Linked List: April 18, 2020

Saturday, 18 April 2020

Together at Home: The Rolling Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ 

Splendid version of the perfect song for the moment.

We’re Woefully Short of COVID-19 Tests and Using the Few We Have to Test the Wrong People 

Ezekiel J. Emanuel (oncologist, bioethicist, and vice provost of the University of Pennsylvania) and Paul M. Romer (professor of economics at New York University), in a must-read piece for The Atlantic:

Current guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention give priority first to hospitalized patients and symptomatic health-care workers, then to high-risk patients, specifically those over 65 and those suffering from other serious health conditions, with COVID-19 symptoms. Under this system, asymptomatic individuals are not tested, even if they had contact with people who tested positive.

This is an enormous mistake. If we want to control the spread of COVID-19, the United States must adopt a new testing policy that prioritizes people who, although asymptomatic, may have the virus and infect many others.

We should target four groups. First, all health-care workers and other first responders who directly interact with many people. Second, workers who maintain our supply chains and crucial infrastructure, including grocery-store workers, police officers, public-transit workers, and sanitation personnel. The next group would be potential “super-spreaders” — asymptomatic individuals who could come into contact with many people. This third group would include people in large families and those who must interact with many vulnerable people, such as employees of long-term-care facilities. The fourth group would include all those who are planning to return to the workplace. These are precisely the individuals without symptoms whom the CDC recommends against testing.

We need to vastly increase our testing capacity and invert our who-should-be-tested priorities. This is easily understood, eminently fixable, and should be uncontroversial.

Rt.live — New Website From Instagram Co-Founders Tracking the Rate of COVID-19 Transmission by State 

Rt.live:

These are up-to-date values for Rt, a key measure of how fast the virus is growing. It’s the average number of people who become infected by an infectious person. If Rt is above 1.0, the virus will spread quickly. When Rt is below 1.0, the virus will stop spreading.

The “Last Week” and “2 Weeks Ago” buttons clearly illustrate the effectiveness of our collective stay-at-home / stay-apart measures.

See also: This post at TechCrunch by Josh Constine, with backstory on the creation of and thinking behind the site.

Legendary Pitt Eatery ‘The O’ Closes 

Alan Saunders, reporting for Pittsburgh Sports Now:

The Original Hot Dog Shop has closed its doors after nearly 60 years of selling hot dogs, french fries, pizza and more from its location on Forbes Avenue adjacent to Pitt’s campus.

Better known as The O, the hot dog shop was founded by Syd and Moe Simon in June 1960, and over the years became Oakland’s most legendary eatery.

Over the years it had been honored by the likes of Gourmet Magazine, The New York Times and Food Network, and was featured on WQED’s A Hot Dog Program with host Rick Sebak.

Its colorful menu boards, neon signage, low prices and sometimes absurd portions made The O a throwback classic. Open until 2 a.m., The O was a frequent destination for Pitt students after a long night of partying.

“Sometimes absurd portions” is putting it lightly. A “small” order of fries was mountainous; a large to-go order barely fit in an entire brown paper bag. And they were some of the best damn French fries I’ve ever had — fresh cut and fried on the spot. Not just good but “Holy shit these fries are amazing” good. The O had everything a college student could want, including a decent-enough pizza — a whole pizza — for just a handful of bucks. And the service was delightfully curt. God help you if you got to the front of the line and weren’t ready to order.

The O was the canonical ideal of the greasy college spoon, the sort of institution that you can’t imagine not having always been there or ever going away. Devastating news — and I was only ever a few-times-a-year visitor from across the state.

‘Capitalists or Cronyists?’ 

Scott Galloway:

However, no more. Modern-day “capitalism” in America is to flatten the risk curve for people who already have money, by borrowing from future generations with debt-fueled bailouts for companies. We have consciously decided to reduce the downside for the wealthy, thereby limiting the upside for future generations.

CNBC guest: Equity holders deserve to get wiped out.

CNBC host: Why does anybody deserve to get wiped out in a crisis like this? This is a natural disaster, why does anybody deserve to get wiped out? Wouldn’t that be immoral in and of itself?

“Immoral,” here we go. Morality for CNBC, and the current administration, is not capitalism but the worst type of socialism, cronyism. Rugged individualism and capitalism on the way up, privatizing the gains — and then socialism/cronyism on the way down as we socialize the losses with bailouts.

The analogy has been used enough to border on cliché, but it really is a “heads they win, tails we lose” system. It’s a scam, when you honestly examine it, but as Galloway pointedly observes, it’s become a foundational belief in the Wall Street class.

Take the cruise line industry. They’re getting crushed by this pandemic for obvious reasons, and they very much want to be bailed out by the U.S. government. But why do they deserve it? For tax and regulatory reasons, they don’t even register their ships in the U.S. — Carnival Cruise Lines is incorporated in Panama, Norwegian in Bermuda, and Royal Caribbean in Liberia. Bermuda is not part of Norway and, last I checked, Liberia is not in the Caribbean. Not only do these companies want U.S. funded bailouts, they don’t even want to pay U.S. taxes or comply with U.S. laws during normal times.

The thing to remember is that if allowed to fail, the cruise ships won’t sink to the bottom of the ocean. The jobs won’t disappear. The companies will go into bankruptcy, existing shareholder equity will get wiped out, and new ownership will take over. A bailout won’t rescue the industry or the jobs — it will rescue the shareholders.