How the actual disease progress
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Silver lining. I'm pretty sure this is going to accelerate the climate action roadmap as a silver lining.
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fwiw I'm specifically thinking of the direct impact of widespread installation of remote/virtual work habits and the effect on business-driven energy consumption. Not generic installation of civic consciousness or collective action ethos or idealistic stuff like that.
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Newspapers should make their virus coverage free... seattle times already did it I think, but LA times isn't doing it... if a random blogger/newsletter guy like me can afford to make most of my writing free, a newspaper should be able to figure it out for public service stuff
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Real-time tracker
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Real-time coronavirus tracker, ht @scrivenix arcgis.com/apps/opsdashbo
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Pandemics are not ergodic. The chances of 100 people catching covid-19 today are not the same as the chances of 1 of those 100 catching it in the next 100 days.
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Thread on org lessons
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I'm trying to look out for structural/organizational lessons that go beyond the basics like avoiding large gatherings, higher decentralization etc. One that struck me is the perils of specialization in healthcare that leads to 1 contact turning into dozens or more.
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Stub for linking in Perrow's Normal Accidents model (2 unrelated things combining in a complex system). We haven't yet seen impact of thatCovid-19 is going to be a sustained 18-month "strike 1" and *any* strike 2 will cause normal accidents (wildfire, quakes, extreme weather)
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Thought that occurred to me that will likely occur to a lot of people is: this thing will decimate (as in 10% sense, but perhaps higher) the older boomers and silents. The “glee except for *my* parents and close elders” reaction will be tempting. But the contradiction is telling.
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Whatever your politics on generational demographic/power imbalance in an aging population that’s living longer, thinking of a pandemic as a rebalancing force is dumb at Thanos levels of simplistic meathead politics. Your instinct to treat your parents as exception reveals why
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Humans evolved to take care of elderly for complex reasons and it shows up as instinct to look out for one’s own parents. The previous generation is your future. You’ll likely live longer than today’s 70+ crowd. What you do today for them is what will be done for you in 30 years.
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Trying to get ahead of the inevitable macabre/dank anti-boomer glee narrative. If I can think this thought others can likely go nuts with it.
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Thread on older contagion reads, movies etc
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Thread of good older things to do with pandemics. Old classic on bureaucratic heroism, riffing on the Contagion movie nplusonemag.com/online-only/on
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‘The message from the federal government was blunt. “What they said on that phone call very clearly was cease and desist to Helen Chu,” Dr. Lindquist remembered. “Stop testing.”’ via stratechery.com/2020/zero-trus
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To be clear this is one thing that can be directly blamed on Trump systematically dismantling/undermining the CDC’s mission for 2+ years. It’s not generic bureaucratic malaise and incompetence. For once Hanlon’s razor does not apply. This is active malice.
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On a more personal front, my office is now on WFH protocol. Kinda ironic that the one year in a decade that I have an actual office to go to, it gets shut down. I was kinda enjoying larping the paycheck life while it lasted.
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I only have a few terry pratchetts left to go, and am saving them up as emergency cheer rations for later. Quarantine escapism is going to be tough.
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Forecasting thread on before/after shifts.
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Post-pandemic before/after speculative prediction/forecasting thread. Will try to capture ideas that occur to me in a non-valuative way (ie, avoid tagging as dark age/return to light)
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Thread on testing debacle
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WHY AMERICA HAS NO IDEA HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE #COVID19 :
(thread in response to @devisridhar query)
1.) In January Trump admin decided CDC would invent test kits, FDA would approve them
2.) CDC kits stalled at FDA approval stage for long time
3.) States started screaming
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In general, what makes this a narrative collapse is that it is the first true social media pandemic, where the possibility of conducting a global conversation in real time changes what it means to us. This pandemic will be live tweeted in exactly the way Spanish Flu was not.
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