nfreeman

It’s not remotely a hot take to think that Mitts has been a major disappointment so far and is at least 50/50 to never become a good NHL forward.

@Weave -- Latest from Dr. Fauci is an estimate of 100K-200K US deaths: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fauci-coronavirus-could-kill-over-100-000-americans-n1171556 Obviously that's still too many, but I mention it just to provide further context to our recent discussion on this upthread.

Dude — you need to stop throwing this around when you disagree with someone.

The Frenchies are making progress: https://techstartups.com/2020/03/27/coronavirus-cure-new-results-french-study-shows-combination-hydroxychloroquine-plaquenil-azithromycin-successfully-treated-80-coronavirus-patients-significant-dr/

Exactly. It's a tricky question. On the one hand, if City A is overwhelmed and City B has plenty of capacity, it's easy to say that City B should take patients from City A -- but everyone knows that this will substantially increase the risk of widespread contagion in City B.

The question of whether a city could legally refuse to accept patients from another city, especially in the same state, and especially where the hospitals receive state money, is interesting. I doubt that a city could do this. The question of whether it would be morally right to do so is a separate and also interesting question. I think in considering that question, weighing one city’s lives against the other’s is unavoidable.

Moved some posts to the politics club.

I feel like keeping Mitts improves the odds of having a #2C about as much as keeping a roast beef sandwich improves them.

I believe that was the document that gave rise to #blueprint. What a freaking debacle.

FWIW, his college coach (Andy Murray -- a former NHL head coach) was on WGR this morning and spoke very highly of him. Murray made it sound like Matthias is absolutely an NHL player. Also, I hadn't connected the dots, but Dawson DePietro was a college teammate of Matthias'. Murray said DDP was one of the fastest players in college hockey and a good scorer, and has a reasonable chance at making the NHL.

I remember watching this game plausibly live on the DVR, not finishing until 2:30 AM and weeping uncontrollably at the end. Thanks again OSP!

No. He looked to me to be completely out of gas.

Dude. Take it down a notch please.

Well, although the suicide rate has increased in the last couple of years, the increase hasn't been dramatic: https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/ Also, I don't see any data anywhere subsequent to 2018, so it's hard to draw conclusions about any relationship or lack thereof with the economy. The dramatic increase in the suicide rate has occurred since 2000. As for drug OD deaths, they actually declined last year for the first time in a generation: https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-01-30/drug-overdose-deaths-fall-in-us-for-first-time-since-1990 Do you not think increased joblessness is related to the bad outcomes I mentioned?

Here's the Washington Post saying the worst case is 1.1MM US deaths: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/19/coronavirus-projections-us/ Here's Yahoo saying that if the mortality rate is 1% -- which is far from established -- the range would be from 700K to 1.5MM deaths: https://news.yahoo.com/more-1-000-us-coronavirus-deaths-near-70-060615886.html I also don't think those projections are able to distinguish virus-caused deaths from deaths caused by other serious health conditions in patients who have the virus. So the likely range is well below 1MM. Of course we want to reduce this terrible loss and should try to do so. My point was simply that we shouldn't ignore that there are huge costs, including life-and-death costs, to continuing the economic shutdown -- and that we shouldn't assume that OSP and others aren't motivated by concerns about those costs, as opposed to merely wanting to be able to bathe Monica Seles in diamonds and rubies without dipping too far into his savings.

First, I don't think there has been any kind of established conclusion that the virus is likely to cause death on that scale. Second, the key question is the loss of life that would result from reopening the economy relative to the loss of life that would result from continuing as we are now. And in calculating the 2nd half of that equation, the increases in mortality from the factors I mentioned that result from joblessness have to be taken into account.

I think the answer here is that the efficacy of programs that are designed to mitigate those destructive consequences is pretty limited, so you're not really going to be able to meaningfully reduce the societal price that would be inflicted by a huge increase in joblessness. In fact I haven't noticed that, although I have noticed that these types of assumptions and insinuations about people's motives and character do tend to surface, regrettably, in these types of conversations. To the immediate point, I don't expect that OSP's comfort is at much if at all threatened by the current economic upheaval -- but I do think that OSP, given his age, is much more vulnerable to the risks presented by the virus to his physical well-being than to the risks to his economic comfort -- and that he's well aware of those relative vulnerabilities.

I don't think it's as black-and-white as this though. When people lose jobs and can't find work, there are significant increases in addiction, family breakups, depression and a host of other destructive consequences that also result in increased mortality. Well, certainly we can consider that possibility. But using that possibility -- especially when there are also many non-billionaires asking these questions -- to shut down a debate over important issues that affect the entire country isn't wise.

That article, and some of the comments upthread, rely on an assumption that isn't supported by anything OSP said: that OSP's comments are motivated by self-interest, not by concern for the population generally. I think it's much more likely that OSP's point was that the country generally -- not the wealthy -- will be better off if people get back to work more quickly, even if there is some loss of life due to the virus that would've been avoided if we all stayed home. It's a valid point to make, and one that many others have been making recently. We shouldn't pretend that this economic shutdown won't result in terrible consequences for millions of people. At the very least it should spur an honest cost-benefit conversation without people immediately assuming that OSP is looking at this like Mr. Burns would.

I'm not much of a Clapton fan, but that is a really good song IMHO.

Good man. Thanks.

There's an assumption here that distresses me...

As someone who telecommutes for a big chunk of each summer, and now potentially for a longer stretch than that, I too greatly prefer working in the office. Do the foundations have donors other than the Pegulas? Separately, I'm curious as to how the $1.2MM figure was determined.

So his nickname is DDP, right?

Better Call Saul has been outstanding this season IMHO.