's performance not seem so bad. 

The criticism of the administration is partly lack of paying heed to warning. More of it is about dismantling government instruments that could have sped our response. Most of the criticism is about the absurd denial that the plague was on the way. This was made worse by saying the plague wasn't worse than a cold or the flu. The colossal failure is in responding at all to needs that, had they been met, lives in the tens of thousands could be saved. The ongoing failure of leadership is stunning to behold.

Forgive me if I mischaracterize your apparent thesis. 

No. I’ve said multiple times that Trump’s initial response was dumb. The column above actually makes the point that the bureaucracy is part of the problem. We don’t necessarily need more “government instruments”.

I generally agree with this tweet. 

 

 

[TexLonghorn 5597]

 

[DigglerontheHoof 21079]

29 minutes ago, GRHorn said:

No. I’ve said multiple times that Trump’s initial response was dumb. The column above actually makes the point that the bureaucracy is part of the problem. We don’t necessarily need more “government instruments”.

I generally agree with this tweet. 

 

 

I'd say trump's downplayed  response was/is criminal.   His "dumb start" will cost thousands and thousands of lives, but I'm sure you'll vote for him, enthusiastically, come November. 

Edited April 2, 2020 by DigglerontheHoof

[Jack Straw 2953]

7 hours ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

Trump has to come out and condemn this. Who the fuck threatens Fauci? 

Republicans

[Mapache 1117]

This dumb sob is a governor.and a Republican of course 

 

[cactusflinthead 27595]

The FDA is to blame?

Fuck off. 

We know why tests weren't approved. Because it was "their new hoax". 

Try to shift blame if you want, but Trump has final say on this. He's going to own it. 

[Mo Horn 8808]

 

[Pancho 44533]

2 hours ago, GRHorn said:

No. I’ve said multiple times that Trump’s initial response was dumb.

You misspelled the word “deadly.”

[bad_teammate 13143]

You misspelled the word “deadly.”

lol exactly!!

"Look, I know daddy did a little goof 'em up, ok?! Don't we all make an oopsie now and then?"

[Bullneck 19027]

3 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

I perhaps falsely assume that the above is intended to somehow make the president's performance not seem so bad. 

The criticism of the administration is partly lack of paying heed to warning. More of it is about dismantling government instruments that could have sped our response. Most of the criticism is about the absurd denial that the plague was on the way. This was made worse by saying the plague wasn't worse than a cold or the flu. The colossal failure is in responding at all to needs that, had they been met, lives in the tens of thousands could be saved. The ongoing failure of leadership is stunning to behold.

Forgive me if I mischaracterize your apparent thesis. 

I don't think he read and understood that article.  It looked scholarly, and by extension, he expected people to think he was smart.  Or, the "could have been better, or could have been worse" sort of glosses over the fact that many people have died by now, and for no good reason.  But he doesn't know what's in it.

Edited April 2, 2020 by Bullneck

[Bullneck 19027]

3 hours ago, GRHorn said:

No. I’ve said multiple times that Trump’s initial response was dumb. The column above actually makes the point that the bureaucracy is part of the problem. We don’t necessarily need more “government instruments”.

I generally agree with this tweet. 

 

 

Doubling down on the dumb, now.

This "bureaucratic mismanagement" is really what jumps out at you, right?  We had this entire conversation with Workswithseed a page or two ago.  Don't come back until you've read over that.

[Bullneck 19027]

1 hour ago, Mapache said:

This dumb sob is a governor.and a Republican of course 

 

He just found out 24 hours ago.  

If it was some 5* football player they had signed he would have been online learning everything there was to know.  But viruses that are overrunning Atlanta's hospitals?  You learn what to do when you finally have to, I guess.

[WBT 20440]

8 hours ago, WBT said:

Fauci's been getting death threats from people he's trying to help since the 80s.  No good deed...

 

8 hours ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Link?

I can't find where I read he received death threats but this BBC article talks about him being the subject of protesters when he was leading the initial response to AIDS/HIV:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52027201

Quote

As the epidemic swept through the US in the 1980s, however, he became the target of activists angry at the Reagan administration's muted response and lack of access to novel drugs.

Image copyrightJ CLIN INVEST. 2007 Image captionAids activists protesting the government's response to the epidemic in 1988

Protesters held signs outside government offices that said: "Dr Fauci, you are killing us" and he was denounced on television by activists.

The playwright and gay rights advocate Larry Kramer even modelled the antagonist of a play after him.

"I remember looking out a window and people on the lawn of the NIH were throwing smoke bombs," Dr Fauci recalled in a 2011 interview. "Police were ready to arrest them and I said, 'Don't. Bring them up to my office so I can talk with them'."

 

[WhatTheBuck 28720]

2 hours ago, Mapache said:

This dumb sob is a governor.and a Republican of course 

 

He also stole an election. 

[WhatTheBuck 28720]

11 minutes ago, WBT said:

 

I can't find where I read he received death threats but this BBC article talks about him being the subject of protesters when he was leading the initial response to AIDS/HIV:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52027201

 

Reagan horribly mismanaged our response to the AIDS epidemic. Protesting against that is hardly the same thing as sending death threats to Dr. Fauci. 

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

1 hour ago, Mo Horn said:

 

Wait a minute. Narcissism is contagious like the COVID?

It can't be because Jared is smart. His daddy paid $2.5 million to get him into Harvard and his honors from there are the same that 90% of alumni achieve. His entitlement has given birth to his delusion.

[WBT 20440]

24 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Reagan horribly mismanaged our response to the AIDS epidemic. Protesting against that is hardly the same thing as sending death threats to Dr. Fauci. 

My point was that he is again being drawn into politics that reasonable people would know that he has nothing to do with.

[wildcat09 29288]

5 hours ago, GRHorn said:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

  Hide contents

History is replete with—even shaped by—those improbable and individually unpredictable events of disastrous import that nonetheless do periodically occur. While the frequent occurrence of the improbable may seem like a paradox, it makes perfect sense: history’s sampling of the relevant random variables is very large. Nassim Taleb has made a career of exploring the manifold implications of this phenomenon in popular books, detailed mathematical treatises, and outrageous rants on social media.

An important point which Taleb has made as of late is that pandemics are not black swans, the most popularized concept in his work. Since pandemics are predictable as events, they are white swans. Notably, another characteristic of white swan events is that they tend to be explained, after the fact, as human error: a gaggle of pundits rushes forward to explain how we, as a society, have been very foolish these past several years. Their favorite reproach is a morality tale centering on preparation. “We were warned again and again that this would happen,” the pundits cry, “and yet we didn’t prepare!” In their telling, we are the lazy grasshopper in some catastrophic version of Aesop’s fable.

The pundits are not entirely wrong. Just four years before COVID-19 broke out, Bill Gates gave a TED Talk warning of a coming epidemic, and U.S. policy changed little in the intervening years. Likewise, with 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis, there were voices in the preceding years that clearly warned of such events.

Yet this response, berating our lack of preparation, is not quite apt. If we examine the countries that have responded best to COVID-19 (especially, the small Asian nations of the Pacific coast), we see that the factor that distinguishes them is competence. This concept is largely orthogonal to “preparation” as it is usually interpreted in the U.S. In an American policy context, preparation connotes warehouses filled with large stockpiles that “adequately funded” agencies plan, regulate, select, and—when the unfortunate happens—distribute. We might call this the Maginot Line mode of preparation; it is very attractive to those whose livelihoods rest more on the preparation than its results. While certain kinds of preparation do directly support competence, this seems to be largely untrue in the American context. The FDA’s poor performance has little to do with insufficient budgets, and everything to do with its unwillingness to adapt its regulatory norms to the crisis at hand.

The countries with the most effective responses to COVID-19 did not “prepare” in the Maginot Line manner. The policies they used—a mix of mask-wearing, testing, contact-tracing, and targeted quarantine—were directed early and vigorously by the state and amplified by a strong and cooperative community response. Taiwan, for example, has relied on a decentralized set of quickly developed digital tools, coordinated by its DIGI+ digital ministry but developed on the fly by private citizens. One tool is an online Face Mask Map to facilitate distribution of masks to the public. Another is a virus-exposure platform that collects voluntarily supplied symptom-reports and collates them by location. Citizens employ a mobile app to determine if their location histories intersect with the virus reports, indicating a possible exposure.

Just as important as the positive responses of these countries has been what they did not do. None of these countries allowed their equivalents of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to block virus-testing and the production of masks. In the U.S., the FDA possesses exclusive authority to approve tests once the Department of Health and Human Services declares a Public Health Emergency, which it did on January 31, 2020. The FDA proceeded to grant such approval only to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In February, the CDC developed a test on its own and distributed it to state labs. But the test kits had a bad reagent and did not work. During the entire month of February, as the virus continued to spread, the FDA granted no private lab approval to test. The first approval for a private lab was only issued on March 2, 2020.

This pattern of impedance is not unique to testing. Why have common surgical masks (and not only the higher-grade N95 masks) run short during the pandemic? Surely they are easy to produce. The answer is that, while they are physically easy to produce, the FDA treats them as regulated medical devices and requires extensive risk analysis and testing before they can be legally sold, making them difficult and time-consuming for a company to legally bring to market.

The syndrome at work here is clear. The American institutions charged with protecting public health are embedded in a bureaucratic culture that values turf-centered gatekeeping and control over effectiveness and outcome. Some might protest that the FDA’s manner of regulating is needed for public safety, but the small Asian nations have refuted this argument, showing that it is competence, not bureaucratic control, that protects the public.

The emphasis on preparation goes awry for a second reason. The event on which the public is now focused is, very naturally, a pandemic, but the number and kinds of identifiable events—black, white, or grey swans—for which we might prepare is essentially unbounded. A cottage industry has arisen around enumerating and urging preparation for a large range of “existential risks.” Many of these risks can be as large as we choose to imagine, ranging up to a massive asteroid strike. Indeed, professional study of risks often leads to a kind of imaginative “hunting” for them. Were we to “prepare” for each of them as their respective advocates deem appropriate, we might well have resources for nothing else.

Nations and states are complex systems inherently subject to both systemic and systematic risks. In the face of such risks, we should seek to make these systems as antifragile as possible. A high level of general competence, in both public and private sectors, is the greatest contributor to antifragility, much more than event-specific preparations. Competence comprises both the ability to act effectively and the will to do so, preferring outcomes achieved over bureaucratic process and control.

Many Westerners may resist the insight, but competence rests not so much on well-planned systems as on virtue, beginning with phronesis (φρόνησῐς), or practical wisdom acting in the world. Government planning in Western nations too often rests on an overextension of episteme (ἐπιστήμη), or rationally grounded knowledge, to areas of human life and organization in which it serves poorly. The future, more often than we wish to admit, is unknown and unknowable, and the effort that we might expend preparing for it is better spent preparing ourselves.

 

Ah yes, everyone knows being prepared to respond to a pandemic and being competent at responding to a pandemic are two completely contradictory things and not actually the same fucking thing.

Edited April 2, 2020 by wildcat09

[cactusflinthead 27595]

 

[RomaVicta 29811]

4 hours ago, GRHorn said:

No. I’ve said multiple times that Trump’s initial response was dumb. The column above actually makes the point that the bureaucracy is part of the problem. We don’t necessarily need more “government instruments”.

I generally agree with this tweet. 

 

 

Yea, this is apologist stuff. Trump didn't misread the threat to the nation; he simply prioritized the threat to himself politically. All you really need to hear to prove that are his comments about refusing aid to the cruise ship off San Francisco because he didn't want "the numbers" to look bad. He meant make him look bad and scare the stock markets. 

The mentioned bureaucratic mismanagement can largely be laid at Trump's feet as well. He was advised by all relevant government entities months before he was forced by the consequences they predicted to bow to the facts. He has only just in the last few days given up his fairy tale of everything being back to normal by Easter.

Again, he wasn't being dumb. He was and is being true to his narcissist character of seeing this threat only in terms of its danger to himself and re-election not to mention continued criminal profit from his high office. 

As Bullneck wrote above, you seem to have assumed something written in a smart sounding way to be smart. No, it's not.

[Post Oak 20188]

If you vote Republican people will die. 

[TXSG8R 3360]

4 hours ago, GRHorn said:

No. I’ve said multiple times that Trump’s initial response was dumb. The column above actually makes the point that the bureaucracy is part of the problem. We don’t necessarily need more “government instruments”.

I generally agree with this tweet. 

 

 

The second bullet is largely a symptom of the third.  The first bullet, while true, doesnt have anything to do with the US waiting from January 3rd (when CDC and the president were keenly aware of the threat) until mid March to start ramping up an effective response.  

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

I imagine  Congress is holding a Rubik's cube and the President has a piece of string....

 

 

He thinks you can take the two ends and make them meet and the economy will be back to wonderful and all that extra string dangling below is just noise from doctors and scientists and people dying.

[BrickHorn 18199]

4 hours ago, GRHorn said:

 

That tweet doesn’t exonerate Trump.  It lays out two additional criticisms.

Trump deserves blame for the bureaucratic mismanagement, for two reasons.  First, he cut funds to the CDC and gutted their pandemic response group.  Second, his denial that the virus was a problem hamstrung the entire executive branch’s response.  His employees can’t be expected to do their job effectively while fighting their boss.

Moreover, I don’t see how China’s statistical fudging justifies Trump’s initial denial.  Those stats pointed to a huge CFR approaching 5% and overwhelmed hospitals.  Based on the fudged stats, Trump should have taken this far more seriously than he did.  

[Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13555]

5 hours ago, GRHorn said:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

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History is replete with—even shaped by—those improbable and individually unpredictable events of disastrous import that nonetheless do periodically occur. While the frequent occurrence of the improbable may seem like a paradox, it makes perfect sense: history’s sampling of the relevant random variables is very large. Nassim Taleb has made a career of exploring the manifold implications of this phenomenon in popular books, detailed mathematical treatises, and outrageous rants on social media.

An important point which Taleb has made as of late is that pandemics are not black swans, the most popularized concept in his work. Since pandemics are predictable as events, they are white swans. Notably, another characteristic of white swan events is that they tend to be explained, after the fact, as human error: a gaggle of pundits rushes forward to explain how we, as a society, have been very foolish these past several years. Their favorite reproach is a morality tale centering on preparation. “We were warned again and again that this would happen,” the pundits cry, “and yet we didn’t prepare!” In their telling, we are the lazy grasshopper in some catastrophic version of Aesop’s fable.

The pundits are not entirely wrong. Just four years before COVID-19 broke out, Bill Gates gave a TED Talk warning of a coming epidemic, and U.S. policy changed little in the intervening years. Likewise, with 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis, there were voices in the preceding years that clearly warned of such events.

Yet this response, berating our lack of preparation, is not quite apt. If we examine the countries that have responded best to COVID-19 (especially, the small Asian nations of the Pacific coast), we see that the factor that distinguishes them is competence. This concept is largely orthogonal to “preparation” as it is usually interpreted in the U.S. In an American policy context, preparation connotes warehouses filled with large stockpiles that “adequately funded” agencies plan, regulate, select, and—when the unfortunate happens—distribute. We might call this the Maginot Line mode of preparation; it is very attractive to those whose livelihoods rest more on the preparation than its results. While certain kinds of preparation do directly support competence, this seems to be largely untrue in the American context. The FDA’s poor performance has little to do with insufficient budgets, and everything to do with its unwillingness to adapt its regulatory norms to the crisis at hand.

The countries with the most effective responses to COVID-19 did not “prepare” in the Maginot Line manner. The policies they used—a mix of mask-wearing, testing, contact-tracing, and targeted quarantine—were directed early and vigorously by the state and amplified by a strong and cooperative community response. Taiwan, for example, has relied on a decentralized set of quickly developed digital tools, coordinated by its DIGI+ digital ministry but developed on the fly by private citizens. One tool is an online Face Mask Map to facilitate distribution of masks to the public. Another is a virus-exposure platform that collects voluntarily supplied symptom-reports and collates them by location. Citizens employ a mobile app to determine if their location histories intersect with the virus reports, indicating a possible exposure.

Just as important as the positive responses of these countries has been what they did not do. None of these countries allowed their equivalents of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to block virus-testing and the production of masks. In the U.S., the FDA possesses exclusive authority to approve tests once the Department of Health and Human Services declares a Public Health Emergency, which it did on January 31, 2020. The FDA proceeded to grant such approval only to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In February, the CDC developed a test on its own and distributed it to state labs. But the test kits had a bad reagent and did not work. During the entire month of February, as the virus continued to spread, the FDA granted no private lab approval to test. The first approval for a private lab was only issued on March 2, 2020.

This pattern of impedance is not unique to testing. Why have common surgical masks (and not only the higher-grade N95 masks) run short during the pandemic? Surely they are easy to produce. The answer is that, while they are physically easy to produce, the FDA treats them as regulated medical devices and requires extensive risk analysis and testing before they can be legally sold, making them difficult and time-consuming for a company to legally bring to market.

The syndrome at work here is clear. The American institutions charged with protecting public health are embedded in a bureaucratic culture that values turf-centered gatekeeping and control over effectiveness and outcome. Some might protest that the FDA’s manner of regulating is needed for public safety, but the small Asian nations have refuted this argument, showing that it is competence, not bureaucratic control, that protects the public.

The emphasis on preparation goes awry for a second reason. The event on which the public is now focused is, very naturally, a pandemic, but the number and kinds of identifiable events—black, white, or grey swans—for which we might prepare is essentially unbounded. A cottage industry has arisen around enumerating and urging preparation for a large range of “existential risks.” Many of these risks can be as large as we choose to imagine, ranging up to a massive asteroid strike. Indeed, professional study of risks often leads to a kind of imaginative “hunting” for them. Were we to “prepare” for each of them as their respective advocates deem appropriate, we might well have resources for nothing else.

Nations and states are complex systems inherently subject to both systemic and systematic risks. In the face of such risks, we should seek to make these systems as antifragile as possible. A high level of general competence, in both public and private sectors, is the greatest contributor to antifragility, much more than event-specific preparations. Competence comprises both the ability to act effectively and the will to do so, preferring outcomes achieved over bureaucratic process and control.

Many Westerners may resist the insight, but competence rests not so much on well-planned systems as on virtue, beginning with phronesis (φρόνησῐς), or practical wisdom acting in the world. Government planning in Western nations too often rests on an overextension of episteme (ἐπιστήμη), or rationally grounded knowledge, to areas of human life and organization in which it serves poorly. The future, more often than we wish to admit, is unknown and unknowable, and the effort that we might expend preparing for it is better spent preparing ourselves.

 

Conservatives mere weeks ago- Ever notice how there's an epidemic or pandemic every election year?

Conservatives today- Like anyone can even predict these things.

[WhatTheBuck 28720]

22 minutes ago, WBT said:

My point was that he is again being drawn into politics that reasonable people would know that he has nothing to do with.

You said he's "been getting" death threats "since the 80's." That implies that it's been a regular occurrence over four decades. Yet you couldn't cite an example. Now you say your point is that he's getting drawn into politics. 

No. He's getting death threats. Actual death threats from right-wing extremist supporters of the most incompetent and unqualified man to ever hold the office of President. A man who lied to the American people, minimizing the dangers of a national health crisis. Lives could've been saved but for Trump's ineptitude which continues to imped our response to the emergency. These idiots predictably lash out at the smart guy in the room for contradicting their God King. This is unique and dangerous.