Skip to content
By using Twitter’s services you agree to our Cookies Use. We and our partners operate globally and use cookies, including for analytics, personalisation, and ads.

This is the legacy version of twitter.com. We will be shutting it down on June 1, 2020. Please switch to a supported browser, or disable the extension which masks your browser. You can see a list of supported browsers in our Help Center.

  • Home Home Home, current page.
  • About

Saved searches

  • Remove
  • In this conversation
    Verified accountProtected Tweets @
Suggested users
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Language: English
    • Bahasa Indonesia
    • Bahasa Melayu
    • Català
    • Čeština
    • Dansk
    • Deutsch
    • English UK
    • Español
    • Filipino
    • Français
    • Hrvatski
    • Italiano
    • Magyar
    • Nederlands
    • Norsk
    • Polski
    • Português
    • Română
    • Slovenčina
    • Suomi
    • Svenska
    • Tiếng Việt
    • Türkçe
    • Ελληνικά
    • Български език
    • Русский
    • Српски
    • Українська мова
    • עִבְרִית
    • العربية
    • فارسی
    • मराठी
    • हिन्दी
    • বাংলা
    • ગુજરાતી
    • தமிழ்
    • ಕನ್ನಡ
    • ภาษาไทย
    • 한국어
    • 日本語
    • 简体中文
    • 繁體中文
  • Have an account? Log in
    Have an account?
    · Forgot password?

    New to Twitter?
    Sign up
vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

Tweets

  • © 2020 Twitter
  • About
  • Help Center
  • Terms
  • Privacy policy
  • Imprint
  • Cookies
  • Ads info
Dismiss
Previous
Next

Go to a person's profile

Saved searches

  • Remove
  • In this conversation
    Verified accountProtected Tweets @
Suggested users
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @

Promote this Tweet

Block

  • Tweet with a location

    You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

    Your lists

    Create a new list


    Under 100 characters, optional

    Privacy

    Copy link to Tweet

    Embed this Tweet

    Embed this Video

    Add this Tweet to your website by copying the code below. Learn more

    Add this video to your website by copying the code below. Learn more

    Hmm, there was a problem reaching the server.

    By embedding Twitter content in your website or app, you are agreeing to the Twitter Developer Agreement and Developer Policy.

    Preview

    Why you're seeing this ad

    Log in to Twitter

    · Forgot password?
    Don't have an account? Sign up »

    Sign up for Twitter

    Not on Twitter? Sign up, tune into the things you care about, and get updates as they happen.

    Sign up
    Have an account? Log in »

    Two-way (sending and receiving) short codes:

    Country Code For customers of
    United States 40404 (any)
    Canada 21212 (any)
    United Kingdom 86444 Vodafone, Orange, 3, O2
    Brazil 40404 Nextel, TIM
    Haiti 40404 Digicel, Voila
    Ireland 51210 Vodafone, O2
    India 53000 Bharti Airtel, Videocon, Reliance
    Indonesia 89887 AXIS, 3, Telkomsel, Indosat, XL Axiata
    Italy 4880804 Wind
    3424486444 Vodafone
    » See SMS short codes for other countries

    Confirmation

     

    Welcome home!

    This timeline is where you’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you.

    Tweets not working for you?

    Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account.

    Say a lot with a little

    When you see a Tweet you love, tap the heart — it lets the person who wrote it know you shared the love.

    Spread the word

    The fastest way to share someone else’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Tap the icon to send it instantly.

    Join the conversation

    Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Find a topic you’re passionate about, and jump right in.

    Learn the latest

    Get instant insight into what people are talking about now.

    Get more of what you love

    Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about.

    Find what's happening

    See the latest conversations about any topic instantly.

    Never miss a Moment

    Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Macabre thing about covid is that the same demographics are at highest risk whether you open up slowly or quickly — the poor and unhealthy. Only question is whether they die of covid or destitution+desperation. If you try to minimize deaths, I think they end up being balanced?pic.twitter.com/wFkd0VdfmH

      31 replies 99 retweets 270 likes
      Show this thread
    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      The perverse incentive: every non-minimal death rate has TWO solution points — a slow-reopen one and a fast-reopen one, and the fast-reopen has less GDP loss per death. Moral hazard here is if you start with an “acceptable” body count you’ll want to err on side of fast reopen

      5 replies 6 retweets 40 likes
      Show this thread
    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Now, since these curves are obviously hard to estimate with any degree of confidence, most people will in practice go for “acceptable body count” thinking. The more surveillance tech you have the better you can estimate these curves and the smaller the gap between p11 and p12.

      1 reply 1 retweet 24 likes
      Show this thread
    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      This creates a second moral hazard: if you want a fast reopen, you *don’t* want a lot of test-and-trace surveillance because of the chances the answer will be too far out past your economic preference. Blindness helps the fast-reopen case so you’ll make that a moral cause.

      2 replies 2 retweets 25 likes
      Show this thread
    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      You’ll derp about courage and grit (of course you will, because you’re likely in a low-risk group) and make a civil liberties anti-tracking case for fast reopen *without* surveillance. Surprise surprise that’s exactly what the economy-first types tend to do.

      2 replies 1 retweet 31 likes
      Show this thread
    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      But they’re not entirely wrong, because there’s a second factor here... the economic loss curve is also uncertain and there’s a genuine case for fear that it might unravel catastrophically beyond a point.

      2 replies 1 retweet 21 likes
      Show this thread
    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Consider this speculative curve, capturing that fear... that past a point the economic breakdown is apocalyptic and irrecoverablepic.twitter.com/BJry7b7uFc

      2 replies 2 retweets 20 likes
      Show this thread
    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      I won’t attempt to sketch the compound speculation but there are 2 cases here: A: the minimum death point lies before the knee of the runaway economic collapse curve B: the minimum death point lies after the knee of the runaway economic collapse curve B is a fake case, why?

      2 replies 0 retweets 17 likes
      Show this thread
    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Because if the min point is past the knee than the assumption of steadily falling covid deaths is wrong.... there’s no hospitals in a true economic collapse. And I don’t mean collapse in numbers bankers care about, I mean actual collapse of the economy.

      1 reply 0 retweets 19 likes
      Show this thread
    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      So yes, we should ramp up test-and-trace because it can’t hurt and will improve the decision, but it won’t actually spare us the hard reopening-speed vs death-rate choices. Perfect measurement diesnt solve the actual problem. It only frames the moral dilemma more sharply.

      3 replies 1 retweet 23 likes
      Show this thread
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      But what nobody is talking about, because it’s fun to pretend the economy only matters to bankers, is a *different* surveillance problem. Not test-and-trace but location of collapse knee. It’s not about symmetrical V recovery vs asymmetrical V It’s about recovery vs no recovery

      9:26 PM - 30 Apr 2020
      • 1 Retweet
      • 22 Likes
      • Daniel Rahul Ramchandani Crappysaurus Mike Abundo FatherJim Dan Egan 🤓 gomezoscar George Bullock brrr Seitz
      1 reply 1 retweet 22 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          What’s the point of no return for the economy? This ain’t the low-tech works of 1918/Spanish Flu. This is 2020. We live in a very complex world atop an enormously complex tech stack. It can undergo far deeper collapse than the 1918 stack. There IS a knee to the collapse curve.

          2 replies 2 retweets 25 likes
          Show this thread
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          A big part of confusion is that “the economy” is being conflated with “wealth machine favoring the wealthy” on the one hand (Economy A) and with “measure of state of health of physical machine of civilization” (Economy B) on the other. Economy A is politics. B is engineering.

          3 replies 6 retweets 46 likes
          Show this thread
        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Both are broken. Rich people want to save A and sacrifice a lot of B that they don’t use. Poor people want to save B and sacrifice a lot of A that they don’t use. Save stock values, sacrifice food banks OR Sacrifice stock values, save food banks

          2 replies 7 retweets 29 likes
          Show this thread
        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          So we’re actually talking about two separate, coupled things when we talk about saving the economy — the machine itself, and the ownership value of the machine. The early reopen people are wealth-savers/machine-vandals. The late reopen people are machine-savers/wealth vandals.

          3 replies 7 retweets 31 likes
          Show this thread
        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Here’s the thing — the later the reopen, the more wealth will be destroyed to save the machine. Politically this means one of two things: socialism (via nationalization of financially distressed assets) or state collapse (via public bankruptcy to bail out wealth). Choose.

          2 replies 9 retweets 28 likes
          Show this thread
        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          It’s fairly clear that we’ll choose BOTH. Only question is in which order? You might have nationalization followed by reprivatization a la Russia, leading to a gangster-oligarch state. Or you might have massive bailout followed by socialist revolution to reclaim looted public.

          1 reply 1 retweet 22 likes
          Show this thread
        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Either way... there’s no get out of jail free card here.

          2 replies 0 retweets 17 likes
          Show this thread
        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          If it isn’t obvious, I’m talking about western style liberal democracies. Group quarantine based containment is constrained strongly here by political DNA. Korea is not actually a good comparison for the west. Not all nominal liberal democracies are the same.

          2 replies 0 retweets 17 likes
          Show this thread
        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted dr. trey

          I too feel this frustration, but the US and UK are NOT Myanmar or Vietnam. And the reason they have the Cala ity to do vaccine research etc to really solve this is also the reason they can’t do quarantine like authoritarian states can https://twitter.com/comparativist/status/1256085315216764928?s=21 …https://twitter.com/Comparativist/status/1256085315216764928 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          dr. trey @Comparativist
          Myanmar and Vietnam stopped community transmission with quarantine with <300 cases, there’s no reason to think it won’t work in the US or UK, but... sure, let’s plot how many people have to die from econ collapse vs epidemic b/c there’s nothing that can be done. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1256068731882450944 …
          4 replies 0 retweets 15 likes
          Show this thread
        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          It’s a cliche but it’s also a deep truth — the liberal democratic west owes all its strengths AND weaknesses to precisely the ways in which it is not like those authoritarian states that find it “easy” to contain Covid in the short term.

          1 reply 5 retweets 26 likes
          Show this thread
        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          And to the extent the world is a connected web with the fates of these supposedly “better” states dependent on the west in a myriad ways — it doesn’t matter that they’ve done better in short-term local ways. In the long term everybody’s fate is linked to what ha;pens to the west.

          1 reply 1 retweet 21 likes
          Show this thread
        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Country comparisons are kinda stupid anyway. It’s like left leg laughing at the right leg for developing gangrene. Coupled fates. Either whole world makes it out of this together or there’s so much hurt instore for all it doesn’t matter that you did well for first few months.

          1 reply 7 retweets 44 likes
          Show this thread
        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          The great diversity of the world’s systems of governance is a feature of how it works. “Why can’t we all be like Korea?” makes about as much sense as “why aren’t we all ethnically Korean?” Because the world doesn’t work that way. It’s a bunch of different places, not one place.

          1 reply 1 retweet 27 likes
          Show this thread
        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          All the objections I get to threads like this sound similar to me to “why can’t we donate excess Idaho potatoes to food banks” Who’s “we”? Which subset of we is going to organize the truck fleet to do this? Who will pay the drivers? “Why can’t we be like country X” is the same

          3 replies 3 retweets 26 likes
          Show this thread
        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          In an ideal world, excess potatoes would miraculously be teleported to hungry people because Twitter Saint willed it. In an ideal world, all diffs between Korea and the US vanish miraculously because Twitter Saint willed it.

          1 reply 1 retweet 17 likes
          Show this thread
        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Solve for the country/systems you have, not the one you wish you had. You can ignore constraints to make bad comparisons to blame people you hate, but those constraints don’t actually go away. Potatoes still need trucking. The US still has an electoral college. Deal with it.

          2 replies 4 retweets 35 likes
          Show this thread
        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          It is easy to work yourself up into a self-righteous lather and feel like you’re a better person than the Bad People who are preventing the Obvious Solution that way. You might even be right about them being bad if not about how the systems work. But it doesn’t solve problems.

          1 reply 6 retweets 28 likes
          Show this thread
        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Interesting that test-and-trace people keep trying to tell me it’s not about measurement but containment. Uh huh. There’s a reason nobody flags that last bit, as in test-trace-and-quarantine. The political difficulty goes up 10x for that. So we pretend the easy part is it.

          1 reply 3 retweets 14 likes
          Show this thread
        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          There is very little political capacity to do large-scale selective quarantine enforcement in the west. Take your pick: Group quarantine Ankle monitors Trust patriotic self-isolation Each breaks. Ship has sailed anyway I think.

          5 replies 1 retweet 13 likes
          Show this thread
        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          I did a thread about this. We’ll have it eventually but not soon enough for this time.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1249380932152258560?s=21 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          Tired: the last mile Wired: the last yard Wireless: last-yard NFC contact tracing
          Show this thread
          3 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
          Show this thread
        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr May 1
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Next question I’m thinking about. Thought experiment— if the government gave up and said “do whatever, we give up, reopen at will...” What would people and businesses actually do? What is the natural reopening pattern absent rule of law? 🤔

          6 replies 1 retweet 12 likes
          Show this thread
        23. End of conversation

      Loading seems to be taking a while.

      Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.

        Promoted Tweet

        false

        • © 2020 Twitter
        • About
        • Help Center
        • Terms
        • Privacy policy
        • Imprint
        • Cookies
        • Ads info