Coyote Blog

Part one of this series was on government incentives.  Part two of this series was originally going to be "managing to the wrong metrics," and we will still get to that topic in part 3.  But as I wrote that piece, it occurred to me that perhaps an even larger issue is not just working from the wrong data, but working from no data at all.

While it would be easy to attribute the "feelz before facts" bias to things like post-modernist thought, in actuality it is older than civilization.    I am pretty sure that panicked, emotional stories about Native American attacks on 19th century settlers grossly exceeded actual such events had we had good statistics (just as panicked, emotional stores of barbarian attacks on 4th century Roman settlers probably similarly exceeded actual cases).

More recently, the global warming debate has been home to many good examples of this effect.  Rising global temperatures are fairly easy to show on a chart, and while the compilation of these statistics is fraught with problems, it is generally unassailable that the data trends up.  Where things really go downhill is in the supposed knock-on effects of rising global temperatures (eg hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, etc).

The media coverage of these issues is absolutely dominated with feelz over facts -- a good example being hurricanes.  Media coverage of every hurricane is full of panicked articles that this particular hurricane is a demonstration of climate change.  Beyond being a great example of how the media often tries to claim a trend from a single data point, the amazing part is that long data sets of hurricane frequency and, even better, total cyclonic energy in such storms, are readily available...  and NEVER published.  This data consistently shows no upward long-term trend in hurricane activity or strength, but such data is deprecated in comparison to fear of the individual hurricanes themselves.

We have seen this exact same kind of thing, with fear and anecdote trumping actual data, from the very beginning of COVID.  For example:

• One single panicked tweet or interview of some random hospital nurse** will create a stampede of stories that hospitals are all full and that if you get sick you will likely get turned away and die.  What these stories never include is either a) real data on hospital bed occupancy in the area being reported on or b) any background how hospitals can and routinely do flex ICU bed capacity or c) any background on how this happens even in many flu seasons and is not a unique COVID marker (eg here, here, here, here).
• Some person will claim so weird long-COVID reaction without any statistics or background on how a) many respiratory diseases have odd longer-lasting effects or b) at what rates these occur or c) how most of these are eventually debunked a few months later (remember the whole young athlete heart thing?).
• A story will feature a person dying at 30 to try to scare people that this is not just killing old people without a) any context of pre-existing conditions in that person or b) without any data on the microscopic overall fatality rate for this age group and how unusual this case actually is.

My wife tends to be susceptible to this panic stuff because a) she actually still trusts the media and b) she tends to be one of those people who will always jump to the worst case scenario.   It is just incredibly frustrating to watch the media push her buttons and make her fearful when no rational basis exists to be scared.  And the hard part is that for rational people to bat this stuff down, it is like playing whack-a-mole.  At some point it just becomes tedious and exhausting to keep responding every day to a new batch of fact-free BS (irritatingly wrapped into a self-righteous mantle of "following the science.")

I remember a Teaching Company lecture course on German propaganda in the 1930's.  The professor Thomas Childers (I would recommend any of his courses) compared the messaging to a wheel.  They would try a message, and for those that this message did not work for they would turn the wheel a bit and get a new message.  And they would do this constantly until no opponent could reasonably knock them all down.

** Postscript.  This sort of gets back to the first post in this series on incentives, but one might wonder why some front-line healthcare worker would go to the media with dramatic stories that are untrue.  Various political sites that are skeptical of the stores have assumed these folks are political in some way with a political mission, but that does not have to be true.  Let me tell a story.

Back in the early 1990's I was on a jury in Dallas.  This was at the tail end of the incredible child molestation and day care panic, where Janet Reno and others using her "Miami Method" put scores of people in jail based on absurd, literally unbelievable stories generated by young children at the urging of prosecutors.    Our jury's case was a dad accused by the babysitter of molestation of his daughter.

The facts were absurd.  The molestation event supposedly occurred in a quasi-public place;  there was no physical or other evidence;  the "victim" recanted earlier stories told to aggressive prosecutors and testified for her dad;  no one actually witnessed anything.  We returned a not guilty verdict in barely an hour.

We can guess the prosecutors were motivated both by sincere belief that they were doing God's work as well as desire to emulate other prosecutors who had jump-started their career by recently making headline-grabbing molestation prosecutions (Janet Reno actually having jumped all the way to US AG, as an example).  But why the heck did the baby-sitter start all this?  It turns out that this was actually pretty clear from cross-examination by a very good defense lawyer.  She had seen another baby-sitter get on the Oprah TV show for accusing a father of molestation, and she wanted the same chance to meet Oprah and get her 15 minutes of fame.  Seriously, the whole family's life was shattered for years because she wanted to be on Oprah.  Never over-estimate anyone's motives, I guess.

When I argue with folks about the irrationality of certain COVID NPI mandates, eg masks and lockdowns, their ultimate argument when their backs are up against the wall is this:  the government and/or the "experts" would not have mandated these interventions if they did not make sense.  The purpose of this and several following posts is to explain exactly why  they might, or more particularly, why certain government mandates might make sense for government officials even when they make sense for no one else.

Briefly, the case against masks

There are people I talk to that assume that the entire history of science consists of a march towards more and more certainly that public masking is essential to stopping respiratory disease spread and that the only people who oppose this NPI are doing so because Donald Trump or the Baptist Church told us to oppose them.  But there are actually really good reasons to be skeptical of masks as a mandated NPI for this respiratory disease:

• The body of public health research prior to 2020, on balance, held that public masking (and large scale lockdowns, btw) were not effective and generally not recommended (at least once the outbreak is past a very small group).  A good roundup of the studies is here.
• People usually respond to this by saying, well, you wouldn't want your surgeon to operate on you without a mask.  Of course, this use case comparison is absurd, since standing next to someone in line at Walmart for 60 seconds is not really anything like hovering over someone's open incision for 3 hours.   But it turns out that the scientific support for masks even in surgery to reduce post-op infection is surprisingly equivocal.
• The weave of your mask looks to a COVID virus approximately what a chain link fence looks like to a mosquito.  It is not stopping the virus itself.  And this is even before discussing the total lack of sealing against the face I see on pretty much every mask.  And the fact that many people are reusing the same mask for days.
• The argument is thus made that the mask is stopping saliva droplets.  But we have known pretty much since last March that droplets don't spread the disease.  Droplets end up on the floor, not floating around for hours.  The disease is spread best by aerosols, and masks are only marginally effective at blocking these aerosols
• Everything I have said above is EXACTLY what the CDC has said for years.  Here is their info-graphic, still up on their web site.  (Here is a copy I have archived in case they ever take it down: understanddifferenceinfographic-508 )
• A case can be made that masks can make spread worse.  Imagine being on a plane for 4 hours and you have COVID.  Before you ever even get on the plane, you mask is saturated with COVID virus and moisture.  You then spend the entire flight blowing COVID-laden aerosols out through the mask like bubbles from a bubble wand.

Incentives of Government Agencies

But within weeks of the start of the pandemic in 2020, government agencies like the CDC threw out all this history and decided to mandate masks.  Masks were mandated for people outdoors, even when we knew from the start that transmission risks outdoors were nil.   Officials are still mandating masks for children, who have lower death rates from COVID than the flu and despite a lot of clear research about the importance of facial expressions in childhood development and socialization.  Officials are even starting to mandate masks for the vaccinated who, if they are not effectively immune from the disease, are nearly perfectly immune to hospitalization and death from the disease.  So why?

One needs to remember that the officials of government agencies like the CDC are not active scientists, they are government bureaucrats.  They may have had a degree in science at one time and still receive some scientific journals, but so do I.  Dr. Fauci has seen about the same number of patients over the last 40 years as Dr. Biden.  These are government officials that think like government officials and have the incentives of government officials.

I will take the CDC as an example but the following could apply to any related agency.  Remember that the CDC has been around for decades, consuming billions of dollars of years of tax money.  And as far as the average American is concerned, the CDC has never done much (at least visibly) as we never have had any sort of public health emergency when the CDC had to roll into action.

If you think this unfair, consider that the CDC itself has recognized this problem.  For years they have been trying to expand their mandate to things like gun control and racism, trying to argue that these constitute public health emergencies and thus require their active participation.  The CDC has for years been actively looking for a publicly-visible role (as opposed to research coordination and planning and preparation and such) that would increase their recognition, prestige, and budget.

So that is the backdrop.  And boom - finally! - there is a public health emergency where they can roll into action.  They see this new and potentially scary respiratory virus, they check their plans on the shelf, and those plans basically say -- there is nothing much to be done, at least in the near term.  Ugh!  How are we going to justify our existence?  Tellingly, by the way, these agencies and folks like Fauci did follow a lot of the prior science in the opening weeks -- for example they discouraged mask wearing.  Later Fauci justified his flip flop by claiming he meant the statement as a way to protect mask supply for health care workers, but I actually think that was a lie.  His initial statements on masks were correct, but government agencies decided they did not like the signal of impotence this was sending.

There was actually plenty these agencies should have been doing, but none of those things looked like immediate things to make the public feel safer.  Agencies should have been:

1. Trying to catalog COVID behavior and characteristics
2. Developing tests
3. Identifying and testing treatment protocols
4. Slashing regulations vis a vis tests and other treatments so they could be approved faster
5. Developing a vaccine

If we score these things, #1 was sort of done though with a lot of exaggerated messaging (ie they communicated a lot of stuff that was mostly BS, like long covid or heart risk to young athletes).  #2 the CDC and FDA totally screwed up.  #3 barely happened, with promising treatments politicized and ignored.  #4 totally did not happen, no one even tried.  #5 went fabulously, but was an executive project met with mostly skepticism from agencies like the CDC.

Instead, the CDC and other agencies decided they had to do something that seemed like it was immediately affecting safety, so it reversed both years of research and several weeks of their own messaging and came down hard for masks and lockdowns.   And, given the nature of government incentives, they had to stick with it right up to today, because an admission today that these NPI aren't needed risks having all their activity in 2020 questioned.

Incentives for Government Officials

Pretty much all of the above also applies to the incentives of government officials.  Our elected officials of both parties, but particularly the Democrats, have been working to have the average American think of them as super-dad.  Got a problem?  Don't spend too much time trying to solve it yourself because its the government's job to do so.  Against this background, the option to do nothing, at least nothing with immediate and dramatic apparent potency, did not exist.  We have to do "something."

It might have been possible for some officials to resist this temptation of action for action's sake, except for a second incentive.  Once one prominent official requires masks and lockdowns, the media began creating pressure on all other government officials.  New York has locked down, why haven't you?  Does New York care more than you?  We had a cascade, where each official who adopted these NPI added to the pressure on all the others to do so.  Further, as this NPI became the standard government intervention, the media began to blame deaths in states with fewer interventions on that state's leaders.  Florida had far fewer COVID deaths, particularly given their age demographics, than New York but for the media the NY leaders were angels and the Florida ones were butchers.  For a brief time terrible rushed "studies" were created to prove that these interventions were working, generally by the dishonest tactic of cherry-picking a state with NPI mandates that was not in its seasonal disease peak and comparing it to another state without NPI mandates that was in the heart of its seasonal peak.  (We are, by the way, starting to see a similar cascade around the most recent delta-driven mandates -- just today a random Arizona county with no uptick in COVID hospitalizations just required indoor masking for the vaccinated).

And then the whole thing got polarized around party affiliation and any last vestige of scientific thinking got thrown to the curb.   Take Chloroquine as a possible treatment protocol.  Personally, I have not seen much evidence in its favor but early last year we did not know yet one way or another and there were some reasons to think it might be promising.  And then Donald Trump mentioned it.  After that we had the spectacle of the Michigan Governor banning this treatment absolutely without evidence solely because Trump had touted it on pretty limited evidence.  What a freaking mess.  In addition to giving us all a really beautiful view of the hypocrisy of politicians, it also added another great lie to the standard list.  To "The check is in the mail" and "I will respect you in the morning" is now added "We are following the science."

Incentives for the Public

I won't dwell on this too long, but one thing COVID has made clear to me is that a LOT of people are looking for the world to provide them with drama and meaning.  The degree to which many folks (mostly all well-off white professionals and their families) seem to have enthusiastically embraced COVID restrictions and been reluctant to give them up has just been an amazing eye-opener for me.

Incentives for Businesses

Many businesses have been caught up in the politicized virtue-signaling, making a big deal of their support for or opposition to various NPI.  But even without this political element, businesses were always going to be conservative and mandate a lot of this stuff if for no reason than to avoid liability.  If politicians are worried about blame from the media for deaths if they did not mandate every intervention their neighbors required, just think what a corporation worries about.  Any tort lawyer worth their salt can get a jury to blame a customer or employee death, without evidence, on a company that somehow did not follow the CDC advice of the microsecond.

Next Episode

In our next episode, I will discuss the role of poor selection of metrics for crazy government interventions.  Spoiler alert -- focusing on cases via positive readings on an overly sensitive test has led to a LOT of the most recent wave of stupidity.

The media and politicians are going to try to panic you over case counts.  Relax.  We have tamed COVID down to flu levels or below in terms of seriousness.  People can still test positive after being vaccinated, but they mostly don't die.  And while half the country has not been vaccinated, the half that has is mostly older folks who are most vulnerable.  Link to article

Years ago I wrote about a scammy company that claimed to be making HydroAtomic Nano Gas (HNG) that they claimed to be the solution to a wide range of environmental problems.  They used pseudo-scientific words strung together at random to try to impress non-scientific environmentalists to invest in their company (it works for Elon Musk, so why not?)  Go read the old article for a good laugh.

A reader sent me a note today that this reader had lost a bit of money in this scam and had friends who "lost their house" investing in this honeytrap.  The reader tells me that apparently HydroInfra is back with another name, at a company called HydroNano Infra Power (same great name, now with even more nano!)  Their science is even harder to critique than the old HydroInfra page, as they have even less detail about the supposed chemistry they are claiming.  But everything that is there is just a word salad of jargon meant to impress the scientifically uneducated.  Here is an example (sorry, no text on the site, only scans from a physical brochure).  Click to enlarge.

By the way, I love the Hollywood-esque equipment, obviously stitched together for this picture from everyday items, nearly as ridiculous-looking as the guy carrying the ice cream freezer through Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back.  I bet if we crowdsourced the effort, we could figure out where each of these pieces came from.

Apparently, according to the reader, it is difficult to get legal action taken against even obviously-fraudulent companies.  I can't confirm that, but it does appear these guys are still going strong.

I have never seen anything like the year we are having in the outdoor recreation and camping business, on many fronts.  The problem hiring workers has been discussed before.  But something I have only seen in written up in a few places is what seems to be a growing abusiveness of the public toward service workers.  We have already had a record number of incidents this year of threats by visitors aimed at our employees.  In most cases, the issue seems to be that the employee, usually politely, attempted to enforce a rule or restriction the customer did not want to hear and the customer exploded.

I do not know if this is just an issue in the outdoor business, with a flood of new customers who have never camped before and don't really have clear expectations about what is and is not allowed in a campground.  I don't know if it is some kind of COVID/Lockdown hangover.  I don't know if it is a sign of rising entitlement.  But it is frustrating to have our people treated this way.

I remember a sign I saw in a restaurant years ago, "please be nice to your server, they are harder to get than customers."

Variations of "my body my rights" have been a central theme for the Left for decades.  I am all for this (as long as we are applying it to adults wholeheartedly but more restrictively to minors).  But I have argued for years that this represents faux libertarianism -- the Left believes this absolutely when it comes to abortion (and more recently for gender transitions among minors) but not so much when it comes to any other issues.  You want to eat GMO foods?  Sorry, you can't do that.  Smoke?  Sorry, no dice.  Teenage tanning salon visits?  Sorry, not without more parental paperwork than is required for an abortion.

Here is your latest example, from the most progressive city in the country, San Francisco which is requiring vaccinations of all employees:

So these folks who don't think a couple of decades of testing of GMO foods is enough are requiring injection of a vaccine that has been tested for barely a year (I personally consider it safe and was vaccinated but I also consume GMO foods without reservation -- my body my choice).

By the way, this is from the ACLU website:

Being able to make our own decisions about our health, body and sexual life is a basic human right.

Whoever you are, wherever you live, you have the right to make these choices without fear, violence or discrimination.

Yet all over the world, people are bullied, discriminated against and arrested, simply for making choices about their bodies and their lives.

The ACLU, of course, has been completely missing in action throughout COVID, when we have experienced some of the greatest government intrusions of individual rights in our nation's history.  Lockdowns?  Silence.  Mask mandates?  Silence.   Bans on assembly?  Silence.  Censorship of heterodox opinions on the virus (that turn out to be right)? Silence.  Forced vaccinations?  Silence.  All of this is consistent with the ACLU's transition from being a true civil rights organization to yet another progressive political lobbyist.

I usually don't quote other blog posts in their entirety, but this is so classic that I feel the need to.  This is from Holden Law Group, an excellent resource we use to try desperately to remain in compliance with California Labor law when such law can sometimes change many times in a single year, sometimes retroactively.  California has very onerous rules on businesses for COVID occupational health compliance.  This is an update on those rules:

[[ORIGINAL POST]] Cal/OSHA continued its burlesque impersonation of a 6-year-old child at an ice cream shop this past week.  Originally, on May 7th, the state bureaucracy unveiled proposed changes to the COVID-19 Prevention Emergency Temporary Standards (“ETS”).  However, shortly thereafter, Cal/OSHA announced that it was tabling its final vote on the revisions; and instead, was scheduling an “emergency” meeting for June 3^rd because the proposed changes were not in-line with the guidelines of the California Department of Public Health and federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”). Then, last week at this “emergency” meeting, Cal/OSHA initially indicated that it would indeed reject the proposed ETS changes because they were not consistent with the CDC guidance. However, by the end of the meeting, Cal/OSHA unanimously voted in favor of adopting those very same revisions.  Vanilla.  Chocolate. Yes, Chocolate…. Well…. actually Vanilla.  Definitely, Vanilla. Click here to read on – blog posted June 8, 2021….

[[UPDATE]] After this blog was originally posted, Cal/OSHA had yet another “emergency” meeting on June 9, 2021, this time unanimously voting NOT to adopt the proposed new revisions to its regulations.  Mind you, this is the same Cal/OSHA who unanimously voted TO adopt the revisions just a few days ago – and no new guidance from the CDC or public health officials has occurred in the interim – just a letter from the State Health Officer to Cal/OSHA reminding them that their proposed revisions were inconsistent with federal guidance and that the rest of the State would be following that federal guidance starting June 15th.

So where does that leave us, you ask. By voting not to adopt the proposed revisions, the same old Cal/OSHA regulations which have been in effect since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic will remain in effect for the foreseeable future – regulations which are even MORE inconsistent with federal guidance than were the proposed revisions.  So, for now, Cal/OSHA is back to Chocolate ice cream – stale, well past its expiration date, Chocolate ice cream.

Long before he was President, I would tell everyone who listened that one of Trump's two main business skills was to be able to walk out of the (frequent) bankruptcies of his various ventures with far more money/value than one could rightly expect from his position in the capital structure.  I am not sure if this is chutzpuh or negotiating acumen or related to the other skill, one which almost by definition has to be a skill of every Manhattan developer -- he had connections.  You or I could bring as much money to the table as we would like and we could still never get a building built in Manhattan, at least not without a lot of payoffs.

Anyway, it seems that the egregious Adam Neumann of WeWork has the same skill set.

I know most of you (and I as well, most of the time) are perfectly happy to have the IRS just shut down.   Unfortunately, when one runs a business, there are certain things that have to be done through the IRS, particularly when setting up or reorganizing a new business.  One of my companies made a pro forma request (a subchapter S election) in a request to the IRS dated August 4.  Today, on May 27, I received the one page confirmation that it had been processed.  Unfortunately, I requested the IRS do some more critical things in December, and I am now worried that if there is a FIFO queue then I may have to wait another 4+ months for these to be completed.  The worst of these is we changed our name, and we submitted the change to the IRS to update our FEIN records.  Unfortunately, every time we try to open a bank account or a do a state registration they come back and deny our application because right now the IRS computer shows a mismatch with our FEIN and our new name.  It takes hours and scads of paperwork to explain what is going on every time, making even the smallest things really hard to do.

I want to thank David Hogg for this remarkably honest explanation for why he wears a mask when it is completely unneeded.

While others may not be doing it strictly to avoid looking Conservative, I do think that many young people wear them because they don't want to be mistaken as somehow anti-social or a Neanderthal.

When I am pressured to put a mask on despite having been fully vaccinated 8 weeks ago, I feel like I am signaling as well -- I am signaling that I am a rube who is meekly knuckling under to an irrational state.  It is certainly an eye-opener to see so many of the supposed members of the counter-culture marching in lockstep with state authority.

This is an excerpt from an email from one of my suppliers.  This is happening everywhere:

We are not a company that makes excuses as to quality or service. When things are beyond our control, we will not point fingers and say it's not our fault. However, the climate to conduct business is becoming more difficult daily.

...Employees were allowed to file for financial relief thus finding they could make more money sitting at home than working. The snowball effect started and is getting bigger.

Orders that were placed back in the fall are being filled at this time, 6 months later. Because of the shortage of materials some prices have almost doubled. I cannot tell my customers sorry I know we have an agreement for that however I now have to charge you this. We have honored our prices, we have not been able to honor our time of production to shipping because of circumstances beyond our control.

The list is endless of the domino effect in just about every industry in the country.

It is no accident that today we had a really week payroll report -- we have high unemployment, huge demand for labor, but no one wants to work as long as the government is writing checks to stay home and play Nintendo.  We're experiencing 1970's Swedish socialism, something that turned out to be such a mess that Sweden today is probably more free market in many ways than the US.

Regulation can be sortof kindof tolerable in stable, predictable, and unchanging markets.  But what markets act like that?  In the labor regulation world, for example, regulatory authorities are doing everything they can to kill a wave of innovation in labor markets.  As I tell everyone I discuss this with -- regulators picture workers as punching a time clock in a Pittsburg mill with their supervisor right there and present every moment, with an on-site HR department, and a cafeteria with huge walls for posting acres of labor posters.  Try to have any other relationship with your employees, and it will be like pounding a round peg into a square regulatory hole.  Even something as staggeringly beneficial to worker agency like letting remote workers schedule themselves tends to run afoul of the shift scheduling laws that are sweeping through progressive jurisdictions.

Here is a great example of the cost of regulation to consumers that our company is experiencing in the insurance market.  Last year after all the fires in California, the property insurance market was left in disarray.  My landlord, in many cases the US government, requires that I insured the assets I am leasing from them against wildfire (leave aside the question of why the Federal government which is supposed to be self-insured is paying for such insurance in the form of lower rents from me).

Suddenly, wildfire insurance on wilderness assets like the ones we operate became unobtainable.  After a LOT of education, we convinced the US Forest Service to allow a temporary moratorium on the wildfire insurance requirement in our agreements.  Good news, right?   Now we can just go out and get a property insurance policy that covers all damage but excludes wildfire.

Not so fast!  It turns out every single microscopic variation in insurance rates in California have to be approved by the state insurance commissioner in a time-consuming process that begins long before the policy year.  Well, it turns out most insurance companies don't actually have an approved rate that excludes wildfire coverage.  They won't sell us a policy with the coverage (too risky) and they can't sell the policy without the coverage (not approved).

Regulation can always be costly but can be particularly so when markets need to react quickly to changing conditions.

There are lots of ways to learn and grow skills and college is just one -- historically, most Americans have gained skills and improved their lives through learning and development in the workplace.  Stop the crazy over-credentialism of work.  Stop demanding a $100,000 education expenditure to qualify for a job where zero of the relevant jobs skills were taught in college.   I understand that college is used as a proxy for being long-term focused and goal oriented, but those can be demonstrated at least as well through work.  This is term would (hopefully) ease the pressure to dumb down education for the truly gifted.

Millions of jobs requiring a four-year college degree can be done without that level of education, some corporate leaders say. They suggest that companies shake up their approach to hiring and consider unconventional candidates. https://t.co/XyJQ1HhzXL

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 5, 2021

Postscript:  I will add that a good portion of my executive team and field managers never went to college.  Has zero effect on their performance, except it gives some of them an inferiority complex I have to keep trying to overcome.

It is unbelievable we are allowing these people to rule us

Here are just some of the restrictions:

• Everyone at the camp—including staff and every kid over the age of two—must wear masks at all times, unless they are eating or swimming. They should wear two layers of masks, especially when social distancing is difficult, regardless of "whether activities are indoors or outdoors."
• Campers should be placed in "cohorts," and their interaction with people outside the cohort must be limited.
• There should always be at least three feet between campers of the same cohort, and six feet between campers of different cohorts. Staff should keep six feet away from campers at all times, whether inside or outside. Distance should be maintained while eating, napping, or riding the bus: The CDC suggests seating kids in alternating rows.
• The use of physical objects that might be shared among kids—toys, art supplies, electronics—should be limited wherever possible.
• Camps should not permit close-contact sports and indoor sports, and should require masks regardless.

We are rapidly approaching the point where people who are unvaccinated are that way because they choose to eschew the vaccine.  Here in AZ, which has had a pretty solid vaccination program, tens of thousands of appointments for *free* vaccinations are going unused.  Vaccination rates are falling because people don't want them.

But states like Michigan still require that every citizen's freedoms be restricted until more people are vaccinated.  What if those folks choose never to get the shot?  Are we doomed to the same east-german-style regime forever?

And why should we?  People are making the individual choice that they perceive the risks and costs of vaccination to be higher than that from COVID.  OK, fine.  I disagree with them, but am happy to respect their right to make that decision.  But why do the rest of us still have to tiptoe around them?  They have made their risk choice, why don't we let them live with it and get on with our lives?

The answer is two-fold, and comes back to political incentives.  First, politicians fear they will be blamed for outbreaks of disease among the unvaccinated that raise their state's numbers -- we have lost the ability to talk in terms of individual responsibility and so somehow even when an individual explicitly makes a risk choice, we still want to blame politicians if this choice goes bad.  The other reason is that politicians really don't want to give up the power they have -- they have gained powers unprecedented in American history through declarations of health emergencies and fanning the flames of irrational fears, and they don't want to give those back.  Any excuse to extend the emergency will be grasped.

CNN: Biden Admin Wants to Outsource Spying on Americans to Private Firms to Bypass Fourth Amendment

The Biden administration is considering using private firms to track the online activity of American citizens in order to get around the Fourth Amendment and other laws that protect Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures and surveillance. The report says that the Biden administration wants to monitor “extremist chatter by Americans online” but can’t do so without a warrant, and thinks private firms can get around the legal restrictions.

I sit on a lot of boards of trade groups and business roundtables of various sorts.  And the #1 exclusive topic -- seriously, we talk about nothing else right now -- is the inability to hire people because the government is still paying millions or people to not work.  In restaurants, campgrounds, stores, manufacturers and scores of other industries, companies are ready right now to put more people to work but cannot because the government is paying people too much money to stay home and they can't get the workers they need.  Bounties, higher salaries, and incentives are all futile when candidate after candidate says that they won't look for work until the government payments stop.

So of course, the Biden Administration is proposing to pay more people not to work:

According to a White House fact sheet, the AFP would create a national comprehensive paid family and medical leave program, funded through tax increases, and paying workers up to $4,000 a month. Under that cap, it would replace a minimum of two-thirds of average weekly wages, rising to 80 percent for the lowest-wage workers.

The proposal does not define "lowest-wage workers," however, and left out details about whether eligibility would differ from current FMLA. Those specifics will be addressed when Congress drafts an actual bill.

Biden proposed that the program be phased in over a 10-year period, guaranteeing 12 weeks of paid parental, family illness, personal illness or safety-related leave by year 10. Workers would receive three days of bereavement leave per year starting in year one.

This is one of those bait and switch programs that are sold on the most extreme forms of eligibility -- ie they talk about leave to help a dying child but in the FMLA there are so many random and poorly defined leave rules that pretty much everyone qualifies.  We had a woman in California who worked for us that liked the job but hated the busy summer season and so scheduled elective surgery every year around Memorial Day to get out of working the summer -- and that was when it was unpaid!  I can't even imagine the abuse of a leave program paying up to $48,000 a year for not working.

I have been close to writing this post off and on for almost a full year.  Starting back in the early days of COVID when the media used graphics about droplet spray patterns with and without masks as "proof" that masks work to slow the spread of COVID.

I was going to write about how dumb this was, but I assumed that other scientific voices would soon skewer these studies and thus it would be a waste of my time.  But lo and behold, while many careful scientific minds did recognize the flaws in these studies, the large news and social media companies have been pretty diligent about preventing any heterodox opinions on masks from getting wide circulation.

And so it stood until the other day when someone once again threw these droplet studies at me as proof that masks reduce the spread of seasonal viruses like COVID.  OK, here is the problem:

It is best to think first in terms of an analogy.  You have a car and want to prove that at any time of day, you could drive 60 miles across Los Angeles in an hour.  So to "prove" that, you take the car our to a test track and show that yes indeed, your car can sustain 60 miles an hour for extended periods of time.

Hopefully the flaws with this are obvious.  Proving a car can go 60 miles an hour is not the same as proving a car can drive 60 miles in an hour in real world conditions, particularly in LA at, say, 5 in the afternoon.

In the same way, showing that a clean, new mask can stop the projection of droplets of liquid does not in any way demonstrate that they are effective in limiting the spread of a virus in real world conditions.  Others can probably add more to the logic problems here, but just a few are:

• Are large droplets even primarily responsible for the spread of COVID  (remember, the COVID virus is WAY smaller than the holes in the weave of most masks)?
• What happens when the mask is worn for a while and becomes saturated from the virus of an infected person.  Aren't they now just blowing out all day through a film of COVID, like a kid blowing bubbles with a bubble wand?
• Are masks efficacious when almost none of them are sealed to the user's face?
• Is there any evidence of transmission in certain environments, like outdoors on a sidewalk, with our without a mask?

The fact is that the sum of studies before 2020 on the efficacy of public mask wearing to limit the spread of seasonal viruses were equivocal as best.  No one thought they did much good.  People will respond, "well, you wouldn't want your doctor to do surgery on you without a mask" but in fact even the evidence on post-operative infection with and without surgeon's mask use is equivocal  (it is also an absurd analogy as I don't think anyone in Walmart will be hovering over an open incision in my body for 4 hours).   And certainly most (all?) of the quality studies since COVID on masks and virus spread have shown little or no mask effectiveness (there have been a few studies that have purported to show mask effectiveness but they had cherry-picked endpoints that compared one geography outside of its COVID season with another that was in it -- see more here).

Postscript:  I am in Knoxville for a day and had two different experiences.  Last night at the Lonesome Dove restaurant was the first time I have been in a restaurant where no one, not even the servers, wore masks.   A small return to sanity.  But then the next morning I went to an indie books store near market square that had a couple of people browsing and the proprietor would not let us in because they were over their COVID capacity limit (as I said to my wife, when your business model is heading for a cliff it is probably best not to stomp on the accelerator).

Postscript#2:  I know others have observed this but it is amazing how many of the people who do where masks when they are not required are under 25 -- and essentially immune from any major consequences.  Is this virtue-signaling?  A gesture of solidarity? Fear of authority?  Scientific cluelessness?  It is a very strange time when the young are mindlessly following authority and the older folks are skeptical.   The analogies I can think of is the German youth movement pre-WWI who were big supporters of war as a romantic endeavor and the young Chinese of the cultural revolution.

Update #3:  As a by the way, in case you every get to Knoxville and are looking for a nice place to stay in the downtown or university area, the Tennessean is the place to go.  Only slightly more expensive than other hotels nearby but has really top quality service and rooms  -- Four Seasons level IMO at a third the price.

It is always dangerous when a non-religious person tries to make a statement about religious belief, especially when we get to complicated arguments about double predestination and supralapsarianism.  But for our limited purposes in this post, in Calvinism salvation and damnation are pre-ordained by God at the beginning of time --thus faith and good works have no bearing on being saved or damned.

I have come to believe that this is largely true of COVID-19, ie that the actions of man (at least as far as non-pharmaceutical interventions are concerned) have little or nothing to do with case rates and virus spread in any particular region.  Different geographies have different seasons for the virus, and trying to attribute low case rates or high case rates to the presence or lack of government interventions / restrictions is futile.  You can see that as location after location that was praised or damned at some point for its supposed good or bad handling of the virus have since seen opposite results.

There are a few exceptions to this, but very few.   On the positive side, the accelerated vaccine development programs were a near miracle, producing multiple viable vaccines WAY faster than I ever thought possible.  On the negative side, ordering infected people into long-term care facilities was a disaster.  But beyond these few exceptions, most of everything else didn't do squat.  The great regression analysis someone does someday on virus transmission rates across geographies is going to have seasonal variables, demographics, and urbanization with most of the explanatory power.

From Glen Greenwald

Twice in the last year, I have written about this bizarre practice where media outlets purport to “independently confirm” one another's false stories by doing nothing more than going to the same anonymous sources who whisper to them the same things while providing no evidence. Yet they use this phrase “independent confirmation” to purposely imply that they obtained separate evidence corroborating the truth of the original story

This awful practice, which I see all the time, let's one anonymous source create a fictional narrative that dominates news cycles.

If you are not reading Glen Greenwald, you should.  When I recommend that a Marxist should be on your reading list, take that seriously.  If you don't want to pay, his work generally appears free a couple of days later on Zero Hedge and other places.  Today's quote is from today's email blast on yet another Russian conspiracy theory, crafted apparently to stop the US's overdue exit from Afghanistan, which now appears to have been almost completely fabricated.

Many of the early failings in COVID response can be laid right at the doorstep of the CDC and FDA.

Shortages of testing?  The FDA refused to approve an tests except those developed at the CDC, and then the CDC tests failed.  Later, the FDA was really slow and conservative in approving new test approaches (eg home testing).

Shortages of PPE?  We learned that PPE manufacturers were all heavily regulated by the FDA, and FDA rules prevented quick ramp-ups, while liability rules made folks like 3M reluctant to shift N95 masks from non-medical to medical markets.

Slow vaccine rollout?  The FDA was its usual conservative self in approving vaccines, and refused to give any credit to vaccines approved by other western nations.  THEY had to approve it too.

First doses first?  No way, the CDC and FDA would not even consider it.   The conservative approach was to insist the vaccines be used exactly as originally tested, despite testing on the Pfizer vaccine showing that 1 dose of it was over 80% effective.  Now we see the world leader in reducing cases is the UK, which is the one country that did first doses first.

In a sane world, the CDC and FDA would have gotten hammered for what could be described as following peacetime rules in during wartime.  Add to that their ever-shifting and contradictory guidance, and guidance on NPI's that went against the sum of scientific research that had been published pre-2020, and you should have expected a LOT of media scrutiny of them in 202o.   Instead there was virtually none, and if anything the media fetishized and hero-worshipped these agencies.  Why?

As usual, the answer is Trump.  By 2020 the media was in the habit of blaming everything on Trump.  If COVID tests were in short supply, it must be Trump's fault.  No further scrutiny was needed.  In fact, no further scrutiny was wanted, because no explanation excerpt for "Trump's fault" was wanted.  Granted Trump helped them to some extent by his usual habit of off-the-cuff stupid statements.  But the media went ever further -- they wanted an anti-pole to Trump, and these agencies and morons like Dr. Fauci were elevated to sainthood not because they did anything right but because they could be portrayed as not-Trump.

For the media, whatever the FDA or CDC said represented scientific consensus.  Which is a horrible bastardization of science.  The FDA and CDC are not "science" and scientific "consensus", if such a thing is even real, is based on a quasi-antagonistic process of challenge and response between differing hypotheses (a process by the way the media actually undermined by de-platforming one side of many of the COVID-related debates) and not dictats by government agencies.  The FDA and CDC are populated by politicians and government bureaucrats who happen to have scientific degrees.  They are subject to all the same influences and bad incentives as any other political organization.  For example, in the government there are very different risk profiles between action and inaction.  Essentially, bureaucrats are seldom held accountable for deaths and harm from inaction -- if people die because they are slow to approve a new drug or procedure, no one puts that on them.  But they try to avoid at all costs approving something that eventually hurts someone, even if that harm is far less than the benefits of what they approved.  But instead of making all this clear, the media granted them the secular form of Papal infallibility.

So now we arrive at April 2021, and the FDA shut down the use of the J&J vaccine because it has about a 1 in a million chance of causing blood clots and a one in 6 million chance of causing a fatality.  People seem suddenly surprised that the FDA would do such a thing that is obviously so irrational (the number of lives saved by the vaccine is  -- by everyone's estimate -- orders of magnitude larger that those who have died from this side effect that may not actually even be due to the vaccine).

What is surprising to me is that anyone is surprised.  The FDA has ALWAYS acted this way.  Libertarians have called them out of this for years (thus, for example, libertarian-sponsored right to try laws).  In particular, failure after failure of COVID response in 2020 can be laid right at the FDA's doorstep, but we were just having too much fun demonizing Trump to actually look for root causes.  Well, now our inattention has come back to bite us with this absurd FDA decision.  The only good thing that can come from it is the potential that we might finally consider some reforms.

Joe Biden is kind of stuck on COVID.  He campaigned on all the things Trump did wrong in his COVID response, but the only policy step of note that I can see that Biden has done differently is to issue a mask mandate for all federal property where Trump eschewed making NPI mandates at the Federal level, preferring to leave it to state and local governments based on their local conditions.  If this is really the case, expect Biden to be about the last man standing on government mask mandates, at least in the US.  My guess is that he will use continued cases or low vaccine rates in some state as an excuse to say that he can't drop the mandate until everyone in the US is ready  (forgetting how insane this is particularly when a more logical Federalist solution exists for the problem).

Biden is trying to claim credit for vaccination rates but it is hard to think of anything he has actually done to boost these rates since most all vaccines are administered by local folks and the vaccines were developed and funded on Trump's watch.  The only major decision Biden has made, which I actually think was a setback, was to declare that the US would not take a first doses first strategy used so successfully in the UK.  Biden has declared a goal of 100 vaccines in 100 days, but this is pretty much meaningless, the equivalent of a random dude running to the front of a parade and claim to be leading it.  Someone in his shop merely took a chart and of vaccination rates and projected it forward and determined about 100 million looked like they would be done in 100 days and so adopted this as a goal, hoping to retroactively convince people they caused this rather than just predicted it.  I would love someone in the press to ask Biden to name three things his Administration did that measurably accelerated the vaccination pace.

Like many, I find Trump irritating and distasteful and I have trouble saying nice things about him but he got a range of vaccines funded and got the US first in line for doses by pre-paying.  Its hard to think of anyone else who did more to help the crisis.  This helps me forget things like the botched testing development, which was really the FDA's and the CDC's fault but a different leader might have kicked those agencies out of their obstinate blocking role and into a more productive mode.

UPDATE:  I will add that the recent CDC / FDA decision to stop the J&J vaccine due to a 1 in a million non-fatal side effect seems like a terrible decision.  Again, possibly not Biden's decision, but like my criticism of Trump and testing, Biden could exercise some leadership here.  This is the price for fetishizing the CDC and FDA as all-knowing consensus voices of "science" that are not to be doubted, even to the point of having heterodox youtube videos taken down.  Because 1) These guys like Fauci are not scientists per se, but government bureaucrats with science degrees.  And as I have written many many times, government employees have incentives that lead to high risk aversion for acts of commission and low risk aversion for acts of omission.  Which means they put much higher weight on a death from a very easy to count and identify side effect that they could have stopped by stopping the vaccine than they do on deaths that are impossible to count or to see that were caused by the vaccine delay.  And 2) the idea of "scientific consensus" is a chimera and a term only used by non-scientists and a small group of government scientists that want to wield their position as a club to exercise power.  Seriously, how does such a consensus even exist if one side never was allowed to debate?  This is consensus as defined by Stalin or Mao.

In some recent debates over the Great Barrington Declaration, critics of that proposal argued that we didn't know that COVID was only a relatively small threat to healthy people under 65.  But we did know, as early as April or at worst May.  I know I was writing about it.  Just think of all the articles you have read with the theme of "everyone, not just old people, need to be terrified of COVID" and then look at this:

People over 65 make up only 18% of the UK population but clearly accounted for 90+% of the deaths.

Here is the calculus as I see it:  I was 58 when this all started.  Let's assume I have 20 good years.  Hiding in my home and not doing the things I enjoy for a whole year, as preached by Fauci and company, would have wasted 5% of my remaining life.  Instead, by ignoring them and going about my business, I was taking perhaps a 1/2000 chance of dying to the disease or 0.05% (I actually think given my health and weight that this is exaggerated).  These two numbers are not even close.  They are not one but two full orders of magnitude apart.  When presented with these numbers, and given my preferences, it would have been wildly irrational (or demonstrated extreme risk aversion) for me to follow the advice and dictats of the coronabros.

In my post about the Sunday NY Times article on the B.1.1.7 COVID variant, I expressed skepticism that it really was substantially more deadly than other variants.  While this is possible, on average we expect viruses to mutate in a way that they are more communicable but less deadly (there are no rewards in the parasite world for killing the host).

Specifically I said:

My personal bet is that we will see a story buried on page 34 in August saying that original relative death studies for this [B.1.1.7] variant appear to have been exaggerated.  When the NY Times is hyping a scare story that increases the power of government, particularly in a Democratic administration, take the under.

Well, I was wrong.  Rather than in August, the predicted story was buried in the Wall Street Journal one day later

Clear evidence has emerged that B.1.1.7 transmits more easily than earlier variants, which helped enable its rapid spread. Whether the variant is associated with more severe disease and death has been less certain, however...

In the new study, the researchers took samples collected in early November from 341 Covid-19 patients admitted to University College London Hospitals or North Middlesex University Hospital. The researchers sequenced genetic material from the samples to determine the viral variant that caused the infection, used the test results to estimate how much virus the patients harbored and then compared the two groups.

Nearly 60% of the Covid-19 patients had an infection caused by the B.1.1.7 variant, and patients hospitalized with B.1.1.7 were younger, had fewer health conditions and more often received an oxygen mask than those admitted with other variants, the study found.

Yet the researchers didn’t find that those with a B.1.1.7 infection had more severe disease outcomes such as needing ventilation or dying, after accounting for other factors such as age, ethnicity and underlying conditions.

I will be more careful than the NY Times, who cherry-picked one study result on the far end of the scale of results to date, and acknowledge that the study results -- all based on small samples and uncontrolled population groups -- are mixed.  But evidence both of prior meta-studies as well as this new one give us little reason to believe that this variant is substantially more deadly.