This is a post I am definitely bookmarking.

So that we can celebrate at the opportune moment?

See, this is why we pay you the big bucks.

Of course, proving continuity is a bitch.

Eh, what the hell, we'll assume it.

In hindsight, 5 should have been by 'OPINIONATED ECONOMISTS'

I'm worried that COVID will wreck this. That is by the time all the COVID news dies down the political journalists will have already rediscovered fake scandals.

That is, IVT only works in 1-dimension...

Might Covid itself not be the serious journalism that occupies the beautiful moment we seek?

You cockeyed Optimist you

Any Democratic scandal that comes up over the next decade, Dems will be able to point to something worse that Trump did and point out that all the Republicans supported it at the time. That, and 75 cents, will buy us a cookie.

Where are you getting your cookies?

The magic of capitalism.

He sells them for 55 cents in Malta and turns a profit.

Remember when it was "that and 50 cents will get you a cup of coffee" and Starbucks came and ruined the idiom.

I'm getting nervous about the scenario where there's some strain of COVID that that vaccines don't work on, and we have like 2 months where everyone thinks it's back to normal, and then it just comes roaring back. Can someone reassure me that this is implausible?

It seems unlikely.

This article gives a very reassuring comparison to mumps, where the same vaccine has worked for decades: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/what-to-know-about-mutation-and-covid-19#Just-how-long-will-immunity-last?

For all of the "it's not the flu" mantra, it seems like it's actually good luck that it's a coronavirus and not a flu virus.

I'm interested in how that will play out. For all that it was horrible, it was also constant stimulation and I suspect we'll miss the (horrible) excitement. I also think (and have been saying relentlessly) that it was incredibly effective as a technique. So much stuff didn't get the attention it was due because there were other genuinely more important things to think about. I think the Biden administration should do all the things all the time, and use the same technique of maxing out the public attention span. Overloading the public attention capacity is a good way to slide the bottom forty percent of things through.

20 is correct. So far we have already gone through a cycle of "This is a good policy" / "But we can't do it because when the more people hear about it the more they will get mad, and if we actually try to do it people will be hearing about it all the time" with the idea of cancelling some amount of people's debt. Isn't there ANY way to do something without litigating it in public for months beforehand? The Trump administration proves the answer is yes.

I don't think coffee is fifty cents anymore even in the dingiest of diners.

I have a crazed view of cancelling student debt. I don't think it's good policy, but it's a handout to Democratic voters, so we should do it for that reason alone. If the Republicans aren't going to support good policy (and they aren't), then the Democrats should do it just to teach them a lesson.

Because Starbucks taught them they could charge more.

So, there's still too much news. An Iranian nuclear scientist was killed. They are saying it was the Israelis. Can Trump be blamed for this? Would the same thing have happened during a Clinton admin or in February during a Biden presidency?

I think so. If it's a lay to make it more difficult for Biden to rejoin the nuclear deal, it's better to do it before he can say anything about it, but the same logic will apply once he's in office.

play

2: I'm bookmarking with you heebie, not at you.

I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like I'm going to be dealing with a sort of PTSD-like response to the past 4 years for awhile. Like, I check Twitter and turn on the news regularly to know what is going on in the world, but there's this constant low level anxiety to it. I wonder when I will get to the point that I can turn on thenews and just feel relaxed.

I'm thinking of turning off the news, or limiting myself to once a day checking it, for my own anxiety levels.

I'm guessing 2023 before the news will be relaxing. It'll be two years of uncovering the damage at least, and then we might start getting stories about how we're back to baseline in the federal agencies. Then it'll be 2024 and time for an election!!

Unless... unless New York goes after Trump. In that case, there might be delicious news in the next couple years.

Anyway, I doubt the premise of the OP about things calming down. Even if things calm down a bit, there's still a battle for hearts and minds going on and one side has decided the primary way to wage that battle is to destroy connections between people and the kind of interactions that builds those connections. (That these are largely the same people who were worried about what rap lyrics would do to culture isn't ironic. They aren't accidentally destroying civic culture, they are doing it deliberately because they can't control it.) Maintaining good functioning in spite of anxiety isn't easy and it isn't a trivial problem if enough people fail at it. Which thought only helps to make me more anxious.

On the plus side, covid is good preparation for the time of my life when I start reading the newspaper at the obituaries.

NY Times said that Trump is working furiously on a border wall and it might be hard for Biden to stop quickly.

31: I'm rooting so hard for Cyrus Vance to do that.

I'm guessing 2023 before the news will be relaxing. It'll be two years of uncovering the damage at least, and then we might start getting stories about how we're back to baseline in the federal agencies.

Depends if there's a competitive Republican primary, I bet.

It would be good if the Manhattan DA or NY AG continued investigations/prosecutions, but hopefully Cyrus Vance will also be gone by then - that election is next year, and he's shady as fuck.

36: I didn't know that. Just that Laurence Tribe mentioned Vance was investigating Trump.

36: Have I talked about Alvin Bragg here, running to replace Vance? Any Manhattan voters who can be talked into voting for him should pipe up if they'd like to be persuaded -- I used to work with him and I think he's terrific.

I had to look it up. It's Cyrus Vance, Jr. I was thinking Cyrus Vance must be as old as President Carter.

40: He'd be 7+ years older than Carter, had he made it to 2020.

I once had to write a paper on him.

My last year of primary school, we put on a production of Jacob and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, which for some reason prompted me to write a parody of "Jacob and Sons" called "Cyrus and Jim", based on the efforts of Cyrus Vance and Jimmy Carter to negotiate a settlement to the hostage crisis.

All I remember of it is that it started with: Something, something, something, something, "Not long after the SALT talks began..."