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There are two things people should keep in mind about the economic challenges we face.

First: getting through this with as little *long term* economic damage as possible is going to be very expensive in the near term.

Second: It is by far the cheapest option.
Not to mention, the healthiest and most humane option, because spending a bunch of money now on hurting people and industries gives them the incentive to do the right thing and stay home when sick.
If you are puzzled by a libertarian who suddenly sounds like a socialist: that's why.
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Megan McArdle
@asymmetricinfo
Yes, I really wish that people would just say "Everyone should give their employees paid sick leave because that's the right thing to do, problem solved!" as if businesses were just huge sacks of money. The most affected businesses are apt to be seeing their revenues collapse.
This is a bad time to begin offering workers a new and very expensive benefit that they are more likely than usual to take.
Now a giant corporation with a nice, sloshy reserve fund can do this--and should! (But also, probably already does). But if your business model is planned around *not* paying those benefits, you may well not have adequate reserves for the expense.
Read 6 tweets
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Megan McArdle
@asymmetricinfo
Obviously travel bans must help at some margin. How large a margin is debatable, but it's absurd to suggest that preventing people from coming into the country from other places with a sizable caseload won't reduce our caseload.
It can still be bad policy, and fine to argue that, for example, this is compromising our efforts to coordinate a global response by insulting our allies. (Certainly it was an obvious failure not to warn them).
But "Do travel bans work?" Of course they work; some number of fewer sick people enter your country. Do they keep the disease from ever getting here? No. But they help #flattenthecurve and we should not be debating whether arithmetic is real.
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Megan McArdle
@asymmetricinfo
For example, I am isolating myself from all large groups right now, because I have one parent who is definitely going to need me, and another who might.
But if you are lucky enough to have parents under sixty who are healthy, think about how you might help people who need to isolate. First, have you reached out to people around you who might be unaware to make sure they know?
But second, how can you help them through a really sucky time? Skype visits? Daily emails and phone calls? Can you be their personal shopper? Could you put a giant greeting card in their yard to cheer them up?
Read 6 tweets

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Hari Meyyappan
@harimeyy
Things I learnt last decade (A thread)
1/ Don't think in Absolutes.

- Identifying with labels (anything ending with -ist) which mostly created in a different time period doesn't serve you.

- Your brain is making tons of assumptions ALL the time. You have an incredible number of blind-spots.
2/ What we see is an abstraction of Reality.

Our senses evolved to keep us alive, not to help us experience what actually is. From the shapes of eyes to the visible spectrum to our neurons, our bodies modulate our reality. Our sensations and sense organs are highly coupled.
Read 20 tweets
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This is Deportation
@DeportationIs
If you’re upset about our treatment of migrants and would like to help, but have limited time and money, please consider this one thing: call your representatives and ask them to support overturning this rule. I’ll explain.

texasmonthly.com/wp-content/upl…
The short version is this: US government agents who are in charge of taking care of unaccompanied children are now required to allow ICE and CPB to check anyone coming forward as a sponsor, to see if anyone in that sponsors household is deportable. Even shorter...
...kids in custody are essentially being used as bait to catch undocumented relatives in the US.

The upshot is that very few families are coming forward to take any of their young relatives in their care. This is the biggest reason centers with kids are overcrowded.

Now...
Read 26 tweets
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Eugene
@e_earns
Going to read “The Right Side of History”. This will be some mixture of enlightening, been there done that, and hate-read dunkathon. Let’s see.

No idea what Shapiro’s background is outside trolling libs, but I maybe he’s sort of Straussian? The ‘Jerusalem plus Athens’ thing.
So the thesis is ‘things have never been better, but we’re fucking it up now.’ Pinker + angst.
‘We’ in the book is Americans, natch.
Read 249 tweets
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Discover Transcendence
@LiveToTranscend
Remember that #depression and #anxiety both come from a misunderstanding about how the brain works. The #brain is a "comparison machine". It doesn't know how to do anything else. It compares every experience you are having to other experiences you've had or could be having.
It's your job to remind the brain that it only sees things in black & white (& based on assumptions). You're not your brain (it's a tool). ALL thoughts are based on an incomplete picture (a half-truth). Reminding yourself that your thoughts aren't fact, that they're only half the
picture, allows you to keep yourself in a state of awareness. The reason #DepressionIsReal is because we believe our thoughts ARE reality - they are not. Thoughts are fragments of information, used by the brain to develop context. The greater the context, the greater the #wisdom.
Read 8 tweets
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Dan Kaminsky
@dakami
"People overestimate what can be done in one year and underestimate what can be done in ten."

...assuming a system that can survive wanting to do a thing for ten years. There are other, more agile systems that can only want to do a thing for one year.

Disruption is blind.
If you're reading this, you are probably a multi-decade project. Surprise!
Of course, just because you are a thing, doesn't mean you want to do a thing. That whole fraying social contract everyone is sensing? This.

I won't pretend to understand Chinese culture. But it, and its leaders, do appear to want to do things on the decade scale.

Do we?
Read 8 tweets

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