thymolu

I've been watching playthroughs because I don't want to purchase the setup for Alyx at the moment for several reasons. My impression matches yours. It seems like a great game, but in watching it, I realized it's basically all the urban City 17 setting of HL2, which was my least favorite setting of the previous HL2 episodes. It reminds me of a very well-done variant of HL2:E1, which I found very intense and claustrophobic. I'm very interested in playing it but maybe less so than if the game involved a wider range of environments. I can't fault Valve for focusing on what they did, but at the moment something more relaxing or casual is more commensurate with my mood.

This strikes me as tone deaf at a time when the focus should be on systemic failures and possible improvements, and the millions who will be impacted.

This is a defense in fear of Fauci being let go, given the patterns of the administration in many other areas.

I have a starter that is about 40 years old now. Recently before the pandemic I was given a new starter by someone who didn't realize I had one (or did and thought I'd want to try a different one).

The flavors are pretty surprisingly similar but not exactly the same. The older one is a little more complex or something but I'm not sure most people would know the difference, especially if you didn't tell them.

Once a levain/starter gets going it's usually pretty stable I think. Maybe older cultures are more resistant to prolonged shocks, but I think it depends on the case. In general I have a theory that older cultures are an opportunity to evolve them to different conditions, like time between changes in storage conditions (which might affect things like rising time), alcohol levels (useful for sugar levels in breads), temperature, etc.

This is the tip of the iceberg with these sorts of contracts, and many of the issues aren't specific to ventilators or the current pandemic.

This has been my concern all along, that flattening the curve and whatnot is misleading without considering what happens at the end of distancing efforts. If you end up with the same exponential growth after inducing widespread costs from mitigation, it seems you're worse off.

On the other hand, at least where I'm at, politicians and policy makers have been explicit in saying the social distancing policies are about buying time: time to improve hospital readiness, time to develop quicker cheaper tests, time to develop antibody tests, and so forth. The benefits of this extra time have to be weighed against the costs ( which turn out to be counterintuitive based on empirical data ), but it's important.

The author acknowledges this and I don't think it's their point, which is to be clear about the effects of mitigation and therefore why you might or might not do it. But I think its also important to keep in mind a non-steady-state-based model time endpoint has justifications too.

One thing on my mind with this is how different the cause is. In many cases, like the great recession, I'd say there was an internal structural, systemic cause for the collapse. But in this case, it's a virus, coupled with top down government lockdowns. That doesn't mean it doesn't economically matter, but wouldn't the recovery process be different, maybe faster?

This is just me thinking out loud; I also expect this line of reasoning could be really misguided. It's not like there aren't any structural problems in the world at the moment.

I'm of the libertarian persuasion too, but I'm really more of what I might refer to as a competitivist, that the government ideally increases competitive exchange of goods services and ideas. Sometimes this means more government services, sometimes less. Regulation is also different from service or resource provision.

In a lot of ways, this crisis was worsened by overregulation. The FDA and CDC to some extent contributed to testing shortages by emphasizing centralized micromanaging of test protocol over test availability. It was entirely preventable.

Many of the crunches we're seeing are due to rent seeking monopolies restricting provider pools and other red tape, that are entirety self inflicted. You're starting to see glimpses of this problem with things like lifting interstate licensing practice constraints, but it's the tip of the iceberg.

US healthcare needs a lot more public support in the form of single payer, etc, but also needs a lot of deregulation.

Libertarianism isn't anarchism either. Healthcare is one of those areas where I think public services makes a lot of sense.

My family (and myself) work as various healthcare providers.

One of them said a few days ago masks and other supplies were stolen from a delivery truck that was broken into as the driver went in to start the delivery to the hospital.

My sense is there's a lot of leakiness in supply of various forms.

My experience is similar to those of others here: it's not really clear there's a substantial increased patient count at the hospitals here, test or not, but supplies are getting scarcer. Maybe other areas of the country or world are creating shortages.

Testing is a mess, but that's a different issue, one maybe more relevant to public health and policies in some ways.

Is it reasonable to track everyone's detailed location during a pandemic though? What purpose does it serve in the absence of good molecular testing info, which would be an even grosser violation of privacy?

General levels of social distancing can be gleaned without phone location info. All you need to do is have police drive around and look.

The problem with requests like this, for detailed phone data, is that everyone can imagine vague benefits in the abstract, and wants to be helpful, so you're more willing to cede protections of privacy (which are ultimately protections of liberty). But those vague abstract benefits don't necessarily translate into actual benefits if you think it through.

I don't see anything necessary about phone surveillance at this time whatsoever. What is necessary is mass testing.