Re: Forecasts

1

Regarding the fear of Covid-19 and flu convergence, I think that the basic fear is this; because the symptoms of the two are identical, it makes HOSPITAL management of both at the same time extremely difficult. Someone comes in with fever and other influenza symptoms -- do you isolate them in the Covid-19 ward? If you do, and they don't have Covid-19, then you've exposed them to a much more dangerous disease. If you don't, they they're spreading Covid-19.

As long as there isn't an instant test, having both diseases circulating at once is a procedural nightmare for health institutions.


Posted by: Nick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 7:19 AM
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Fair point.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 7:37 AM
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I am pathologically compelled to start with the most optimistic minimization of concerns, and then to gradually have the real version pointed out to me.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 7:38 AM
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Covid causes ponies in laboratory rats.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 7:43 AM
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Covid death rates will continue to drop because it appreciates our pain.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 7:48 AM
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The United States is incapable of formulating a coherent response to Covid as long as the Republicans hold the federal government. State and local actions, where possible, will not be sufficient to prevent Covid from running it's course through the U.S. population meaning that deaths will range from between 300,000 to over a million depending on when a vaccine is made.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 7:52 AM
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Gradual enough?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 7:53 AM
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Burn baby burn. I giggle through my gimlet.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 7:53 AM
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To be fair, I think that the observation that coronavirus precautions might totally crush the poor influenza virus is totally valid -- I find it kind of hard to imagine how you would have a real influenza epidemic with everyone wearing masks and partially locked down. The problem is if prevalence is still really high in the US when influenza begins; it's not possible to totally stop transmission of either, and so if they start bumping into each other in hospitals things will get really sketchy.

The thing to remember about Covid-19 is that at every stage it has exceeded our estimations of what it might do -- for every single thing that seems probably about its transmission, you can find an exception. There are countries where school transmission seems to have been minimal, countries where school transmission seems to have been critical, etc., etc.


Posted by: Nick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 7:54 AM
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The United States is incapable of formulating a coherent response to Covid as long as the Republicans hold the federal government.

In dark moments, I walk carefully through how the McConnells and Boehners and Fox Newses would have done their absolute best to sabotage an Obama pandemic response. Their current refusal to stop the spread multiplied by their refusal to do what a black guy wants them to do? Unfathomable.

Their desire to kowtow to Trump is peanuts compared to their desire to sabotage Obama. It would have been thoroughly upsetting, in different ways. They would have seen a pandemic as an opportunity to maximally incapacitate Obama, while also obfuscating the dangers.

Obama's response would still mean wildly fewer deaths, don't get me wrong. We'd have ramped up PPE and testing, etc etc. I'm just moaning how awful it would have been to have to fight tooth and nail with Republicans to implement a serious response under serious leadership.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 8:02 AM
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State and local actions, where possible, will not be sufficient to prevent Covid from running it's course through the U.S. population meaning that deaths will range from between 300,000 to over a million depending on when a vaccine is made.

Why is this, with suitable travel bans? If these were European countries, the scale would be similar.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 8:05 AM
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Just because we're hamstrung by having to balance state budgets, and having a nationwide lack of supplies?


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 8:05 AM
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Their desire to kowtow to Trump is peanuts compared to their desire to sabotage Obama.

I'm not sure I agree the (counterfactual) effects are outsized. Obama being able to coordinate the already-massive resources of the federal government would have gone a long way, even if Republicans had held up more funding.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 8:10 AM
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I agree - the outcomes would have been far better under Obama. I just spend time imagining the upsetting parts.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 8:12 AM
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11, 12: Mostly the money thing because states don't have enough of it. But I don't think a U.S. state could do an effective "travel ban." The restrictions are basically all voluntary.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 8:16 AM
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15: I thought states were allowed to close borders in an emergency. Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Board of Health of State of Louisiana, 1902.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 8:25 AM
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Maybe, but there's no established check points and there's lots of roads and huge numbers of people commute across states lines for work. As a practical matter, I think would be difficult to do.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 8:29 AM
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That is true.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 8:32 AM
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I'm sure it would be done in a heartbeat if we got to 10,000 deaths a day, but it's pretty clear that 1,000 deaths a day is something that most people are willing to live with.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 8:36 AM
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I agree with Moby that there will be no effective response anywhere Republicans are in charge, and that that will sabotage the relatively better efforts in Democratic states.

I disagree with Moby that 10,000 deaths a day would do the trick. Humans are basically innumerate and all big numbers are the same. Might as well be hrair deaths. It will matter when, say, half of people have a death in their loose acquaintances.

I have absolutely no expectation that anything good will happen until/unless a Dem president is sworn in. We will never beat this with good practices, so it'll be the vaccine next year that ends the spread.


Posted by: Megan | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 9:04 AM
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Rhode Island was pulling over cars with New York plates at the border, until NY Governor Cuomo started bitching about it and so they started pulling over all cars at the border.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 9:21 AM
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That works because it's an island.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 9:24 AM
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Except for the part that used to be a planation.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 9:25 AM
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1 is a really good point.

Should my family make every attempt to lockdown for the first nine weeks of the semester, until the trends reveal themselves?

Yes. I mean fuck yes.

The US is a failed state at this point. It's going to rage through the population and not only won't Republicans do anything coherent and effective about it they'll do things to make it worse and cover up the reality of the situation.


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 9:33 AM
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10: I do the same thing with Clinton as president.


Posted by: hydrobatidae | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 9:55 AM
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We're betting the other way. Our son needs to spend time with people who aren't us and that is becoming more clear. If schools are open, he's going. It's not an additional risk for the teachers since he hasn't been in contact with much of anybody for a while and the additional risk for him and us is tolerable.

But obviously it will be a disaster and there will be another quarantine by Thanksgiving, but there will have been a break.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 9:55 AM
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I'm professionally acquainted with Regina Rini and find her views generally well thought-out. She has an upcoming book on Microaggressions that I'm looking forward to. https://www.routledge.com/The-Ethics-of-Microaggression/Rini/p/book/9781138713147


Posted by: Ponder Stibbons | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 10:22 AM
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It will matter when, say, half of people have a death in their loose acquaintances.

True, and even more devastating when you realize that 30% of African Americans already know someone who died of Covid, but only 9% of white people do.

This pandemic is about a lot of things, but one of the cruelest is how it mercilessly shows who in this country has power to make their lives matter and who doesn't.


Posted by: Witt | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 10:22 AM
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I can't tell if 27 is in the wrong thread or very meta.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 10:24 AM
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I think in the wrong thread, but I'm going to remember the book.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 10:26 AM
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27 / 30. That does look interesting, thanks.


Posted by: NickS | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 11:12 AM
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25 - with Clinton as president we're probably looking at 58 or so Republican Senators and a Republican House, and they probably impeach her for the third time (getting like 60 votes to convict in the Senate) over either the COVID deaths or the federal action to combat it, or possibly both.


Posted by: Tom Scudder | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 12:38 PM
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The back of envelope calculations in this post were helpful for me: reduce R to 0.75, and you have to keep it there for about two months before you've reduced the current Arizona outbreak to what Germany considers low enough NOT to trigger a shutdown. I don't see that happening, but as long as I'm considering counterfactuals at least they should be specific.

The chickens have really come home to roost/shown their true colors/choose your cliche in red states, haven't they? In response to a post of a corona prevalence map at the other place one of my friends up there (who was hospitalized earlier with COVID19) was saying "come on, [Western Mass county], don't let up! We're at 1.3 cases per [denominator] - 30% lower and we turn our county green!" Meanwhile in my red state county on the same map we're at 62 cases per same denominator and people here are all "lol, herd immunity's coming, right?"


Posted by: chill | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 2:33 PM
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Heebie, FWIW, I'd say "do whatever you can to minimize your and your family's exposure in every way, shape, and form". And indoor time with lots of other people ? Right out. Right out. Here's a thing from TPM: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/not-just-die-or-survive

He forward me this JAMA study from Italy. You can see the details here. But the gist is that they talked to 143 patients who had been hospitalized for and survived COVID. Only 5% had been on a ventilator. So this wasn't just people who had been on the edge of death. The mean hospital stay was about two weeks. They were interviewed 60 days after the onset of symptoms.

Only 12.6% reported being symptom free. A worsened quality of life was observed among 44.1% of the group. The most common symptoms were fatigue and labored breathing. Other instances include what appears to be permanent organ damage from COVID or persistent neurological or psychiatric impacts. One day you're healthy and the next you have a permanently compromised heart or kidneys. It's not great.


I guess we can say "well, they were all old people, I'm young, it doesn't apply to me." Sure, I guess. I look at it, and say "no amount of short-term money, can compensate for spending the rest of my life not being able to climb a flight of stairs, or on dialysis, or ....."

There's a term I read here: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/7/9/1959135/-Four-first-hand-reports-from-Real-World-Covid19-edition-They-do-not-fit-any-narrative-very-well?utm_campaign=trending
"Vibration zombies", referring to people with neurological deficits from covid. Again, no amount of short-term money can compensate for losing my mental faculties.

There are people who simply don't have these choices: they're also the sort for whom our country and our economy has not a care, and they're going to have to go to work regardless, some of them will have to send their children to school the day it reopens, regardless. But for anybody with choices, I don't think it's even a question. Until chill @ 33's criteria (from Germany) are met, I don't see the case for anybody with a -choice- to send their kids to school, to go themselves.

Also, little tidbit: from what I understand, German schoolchildren are tested twice-weekly. Twice. A. Week. Imagine. So even if we get the daily case rate down, I'm going to be waiting a while before I trust it, unless we have that sort of surveillance testing, and I mean everywhere.


Posted by: Chetan Murthy | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 2:59 PM
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From Tom Frieden (via Delong): https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1281762304158240770.html

9/10 Covid19 will get worse before it gets better. Where Covid is spreading, close restaurants & bars, stop gatherings of more than a few people, follow the #3Ws: wear a mask correctly, wash your hands, watch your distance. And box the virus in: test, isolate, trace, quarantine.
10/10 Unless this happens, there's little hope of safely opening schools and keeping them open, no matter what anyone says.

Who wants to be the last person to catch covid from going to school right as they're closing down again?


Posted by: Chetan Murthy | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 3:17 PM
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I feel like a lot of our decisions hinge on what kind of options Jammies is given through his job. If he is required to be there fulltime in the fall, then do I really try to keep the kids home by myself, while doing my job?

I don't know how to assess what I'll regret in 20 years. Will it seem shortsighted not to say, "Sure, it will be an utter nightmare, but come on, this is your longterm health"?

If they give Jammies the option to work from home, and so we figure with two parents home we can handle the kids, and I'm the only one going out: is it "very safe" for me to lecture a quiet group of college kids from the front of a classroom, while we're all wearing masks? I'd have all the official parameters in place - distance, mask, etc.

I just don't know what we're allowed to do with our jobs.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 3:48 PM
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Just pounce on the first couple of kids who dare to ask a question.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 4:00 PM
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The flu is marvellously suppressed in the Southern Hemisphere, the virology-Twitter (eg @MackayIM) reaction is more or less "well, we've definitely shown this level of reaction would work against a flu pandemic so that's something!"

Aside from distancing, flu vaccine uptake has been much higher than in other years, you may need both distancing and a vaccine to get this level of flu suppression.


Posted by: Pineapple | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 6:02 PM
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FWIW, I'll be back in the classroom this fall for two of my classes (small, easily distanced if we don't count the HVAC which I suspect is going to be a nightmare), and I'm basically going to self-isolate for the first month until we have a better idea of what's going on. Debating homeschooling the Calabat, too. I don't want to but I'm not optimistic about the fall. Usually in political disputes there's reliably two sides which if nothing else will ping each others' claims. But Trump wants everyone back so he doesn't look bad in November, and everyone else wants their kids back because balancing work/family/school with no school is impossible, so everyone's too eager to accept the line that kids neither get the virus seriously (some evidence!) and are not vectors of transmission (under conditions where they're out of school and isolated, sure!). It's impossible to get a man to understand something, etc., if getting his kids out of his hair depends on it.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 07-11-20 9:59 PM
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I had anxiety insomnia about this all night long. It would be such a nightmare to keep the kids home - but it's so fucking insane to send them in to school at the height of a surge. Everything is awful.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 6:44 AM
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https://twitter.com/rosoulra/status/1281261250786312192?s=21


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 6:57 AM
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Do schools really have trouble controlling lice? You can see it and quickly test the whole school. They have done that successfully from what I've seen.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 7:00 AM
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In Texas, they will not send kids with lice home, so yes, they utterly fail to control it.

The reason is not crazy: it's not an illness, and it contributes to absenteeism. The real reason is that funding is tied to daily attendance, so if you send kids home for lice, your district has less money. But the consequence is not crazy, especially given disparate impact of absenteeism on poor kids.

That said: If you're not going to send kids home for lice, then you need to get a goddamn lice comber in your nurse's office. Instead we just have a large, chronic lice population who must be extremely well-educated by now.

Have I mentioned that we combed our kids out weekly, in the Before Times? Probably once a month we'd find a single adult louse who hadn't yet laid an egg, or maybe there were 2-3 eggs. We don't know anyone else that checks weekly. But if you don't, how could you not have several outbreaks per year?


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 7:20 AM
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But I have a good feeling about this Covid thing.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 7:24 AM
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Lice have never gotten that bad here. It's like one or two kids in the school.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 7:25 AM
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I guess the Covid rate is much lower here also.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 7:49 AM
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1. What's the lice policy on sending kids home?
2. Are lice resistant to the poison-shampoos?


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:01 AM
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43: lice comb and lice shampoo. There's even one that also kills the nits.


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:03 AM
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I don't know. The policy that I know is you get an email saying some kid was found with lice and that you need to check your kid before they go back to school. I remember when I was a kid, the policy was they had a nurse check every kid all lined up as soon as one kid was found with a louse.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:03 AM
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Speaking of school, my Fall class has about 90 students. Since it's lecture based it will be mostly asynchronous, but we're having 1 hour of synchronous per week. Since it's restricted to the 1 hour there's no good way to handle things in smaller groups without severely limiting the time each group would get. We've been assigned "instructional support" specialists from IT to help out with managing the courses for the Fall. When I asked mine about how to usefully manage a zoom session with 90 people the response was essentially: "Yeah, that's a tough one". Thanks guys.

Our 7 day averaged positive rate seems to have settle down to fluctuating around 4.5%. Hospitalizations still flat/maybe declining.

One thing I notice when I walk around my restaurant/bar heavy neighborhood is that the bars are basically empty. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand they give the neighborhood a lot of its character so it would be a shame if they all go out of business. On the other hand, bars really do seem to be big spreading centers, and I think one of the reasons our reopening seems to be going well is that people are voluntarily avoiding them.


Posted by: AcademicLurker | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:04 AM
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47: I remember getting sent home with lice from summer day camp, and I felt tremendous Shame. The OTC shampoo killed the lice but not the nits. Luckily my Mom got the prescription stuff. She did use the lice comb but if I had had to rely on her getting every last bit out, I'd have been in trouble.


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:06 AM
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48: I'm pretty sure the rx shampoos do not kill nits, at least in local strains. I understand about the combs.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:10 AM
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50: I wish that they were closed. If closed for public health reasons, we could justify paying extended income support. Open with people choosing not to go, they all go out of business and something valuable is lost when it would be safe for them to reopen


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:11 AM
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52: They used to. That was their selling point. But that was more than 40;years ago, so maybe they are all resistant now.


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:12 AM
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I have not looked at shampoos in about five years. They were all definitely worthless on nits as of 5 years ago, and OTC couldn't even handle live lice very well.

Based on how unchecked our outbreaks are, I'm guessing there's nothing affordable that works on the market, at least.

Anyway, we've got a workable prevenative system for our family, but it doesn't scale in any way as a societal solution.

For about the two months of quarantine, every time Rascal needed a bath, he'd moan, "Do we have to do lice checks?" and we'd remind him that we didn't have to do them during quarantine.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:21 AM
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Fucking evolution.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:23 AM
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Apparently, the NYT has a new story about how Pittsburgh is about to go from COVID success to failure.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:36 AM
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Maybe I'll do my grocery shopping today.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:39 AM
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58: That reminded me, my favorite t-shirt of the week was worn by a girl in front of me in the checkout line at the supermarket: "Socially distant before it was cool".


Posted by: AcademicLurker | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:59 AM
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People in the line to get in are not wearing masks. I'm not sure I've seen that lately. They have them in their hands.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 9:27 AM
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Maybe five people out of forty.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 9:28 AM
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It's time to crowdfund Unfogged U!

https://www.necn.com/news/local/bids-for-a-closed-vermont-college-campus-will-start-at-3m/2296620


Posted by: J, Robot | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 9:34 AM
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Indoor pool, library, and theater, but no sex grotto.


Posted by: Kreskin | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 9:43 AM
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Don't bid too high, the market for closed New England college campuses is going to be flooded with inventory pretty soon.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 9:47 AM
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64 Maybe one will even have a sex grotto!


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 10:21 AM
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Depends on the college. The old puritan sex grottos tend to be pretty uncomfortable.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 10:54 AM
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Some of them have very restrictive covenants.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 11:44 AM
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62: Hey, I think I know someone who went there.

64: So I realize that things are awful at colleges, but does it help anything to know that Vermont has among the best COVID-19 numbers in the country? People might want to go to Vermont who wouldn't want to go anywhere else. (Of course, the good numbers end when people actually start going there.)


Posted by: Cyrus | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 12:25 PM
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Vermont had a fast, early outbreak, and then took a highly preventative attitude and then it mostly went away.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 4:53 PM
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I often think that, while it's true that red states would have acted catastrophically badly no matter what, it might have gone a bit better if they'd had more of an initial outbreak, enough to instill a bit of fear in them.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 5:02 PM
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heebie @ 70: I wish you were right. And think that the stupidity of (e.g.) California should convince you otherwise. We had a serious outbreak; we got really serious about squashing it, got it well on the way to being squashed, and then .... PAR-TAY! And here we are, back in the meatgrinder.

The only governor I've seen who seems to have gotten religion (late, but he seems to have gotten it) is Cuomo. He's saying "yeah, we got this thing on the run, sure; but it's comin' back, b/c we're not an island, yo', so keep masking and distancing, for your life!"


Posted by: Chetan Murthy | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 5:15 PM
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Louisiana and Georgia had tthem. But LA was mostly due to Mardi Gras (although it had some more general leakage) and Georgia was in poor rural black areas so they could be pretty much compartmentalized by the government and other people in those states.


Posted by: JP Stormcrow | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 5:19 PM
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Fair points. We're just doomed.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 5:35 PM
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I actually would prefer not to be doomed.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 5:36 PM
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Liberal exceptionalism.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 5:37 PM
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At least this is harder to shoehorn into failing-empire narrative, since the Roman Empire at its absolute acme could not have done shit about plagues.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 5:42 PM
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You don't have to rub it in.


Posted by: Opinionated Justinian | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 5:49 PM
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Hmm, I think I can still make it work.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 5:50 PM
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Doomed? That would, uh, be far easier.
No; we simply fail without being doomed.

76 is why it's worse than being doomed. It's failing without being doomed, given that you're governed by evil morons.


Posted by: One of Many | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 5:59 PM
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71: I think Baker has religion. He's just so bland and lacking in charisma you wouldn't remember it if you didn't live in the State.


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 6:27 PM
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73: Friend of mine who lives in San Antonio is from a small town in Georgia that was a proportionately huge hotspot because of ONE funeral. He's white - though I believe his grandfather or great grandfather was a share cropper (his Dad is a lawyer) - so it may be a poor area, definitely rural.


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 6:30 PM
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Heebie, I don't think we're *doomed*. I think that with adequate Federal backup and guidance, CA would have stayed the course. I think it's possible Cuomo and the Northeast still WILL stay the course. So what we're waiting for is .... Biden and a competent administration to get going. I was trying to explain this to a relative. I told her that every other Western country (except Sweden, even the UK) has solved this problem. That means it's not an extra-credit problem -- just a bog-standard "you should expect this on the final" problem. So sure, we drank ourselves into a stupor and showed up for the exam still very drunk. But once we get sober and all cleaned-up, with some modest studying, we can also pass this exam. It's not rocket science. Yeah, it'l be harder in January. But we can pass it. That said, I fully expect at least six months of hard work -after- Biden's in post.


Posted by: Chetan Murthy | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 8:31 PM
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Am I a paranoid conspiracy theorist, or is having a misaligned radar system plausibly within the realm of having been caused by a cyberattack, but there is interest on the part of both the United States and Iran to keep this on the DL?


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 9:21 PM
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I suspect that one of the secrets of the Swedish performance is that the state there no longer works as people expect and assume that it will. This would be the likeness with the UK. It's not just down to decades of privatisation and shrinkage of central government, though that has made things much worse. Before then, there was a quiet, resigned, expectation that anything which involved public sector workers doing stuff outside the usual routine would fail. The most spectacular example is the Palme murder enquiry; the one which I can't forget is when one of my closest friends and mentors there died of a heart attack in 1989 and his widow told me that they had had to wait an hour for an ambulance in central Stockholm because it was a Saturday afternoon and, of course, no one works then.

But the last time I was in Stockholm, AIMHMHB, I got treated to a long rant by a senior editor at the main paper there about how nothing worked any longer. Sweden, he said, had been a country where two things were true -- the post worked and the trains were on time. Both were now entirely chaotic and unreliable. He had the previous day spent 14 hours getting from Gothenburg to Stockholm by train, a journey which had used to take me six.

So a lot of the discussion about how the governments, both here and there, have been pulling the wrong levers presupposes that these levers were attached to anything much and maybe they weren't. This is tacitly understood in a lot of the planning. I was really struck, when first I read the Imperial College paper at the start of the lockdown, by how very pessimistic the modellers were that people would follow their guidelines and obey the rules.


Posted by: NW | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 10:10 PM
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84 Jesus, NW, what happened to hollow out the state there?


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 10:22 PM
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I have a friend with a simple typology for goat-rodeos: either doomed or fucked.

If I get it right, we are COVID-fucked but climate-doomed.


Posted by: clew | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 11:12 PM
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If I'm right that (a) fuckery differs from doom in that fuckery was evitable, and (b) assuming that political changes, e.g. 84, are at some level chosen. Eh.


Posted by: clew | Link to this comment | 07-12-20 11:15 PM
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is having a misaligned radar system plausibly within the realm of having been caused by a cyberattack

I mean, yes, it might be. But I can't imagine a good reason for the Iranians to want to keep this a secret. Why not (even if it isn't true) say "yes, we shot that airliner down, but the Jews and the Americans tricked us into thinking it was a bomber"?

They aren't exactly improving their international reputation by saying "yes we shot it down but it was a mistake by one of our incompetent air defence operators".


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 1:53 AM
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I enjoyed 86 greatly and may adopt this going forward.


Posted by: ydnew | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 4:16 AM
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I'm also curious to the answer to 85.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 5:17 AM
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According to Wallander, it was yuppies.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 5:18 AM
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I believe someone wrote a prize-winning book on this topic.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/fishing-in-utopia-sweden-and-the-future-that-disappeared/oclc/456378245

Well, it's also about a lot of other things, but that topic is addressed.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 6:10 AM
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I believe someone wrote a prize-winning book on this topic.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/fishing-in-utopia-sweden-and-the-future-that-disappeared/oclc/456378245

Well, it's also about a lot of other things, but that topic is addressed.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 6:10 AM
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Why not (even if it isn't true) say "yes, we shot that airliner down, but the Jews and the Americans tricked us into thinking it was a bomber"?

Because that's also like saying "we were totally pwned and can get pwned anytime" which is bad for domestic consumption.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 6:12 AM
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Total librarian move to link to WorldCat there peep, respect.


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 6:13 AM
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95: I was hoping you would appreciate that, Barry.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 6:16 AM
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94: you're arguing that it actually looks better, to the Iranian public, for the Iranian armed forces to pretend that their air defences killed a load of innocent passengers purely through ineptitude? I would disagree, but OK.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 7:04 AM
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I mean, there have been other cases. Lots of Iranian nuclear scientists etc got blown up by Mossad before the Iran nuclear deal, for example. I don't think that the Iranian government tried to pretend that those deaths were all accidents. They went right out and accused Israel, even though it basically meant admitting that their high-value national assets were being killed off.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 7:07 AM
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Do we really, really think that the elections will be free and fair enough for Biden to win? That's what I'm worried about - voting in cities being largely shut down, lots of people in cities unwilling to go out to vote due to the virus, throwing away 25% of mail-in ballots like happened in some parts of New York, etc.

There's a lot of "never Biden" chatter on left Twitter, but I think most people are going to cave because of the pandemic.

TBH, I think that things are going to get bad enough in the medium future that even a Republican administration will coordinate a federal response. The 1% can coast indefinitely and they don't care about the, say, 90% of the rest of us, but there's about 10% of people who are pretty rich but not wealthy enough to coast indefinitely, and as systems fail, they're going to agitate for some kind of action. Supply and distribution chains are stressed already and there are a whole bunch of tech and infrastructure things where they're going to start to fail, and while you can work around that on an individual level if you're rich, it does eventually hit the bottom line.

The other thing I don't understand is why landlords are so anxious to evict. If I had a bunch of properties, and I knew that 30% of people couldn't pay their rent, I'd be thinking "there aren't going to be new, better tenants to replace the ones I evict and indeed the pressure of more apartments than acceptable renters is going to drop rents" and trying to move to sliding scale rent to cover my expenses. It's all very well to have a bunch of properties sitting empty when they're new and fancy and serve primarily as investment vehicles, but the kinds of low-quality properties that we're talking about are going to deteriorate and be vulnerable to break-ins, etc, if no one is living there.


Posted by: Frowner | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 7:44 AM
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throwing away 25% of mail-in ballots like happened in some parts of New York

This sounds a bit serious - when did that happen? Got any details?

There's a lot of "never Biden" chatter on left Twitter, but I think most people are going to cave because of the pandemic.

Left Twitter is a loud but tiny and unrepresentative bit of the Left, though, which is in turn a tiny bit of the Democratic Party. I'd be cautious about extrapolating.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:17 AM
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100: The ballot thing was real - I saw it in a respectable source, not a wingnut one. But it wasn't for races I'd been following and TBH there's only so much terrifying news I can take so I didn't really do more than read the article a week or so ago. I'll look for the source again later today.


Posted by: Frowner | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:23 AM
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I'm extremely worried about voter registration in Texas. You still can't register online, (in violation of the moter-voter law!) except under extremely limited circumstances - already registered, moving within the same county, and you have to know your voterID number, which can't be found online. It's only on the little yellow card they mailed you back when you originally registered. (And even this is new. It used to be no online registration.)

If people can't register online, how is this supposed to work during a pandemic?!


Posted by: heebie | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:27 AM
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Based on what I've read, the issue of throwing away ballots is because the ones received after a certain date were required to be "postmarked" by a certain date, but they had prepaid postage so they were never postmarked at all. Seems like this should have also come up in the previous several dozen elections, but apparently yes it is that stupid. Don't know if this was a dirty trick or just incompetence but I am optimistic that it's unique to New York's uniquely horrible election administration.


Posted by: Cryptic ned | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:38 AM
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It was unclear to me what the scope of the 25% was. Like, I don't think (but I'm not sure) that it was 25% of the absentee ballots from Queens, it was 25% of the ballots from some electoral districts, which are pretty small. The absolute numbers could still be low.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:40 AM
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Also, as an employee of NYS government, we are in many ways a blazing tire fire.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:41 AM
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The 1% are rich enough that the actual level of money doesn't matter, but if the economy craters they're going to have a whole bunch less of it. All of their wealth is tied up in stock ownership.

Landlords are morons.


Posted by: Walt Someguy | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:45 AM
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104: Yes, this is what I was remembering. I just don't understand why anyone would think, "aha, these have no place to post-mark anything, therefore I will throw them away".

The worst thing about this whole crisis is people. I used to live in a bubble of fairly nice, fairly intelligent people who could usually be relied on to avoid doing really fool or malign things, and I had no idea what the world was really like.


Posted by: Frowner | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:45 AM
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Sweden: two things, one left and one right. In the Seventies and Eighties it was the unions. Although Swedes did work then much harder than the English, at least in my personal experience of working in small factories in both, there was a very strong social consensus against anyone having to work at the weekends (and in any case, almost all the shops were shut then, so very little part time work there).

Then in the late eighties and early nineties, the entire Swedish ruling class in all parties was converted to Economist/Blairite liberalism. Everything possible was privatised, and inequality shot up. The outside world didn't notice this much because it doesn't; but there was a gigantic retreat from the ambitions of the social democratic state. Joining the EU was part of that, too.

And it is this latterly privatised infrastructure which has been crumbling. In the specific context of Covid, the responsibility for health had been moved out of the traditional regional authorities down a layer, but that meant that there wasn't the centralised purchasing power to compete for PPE on the world market. Or so I read in DN last month!

But Sweden, when I visit it today, really shocks my old social democrat reflexes. There are ads for sports betting everywhere --always a sign that the government has given up on the formerly working class. I really wish someone would pay me to go and look around the provinces again, but no one in this country has the money.


Posted by: NW | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:48 AM
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Sweden: two things, one left and one right. In the Seventies and Eighties it was the unions. Although Swedes did work then much harder than the English, at least in my personal experience of working in small factories in both, there was a very strong social consensus against anyone having to work at the weekends (and in any case, almost all the shops were shut then, so very little part time work there).

Then in the late eighties and early nineties, the entire Swedish ruling class in all parties was converted to Economist/Blairite liberalism. Everything possible was privatised, and inequality shot up. The outside world didn't notice this much because it doesn't; but there was a gigantic retreat from the ambitions of the social democratic state. Joining the EU was part of that, too.

And it is this latterly privatised infrastructure which has been crumbling. In the specific context of Covid, the responsibility for health had been moved out of the traditional regional authorities down a layer, but that meant that there wasn't the centralised purchasing power to compete for PPE on the world market. Or so I read in DN last month!

But Sweden, when I visit it today, really shocks my old social democrat reflexes. There are ads for sports betting everywhere --always a sign that the government has given up on the formerly working class. I really wish someone would pay me to go and look around the provinces again, but no one in this country has the money.


Posted by: NW | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:48 AM
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Mail in ballots do have a much higher percentage of rejection -- I think the most common reason, though, is late receipt/postmark. Our county elections office compares signatures, and one that is blatantly off gets rejected.

The campaigns can (everywhere?) and should monitor the vote opening and counting process, and be ready to litigate when called for. There's nothing they can do, though, if the voter doesn't mail in the ballot on time, doesn't sign the envelope, or any of the other technical reasons for invalidation.

If the people wasting time with their toxic Never Biden fantasies instead put that energy into educating and helping voters get their ballots in on time and in technical compliance, then the fear about election integrity could be lessened. Who knows, maybe building relationships through helping people get rid of Trump and his lackeys would be a useful bit of organizing? No, whining on Twitter is much more likely to sufficiently mobilize ordinary people to bring about change.


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:48 AM
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The landlord thing might be that they're expecting a rapid recovery, and it's easier to raise rents on an empty flat than an occupied one (rent controls?); or they're just sick of those particular tenants for whatever reason; or they think for whatever reason (rational or not) that they will actually be able to fill the flats.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:49 AM
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bollocks. Sorry: the Post button was right down at the bottom of the screen and I couldn't see if I had pressed it properly.

[Narrator: he had]


Posted by: NW | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:49 AM
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Annoyingly, while I remember seeing the same thing I think you must have seen -- percentages of rejected ballots -- I'm not finding it again, and what I am finding seems to say that the absentee ballot counting isn't done yet so I can't see how those percentages could have been arrived at. I'll keep poking around.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:49 AM
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The 1% are rich enough that the actual level of money doesn't matter, but if the economy craters they're going to have a whole bunch less of it. All of their wealth is tied up in stock ownership.

I don't know, the economy has been cratering for four months and the stock market is doing great.


Posted by: Cryptic ned | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:50 AM
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Here's a famous case that was about counting absentee ballots: https://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/documents/MNElectionContest-Opinion-6-30-09.pdf

The takeaway from this, as from 2000, is that we have to absolutely swamp the polls, everywhere, and not leave anyone feeling smug about not picking the lesser evil.


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 8:56 AM
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The stock market is forward-looking, so if you expect everything to snap back to normal then it makes sense. I don't know why investors think that, but if this expectation is not met, we'll see the stock market crash again.

84: Things in Norway basically work, even though no one there does any work. I think phone apps run the country now. I wonder how it contrasts with Sweden in general. They definitely handled COVID better.


Posted by: Walt Someguy | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 9:01 AM
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Thanks NW.

Then in the late eighties and early nineties, the entire Swedish ruling class in all parties was converted to Economist/Blairite liberalism.

That was my suspicion.


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 9:11 AM
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Do you mean Thatcherite?


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 9:26 AM
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116.2: I thought Norway gets by on exporting North Sea oil.


Posted by: AcademicLurker | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 9:52 AM
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The 10% have their wealth tied up in stocks. The 1% have their wealth in hedge funds and other scams such that heads they win tails everyone else loses. Volatility is great for the ultra-wealthy, they make money in any situation.
I pulled part of the oldest kid's education savings out of stock index funds today- as someone called it, the "Wiley E. Coyote" market. If I really had the courage of my convictions I'd put it in a short market ETF.


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 9:59 AM
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The market can stay fucknuts longer than you can stay solvent.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 10:05 AM
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Or something like that. I'm probably not getting the quote right.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 10:05 AM
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The market can fuck you long after it stops feeling good?


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 10:11 AM
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Something to the effect that it costs money to maintain a short position over time.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 10:17 AM
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I think this was the thing Frowner and I saw, and while I can't vouch for the source, they remembered it better than I did: a preliminary review shows around 25% of absentee ballots rejected in Queens. https://twitter.com/benj_rosenblatt/status/1281972307943014405?s=21


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 10:51 AM
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I got an email confirming my mailed (not absentee) ballot was accepted. Is that a possibility in other states?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 11:07 AM
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99
Do we really, really think that the elections will be free and fair enough for Biden to win?

Reply hazy, try again.

If it were a week before the election and Biden was leading opinion polls by 2.5 percent like Clinton was I'd have absolutely no hope. But as of this minute, Biden is leading by 9 percent. Yes, I realize Clinton had a big lead at one point and lost it, but still, incumbents have a tough job in circumstances like this. Can Republicans steal that much of the vote? I wouldn't say I'm optimistic about anything these days but I'm not completely despondent. Too early to say.

The other thing I don't understand is why landlords are so anxious to evict.

They have mortgages of their own. Or if it's a corporation we're talking about, they have employees to pay. Loans are easier for people with property to get than people without property, but they still have to be paid back, usually with interest.

I've had the half-baked idea for a while that a lot of left-wing rhetoric doesn't handle the idea of debt well. (Maybe I should read the book by that name. Not sure, I don't remember if the hive mind around here actually liked it.) The rentier class isn't just the top 1 percent, there's a huge range of "ownershipness". There are huge numbers of people out there renting out an apartment or room in a house they have a mortgage on, or jobs that are nominally management but roughly the same amount of authority or security as the people they supervise. If one of those landlords forgave rent or one of those supervisors gives breaks to too many employees one month, they'd have a good chance of losing their own house/job the next month.

I dunno. Obviously lots of people don't even have property to rent. Maybe calling this half-baked is still giving it too much credit. I'm just saying maybe the landlords aren't forgiving rent because it's landlords all the way down.


Posted by: Cyrus | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 11:57 AM
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Here, you can log onto the state website and check to see if your ballot was accepted.

You can also get a call from a campaign every day until you turn your ballot in.


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 12:02 PM
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One of the pieces of evidence used to demonstrate fraudulent elections is divergence from scientifically valid polls, but many people believe polls are totally useless based on 2016 (even though national popular vote was within reasonable error) and people are too innumerate to realize that a 1 point miss is like a billion times more likely than a 9 point miss. So we have a situation where a big flag to monitor for stolen elections is pre-discredited.


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 12:08 PM
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118: no - Blairite, in that they believed in society and wanted to use the profits of a market economy for the good. They didn't see at all how dismantling the state would also to some extend dismantle society.

There was this weird thing I noticed about Swedish politicians in the years when the embassy used to have me round because the then ambassador had liked my book so much: those on the Right were well to the Left of the Blair/Brown Labour party in terms of caring about the left-behind parts of the country; while those on the Left were well to the Right of the British conservatives when it came to privatising stuff and letting the markets in.


Posted by: NW | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 12:13 PM
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127: But the particular point is that if everyone is getting evicted, you're going to find it really hard to replace your tenants without substantially dropping the rent, and your new tenants are just as likely to default as your old - it's not like someone who is renting low-quality apartments is suddenly going to find a bunch of millionaires who want to live there, and you can't do very good business with AirBnB so easily right now either. So you have the costs of eviction and finding/vetting new people without a guarantee of better results, plus however many months of the apartment sitting empty. That's why I feel like it's more sensible to offer people sliding scale rent to try to cover expenses rather than focus on eviction.


Posted by: Frowner | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 12:17 PM
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Maybe tenants are hostages being threatened in an attempt to get more of a stimulus payment?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 12:22 PM
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131: It's all going to depend on the local rental market. It wouldn't surprise me for a landlord to figure that the apartment won't sit empty for long, and if they have to repeat the process in a few months, it's at least a few months rent. Renting out your mother-in-law apartment is a big thing around here, and it's how some people find somewhere to live when they can't afford a house, and how some people make the mortgage payment on a house that they otherwise can't quite afford. It's a tight housing market so not too hard to find another renter. Not a lot of incentive not to be a jerk.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 12:30 PM
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Anyhow, we won't get another round of stimulus unless the stock market crashes, because Trump is a toddler who thinks that the stock market is the economy, and most of his base thinks the same thing. If it hadn't crashed in February we'd probably never have shut down at all because the high stock market would prove there wasn't really a coronavirus.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 12:31 PM
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There were stories at the time of the first stimulus of landlords using the federal website to look up what the tenant was getting and when to try to get paid first. Needless to say, that's illegal and presumably not so common. But I think it captures the mindset.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 12:40 PM
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127: The hive mind verdict on "Debt" was that we liked the parts we didn't have any direct knowledge of, but the parts that we did were really bad.


Posted by: Walt Someguy | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 12:51 PM
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I didn't read it because darn really didn't think it was good. Also, reading things takes time.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 12:57 PM
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Stupid phone. Darb.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 1:02 PM
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||
Likely interesting to heebie, since it's about colleges, student norms, and Covid -- https://twitter.com/DrSherryPagoto/status/1282038048751071237
|>


Posted by: Mooseking | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 1:34 PM
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127, 131 -- I wouldn't be shocked if the landlord's lenders would need to sign off on material reductions in rent. For big commercial outfits anyway, not people renting out their mother-in-law apartment. They'll have made the loan based on a specific income stream. I shouldn't say lenders, because, I imagine, the actual lender is long gone, and the note is held by a trust that has specific contractual obligations to its investors. OK, I suppose the trustee institution has some sort of power to renegotiate loans, but its beneficiaries are nameless faceless vultures somewhere far away.

134 -- Yes, although I still that that payments of 5k to everyone making 50k or less, issued in the last week of October, checks signed by Trump, is something he'd entertain.

120 -- Some of the 10% have their wealth in commercial real estate; much of the 50% has its wealth in residential real estate. At a certain point, you get a more than short-term impact. On the other hand, people who apparently aren't drug dealers are buying houses here on the day of listing, sight unseen, all cash, at or sufficiently above asking to get an immediate sale. They think they're going to escape covid. Or poor people?

The wife was in a convenience store yesterday -- everyone masked, as required by the county health department, as is the sign by the door telling everyone to wear a mask. Young woman walks in, no mask. Wife says to her 'you're supposed to wear a mask in the store.' Woman responds 'I'm not from around here.'


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 1:37 PM
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131: My thought is that the fact that not everyone is going to get evicted is relevant. There are people on expensive leases that are about to expire who will be shopping around for lower rent for their next lease. Landlords may hope that they can get some of these people as new tenants.


Posted by: Ponder Stibbons | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 2:19 PM
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I found myself unexpectedly looking for a rental this month -- a tree fell on my house. My new landlord told me that he didn't get as many inquiries as he had in the past, but that every inquiry was a serious one.


Posted by: politicalfootball | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 2:33 PM
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Yikes. Hope everyone is O.K.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 2:45 PM
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I feel like I cheated everyone by not putting this where it belongs - in the Semi-Weekly Check Ins, Reassurances, and Concerns. It's been two weeks, but I've been busy!

We're all fine. You want to know the longest two seconds in the world? The time between when you shout "Is everyone okay" and the time your daughter answers.

A big, beautiful red oak -- not at all visibly diseased, maybe 50 feet tall -- just got tired of living and came crashing down on our living room. We also lost a car, two additional trees and a bush. Damaged another car. In the house, we were situated in such a way that, had it fallen a couple of degrees differently counter-clockwise, it could have taken all four of us out. On the other hand, a few degrees in the other direction and it would have crushed my neighbor's house.


Posted by: politicalfootball | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 3:04 PM
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Whoa. Glad everyone's okay.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 3:17 PM
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Holy shit. Yes, glad you're all safe.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 3:36 PM
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Glad you're okay.

A tree fell on my parent's house several years ago (a large fir) and in that case it was remarkable how little damage it did -- it broke a couple windows and damaged the roof, but mostly the house withstood the impact. This sounds much more dramatic.

Likely interesting to heebie, since it's about colleges, student norms, and Covid -- https://twitter.com/DrSherryPagoto/status/1282038048751071237

That is a very good thread.


Posted by: NickS | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 4:03 PM
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That's a deeply unnerving thread.


Posted by: clew | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 4:36 PM
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147: Our tree was pretty much going to go to the ground floor no matter where it hit -- it crushed a brick chimney on the way down. We've got a crack in the wall in the basement below the chimney.

The tree was behind the house, and the branches started high up - maybe 30 feet - so for the most part, it was only the trunk that damaged the house. One of the sturdier branches totaled a minivan in front of the house. You couldn't see our house from the street because of all the branches and green leaves.

Hell of a sound -- and it lasted longer than you might think. There was a bad sound, when I knew something big had fallen on the house, followed by a calamitous sound when I knew that some portion of the house had been crushed. I'm thinking the first sound was the tree being momentarily impeded by the chimney on the way down.

I was sure -- really certain -- that the previous night's wind/rain storm had weakened the soil, and that the tree had toppled because the roots came up. Nope. It broke at the base. I'm still mystified as to why. I mean, once a tree breaks, you can see inside, and it looked as good on the inside as it did on the outside.


Posted by: politicalfootball | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 5:02 PM
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Have you asked a certified arborist?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 5:12 PM
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Damn. Super scary. I've seen a major limb fall twice and both times it was surprisingly quiet.

The first time I was sitting at a table under a huge elm and my lunch partner and I heard a really surprisingly quiet cracking. We definitely had a second where we met eyes and agreed that it had happened and that we'd rather look stupid for running. So we hauled ass out of the tree branch radius. Seconds later, the limb landed on the next table over (where people who definitely looked sedentary and slow had finished eating and left 5 minutes earlier.) so we needn't have run, but the pick-up soccer game saw it and some of them clapped for us anyway.

Lesson: believe the first quiet cracking sound.


Posted by: Megan | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 5:20 PM
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150: We had someone out to the house two years ago, who we paid handsomely to diagnose the bad stuff and cut down limbs. The change was instantaneous: stuff stopped dropping on our house. My wife was in the basement Thursday night (two weeks ago) during a brief but very intense storm that I was watching from an upstairs window. She missed the storm entirely, but I said to her afterward, you know, maybe it's time we had the tree guys out again. The tree came down at about 9:20 the next morning.

And the tree guys came out to clean it up. I didn't ask the guy in charge whether he was certified, but he said he couldn't explain why the tree fell.


Posted by: politicalfootball | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 5:45 PM
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In conclusion, we might get crushed at any moment, so no sense in worrying about something as distant as the upcoming school year.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 6:02 PM
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We might not get crushed and the post office isn't going to open until midnight on July 15, so mail your taxes tomorrow.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 6:12 PM
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Probably nobody but me still mails taxes.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 6:16 PM
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We just paid someone handsomely last week to thin the huge tree in our yard so I guess it has two years left. A relatively large branch came down a couple months ago and spectacularly destroyed some of what we had in the yard and that limb was not even 1/100 of the mass of the tree.


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 6:20 PM
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Not federal but I mailed state today because no goddamn way I'm paying TurboTax $25 to file my taxes on top of what I already paid for the software.


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 6:21 PM
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155: You and my mom.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 6:21 PM
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Anyway, it's never a good time to lose your house and this is an especially bad one. My sympathies.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 6:24 PM
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And now there's a frickin' comet. Harbingers of doom, they say.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 7:52 PM
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Not just harbingers.


Posted by: Opinionated dinosaur | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 7:56 PM
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So I turned the radio to the Swedish news this morning, as I do when I want to be reassured that the world doesn't change much, and dead on cue was the news that trains have been more punctual during the epidemic than at any time since records began in 2013 [before then, of course, no one thought of measuring punctuality because it just happened, more or less]. 93% arrived withng five minutes of their timetable! Turns out this was because all the commuter trains have been running half empty and there were fewer of them anyway.


Posted by: NW | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 11:06 PM
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[reading backwards] Yikes! That tree fall sounds very grim indeed.


Posted by: NW | Link to this comment | 07-13-20 11:09 PM
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Holy shit pf! Glad you're all well.


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 07-14-20 1:14 AM
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D'oh! We jinxed Vermont.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 07-14-20 9:25 PM
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Tourists keep licking the maple syrup tree.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07-14-20 9:33 PM
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Its not a maple syrup tree its just a maple tree.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 07-14-20 9:41 PM
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157: Did mine in March, but YES! There is some free software the state puts out to file online which is separate from TurboTax, but you'd have to enter your info twice, and who has time for that?


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-15-20 2:32 AM
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