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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

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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      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
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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      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
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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      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
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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      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
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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      Either way... there’s no get out of jail free card here.

      2 replies 0 retweets 17 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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      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
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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      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
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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      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
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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      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
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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      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
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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      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.

      10:12 PM - 30 Apr 2020
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      • Torsten beatrice Jody Woodland nigel Danny Schaffer ivashko Adele Dewey-Lopez Deferred Pronouns: He Will/His Yet to Be 😷jorgebar
      1 reply 1 retweet 27 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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          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
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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          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
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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          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
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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          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
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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          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
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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          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
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 30
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          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
        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr May 1
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          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
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        10. End of conversation

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