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Others have mentioned the size of projects, which might be true.

Another factor is the incentive structure. There's immense pressure to obtain grants (due to indirect fund income) and focus on h factors increases this as well. The best case strategy given both of those incentives is to have large groups of people who each submit as many grants and papers as possible, and put each other on each submission. That way, even with a high grant failure rate each will bring some money in, and self-citations to a paper will be multiplied by the number of authors.

The missing variable in this is what happens when you lift lockdown in the absence of a treatment or vaccine.

Comparisons with eg Sweden at this point have always seemed strange to me because the whole point of a herd immunity approach is to increase exposure initially, which will necessarily involve deaths being less spread out. The real question is, after a year, what's the total excess mortality including non-COVID cases due to delayed treatments due to lockdown etc. (which are never included in the models, which focus on one disease, and would take time to manifest) ?

I'm not opposed to shelter in place but the endgame logic has always been unclear, and as such, classist. The right way to do it, for example, is to pay people to stay home.

It's not even correlational. They didn't even have a group of non-COVID patients to compare to, which would have been really easy. They could have looked at non-COVID ICU patients as well and did not. That would have at least been correlational.

Related to this is that the current circumstances are different from, say, 2008, which was a sort of internal collapse. A lot of this is external, regulation-driven. Not saying it's not a bad situation, or all government shutdowns of the economy, but there is a big element of it.

A lot of businesses are cutting back because people can't go out and do what they'd normally do legally. So when governments start easing restrictions, people [stockholders] are probably more optimistic because the situation seems more tractable. It's a lot more predictable than 2008 when people were talking about the collapse of fundamental financial institutions and systems involved in monetary supply because of their underlying structural composition.

I do think there's some disconnects in interpreting the stock market, but it seems to me investors are just seeing restrictions being eased, daily COVID case counts on a downward trajectory, etc. They're reinvesting in markets they see a path of recovery in, early.

What's less certain to me is if in say, July, this all gets worse again with overrun hospitals, etc. in a second wave. Then markets might really take a nosedive.

I'll say for a long time I was the same way, until I bought a Prius.

A little while after I bought it, prices actually went up over what I purchased it for, and I was getting letters from Toyota dealerships offering to buy it back from me above my cost.

It's declined in value since then, but still runs well (knock on wood).

This isn't saying used cars aren't worth it -- they definitely are -- but for certain scenarios I think the choice is maybe more complicated than I thought for a long time.

It's interesting to me when others come up with similar conclusions independently.

There's studies of sales of works (books etc) and iirc, at least with books, the vast majority of sales are within the first several years, with income trailing after that. This has come up in discussions of zombie rights to works, where a publisher sits on something out of print without releasing new copies because the return isn't enough. It's like the textbook reason for limits on copyright terms. Last I looked at it, 30 years was more than sufficient to cover the bulk of sales in almost all cases. If you think back 30 years now, that would be works released pre 1980s and earlier. That makes intuitive sense to me.

Business opportunity in that current asymmetry?

My guess is there will be mandatory testing for students wanting to return, along with heavy disease surveillance. I also suspect even places claiming "normal operation" will not actually be normal — certain things will be virtual and other things not. There will likely be some reshuffling of teaching assignments too.

I noticed also (former professor) that my institution is now heavily incentivizing early retirement for those getting close to qualifying, and are not shy about linking it to coronavirus.

Finally, I think a lot of social distancing guidelines apply technically in many situations with lectures, etc.

It will be an interesting semester.

We have geothermal HVAC. When we moved in we had that water heating setup, but then changed the water heater (natural gas tank). When we did, we asked about hooking up the desuperheater again and were told the energy savings weren't worth it on newer water heating units because of the efficiency. This is coming from a well respected company in the area that specializes in geothermal and heat pumps, and generally has bent over backwards to suggest improvements to all sorts of things in other ways (I also am pretty sure they installed the original system).

Not sure if they were right or wrong, but my experience with a lots of these heating and cooling things is that the real world efficiencies are often different from theoretical values.

I would but I have a young child and spouse. It's not even so much the risk of serious medical complications for me, it's the complications involved in isolating myself, if that were even possible. It's one thing to increase your risk of exposure with a family; it's another to deliberately infect yourself. Definitely not saying it's morally wrong necessarily, just that I haven't quite figured out a way to do it in which my family would feel ok with it or understand.

I've found that if you restrict purchases to goods in "preowned" condition for a lot of things you basically get the same Ebay as before.

The tricky part is that there's a lot of people selling preowned goods as "new", usually they're items they purchased or received as a gift they never used. I think they're trying to emphasize the unused nature of the items, but nowadays they just get lost in the noise of direct-from-the-factory items.

I'm a former professor (tenured) and have been watching from the sidelines. I've been discussing this all with my friends still in university faculty positions.

I agree with you 100% but think the prospects of returning are not nearly as dire as some are making it out to be. I also think it depends a lot on the institution.

A lot of schools are going to reopen in the fall. By then there will be incredibly extensive testing and lockdowns will be mostly gone by a couple of months at least. If the quarantines continue the economic losses will boil over and there will be riots. There will be an increase in cases in the summer and then it will subside.

Many schools won't have any choice but to reopen. When they do, they'll probably offer extensive testing to incoming students as a service, probably some sort of current-status test as well as antibody test, as a courtesy and safety matter. They'll also make it incredibly easy to get for students who return, and will probably have a lot of policies in place to allow students on campus, and probably will have some kind of hybrid system in place where smaller seminars and classes will meet normally, but other things will kind of be pushed to a combination of online classes and smaller in-person classes. Large lectures will be gone for year or so, which probably should have been the case anyway. Students will be on campus again, but will be offered a lot of health services and courses won't be quite the same. Sports might be on hold in the fall.

College age students are probably the lowest risk of COVID complications of any age group, which will ease concerns about pandemics.

The bottom line is it doesn't matter what 20-year professors say. The students don't have anything else to do, and for a lot of them, they're not spending their own money anyway, or it's money that's all in the future in the form of debt. So rather than sitting at home, with their parents they tried to escape, they'll return. Open the doors and they will come.

Besides this, the feds will throw money at the universities like there's no tomorrow as a way of stimulating whatever they can. It's easy to politically justify. There won't be many strings attach to bring needed reforms (for example, eliminating indirect funds on grants) as now is not the time to ratchet down the screws. As a result the inexorable march toward nationalized higher education will continue even more among R1 institutions.

Smaller schools might struggle if they don't have enough money, and public unis being screwed by states or municipalities already (Arizona, as an example) will be in crisis. But many others will grumble and panic and then be fine.

I wish like hell this crisis would instigate a lot of changes to the bullshit that is higher ed at the moment, but it will not. And I disagree with Prof. Klein in her advice, at least as blanket advice that applies to everyone: students should consider their unique situation, as every case will be different in these times.