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Every conservative wishlist item has been granted.

- Halt to immigration
- Reshoring of manufacturing
- Woke colleges shut down
- Dinner with family
- Crash in Tinder usage
- And a society so physically modest that everyone covers their faces when outside

Who's discussing this?
Socialist wishlist items have been granted too.

- Prototype universal basic income
- MMT-in-all-but-name, trillions printed
- Price controls, mask seizures, attacks on "hoarding"
- Control of industry via Defense Production Act

So the state has become nationalist socialist.
Much more to say on this.

But one of the most bizarre developments of this whole crisis is that highly political people are getting huge chunks of their agenda into policy, yet seem to not even be talking about that.

See also thoughts by @DouthatNYT.
Correction, h/t @modestproposal1.

While physical clubs & bars are down, and one might assume social distancing limits in-person Tinder, it appears corona has increased online dating while turning it into a quasi-eHarmony with a longer courtship phase.
fortune.com/2020/04/13/onl…
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Balaji S. Srinivasan
@balajis
Modelers & anti-modelers miss the point. This isn’t physics. We can’t run controlled experiments or make granular time-series forecasts.

There are only two parameters we really care about: how transmissible is the disease and how severe is it? Everything else follows from that.
Models for the trajectory of a ball thrown in the air tend to be accurate because we can repeat the experiment and fix what we got wrong.

But forecasting this type of stuff is at best directional.

Molecular biology is what’s crucial here, not models.
At best, modeling this type of stuff is like looking at a business plan for a startup that forecasts out a few years.

Yes, it’s useful to see that virality is a key parameter. No, you don’t put a lot of confidence in the forecast for Aug 2023 revenue.
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Balaji S. Srinivasan
@balajis
NYT: lol it’s totally crazy to say that corporate journalists consciously plot against tech companies

NYT: “we should together confront the forces weakening our industry...Facebook and Google”
archive.is/jXXSv
A literal secret meeting where an editor tells the squabbling unions and publishers they will all make more money by using their “outsize presence on social media” to attack tech companies, their competitors.

There you have it. Open admission of what’s been obvious for years.
The point: every single article by a corporate journalist on tech should have a disclaimer at the top.

This is Coke vs Pepsi. These aren’t neutral commentators.

Doesn’t mean everything they say is false. Does mean tech needs to build its own content and distribution channels.
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Balaji S. Srinivasan
@balajis
Cochrane’s thesis is that rational, risk-averse individuals may avoid the virus on their own. Hope so, but feels risky relative to active containment.

He also calls for better models. I don’t know if that’s key. Just parameter estimates for contagion & severity are sufficient.
In tech you are exposed to the logic of decentralized order. That’s how someone takes it upon themselves to start a company.

But you also gain a healthy respect for centralized order. Flipping a switch server-side is by far the fastest way to change the behavior of millions.
One of the issues with the virus crisis is that excessively ideological responses just don’t work.

The one silver lining is that nations are starting to be judged by numerically quantified results, rather than verbally expressed intentions.
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