Maybe it's the Cool Ranch Doritos. If you're going to be cool in a crisis, you need the CRDs..it's in the name.
Although I hate Cool Ranch Doritos, I was eating them earlier on in the pandemic, and it helped enormously. The thing that got me angry was the breaking my routine, making my life harder because they were over scared by their own innumeracy and watching too many pandemic movies (which has always been "watching any pandemic movies" in my view).
Of course, for me it was had to decouple the facts about the COVID situation and the work situation. Since I had to move everything on-line, I've basically been making 200 slides a week for a year. And because of student reactions and random format changes, they were one-use. On top of that, there was writing on-line homework (which is basically coding) and tests (writing an on-line test us like slowing writing five regular tests because of the anti-cheating measures; and then the grading is harder). So, I've barely had any time for myself, while simultaneously feeling like the students are doing even less than they normally would. I've been tired and angry for a long time. I didn't realize how tired I was until a month and a half ago when I cycled through to the videos just after the original lock-down in March, and I noticed how much more lively my voice was exactly a year earlier. Freaky and annoying.
I think that because we've done less damage to our country due to decentralization, we have fewer tradeoffs to make now. The places that are most hysterical in the US right now are the places where they over-reacted early and often, hurting people by impeding them from making a living and keeping them from caring for themselves. By giving people as much choice as possible, they feel more in control of their own fate, and they get less scared. That's bad for politicians, that's bad for newspapers, but that's good for us.
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There are public hospitals all over the place in the US, including ones associated with cities and public universities, although there are fewer than there should be because currently operating hospitals have veto rights on bringing new ones in.* Still, it looks like for bed capacity, the number of beds is similar. In Houston, just the Texas Medical center has 1330 beds, normally and another 875 or so surge capacity. And that's mostly university affiliates (although Baylor is private). And there are other hospitals, especially in the suburbs. If we include "Greater Houston" (which has about the same population as Ontario, and the same size and population as MA***), then in addition to the smaller hospitals like the ones around me, there is UTMB in Galveston. It's hard to get a good aggregate number, but you can look at a few tens of percent higher for the entire area (UTMB has 160, the other 70-80 hospitals are smaller entities, and many have none).
But, with a larger area to cover, you'd want to have more capacity in Ontario than in Greater Houston, not less.
The problem with using democratic command allocation of resources over the free allocation of resources is that the command allocation is much more sensitive to hysteria than free allocation. This is especially true right now. For whatever reason, the world is much more hysterical than it used to be -- only it's so hysterical that it's perilous to laugh at it. We react too strongly to the current crisis (and there are several actors for whom there must always be a crisis to exploit), and it's hard for a controlled system to roll back after a crisis because of the concentrated interest problem.
So, if you're in a hysterical country, you don't worry about the costs of your policies or how you're going to pay for them or even if your metric is the right one. If people are still getting sick, everyone has to stay home.
The hysteria has been bad, but I'm glad it's been less hysterical here than elsewhere. Fortunately, many places in the US were able to be reasonable about the lockdowns, able to pick a target (keeping ICU beds available) and modify their actions accordingly. It was nice to see the federal system almost work for once. Certainly, the hysterical elements in our society tried to undermine reasonable accommodations, e.g. read the Times' account of Texas' ICU crisis (where the normal capacity was reached) early on. Rather than actually find out what was happening, they took a reasonable approach and tried to turn it into a crisis, whether through misfeasance (innumeracy) or malfeasance (deliberate misunderstanding) is unknown. They are reporters, after all, and they need a master's degree to do a job that 50 years ago was done by people with a high school diploma.
It is unfortunate that the new regime is using COVID as a cover to get through bad policies (and is spending money it doesn't have). But at least they aren't trying to take over the states' roles.
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* There are far too many of these cartels in US law. For example, if an HBCU has a program that's unique to an area (e.g., a pharmacy school), it can prevent another program from being offered at nearby schools (for most of the country, basically the same city; where population density is high, neighboring cities could be affected; e.g., a school in south Baltimore could block GWU from instituting a program).
*** I could have sworn I made a "**." This is out of order, anyway. This Massachusetts factoid reminds me that we shouldn't be make DC a state. It should be retroceded to Maryland like Arlington was to Virginia, if you want to give them a senator. Delaware, which lacks a raison d'etre, should also be ceded to Maryland because it looks stupid. And, New England should be accreted into a single state. Rhode Island and Connecticut are each smaller than my back yard.
no subject
Although I hate Cool Ranch Doritos, I was eating them earlier on in the pandemic, and it helped enormously. The thing that got me angry was the breaking my routine, making my life harder because they were over scared by their own innumeracy and watching too many pandemic movies (which has always been "watching any pandemic movies" in my view).
Of course, for me it was had to decouple the facts about the COVID situation and the work situation. Since I had to move everything on-line, I've basically been making 200 slides a week for a year. And because of student reactions and random format changes, they were one-use. On top of that, there was writing on-line homework (which is basically coding) and tests (writing an on-line test us like slowing writing five regular tests because of the anti-cheating measures; and then the grading is harder). So, I've barely had any time for myself, while simultaneously feeling like the students are doing even less than they normally would. I've been tired and angry for a long time. I didn't realize how tired I was until a month and a half ago when I cycled through to the videos just after the original lock-down in March, and I noticed how much more lively my voice was exactly a year earlier. Freaky and annoying.
I think that because we've done less damage to our country due to decentralization, we have fewer tradeoffs to make now. The places that are most hysterical in the US right now are the places where they over-reacted early and often, hurting people by impeding them from making a living and keeping them from caring for themselves. By giving people as much choice as possible, they feel more in control of their own fate, and they get less scared. That's bad for politicians, that's bad for newspapers, but that's good for us.
----------
There are public hospitals all over the place in the US, including ones associated with cities and public universities, although there are fewer than there should be because currently operating hospitals have veto rights on bringing new ones in.* Still, it looks like for bed capacity, the number of beds is similar. In Houston, just the Texas Medical center has 1330 beds, normally and another 875 or so surge capacity. And that's mostly university affiliates (although Baylor is private). And there are other hospitals, especially in the suburbs. If we include "Greater Houston" (which has about the same population as Ontario, and the same size and population as MA***), then in addition to the smaller hospitals like the ones around me, there is UTMB in Galveston. It's hard to get a good aggregate number, but you can look at a few tens of percent higher for the entire area (UTMB has 160, the other 70-80 hospitals are smaller entities, and many have none).
But, with a larger area to cover, you'd want to have more capacity in Ontario than in Greater Houston, not less.
The problem with using democratic command allocation of resources over the free allocation of resources is that the command allocation is much more sensitive to hysteria than free allocation. This is especially true right now. For whatever reason, the world is much more hysterical than it used to be -- only it's so hysterical that it's perilous to laugh at it. We react too strongly to the current crisis (and there are several actors for whom there must always be a crisis to exploit), and it's hard for a controlled system to roll back after a crisis because of the concentrated interest problem.
So, if you're in a hysterical country, you don't worry about the costs of your policies or how you're going to pay for them or even if your metric is the right one. If people are still getting sick, everyone has to stay home.
The hysteria has been bad, but I'm glad it's been less hysterical here than elsewhere. Fortunately, many places in the US were able to be reasonable about the lockdowns, able to pick a target (keeping ICU beds available) and modify their actions accordingly. It was nice to see the federal system almost work for once. Certainly, the hysterical elements in our society tried to undermine reasonable accommodations, e.g. read the Times' account of Texas' ICU crisis (where the normal capacity was reached) early on. Rather than actually find out what was happening, they took a reasonable approach and tried to turn it into a crisis, whether through misfeasance (innumeracy) or malfeasance (deliberate misunderstanding) is unknown. They are reporters, after all, and they need a master's degree to do a job that 50 years ago was done by people with a high school diploma.
It is unfortunate that the new regime is using COVID as a cover to get through bad policies (and is spending money it doesn't have). But at least they aren't trying to take over the states' roles.
----------
* There are far too many of these cartels in US law. For example, if an HBCU has a program that's unique to an area (e.g., a pharmacy school), it can prevent another program from being offered at nearby schools (for most of the country, basically the same city; where population density is high, neighboring cities could be affected; e.g., a school in south Baltimore could block GWU from instituting a program).
*** I could have sworn I made a "**." This is out of order, anyway. This Massachusetts factoid reminds me that we shouldn't be make DC a state. It should be retroceded to Maryland like Arlington was to Virginia, if you want to give them a senator. Delaware, which lacks a raison d'etre, should also be ceded to Maryland because it looks stupid. And, New England should be accreted into a single state. Rhode Island and Connecticut are each smaller than my back yard.