20) I know of very few software companies that couldn't go full remote permanently. I'm not predicting any historic shift at this point though, mainly because I thought we'd see most tech firms commit to permanent full remote in week one of the lockdowns, and that didn't happen.
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31) Covid never took off in Hong Kong because the people led the effort. The state had very little work to do when they actually kicked into gear. Mass adoption of pathogen defense is the silver bullet, but there has been no attempt to do that in the US.
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32) If we do ever adopt a defense in depth strategy in the West I expect comprehensive gaslighting from the established institutions, just like what happened with masks, or what could easily happen if hydroxychloroquine trials work out. Nobody will learn the lesson.
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33) That inability to learn lessons even at tremendous cost is precisely why we need to completely replace most of our institutions. We had our chance for incrementalism and we squandered it. Now we have our chance to be nonviolently revolutionary. Let's hope we use it.
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34) Stasis is not a thing in politics. You can have relatively stable conditions for long periods of time, but things are constantly shifting in all manner of dimensions. There is no status quo ante that we can return to. No changes are permanent, but change is.
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35) I just don't understand the thought process that feeds into wanting to ban guns while simultaneously being terrified of political rivals who have guns that aren't going away even in a ban scenario. Why not arm up yourself? Is it just hoplophobia? Why do most progs think this?
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36) I've been thinking a lot lately about Georgism and its prospects. The wave of neo-Georgist thought characterized by the Weyl-Posner work is still building, but to what end I'm not sure. They present an excellent grab bag of ideas, but with few paths to implemention.
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37) I think Georgism and the land value tax was kneecapped by the emergence of the far less just, far easier to manipulate income tax regimes that we have today, and I think that kneecapping happened because the oligarchs of the time wanted it to.
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39) Major universities have similar corruption patterns to the monastic estates of the Renaissance.
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40) 20th century prog institutions increasingly resemble a decayed ancien regime.
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41) The fact that people have a hard time thinking about the possible outcomes of drastic political change over short periods of time is exactly what makes those moments of dramatic change dangerous.
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43) Blue tribe people should understand that the charitable explanation for shutdown fetishism is that supporters are out of touch and don't understand the conditions being experienced on the ground. The less charitable explanation is increasingly the consensus among some people.
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44) By the time early March came around even I was supportive of a multiweek national service industry lockdown and office work-from-home order. Most firms were sending their staff home anyway. We needed to buy time to scale up a response. And then nobody in government did shit.
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45) Think about that. We shut down the entire economy. People mostly complied, knowing they were putting their livelihoods at risk, out of genuine civic and humanitarian spirit. And the bureaucrats at every level of government pissed away the time that we bought them.
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46) Why should we trust these institutions with anything ever again? Why should we trust the alphabet soup to do its job in any matter of consequence? What titanic failures happen under the surface and never float to the top for the public to see?
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47) Action and inaction have consequences, and those consequences always play out one way or another. We've had zero accountability for the institutions that have steered our society into disaster after disaster over the last few decades. This will all eventually come to a head.
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48) When it does, the people in the institutions who slept through this had better hope the reckoning stays limited to hearings, sackings, and new names for some agencies. I have a feeling it's gonna go a lot further than that, and I just hope things stay peaceful.
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49) Young people in DC need to pick what side of this they plan to be on, because the barbarians are gonna be at the gates soon and it's not gonna go well for people who don't throw the doors open. You really don't want to be a part of Team Status Quo Ante.
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50) My immediate family's quarantine morale is high. That said, there's a lot of rational concern about the next month, mainly on the economic and political side.
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51) Been thinking a lot about quarantine morale as a measurable thing. You could gauge response to various degrees of lockdown with phone and email surveys. I'd imagine freely available public sentiment data on that sort of stuff would be useful to a wide range of groups.
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52) When I worked in polling we did a lot of data collection on forward-looking sentiment in specific emotional terms and then layered health data over it. Sicker areas were more negative in aggregate, which makes sense. Thinking about how we could measure that right now.
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53) One thing I'd like to look for is a "Blitz mentality" with regard to quarantine, and what that might look like relative to peoples own expectations about outcomes over time.
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End of conversation
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