COVID-19 thread

[masako]

How did even Coronavirus get so politically charged? I swear, it's a good thing bacon has been around for a while, because if someone invented bacon today, one randomly chosen half of America would feel the need to oppose it.

Apparently, you're not familiar with PETA.

Seriously, if a thing exists, there is almost always opposition to it.

[Kuchigakatai]

How did even Coronavirus get so politically charged?

I have an infinite gripe about the politicization of climate change. But I do my best to not argue anything about that on the Internet because my ire against these little damn politicists, left-wing or right-wing, would be of eddythread proportions... I see nothing inherently left-wing in wanting to address climate change, unless you literally define being right-wing as being against wanting to do anything about it or accept its existence.

[Richard W]

- How do you feel about reporting violation of containment rules to the authorities? Say, you see three or four people talking way too close, with no obvious business outside. Would you report them? How would you feel about reporting them?

That's not yet illegal in the UK (unless they've been individually confined to quarantine as suspected carriers - in which case they shall receive written confirmation). If I were in France, I'd be hesitant to deal with the French police.

It will be interesting to see how the police deal with groups of children on the streets of the UK on Monday. Lots of teenagers are going to be left unsupervised.

[Nortaneous]

How did even Coronavirus get so politically charged? I swear, it's a good thing bacon has been around for a while, because if someone invented bacon today, one randomly chosen half of America would feel the need to oppose it.

It's a crisis in an election year. When there's a crisis in an election year, the party that doesn't hold the presidency takes issue with the other party's handling of the crisis. To the extent that it's worse than usual, it's mostly because China is running a global PR coverup to hide the fact that it mismanaged the initial outbreak, and some people are falling for that. But I remember the political charge of Hurricane Katrina being worse, and that wasn't even in an election year.

[Linguoboy]

It's a crisis in an election year. When there's a crisis in an election year, the party that doesn't hold the presidency takes issue with the other party's handling of the crisis.

I'm sure it's that and not the fact that the party whose unifying principle is opposition to "Big Government", whose ideologues want to "starve the beast" that is the Fed, who think businessmen are better than "politicians" at solving political problems is mishandling the kind of challenge that governments were pretty much invented to address in pretty much exactly the way that you'd expect members of a party which holds those view to do.

Seriously, who disbands a pandemic response team as a cost-cutting measure in order to cut taxes on the wealthy, delays their response to a crisis because the director of the relevant agency assumed the private sector would do something, resists invoking legislation specifically designed to compel that private sector assistance when it isn't forthcoming, and then stands there surprised that things are getting so much worse so quickly? Oh, that's right, Republicans.

[Moose-tache]

How did even Coronavirus get so politically charged?

I have an infinite gripe about the politicization of climate change. But I do my best to not argue anything about that on the Internet because my ire against these little damn politicists, left-wing or right-wing, would be of eddythread proportions... I see nothing inherently left-wing in wanting to address climate change, unless you literally define being right-wing as being against wanting to do anything about it or accept its existence.

Looking at some of the responses I've gotten, it looks like you are exactly right. It's frustrating, but you can't complain about politicizing technical issues that should be straight forward ("what does Rob Ford have against windmills?") without incurring exactly that same political bs in the thread ("Rob Ford did nothing wrong!").

And to those of you pointing out that bacon has its critics, you forgot to mention my physician! But seriously, there is not 50% of America that has convinced itself that bacon is bad for no reason, or that bacon does not exist, or that it makes frogs gay. What I'm complaining about is that whenever a new question pops up, like "should we respond to a virus" or "do we keep building windmills?" The answer should be a technical one, and in many cases is almost obvious. But half the country has to line up on either side of it, regardless of whether or not there are two reasonable positions. So we have conservatives, living in rural areas reliant on agriculture, descended from men and women who lived off the land, who hunt and fish and go camping, who will tell you with a straight face that the climate has not changed in the last century, simply because the other side points out that it in fact has. I don't expect people to agree on everything, and yes, everything is political to some extent. And the major parties do need to disagree to give voters meaningful choice. But there are some technical issues where the public suffers from political polarization. Disease outbreak definitely fall into that category. I'm reminded of SARS in '03, when a Republican administration took steps to successfully prevent infection in the US. The Democrats, for their part, went along with it and didn't try to sabotage the administration's efforts. Good job by both teams. Clearly we can do this when we want to.

[Raphael]

Moose-tache, I've got the impression that you yourself, in your most recent post, at least partially answered your own question from your earlier post.

[Raphael]

I hold basically no right-wing policy views, and I despise Trump and think he's the worst president in modern American history, but I have to say I'm really getting tired of constantly seeing shit like this:

It's inappropriate to mock "right-wingers", which is such an immensely broad group. It's fine to criticize individual politicians or figures for actions they've taken or things they've said or policy views they hold, it's not fine to brand a large fraction of American adults (a larger fraction than left-wingers!) as complete lunatics,

As far as I can see, in the statement you quoted I neither mocked right-wingers, nor insulted them, nor branded them complete lunatics. I made a specific observation about how they see things.

Saying that all right wingers approve of people "constantly losing any semblance of self-control and exploding into spittle-flecked rage" is, (a) attributing a trait to ALL "right wingers", which is clearly improper, and also (b) factually false, and also (c) an insult, since it's obviously a negative trait (I promise you the vast majority of right wingers will agree on this point), and you obviously consider it to be one. So you have falsely accused all "right-wingers" of a negative trait: "being complete lunatics" was my shorthand for this; I agree that's not precisely what you accused them of. Perhaps in retrospect "supporting lunatic/unhinged behavior" or something might have been more accurate, but the basic point that you insulted all right-wingers still stands.

Ok, I change my statement to "many right-wingers, probably including many of the most passionate Trump supporters, believe that constantly losing any semblance of self-control and exploding into spittle-flecked rage is a cool, tough, strong, and manly thing to do".

I would also strongly argue that the best way to change a conservative's mind is to cordially debate with them on why your positions are superior to theirs, but no one is going to listen to you if you first accuse them of something they know falsely applies, or insult them, or whatever. Let's start from a foundation of respect and trying to see their point of view so we can actually effectively engage with it.

I've generally got the impression that people seriously changing their political opinions in a major way as adults is something that seems to happen so rarely that it's probably impossible to derive any general rules about what is more or less likely to make that happen.

*I had remembered I had once heard about a study which found that liberals are worse at predicting conservative responses to moral questions than vice versa, but when I managed to find the original study just now it looks...really weak. So, take it with as many grains of salt as you wish.

For a start, many right-wingers seem to seriously believe that everyone to the left of themselves is a communist, which doesn't strike me as a sign that they're good at understanding their opponents.

The basic point that people tend to misanalyze their ideological opponents' views by exaggerating them is undoubtedly true, however, and the particular idea that liberals tend to have a poor understanding of conservative thought, as also mentioned in the longer quote from Haidt, seems at least somewhat plausible, and it does match my personal experience as far as I can tell (not being a conservative, I can't be positive whether it does) [this is not to say lots of conservatives don't horribly distort the views of liberals]. If it does happen to true, I imagine this is partly because conservatives in the US have a lot of exposure to liberal viewpoints in popular culture, newspapers, movies, colleges and universities, celebrities, and so on, while liberals can be more isolated from conservative views unless they watch Fox News for some reason,

My impression is that a lot of liberal outlets in the US, at least the ones I myself follow semi-regularly, spend a lot of their space covering things right-wingers said or wrote, so it's not as if liberals wouldn't be exposed to that stuff. Most liberals could probably recite the basic points of what US right-wingers, at least before Trump, claimed to believe in fairly easily (small government, low taxes, free markets, deregulation, strong defense, traditionalist values about how to live one's life, etc.), though many liberals would probably express doubt that that is what most right-wingers are really about.

[Curlyjimsam]

The thing to remember when accusing "the other side" of being like small children with no emotional control is that many of them have a similar opinion of you.

[Raphael]

Latest German measures - decided at a teleconference of Merkel and all state PMs:

Minimum distance of 1.50 meters in public spaces (about 5 feet).
People may only be in public spaces alone, or with one other person, or with members of their own households.
People are still allowed to go to work, to emergency care, to "necessary" appointments, to do individual sport exercises and to move in fresh air.
No more groups of celebrating people, not even in private spaces.
Restaurants etc. are closed, but taking away food and drinks is still allowed.
Service businesses that are about medical care get closed, except for medically necessary procedures.
All places of employment are especially urged to abide by rules of hygiene.

So far, that's supposed to last "at least" two weeks - of course, it will almost certainly stay in force for much longer than that.

[Nortaneous]

It's a crisis in an election year. When there's a crisis in an election year, the party that doesn't hold the presidency takes issue with the other party's handling of the crisis.

I'm sure it's that and not the fact that the party whose unifying principle is opposition to "Big Government", whose ideologues want to "starve the beast" that is the Fed, who think businessmen are better than "politicians" at solving political problems is mishandling the kind of challenge that governments were pretty much invented to address in pretty much exactly the way that you'd expect members of a party which holds those view to do.

Seriously, who disbands a pandemic response team as a cost-cutting measure in order to cut taxes on the wealthy, delays their response to a crisis because the director of the relevant agency assumed the private sector would do something, resists invoking legislation specifically designed to compel that private sector assistance when it isn't forthcoming, and then stands there surprised that things are getting so much worse so quickly? Oh, that's right, Republicans.

If you want to talk about the small-government Republicans, a case can be made that they just weren't extreme enough about it. We didn't get early extensive testing because the federal government had strict criteria for who was allowed to be tested. When researchers in Seattle did testing anyway, and found more cases than the official numbers suggested, the federal government told them to stop. When the CDC got around to distributing tests, they didn't work. And, even though the tests are routine and could easily be put together and run in a hospital, the FDA says that only the CDC is allowed to make the tests. The same CDC that outright lied to the public about safety measures.

On the other hand, small-government ideologues would get some things wrong -- government assistance in onshoring PPE production, for example, would be an exceptionally good idea right now, and would've been an even better idea when the problem became obvious in December or January. The problem is neither that the government is doing bad things nor that it's failing to do good things; the problem is that both of these are true at the same time.

As far as I can tell, the only political factions that come out of this looking completely reasonable are the far-right bloggers who've been talking about "anarcho-tyranny" for a decade, the protectionists who think we shouldn't have outsourced our entire PPE production capacity in the first place and want to bring it back, and the otherwise bland centrists who have suddenly discovered that it's bad when the government lies. And those bland centrists get complaints in their comments sections about how it's bad to point out when the government lies because it undermines trust in the lying government, because a dominant strain of thought in American politics is the sort of managerialism that sees the populace as empty vessels entirely devoid of agency who simply accept whatever information is given to them, for no other reason than that it's given to them.

It's an outright lie to say that normalizing mask-wearing won't help flatten the curve. The countries that have succeeded in flattening the curve are the countries where mask-wearing was already normalized. You can tell which countries have already normalized mask-wearing from a graph of cases by country. But the government's seeming justification for this lie is a shortage of masks. Taiwan doesn't have a shortage of masks, because it produces masks, at the rate of eight million a day.

The Republican Party is not very defensible as it stands. The problem is that the alternative is the Democrats, who are at least as bad (has anyone seen Biden recently?) and much more equipped to unilaterally block a necessary realignment. (Compare Biden to McMullin. Even Buttigieg ran a more competent campaign than the #NeverTrump CIA spoiler candidate, and if Sanders somehow wins the nomination, I bet the CIA spoiler candidate that inevitably launches a third-party run against him will do better than Egg McMuffin did. The man came third in Utah.) Trump couldn't immediately deliver on the realignment, but neither could Goldwater. These things take time. And if you don't like the Reaganites, shouldn't you support the realignment away from them?

(And on the subject of mismanagement, remember that the opioid crisis wasn't a major issue until 2016. I know a few low-level people in Democratic factions -- people who set up PACs for state elections, journalists, and so on -- who I've personally seen support the opioid crisis for the same reason Reagan intentionally mismanaged AIDS: it was killing people who they figured needed to die.)

[alynnidalar]

A quick question and survey on cultural norms:

- How do you feel about reporting violation of containment rules to the authorities? Say, you see three or four people talking way too close, with no obvious business outside. Would you report them? How would you feel about reporting them?

(The reason I'll ask this is that supposedly in France we have different cultural expectations about this, and I wonder if that holds...)

given that I don't live in 1984, I think I'll decline spying on my neighbors for the purpose of reporting their Unpatriotic Behavior to the authorities... how should I know if people have "business" outside simply from peeping through my curtains, anyway?

I mean, if someone were to ask me, "should I go outside and chat with three or four people, with no obvious business?" I would tell them no. I might even stick my head out the window and yell at them if I was feeling particularly self-righteous. But I'm certainly not going to call the police over it!

[Raphael]

Meanwhile, a message for the web developers among you and the people you know:

https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2020 ... et-static/

[Kuchigakatai]

I would've loved it if whoever wrote that named some examples of websites giving out 502 errors because of CMS crashes.

I did notice that yesterday I struggled immensely trying to grab some stuff from the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, as their Java EE website kept getting overwhelmed.

[Ares Land]

No, it's good practice, really! And one that's often implemented by putting a static cache in front.
Well it does lead to the common antipattern of clearing the whole cache everytime you deploy in production and ignoring underlying perfomance issue. I spent most of the summer of 2015 stuck in an endless charade of deploy upgrades / flush cache / everything collapses / panic, ah, those were the days! -- but anyway, still good practice.

Unfortunately, in many places, it's not a good time to implement it, with all your engineers behind a dramatically undersized VPN.

(Though you can bet that as soon as the situation is restored to normal I'm going to put up a shitton of Varnish caches)

[chris_notts]

Meanwhile, a message for the web developers among you and the people you know:

https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2020 ... et-static/

I guess I'm (kindof) a developer, although mostly not web front-end, and my official job titles have been things like Mathematical Modeller, Data Scientist, and whatever other combinations of buzz-words is currently fashionable. But I've long longed for a long time for a less dynamic web not to save bandwidth but just to have webpages that don't break basic web usability standards like the back and forward buttons. All these dynamic social media sites suck because the second you click on a link in their feed your position is lost forever and not recoverable even if you press the back button one second later, which then leaves you back at the top of the "same" page when you were actually 20 minutes of scrolling and dynamic loading down.

I want all necessary information to successfully return to the same page a short time later to be encoded in the URLs, the way the web used to work before Javascript and client-side rendering took over everything. And I actually preferred it when everything was paginated because then you actually had control, unlike now when any given website could do anything at any time that some Javascript programmer looking for some nails to hit with their chosen hammer dreamed up.

Predictable behaviour is the most important property of a platform, and the web doesn't have it anymore.

[Pabappa]

you'd probably hate the iPad then, and i think other tablets are moving that way .... I dont use a tablet but i see people on youtube with iPads and the only thing you see in the address bar is the top-level URL, e.g. cnn.com ... the whoooooole interface is just a shell running within the front page, so there's no URL at all you can attach to wht youre seeing. and on Android phones for quite a while now there's been "AMP" which basically does the same thing but in a different way and the top URL is google instead of whatever site it is. i think the iPad thing is probably site-dependent, so that e.g. cnn.com hides everything in a shell, but other sites like Wikipedia likely behave normally. Wikipedia in particular would be extremely difficult to use if you couldnt access the bare URL.

[MacAnDàil]

With the current rate of expansion, America will likely be the most hit country by Thursday and Italy will overtake China they day after. But Italy's getting more and more recoveries (and deaths of course) so the active cases are not so many compared to America where it will likely continue soaring.

[Kuchigakatai]

On March 15th I posted:

Someone from Ireland reports: "Ireland is closing the pubs. It's definitely The Apocalypse."

The same guy now reports: "Irish Distillers now making hand sanitizer. I'm telling you, it's the Apocalypse..."

[gestaltist]

Meanwhile, a message for the web developers among you and the people you know:

https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2020 ... et-static/

Or get on a CDN.

you'd probably hate the iPad then, and i think other tablets are moving that way .... I dont use a tablet but i see people on youtube with iPads and the only thing you see in the address bar is the top-level URL, e.g. cnn.com ... the whoooooole interface is just a shell running within the front page, so there's no URL at all you can attach to wht youre seeing. and on Android phones for quite a while now there's been "AMP" which basically does the same thing but in a different way and the top URL is google instead of whatever site it is. i think the iPad thing is probably site-dependent, so that e.g. cnn.com hides everything in a shell, but other sites like Wikipedia likely behave normally. Wikipedia in particular would be extremely difficult to use if you couldnt access the bare URL.

You absolutely can access the bare URL on an iPad. It's only hidden when browsing but the moment you click on the address bar, you see the full URL.