Killing pets was a bit brutal, don’t you think?
tkpwaeub
Karma: 315
I think part of the problem is in the fog of a contentious election, we never had a rational, nuanced discussion of how mask mandates should be enforced. The CDC had some constructive suggestions early on, that struck a reasonable middle ground.
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Is it at all possible that the bill could promote greater honesty towards investors? After all, if you’re taxed on book income you’re that much less likely to make it appear to investors that your company is more profitable than it really is. Not saying thus will necessarily happen, but certainly worth watching and keeping an open mind.
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I’m not sure how much different taxing book income is from reversing a key provision in the TCJA from 2017 - namely, the TCJA raised the income threshold where companies are required to use an accrual basis to report income.
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I think the reality at this point is that while Covid is certainly endemic and will be a permanent fixture of our lives, it is also in every way that matters, deterministically avoidable.
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N95 respirators are cheaper than they’ve ever been ($25 for 50 Kimberly Clarke pouch style masks—I can switch out my single use masks daily)
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It’s really not that hard to get boosted every 3-4 months if your D&D alignment is “neutral-good”. The only person stopping you from getting an extra booster right now is...you.
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Labcorp is now offering spike antibody tests that go up to 25,000 u/mL. You can take a few, spaced a few months apart, to get a good sense of your half life. If you’re able to hold at, say, 7000 u/mL for 8 or 9 months, you’re probably all set for a couple years.
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Rapid tests are easier to get
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Higher levels of population immunity
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Heterologous immunity, from vaccines against other diseases, is a thing
Basically, I’m living my best life at this point.
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Just a reminder that this paper provides a cute way to estimate the “true” prevalence of Covid (or indeed any pathogen) in a community: geometric mean of case rate and positivity rate.
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009374#:~:text=We found that the state,cases and test positivity rates.
Thus for instance based on today’s numbers for the NYC metro area on covidactnow.org
50.4 per 100K = .000504 13.7% positivity rate = 0.137
True prevalence = 0.831%
Thing is....our public health infrastructure is pretty well buggered at this point, and we don’t have the resources to do adequate contact tracing. So is it spreading beyond sexual networks? Can’t be sure, but it also seems like that’s the only place we seem to be looking.
I’m probably a bit more concerned about monkeypox than you are, mainly because it has an alarmingly long incubation period (up to 14 days) and then a punishingly long infectious period (3-4 weeks). That’s a lot of time to infect a lot of people in a lot of places. Plus it seems like it’s pretty hardy on surfaces. In places like NYC, monkeypox + covid could easily overwhelm public health systems.
The public health messaging is awful, and you couldn’t think of a better way to create distrust and homophobia.
As with Covid, the clunky system for prioritizing who gets vaccinated “first” is transparently stupid. The idea that any male with a good internet connection isn’t going to set up an alert to monitor changes to a website and just get a jab regardless of their sexual proclivities is just plain laughable. You might as well auction off doses to the highest bidder.
What’s needed is a “virtual” line. Let everyone go ahead and schedule their shot. Ask for a modest non-refundable copay. There are three possible contingencies to consider:
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Someone with a higher priority comes along and wants your spot, more than 48 hours before your appointment. Then you automatically get moved or rescheduled and possibly offered a different vaccine you’re due for anyway.
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Out of stock. Offer a different vaccine. Reschedule
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No show—retain the deposit. Jab anyone
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For #10, I’d replace it by a more agnostic “allow price gouging OR enforce nationwide rationing”—however you feel about free market vs government control, the idea that there’s a conflict-free middle ground where we ban price gouging but don’t go all in with rationing is pure fantasy.
“those few people can be well-compensated in money and also honor and status and would happily volunteer and so on, all the usual arguments. Worth noting.”
I’m so glad you made this point. The resistance to challenge trials as being somehow unethical always struck me as odd—lots of people put their lives on the line for the public good, and we don’t see that as an earth shattering moral dilemma.
What’s needed is state level counterparts that can approve manufacturing facilities within their borders. The FDA can simply distribute funds and periodically “approve the approvers” and thereby ensure that states give one another full faith and credit.
Are we going to talk about the coincidence that Abbott is also the leading supplier of rapid Covid tests???
Appalling, since it’s pretty easy to verify obesity on the spot. Most pharmacies sell calculators, scales, and tape measures.
What’s not within our power is making sure that well-fitting respirators (full or not) are available to everyone. In order to make this happen, at the very least, we need to make sure that public or private insurance covers qualified fit-testing services (and we need some sort of infrastructure for certifying who offers such services—this appears to be a thing in some other countries).
And I’d also remove the word “covid” from the initial part of the sentence, and have it read “If people actually took risk seriously”, since big part of our failure is not balancing covid risk with other risks, like the risk that flight attendants and store clerks assume (physical violence, mainly) when they’re tasked with enforcing mandates.
Part of the Covid endgame we should probably be considering right now—and feel free to down vote me until I add links (if you hate me) or add links for me (if you love me) should probably be—underlying genetic resistance (or susceptibility). There are tantalizing clues that this might be relevant:
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the UK challenge study—about half of the participants stubbornly refused to catch Covid
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actual progress in identifying genes for susceptibility, lots of data
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experience with other viruses, often with tradeoffs (e.g. HIV vs West Nile virus—weird, right?)
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waves often don’t go past about 60%
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lots of breakthroughs and re-infections and lots of people not getting it (consistent with my own social circle)
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household secondary attack rates surprisingly low
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myxomatosis in rabbits and virus/host co-evolution. As with humans and covid, interferons seem to be the key to understanding innate resistance/susceptibility to novel pathogens
At this point, I’m really starting to think I’m one of the lucky ones, since I’ve been plenty exposed and I test myself fairly frequently. Just like if I were to flip a coin and get 10,000 heads, at some point I start to wonder if it’s biased. I don’t feel too guilty about this, since swine flu got me pretty bad in 2009 and I’m old enough to have had chickenpox pre-vaccine (fun fact—everybody who gets chickenpox has “long chickenpox”—the body never clears it)
For my own personal closure on all this mishuggass I recently sent my spit to 23andme to get a sense of where I fall on the innate susceptibility spectrum. Don’t try this at home, dear reader. It’s pretty safe for me to do this, since I’ve got no plans to buy life insurance (no kids!) and I have a stable unionized government job with a great benefits.
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A possible reason for being cautious about prescribing Paxlovid to just anyone (regardless of underlying risk factors and severity) from a public health standpoint is the issue of rebounds. The Paxlovid might hold the infection at bay for a while, and then people could start testing positive again a few days later, so quarantine protocols become a bit more complex.
This NYT article is a bit closer to deserving the “stop being poor” criticism:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/well/live/ba2-omicron-covid.html
In our current landscape we’ve got an insurance/banking regulator in every state, plus DC and Puerto Rico. Then there’s the US DOL, that regulates self-funded employer plans (ERISA). Then there are local, state, and federal employee/retiree plans. Then Medicare and Medicaid, which fall under CMS. Finally there’s the wild west of plans offered by religious employers, which aren’t under the jurisdiction of any administrative agency (if you exhaust your internal appeals your only recourse is the courts). This state of affairs is largely due to the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which asserted that insurance was the exclusive jurisdiction of the states (in response to a SCOTUS decision that said otherwise). So we’re left with an insanely inefficient patchwork in which large insurance companies shop for jurisdictions that make it as easy as possible for them, and as opaque as possible for customers. I think if we simplified regulation of insurance, we’d have less of a pressing need for single payer.
To me the most compelling reason to let people go ahead and get all the boosters they want, at this point (as long as they’re reasonably safe) involves going back to the basic function of government: managing human conflict. For over half a year now, the principal axis of conflict has been between people who won’t get vaccinated and people who will (and want more protection from those thar won’t get their shots). At this point, the best way to settle this would be to move towards a boosting-free-for-all, with clear communication that (1) You should really get your first shot if you haven’t already, and if you haven’t yet, that’s a you problem (2) If you’re worried about being beset on all sides by inadequately vaccinated people, that’s also a you problem, help yourself to a shot (3) If there’s a need for any sort of prioritization, make it “virtual”—if you book an appointment and someone in a higher priority score wants your slot with a 48 hour notice, you get bumped
My suspicion is that vaccine doses are way more fungible than we think they are, and the focus should always have been matching willing arms with doses. What was a hard public health problem is mostly a banal manufacturing problem—rapidly creating covid-hardy humans.
Every time I hear someone start preaching to be about single payer, I want to say “Good idea, but maybe we can start with single regulator?”
The fundamental problem with student loans is that education is an intangible asset. Unlike a loan to buy a home or a car, there’s nothing that the lender can repossess if things go sideways. Financing education, both at the individual level and societal level, is always going to be a difficult problem, contentious and fraught. That being said, there’s some low hanging fruit.
1. Streamline the collection of student debt by creating a system of payroll deductions—maybe even add it to W4′s. It’s all going to the U.S. Treasury anyway.
2. Cap payments at a fixed percentage of the borrower’s federal tax liability, say 20%. Thus if you pay $10 in taxes in a given pay period, at most $2 would go toward your loan.
3. Prorate PSLF instead of making it all-or-nothing—if you work half a year for a qualifying employer, you’d get 5% of your principal written off.
4. Federal student loans are unique compared to other loans in that they’re completely forgiven when the borrower dies. That’s nice, but it also means that a significant portion of the high interest rates is likely due to default risk. Borrowers should be allowed to get a reduced rate if they buy credit life insurance, making the government (that is, the lender) the beneficiary.