Monday’s Forum
Time to do it again.
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, March 30, 2020
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92 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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John Prine: singer-songwriter critically ill with Covid-19 symptoms, family says
While I appreciate this site as much ever, both with regards to the efforts of the Big Two as well as all thoughts of the regular commentators, I do miss the talk about politics. Where is Biden and what should he being doing? What are Trump’s chances for rëelection? (and should we be using the diaeresis, à la The New Yorker?) Ol’ Bernie was shot down because the young don’t vote but the elderly do, so what happens after the elderly get literally decimated (word chosen with care) from coronavirus? How does the economy play into these calculations? Just the other day, a major recession was on the cards, but now some are talking about a strong V-shape recovery? WTF? Is this situation supposed to be good for us? Will the inevitable monster deficits lead the Right to the Holy Land of finally eliminating various social programs (and justifying more tax cuts)? If Trump’s support is expanding during this crisis, is there anything that would make his base abandon him? Are people having second thoughts about e-voting in principle (not to imply that it is ready for prime time)? How will people go to the polls if the country is worried about a second (or third) outbreak? How do we get out the vote if we can’t get out? And what about thoughts on how the Right is trying to turn this crisis in an ugly xenophobic direction (as is China, by the way)? And how to we feel about how the media have been covering the crisis? And whatever happened to all those court cases wending their way through the justice system, any one of them ready to strangle Trump? Was that all wishful thinking on our part, and if so are we the ones in a bubble? Is the justice system just a paper tiger when it comes to the President? Where’s the deep dive into emergency powers and civil liberties?
Politics doesn’t stop just because the world does, people. And this is over all a political blog. Am I the only one with more time on his hands?
While the open forums (that’s the only plural my dictionary gives) are great, I feel that dedicated posts always help to concentrate people’s minds.
The only state that has gotten a meaningful amount of supplies from the Trump administration is Florida, a red state and a battleground state. Blue states, much harder hit, have gotten chump change. To make matters worse, the feds are buying up everything on the market, leaving the states with no avenue to get their own.
I’ve got tears running down my face: Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device
………………………
@MarkedMan: After trump told them they were on their own.
The U.S. Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed.
Earlier there was a lot of yapping from the usual suspects about why prior administrations didn’t prepare. Well they tried.
Ah yes the vaunted private sector.
Why is this not a surprise?
Read the whole thing.
@Kit:
I have two thoughts on this. First, at the moment, Democratic areas are most heavily impacted by covid-19, so there’s no reason for his supporters to care. The virus is targeting those coastal elites, but they haven’t really felt it yet. The polls are showing that Republicans still don’t see the virus as a threat the way Democrats do. Will they feel differently when it has more direct impact on their lives? Maybe some of them will.
The second thought is this: in 1932, three years into the Depression, Hoover still got 40% of the popular vote. I’m guessing that a minimum of 42% of voters would vote for him even if he was killing people on Main Street of their own town.
@Kari Q:
This went from hyperbole a couple of years back to figuratively true today. I wonder if we take a further step and reach true by proxy, i.e. sending troops into blue states to enforce his orders with regards to quarantine. If this virus is still one the front page come November, the scope for mischief increases dramatically.
@Kit: i’m not exaggerating when I say that the first thing I did after moving 3000 miles was get a card at the local library and catch up on my New Yorkers.
The Curse of the Diaeresis
@Sleeping Dog: Okay, I can actually give some inside scoop on this, as I have been to (formerly) Newport a half dozen times after the acquisition, working with their engineering team. Covidien bought them for a different low cost ventilator which they correctly believed filled a much needed slot and erroneously believed was mere months away from market. My guess is the other projects they were working on didn’t weigh into the decision at all.
Now you can blame Covidien for that, but I think the real culprit is the moronic Republican/Modern Conservative knee jerk reaction that we don’t need the government dictating solutions but instead should let private industry do everything. So they invested modestly in a company, getting no rights to the design and no commitment to keep the project going long term. The way it should have been done was contracted development with the government retaining ownership of the design and all the deliverables, ensuring that it could be transferred somewhere else if Newport collapsed. Instead, due to that Republican mentality, they put all their eggs in the basket of a startup, essentially gambling that the startup would succeed and remain independent. Surprise, surprise, like most startup companies they ran out of money and took a buyout. That’s not the fault of the purchaser.
Trump’s announced in a signing statment that he intends to ignore some of the oversight provisions the Democrats insisted on including in the $2T stimulus bill as a condition of its passage, claiming that they would “infringe on the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.”
From USA Today:
That’s just one of the areas of defiance. On another, the article quotes Pelosi as sayng that the Democrats expected some obstruction so they included multiple layers. Hopefully they also built in provisions conditioning the release of funds on unfettered Congressional oversight.
@Kari Q: “God called him/her home.” not “Granny died because trump did nothing.”
@Teve:
How I miss the pre-Trump days when everyone here at OTB would be expected to have time to weigh in with a surprisingly sharp opinion on the matter…
On a tangentially related subject, just which emoji are allowed here and how are they entered?
@Kit: Don’t know, but I get smiley face by typing a colon, hyphen, close paran 🙂
I get frowny face by the same with an open paran instead 🙁
And a winky face by starting with a semi colon 😉
The flu last year killed more Americans than died in Vietnam. This novel coronavirus has killed approximately as many people as died in 9/11.
Coronavirus forces economics profession to leave comfort zone
………………………………
@Kit: I have read, conservatively, 1,000 issues of The New Yorker. Six or seven library copies are sitting on my TV table right now. But somehow I haven’t formed a strong opinion about the diaeresis.
I have much stronger opinions about Tina Brown, for instance.
@OzarkHillbilly: Let’s see what others may work…
Meh 😐
Big smile 😀
Really haha XD
@Mikey: Well two out of three ain’t bad.
Mayor Big Bill of NYC says that people can now be fined $500 for not following social distance rules. Tomorrow’s headline: “Married couple fined for holding hands in their back yard!”
@Kari Q: @Kit:
Last evening, after Trump announced the extension till April 30, there were some rumblings of discontent with Trump among Cult45. I don’t know if they’ll last.
😡
It’s just showing off if you give the emoji without the code!
Colon hyphen letter x.
Now how does one do meh? The vertical bar?
Jonathan Chait
@jonathanchait
It sounded better in the original French.
@MarkedMan:
Thanks for the insight.
@sam: I wonder what it is when I tell him to go fuck himself with a rust rake?
@Teve: Colon and vertical bar = meh 😐
@CSK:
Probably not. It takes a little time for the hive mind to coalesce, but they will soon be insisting that only liberals wanted to end social distancing sooner than May.
@Kit:
If we should, we should also be putting it on the second ‘e’, not the first.
(Punctuation porn is also a source of relief in these trying times.)
@DrDaveT: Ouch! Damn spell checker…
@MarkedMan:
This, a thousand times.
You would not believe how many of the military’s systems and munitions the government does not have the right (or the ability) to make for themselves, or to have someone new make for them.
@DrDaveT:
The flip side to this policy is that it would doom the government to using out of date technology because no company with a patent is ever going to accept a government contract if it means the government now has a license to share the tech with whomever it wants.
Useful data site from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (University of Washington research institute funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation):
http://covid19.healthdata.org/
@DrDaveT: As I think about it, I’m pretty sure that the ventilator I described above, the one that was the reason Covidien bought them for, was the basis for the lower cost ventilator that the government invested in. It used some newish components that would result in significantly lower cost. Not as low as a selling price of $3K but low. And those components proved to be problematic. The ventilator that was on the verge of going out the door actually required years more work and came in significantly higher. Some of that was definitely due to scope creep, but those components and the supply chain manufacturing them was also a significant part of the problem, as they couldn’t pass the verification testing. Since a ventilator is a life supporting device failure is not really an option, and once a tube is down your throat you need that machine to work in order to breath. All in all, it makes me skeptical that the government ventilator was as far along or as problem free as the article seems to imply. It also makes me extremely skeptical of the GM ventilators being rushed to market.
Something kind of pissing me off:
Pennsylvania’s governor, Tom Wolf, has done a really good job running the sate for almost six years now, but is getting zero national buzz for it. In the case of the Coronavirus, he started shutting stuff down as early as March 11th, almost a full week before San Francisco, and it’s really helped limit the spread here.
Yet the news is constantly going gaga over San Francisco, but not a single word on Pennsylvania, because our news media SUCKS.
@Stormy Dragon:
This is a really good point in general, but I’m not sure it applies in this case, or at least that not putting in patented technology might not make that much of a difference for a no frills unit. Bear in mind that the “outmoded” part would only need to apply to that part of the technology specific to ventilators as well as specific algorithms, and you could still use modern electronics, user interfaces and manufacturing techniques and components. But a ventilator is what is called a 510K device, meaning that it receives reduced scrutiny because it is “substantially equivalent to a predicate device”. In plain English, this means that a new ventilator model can get FDA clearance faster if it proves it does not differ in operation or function from existing models. So all mainstream ventilators pretty much function the same way. I ran a team for about a year working on a ventilator so that’s the limit of my experience, but I suspect that any innovations have come about at the high end, in highly specific modes of operation that wouldn’t apply to a no frills ventilator anyway. Units capable of the basics (such as switching between constant pressure or constant volume) have been on the market for decades.
@Stormy Dragon: I’ll second that praise of the PA government response. My current company definitely falls into the critical category and, while not in PA ourselves, we have several crucial supplies there. Almost two weeks ago we learned that at least one was going to shut down in response to the PA restrictions. Friday (ten days ago) afternoon our company President sent an email to the emergency response team to an address he pulled off their website, as kind of a “one more thing” to try, expecting little results. He got an email reply Sunday morning at 10am, telling him to contact our vendor, give them a copy of this email and tell them to apply for a waiver. They had a backlog of 12,000 requests but expected them to be cleared in 48 hours.
Pennsylvanians are lucky they were able to get rid of the previous governor, a typical Republican tool eager to drown government in a bathtub, in the 2014 election and have had a solid 5 years of someone who believes government has a responsibility to deal with statewide issues.
Volunteers from MIT are hacking together a cheap ventilator design.
(Don’t try this at home, kids. It still requires having sufficient expertise to make sure this falls within FDA specs.)
Now if we can only goose the MIT Media Lab into producing a VR training course on how to use them….
@Stormy Dragon:
This is untested. Who else is Lockheed Martin going to sell to? They have no other customer, and are now so highly-specialized as a defense contractor that they have no competitive advantage elsewhere. They only build things to military specifications and requirements; there are no “dual use” technologies any more.
It would be fascinating to ask for bids on defense contracts that require two quotes: the first is the price if the contractor retains all IP and data rights, and the second is the price if the government receives full government use rights. The difference between the two bids would be instructive.
@Kit:
I’ve been wondering what first threw the stock markets down: the pandemic or the collapse of oil prices.
And when the prevention measures are over and people get back to work, will the oil prices stay collapsed? This can have a great effect on many countries and regions within countries. Sure, demand will go up again, but will the Saudis still be over-producing?
@DrDaveT:
Yeah, Lockheed Martin would have to go along with it. The McKesson Corporation, on the other hand, would tell the federal government to get lost.
Never heard of the McKesson Corporation? Then stop talking about what government acquisition policy should be because you obviously have no idea what you’re talking about.
On the good news front, did anyone notice Elon Musk is not trying to single handedly save the world from the novel coronavirus?
On cooking news, despite having a shopping list and checking it several times at the store, I forgot to buy canned beans. So I just made plain rice to go with the shredded beef in pasilla sauce. I also ran out of pasilla chiles, which is good. now I can make something else next week. I’m thinking cornbread with shredded chicken and black mole.
I did make dessert this week: “blueberry” “yogurt” gelatin, in which I mixed “coconut” atole(*) and sliced strawberries. I haven’t tried it yet, as I left it in the fridge to set overnight.
(*) Atole is flavored, unsweetened cornstarch, typically drunk hot. I’ve never liked it, but it does go well in gelatin desserts.
Kevin Drum has a great post up pointing out that there are tons of stories about the $1,200 check a good chunk of us will be receiving (including me) but not enough stories about the increase in UI benefits for nearly 3 months. He is correct, this would calm some folks down and allow them to make arrangements with their landlord/credit card provider(s)/etc. to confirm those cats will get paid once they get their UI check.
Folks in the media (and even prominent bloggers) need to produce stories that will help alleviate some of the stress folks are feeling when it comes to wondering how they will pay their bills…well, President Trump of all people signed the bill that will help them keep a roof over their heads so I am curious, why has he not crowed about this yet? Maybe he has but I have not been paying attention, but more bragging about helping down on their luck American Citizens and less bragging about his ratings (groan and LOL at same time) would do our President a lot of good (people would start chattering about how he actually helped people instead of having fun ribbing him over his inane ratings comment).
–
#DebateBernie is trending on Twitter because the BernieBros are apparently turning into Ben Shapiro style “Debate me!” sealions.
@MarkedMan:
With good reason, but this crisis allows the use of the any port in a storm exemption. Some may die due to faulty ventilators, but they likely would have died anyway.
@inhumans99:
Have you looked at what UI actually pays?
I’m on 50% furlough right now. We’ve gone to week-on/week-off scheduling so that people can claim UI on the off weeks. In Wisconsin: You need to make under $500 in the week to claim anything, and the max payout is $350/week.
I don’t even qualify for that much. I went to the grocery store I used to work at and offered to work. 20 hours there will be more than what I can get from UI. It’s really not the safety net that some people think it is. I live a pretty lean lifestyle, and I couldn’t make it on UI for very long (I had to do it for 6 months in 2011, so I know what it’s like).
Here’s the big news where I live
Florida coronavirus updates: DeSantis says South Floridians should stay at home until mid May; state cases almost 5,500
I’m home already.
@Stormy Dragon:
To be fair, McKesson telling people to get lost is a common response, at least whenever I’ve had to reach out to them. Never had a corporation put out a “Do not call/email us about daily missing data before a specific time because we *WILL* bitch at you and your boss” and consistently enforce it before. Newbies always think we’re kidding when say they’ll rat you out to the VP and are always upset when the inevitable conversation happens.
That being said, they hold their stance and their standards. If they say no, they mean no, damnit. They’re big enough to toss their weight around and have it mean something.
@Stormy Dragon:
Ughh…so much ink has been spilled about Cult45 and we all like to point at Cult45 members and go Ha! Ha! like Nelson from The Simpsons but we have our own version of Cult45 like members and they are Berniebros (and to be fair I would call Hillary Clinton PUMAs another variant of Cult45 like members).
It is fun to mock the folks who have joined Cult45 but by focusing on Cult45 we are letting a wildfire rage out of control in our own backyard by not doing enough to diminish the potential impact Berniebros can have on the election.
They are steering the Democratic Party into an iceberg and are doing so with an inordinate amount of glee on their face. I am always frustrated by the Republicans current my way or the highway approach to politics by refusing to negotiate with Democrats except when circumstances force their hands (i.e., Coronavirus Bailout bill) but how are Berniebros (and Clinton PUMAS prior to the rise of Berniebros) any different than Cult45 members who stubbornly refuse to listen to reason?
The slightly scary thing is that I do not have even an inking of a possible solution ready to discuss in my head but I can see that this path the Berniebros want to set us on is a road to ruins. I hope some influential Berniebros can see the iceberg on the horizon and realize there is still time to adjust course.
One Richard Epstein wrote a paper, Corona Perspective, which the administration used to push the open-by-Easter line. Epstein estimated total deaths at 500. When that was overtaken by events in a week he updated it to 5,000. ‘500? I didn’t mean to say 500. It’s 5,000. 5,000. that’s the ticket.’
I read the paper carefully to understand his method, failed to find a method, and called him an “idiot” in one of these threads. He’s so dumb he agreed to be interviewed by Isaac Chotiner of New Yorker. One should read the whole thing but this gives a little flavor:
The whole interview is lawyerly semantic attacks on scientific knowledge. What they do all the time with evolution and AGW.
Justin Wolfers tweeted – I have never seen someone demolish a scholar’s reputation as savagely as Richard Epstein demolishing his own.
OK, who cares?
This guy is one of our leading conservative legal scholars. Is the rest of his work product as sloppy as this example?
gVOR08, and the funny thing is that he will move the goalpost again…by Easter, I said that had only a slight possibility of happening and now think April 30th is more realistic.
The goal post moving is so obvious that it makes me chuckle a bit, and I will not be surprised when folks like Epstein shift the timeline for something like School/University openings to mid-May before they just say screw it…close the schools down until the new school year starts up again in August.
This reminds me, I need to click on the Politico article where Biden tells Trump that he needs to stop thinking out loud (lol).
@Sleeping Dog:
No, I’ll pass. Reading the whole thing will just make me angry. The clips you provided were bad enough. 🙁
@gVOR08: Amanda mull said, “if I ever get an email from Isaac chotiner, I’m just going to fake my own death.”
@Mu Yixiao:
I had a really long post (I mean really long, not kidding) that I scrapped in reply to your response but I just want to briefly say (at least, brief for me:) ) that I get it…in the past 5 years I have been unemployed and lived alone in an apt in one of the more expensive cities to live in CA for a combined period of well over a year with me taking advantage of UI for the full 6 months twice(!).
I respectfully disagree with you and think a $600 bump (temporary though it may be) is a bigger deal than you make it out to be. It is not the nothingburger some folks are making it out to be and even though they may still need help from family and friends the reality is that the unemployed will be less of a burden on their family and friends so there is that to consider.
By the way, you are probably thinking to yourself, he considers this post a brief reply, yikes, maybe I really do not want to see what he thinks is a long one…lol.
@Stormy Dragon:
Sure. Clearly, one size does not fit all. I did not intend to suggest an “always everything” policy.
For commercial products, in particular, the government has no interest or business digging into the IP or trade secrets of the provider. Similarly for IDIQ contracts with multiple qualified vendors. For bespoke or customized (“of a type”) products, there is leeway to negotiate an intermediate level of data rights that lets the government compete important services later without the OEM having to surrender the family jewels.
The big bucks are associated with operations, support, and upgrade of systems where the original manufacturer has a monopoly on the work. There are current fighter aircraft in service for which the Pentagon does not even know the parts explosion. This not only costs the taxpayers lots of money, it limits the ability of the military Components to keep up with changing technology and threats. Everyone would be better off if DoD would bite the bullet and compensate the prime up front for the lost monopoly rights, then get the benefits of competition and innovation over the life of the platform/system.
@Kit: You can also get big smile with colon, hyphen, and capital D 😀
Capital P instead gets you stuck out tongue 😛
I dunno how to get shrug. The only time I ever managed to do it, I pasted it in from a clip from somewhere else and it never worked again for me.
Given the situation now, shouldn’t Bernie concede and agree to delay or cancel the remaining primaries?
The best he can hope for is that the DNC decides to nominate Cuomo rather than Biden. I don’t see how that helps him.
@Mikey: How did you do “Meh?” Colon, hyphen, and verticle line key on the shift of back slash 😐 ?
ETA: Yeah. That was it.
@gVOR08: Wow. That was an… astounding interview. This is a “leading” conservative intellectual. This is exactly why I came to despise the conservative think tanks so long ago. The sloppiness goes unchallenged, the experts are lauded despite making elementary mistakes because their is always some billionaire hobbyist ready to fund them if they continue to come to the same conclusions. (But of course, both sides do it. The billionaire polar bears are funding all those environmental scientists and post grads, and inviting them to speak at private gatherings of like minded sea lions and such, with a $5K stipend and all the classy scotch they can drink).
Years ago Rush Limbaugh subsitute hosted for one of the late night comedians and the audience actually turned hostile and started booing him. He had lived inside the conservative bubble for so long he had no idea that the typical mean spirited and toxic humor “conservatives” so love plays very poorly in the general population. This economist/lawyer/biologist or whatever he calls himself falls into the same category. Unused to having his analysis actually challenged and being put on the spot he completely crumbles.
North country follies
Man injured when gun tucked into pants accidentally fires
Seeking a second a@@hole perhaps.
@Mu Yixiao: @inhumans99: As a gypsy union carpenter I learned early on that no job lasts forever and a layoff was always just over the horizon. I also learned to keep my debt levels low and to always put aside some of every check (usually 15-20%, never less) because unemployment won’t cover everything. But it sure was nice to see that check in the mail once every week.
@inhumans99: As a person who lived on less than $18,000/yr for 4 or 5 years at the turn of the millennium, allow me to second your motion on this point. Back in those days, the ability to find even 50 or 60 extra dollars in a monthly budget was a real boon. $600 would have been serious money. And Vancouver/Portland area was not expensive to live in yet back then.
@Sleeping Dog:
A well-trained militia…indeed.
@Teve: He has that reputation, but I don’t see in this interview anything but sandard questions, then when Epstein started digging a hole, Chotiner handed him shovels.
A couple of days ago I mentioned there were two people in a nearby building (I live in Building 11. They live in Building 12 of a 14 building 55 and over community) who tested positive for the Coronavirus. We learned that the couple went to Mardi Gras.
Most of the Canadians living here have bailed out. Including the President of the Board for our building.
The Sports headline of the day-
Will the 2020 college football season be canceled? Coaches, ADs weigh possibility and impact*
My God, what will all those players do in the meantime? I know. Go to class.
If there are any. What will the world be like in 6 months? My crystal ball is under the weather.
*- The problem I see at the moment is that with almost no sports going on at present, what are sportswriters supposed to do? Worry about next football season of course!
@Bill: When the Mardi Gras couple writes that note of apology to everyone in your complex, I suggest you leave it in the mailbox at lease a week before anyone in your household picks it up to disinfect it.
@MarkedMan:
Paul Campos at LGM weighed in on what Epstein is:
Apparently Epstein was one of the founders of Law and Economics, for which Campos expresses little respect.
@GVOR08: somebody joked, David is the only Epstein who died by his own hand!
Don’t lay us off, have us make ventilators.
Yeah, but the company loses a chance to trim its workforce.
@gVOR08:
This reminds of a Michael Lewis book about the internet, in the late 90s.
He looks at the case of a teenager who trades stocks, talking them up on message baords at the time. he did rather well financially.
Another case involves a legal advice forum. One of the top-rated people doling out free advice was a high school student who got his legal knowledge from watching TV shows about lawyers and cops.
@Bill:
Around here, New England, they’re beating stories to death. The Globe alone must have run a half dozen articles on whether it is/was unseemly for Chris Sale to have Tommy John surgery and god forbid how many gigabits of data have been expended talking about who will QB the Patriots.
re Supported emoticans
Did you know that Windows has added Emoticon support by pressing [windows key] [.]
(btw, that’s a period for all ya olds)
❤ (●’◡’●) ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
and lots more.
Not a lot of people know that… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
(note: many did not show up. Trial and error, I suppose)
@Sleeping Dog:
I’m sure all Brady wants is to tie the record set by Favre and Manning of having scored a victory against all NFL teams. To date, Brady hasn’t beaten the Patriots.
@Kathy:
Brady some how expects to do that with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers?
That reminds me of a joke. A judge is conducting a custody hearing for a 7 year old girl
Judge- Do you want to live with my Mommy.
7-year-old- No. Mommy beats me.
Judge-You want to live with your Daddy then?
7-year-old- No. Daddy beats me even worse than Mommy does.
Exasperated Judge asks- Who do you want to live with?
7-year-old- I want to live with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They don’t beat anybody.
@Bill:
If he has an exaggerated view of his own importance? Without him the Patriots will be like a high school team, and with him the Bucs will be like the Patriots were last year or something 😛
Or he may pay off some key players on New England to throw the game. We know he’s not above cheating.
I don’t even know if Tampa will play New England this year, if there is a season at all.
@Sleeping Dog:
They make jet engines. The planning stage of retooling their factory would take weeks, and the actual retooling would probably stretch for months. The company I work for converted one line to making face masks–they shifted from cutting sheet metal to cutting sheet plastic–and that took them a couple weeks. I can’t imagine what’s involved in converting from aircraft engines to medical devices requiring FDA approval.
Meanwhile the GE division that actually makes ventilators already is ramping up production.
@Kathy:
If it’s important to the owners to have Brady tie that record (a pretty big if IMLTHO), they will demand the circumstances where the league will have a NE/TB game.
Leonita bumped into a neighbor. His name is Tom, he lives by himself, and he is our age (58-59) or very early 60’s.
Tom says he has 70 rolls of toilet paper. That has got to be a 1.5 year supply.
I think we have 20-30We have 35.@Just nutha ignint cracker:
It’s not that easy.
Of 16 games:
6 are against divisional rivals
4 are against the teams from one division in the team’s conference, and one’s divisional rivals play against the same teams
4 are against the teams from one division in the other conference, and one’s divisional rivals play against the same teams.
That’s 14. The divisions one’s division play against rotate year to year in order.
The remaining two games, are against teams that 1) had a similar win-loss record the past season and 2) are not among the teams already scheduled for play.
So unless the AFC East will play the NFC South this year, it would be too blatant to pair the Patriots against the Bucs.
@Kathy:
Tampa and New England aren’t scheduled to play in 2020.
@Bill:
Well, there you are then 🙂
I think Favre had to join the Vikings to beat the Packers.
@Kathy:
(Warning: serious geek stuff follows that would be incredibly, painfully boring to anybody who isn’t interested in the physical sciences.)
I had an interesting to me question about how primitive people made furnaces that went to 2000 F, and somebody pointed me to this “really smart guy who is a computer programmer who explains all of this physics stuff on Quora.”
God in heaven. It was a great example of the Salem Hypothesis. People who think they know all kinds of shit authoritatively outside their field, have an unusual likelihood to be engineers. When I got to his explanation of how if you throw a ball straight up in the air, as it stops moving upwards and turns downwards, at that instant of zero velocity, it must have zero acceleration because how could you be accelerating if you’re not moving? JFC.
In an odd coincidence, @AstroKatie, Who is now a professor of theoretical cosmology at one of my alma maters, just said this today:
(disclaimer: I have known many wonderful engineers in several states, and some of them are absolutely the beeks knees. There’s just a small subset of engineers who are in junior varsity but think they’re in the NBA.)
@Kathy:
If there is a 2020 season, the Pats and the Bucs are not scheduled to play unless it is in the playoffs. There is every indication that the Pats are planning to tank, so it won’t be this years playoffs.
I’ve yet to read more than a headline of any of the Brady articles, so I have no idea what the issues are, but given his age and rate of decline, it was time to move on.
@Mu Yixiao:
And that division is planning to do so in conjunction with Ford. Go figure
@Sleeping Dog:
And for those teams to meet in the postseason, it would have to be in Superbowl.
@Teve:
Duh! they used Celsius, which requires much lower numbers 😛
Seriously, I’ve no idea. I know bellows go back a long, long time, and that people knew about as long that charcoal gets much hotter than wood.
@Teve:
Used to be I couldn’t even spell enjinere, now I are one. Glad you said the guy was actually a programmer. F=ma is like really, really basic to us mechanicals. (Subject to my previously stated opinion that Pareto’s law applies and only 20% of us are good at it. As seems true in most fields.)
I read Epstein’s piece. I dont know if helped originate the misunderstanding (deliberate?) or just perpetuated it, but they all just ignored that people are on vents for quite a while before they die. In the US people spend an average of about 4 days on a vent. By then they are better or die, with some going on to long term vent status outside the acute care setting. With coronavirus people are spending a couple weeks on the vent before dying. People who actually follow the disease knew this so the early low death rates just were not accurate. The critical care (and other docs) docs from Italy were actually doing interviews so this stuff wasn’t secret.
The instant expert, IMHO, is a phenomenon prevalent amongst lawyers, engineers and physicians (my field). Not sure who is worst. Probably engineers. Think lawyers do it as an offshoot their work. Engineers are true believers. (Hence, a significant percentage of terrorists are engineers.)
Steve
@steve:
During much of my technical career, I was the systems guy who got stuck with having to become an “instant expert” in order to answer some question. The three fields you name — law, engineering, and medicine — would be near the top of my list of common “complex systems” professions. One of the classic systems lines is, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.” Some models apply in many fields — eg, sigmoid curves turn up in lots of places. Some models don’t. If your day-to-day job is in a systems field, it’s easy to assume that the mental models you use every day work everywhere.