ill-conceived question

[Gary Schiltz-4]

Merle, I'd like to watch that interview. Do you watch Fareed over cable or satellite, or over the internet?

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 11:55 AM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the elderly who primarily live together in retirement).

As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, Anders Tegnell, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the world.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do? 

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands. 

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you don't have to lock down.  As an old person I have my doubts about that approach.  In the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of covid related causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no known covid involvement.

On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the elderly who primarily live together in retirement).

As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, Anders Tegnell, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the world.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do? 

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands. 

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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[David Eric Smith]

Hi Gary,

I would put up this one as a constructive reply to your link below, not to counter but to add alongside:

https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-power-of-community-how-cuba-survived-peak-oil-2006/

I am pretty sure I have posted this to the list in the past, but it remains a strong reference for me. 

Six weeks or two months into a shutdown, with pictures of glittering skyscrapers in NYC with nobody maintaining them, and yoga people sitting on posh porches overlooking the forest, I get the impression that something is being overlooked.  If I saw the same video made by a Panamanian immigrant in Brooklyn, living with 6 family members in a small apartment, I would feel safer abducting from the anecdotal point of view to a generalization.

I don’t say that to disagree with the intent of the short video you circulated, which expresses preferences that I also hold.  But all the ways we create damage, from climate to farmland management to ecosystem destruction happen partly because it is hard to understand long-term trajectories from the early stages of transients, and we are particularly bad at recognizing that transients are that.  This little bit of inertia, while people consume stocks that were in inventory already, does not look to me like a model for an alternative steady state in barely any respects (though still a few).  I don’t doubt that the maker of the video understands this and would agree, but he probably sees the end of making the point as justifying the means of omitting these things.

I like the Cuban case because it starts to get into the weeds of just how much _work_ is needed, and how many and how diverse are the problems that require invention to solve, to significantly re-arrange a social system.  I think the documentary makes the case that the move they made was entirely in the right direction.  The thing that makes it feel real to me is that it was a lot of work for a modest and very incomplete improvement.  To make a good world will require that kind of work-for-change as a way of life to which we remain committed over generational timescales.  It also required that the center of mass of the society be going in that direction, and not just a committed fringe swimming against a current that is all going the wrong way.  The latter nut is one that is seeming particularly hard to crack.

Many thanks,

Eric

On May 3, 2020, at 10:05 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched this five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not... https://vimeo.com/411278238

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it, and anything I try will come out a mess.  So let me try for Less is More.

I think part of this is habit and commitments.  Somehow the society has to sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how much of what.  A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has enormous inertia.  Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of systems that happen to be doing an allocation that we don’t have other systems in place to do as an alternative.

Take food production.  Fine, what people need to eat is relatively inelastic, and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to dollar-wealth.  But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are produced by very few decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered to the hilt with credit, on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) turnaround times.  (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent commodity meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in structure where near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a different analysis is needed.  For now I will just look at the simple one.

We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops.  We don’t own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to do that in a system that over-produces already.  So the production is there.  But if we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a grant/loan/lobby businessman more than an expert in soil health etc.), why should he give us anything to eat?  You could say “Ah, he only needs enough to live, and he is only one man, so he could give the rest away because people need it.”  But he isn’t only one man.  He is a vastly debt-leveraged operation, with enormous capital replacement and maintenance costs, huge loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and no way to pay that unless he turns over the crop within certain price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of Ag to make up the difference; what happens is a lot of both).  So he has no choices if we don’t have money, and we have no choices if we have no money.  But then what should anyone pay any of us for if the US operates on 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to be fed?  Some system has to work that out.  

During the near-century of technological increases in output optimization, the rhetoric was that with less labor used to produce consumables, people’s efforts would be liberated to do other good things.  But to the extent that those things aren’t “necessary” in the Maslov sense like food is (following Steve S.), really all those other people are useless.  

One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally managed communist economies, but apart from small-scale experiments on UBI within much larger conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I don’t see evidence of mechanisms to put behind those visions.  So we are left with an unsolved problem of distribution.  Not least, just How do we coordinate it?  But also how do we do so stably enough that the system is perceived as having some kind of legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to being individually negotiated and thus allowing people to want different things, all the marginalist Econ stuff).

Take any other area.  Gas-powered transportation.  Well, maybe you don’t “need” it in the sense that you can conjure a world where you live and work close together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc.  But where you are now, you and almost everybody else in the US, has demographically committed to being unable to do much of anything without plugging into that whole “unnecessary” system.  So some part of the economic inertia comes just from the thick web of these commitments that people have made, which leave them unable to withdraw from dependencies on lots of complicated services.

Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V?  Coil some wire to make an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the wire.  Sudden shifts of anything have a dimension of problem just from the timescale, in addition to whatever may have been problems or virtues of the normal state of operation.

If one thinks that these kinds of “commitments” or “inertia” as one principle, and the mechanics problem of negotiating a widely-applicable and adequately stable set of permissions for access to a wage as the second, are two broad “primary” drivers of the restarting, then there is still a vast depth of smaller-grained design choices that have accumulated since the Industrial Age, in supply chains, transportation, management, law, etc.  It’s a hard web to change fast without a lot of chaos that drowns a lot of people.  

However bad it was during the last depression, city people still could go back to the farms, because there there was food, and they could somehow chip in in exchange for eating, to get around the coordination failure.  Now, with all the permission massively centralized, no people in the interior, and everything going through bank credit, even that demographic shift no longer exists as an option.

There is a whole separate story about the fact that the predator and parasite class are still there, and they aren’t going to leave of their own accord, but I think that is more a story of motive and how the mechanics gets steered and evolves, whereas what I put above is just about what mechanics exists.  I think the mechanics will dominate in the immediate-short term.

Very inadequate.  

Eric

On May 3, 2020, at 1:33 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues, 

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?  

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.  

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand? 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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[Gary Schiltz-4]

David, thanks for your thoughtful response. The film does present a very simplified, and probably elitist and naive view. I will have a look at the film you referenced and reflect my thoughts back here.

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 4:49 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Gary,

I would put up this one as a constructive reply to your link below, not to counter but to add alongside:

https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-power-of-community-how-cuba-survived-peak-oil-2006/

I am pretty sure I have posted this to the list in the past, but it remains a strong reference for me. 

 

Six weeks or two months into a shutdown, with pictures of glittering skyscrapers in NYC with nobody maintaining them, and yoga people sitting on posh porches overlooking the forest, I get the impression that something is being overlooked.  If I saw the same video made by a Panamanian immigrant in Brooklyn, living with 6 family members in a small apartment, I would feel safer abducting from the anecdotal point of view to a generalization.

I don’t say that to disagree with the intent of the short video you circulated, which expresses preferences that I also hold.  But all the ways we create damage, from climate to farmland management to ecosystem destruction happen partly because it is hard to understand long-term trajectories from the early stages of transients, and we are particularly bad at recognizing that transients are that.  This little bit of inertia, while people consume stocks that were in inventory already, does not look to me like a model for an alternative steady state in barely any respects (though still a few).  I don’t doubt that the maker of the video understands this and would agree, but he probably sees the end of making the point as justifying the means of omitting these things.

I like the Cuban case because it starts to get into the weeds of just how much _work_ is needed, and how many and how diverse are the problems that require invention to solve, to significantly re-arrange a social system.  I think the documentary makes the case that the move they made was entirely in the right direction.  The thing that makes it feel real to me is that it was a lot of work for a modest and very incomplete improvement.  To make a good world will require that kind of work-for-change as a way of life to which we remain committed over generational timescales.  It also required that the center of mass of the society be going in that direction, and not just a committed fringe swimming against a current that is all going the wrong way.  The latter nut is one that is seeming particularly hard to crack.

Many thanks,

Eric

On May 3, 2020, at 10:05 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched this five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not... https://vimeo.com/411278238

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it, and anything I try will come out a mess.  So let me try for Less is More.

I think part of this is habit and commitments.  Somehow the society has to sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how much of what.  A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has enormous inertia.  Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of systems that happen to be doing an allocation that we don’t have other systems in place to do as an alternative.

Take food production.  Fine, what people need to eat is relatively inelastic, and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to dollar-wealth.  But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are produced by very few decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered to the hilt with credit, on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) turnaround times.  (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent commodity meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in structure where near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a different analysis is needed.  For now I will just look at the simple one.

We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops.  We don’t own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to do that in a system that over-produces already.  So the production is there.  But if we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a grant/loan/lobby businessman more than an expert in soil health etc.), why should he give us anything to eat?  You could say “Ah, he only needs enough to live, and he is only one man, so he could give the rest away because people need it.”  But he isn’t only one man.  He is a vastly debt-leveraged operation, with enormous capital replacement and maintenance costs, huge loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and no way to pay that unless he turns over the crop within certain price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of Ag to make up the difference; what happens is a lot of both).  So he has no choices if we don’t have money, and we have no choices if we have no money.  But then what should anyone pay any of us for if the US operates on 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to be fed?  Some system has to work that out.  

During the near-century of technological increases in output optimization, the rhetoric was that with less labor used to produce consumables, people’s efforts would be liberated to do other good things.  But to the extent that those things aren’t “necessary” in the Maslov sense like food is (following Steve S.), really all those other people are useless.  

One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally managed communist economies, but apart from small-scale experiments on UBI within much larger conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I don’t see evidence of mechanisms to put behind those visions.  So we are left with an unsolved problem of distribution.  Not least, just How do we coordinate it?  But also how do we do so stably enough that the system is perceived as having some kind of legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to being individually negotiated and thus allowing people to want different things, all the marginalist Econ stuff).

Take any other area.  Gas-powered transportation.  Well, maybe you don’t “need” it in the sense that you can conjure a world where you live and work close together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc.  But where you are now, you and almost everybody else in the US, has demographically committed to being unable to do much of anything without plugging into that whole “unnecessary” system.  So some part of the economic inertia comes just from the thick web of these commitments that people have made, which leave them unable to withdraw from dependencies on lots of complicated services.

Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V?  Coil some wire to make an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the wire.  Sudden shifts of anything have a dimension of problem just from the timescale, in addition to whatever may have been problems or virtues of the normal state of operation.

If one thinks that these kinds of “commitments” or “inertia” as one principle, and the mechanics problem of negotiating a widely-applicable and adequately stable set of permissions for access to a wage as the second, are two broad “primary” drivers of the restarting, then there is still a vast depth of smaller-grained design choices that have accumulated since the Industrial Age, in supply chains, transportation, management, law, etc.  It’s a hard web to change fast without a lot of chaos that drowns a lot of people.  

However bad it was during the last depression, city people still could go back to the farms, because there there was food, and they could somehow chip in in exchange for eating, to get around the coordination failure.  Now, with all the permission massively centralized, no people in the interior, and everything going through bank credit, even that demographic shift no longer exists as an option.

There is a whole separate story about the fact that the predator and parasite class are still there, and they aren’t going to leave of their own accord, but I think that is more a story of motive and how the mechanics gets steered and evolves, whereas what I put above is just about what mechanics exists.  I think the mechanics will dominate in the immediate-short term.

Very inadequate.  

Eric

On May 3, 2020, at 1:33 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues, 

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?  

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.  

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand? 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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[Merle Lefkoff-2]

Gary, he's on CNN (Cable) on Sunday mornings.  I'm not sure how to get it anywhere later.

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 11:03 AM Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Merle, I'd like to watch that interview. Do you watch Fareed over cable or satellite, or over the internet?

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 11:55 AM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the elderly who primarily live together in retirement).

As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, Anders Tegnell, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the world.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do? 

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands. 

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

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[Steve Smith]

Eric -

I would put up this one as a constructive reply to your link below, not to counter but to add alongside:

https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-power-of-community-how-cuba-survived-peak-oil-2006/

I am pretty sure I have posted this to the list in the past, but it remains a strong reference for me.

I was (only vaguely) aware of the Cuban "special period" and think the description of the Cuban people's response in the movie was very inspirational.  It helps a great deal that Cuba has a very good climate for year round agriculture and that it's people were not terribly addicted to personal-conveniences as provided by our idea of modern technology.   I have not really paid attention to what has evolved there more recently.

I have friends/colleagues in Ukraine who are old enough to have remembered both Chernobyl, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Ukranian independence.   They went through some similar experiences to Cuba, suddenly not having direct access to the huge false-economies of the Soviet Empire and having to try to keep a system running on nominally only what could be produced regionally.

I wondered when Puerto Rico got hit so hard by the hurricane a few years go if THEY might not follow a pattern closer to Cuba's as described in the movie.

Six weeks or two months into a shutdown, with pictures of glittering skyscrapers in NYC with nobody maintaining them, and yoga people sitting on posh porches overlooking the forest, I get the impression that something is being overlooked.  If I saw the same video made by a Panamanian immigrant in Brooklyn, living with 6 family members in a small apartment, I would feel safer abducting from the anecdotal point of view to a generalization.

I agree that Gary's video leaves me waiting for "the other shoe to fall" when I know the beast in question is more like a centipede than a biped.

I don’t say that to disagree with the intent of the short video you circulated, which expresses preferences that I also hold.  But all the ways we create damage, from climate to farmland management to ecosystem destruction happen partly because it is hard to understand long-term trajectories from the early stages of transients, and we are particularly bad at recognizing that transients are that.  This little bit of inertia, while people consume stocks that were in inventory already, does not look to me like a model for an alternative steady state in barely any respects (though still a few).  I don’t doubt that the maker of the video understands this and would agree, but he probably sees the end of making the point as justifying the means of omitting these things.

Yes, in spite of our just-in-time logistics system, there has been quite a bit of product in the pipeline and it is not like *every* factory and *every* packing plant, etc.  shut down immediately or entirely *IF EVER*.   Your reference to the style of glossing in the movie is well-taken and I think I agree it was deliberate and aspirational more than pretending that (as you point out) that 2 months in we can *know* that everything is going to be OK even (especially?) if we cut our manic hypercapitalism by a factor of 2 or 10.

I like the Cuban case because it starts to get into the weeds of just how much _work_ is needed, and how many and how diverse are the problems that require invention to solve, to significantly re-arrange a social system.  I think the documentary makes the case that the move they made was entirely in the right direction.

The improvements in health and nutrition they report is a good indicator.

 The thing that makes it feel real to me is that it was a lot of work for a modest and very incomplete improvement.  To make a good world will require that kind of work-for-change as a way of life to which we remain committed over generational timescales.  It also required that the center of mass of the society be going in that direction, and not just a committed fringe swimming against a current that is all going the wrong way.  The latter nut is one that is seeming particularly hard to crack.

But I would claim/suggest that a "catastrophe" like the one we are on the crest (of the beginning?) of is a good opportunity, not unlike the "Special Period" of Cuba, for that center of mass to shift perhaps.   And there are directions to lean that will help that or alternatively hurt (return to normal) that.

Good video and good thoughts,

 - Steve

Many thanks,

Eric

On May 3, 2020, at 10:05 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched this five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not... https://vimeo.com/411278238

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it, and anything I try will come out a mess.  So let me try for Less is More.

I think part of this is habit and commitments.  Somehow the society has to sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how much of what.  A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has enormous inertia.  Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of systems that happen to be doing an allocation that we don’t have other systems in place to do as an alternative.

Take food production.  Fine, what people need to eat is relatively inelastic, and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to dollar-wealth.  But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are produced by very few decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered to the hilt with credit, on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) turnaround times.  (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent commodity meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in structure where near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a different analysis is needed.  For now I will just look at the simple one.

We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops.  We don’t own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to do that in a system that over-produces already.  So the production is there.  But if we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a grant/loan/lobby businessman more than an expert in soil health etc.), why should he give us anything to eat?  You could say “Ah, he only needs enough to live, and he is only one man, so he could give the rest away because people need it.”  But he isn’t only one man.  He is a vastly debt-leveraged operation, with enormous capital replacement and maintenance costs, huge loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and no way to pay that unless he turns over the crop within certain price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of Ag to make up the difference; what happens is a lot of both).  So he has no choices if we don’t have money, and we have no choices if we have no money.  But then what should anyone pay any of us for if the US operates on 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to be fed?  Some system has to work that out.  

During the near-century of technological increases in output optimization, the rhetoric was that with less labor used to produce consumables, people’s efforts would be liberated to do other good things.  But to the extent that those things aren’t “necessary” in the Maslov sense like food is (following Steve S.), really all those other people are useless.  

One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally managed communist economies, but apart from small-scale experiments on UBI within much larger conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I don’t see evidence of mechanisms to put behind those visions.  So we are left with an unsolved problem of distribution.  Not least, just How do we coordinate it?  But also how do we do so stably enough that the system is perceived as having some kind of legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to being individually negotiated and thus allowing people to want different things, all the marginalist Econ stuff).

Take any other area.  Gas-powered transportation.  Well, maybe you don’t “need” it in the sense that you can conjure a world where you live and work close together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc.  But where you are now, you and almost everybody else in the US, has demographically committed to being unable to do much of anything without plugging into that whole “unnecessary” system.  So some part of the economic inertia comes just from the thick web of these commitments that people have made, which leave them unable to withdraw from dependencies on lots of complicated services.

Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V?  Coil some wire to make an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the wire.  Sudden shifts of anything have a dimension of problem just from the timescale, in addition to whatever may have been problems or virtues of the normal state of operation.

If one thinks that these kinds of “commitments” or “inertia” as one principle, and the mechanics problem of negotiating a widely-applicable and adequately stable set of permissions for access to a wage as the second, are two broad “primary” drivers of the restarting, then there is still a vast depth of smaller-grained design choices that have accumulated since the Industrial Age, in supply chains, transportation, management, law, etc.  It’s a hard web to change fast without a lot of chaos that drowns a lot of people.  

However bad it was during the last depression, city people still could go back to the farms, because there there was food, and they could somehow chip in in exchange for eating, to get around the coordination failure.  Now, with all the permission massively centralized, no people in the interior, and everything going through bank credit, even that demographic shift no longer exists as an option.

There is a whole separate story about the fact that the predator and parasite class are still there, and they aren’t going to leave of their own accord, but I think that is more a story of motive and how the mechanics gets steered and evolves, whereas what I put above is just about what mechanics exists.  I think the mechanics will dominate in the immediate-short term.

Very inadequate.  

Eric

On May 3, 2020, at 1:33 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues, 

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?  

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.  

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand? 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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[Prof David West]

The lesson might be if you are willing to lose the old people who are somewhat poor and already warehoused in overcrowded care facilities you don't have to lock down.

On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you don't have to lock down.  As an old person I have my doubts about that approach.  In the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of covid related causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no known covid involvement.

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz,

Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the elderly who primarily live together in retirement).

As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, Anders Tegnell, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the world.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do? 

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands. 

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.

President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy

emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]

mobile:  [phone]

skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Dave

Maybe I lack adequate knowledge of the variety of care centers but the ones I know charge something like $200,000 admission and $6000 per month.  Maybe you mean "somewhat poor OR already warehoused..."

Frank

On Mon, May 4, 2020, 5:31 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

The lesson might be if you are willing to lose the old people who are somewhat poor and already warehoused in overcrowded care facilities you don't have to lock down.

On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you don't have to lock down.  As an old person I have my doubts about that approach.  In the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of covid related causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no known covid involvement.

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz,

Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the elderly who primarily live together in retirement).

As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, Anders Tegnell, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the world.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do? 

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands. 

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.

President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy

emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]

mobile:  [phone]

skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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[Prof David West]

Frank,

When looking for a facility for my mother, I found a lot of the 200K / 6K per month facilities, but more than 3/4 of the facilities that exist are subsidized and they simply take between 40 and 80% of the patient's social security and retirement income.

I am pretty certain that the ones with intense outbreaks were the latter type.

When all the shouting is over and all the data is available, I would bet a significant amount of money that the single largest comorbidity factor will be poverty / lower economic status.

davew

On Mon, May 4, 2020, at 6:12 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Dave

Maybe I lack adequate knowledge of the variety of care centers but the ones I know charge something like $200,000 admission and $6000 per month.  Maybe you mean "somewhat poor OR already warehoused..."

Frank

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz,

Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, May 4, 2020, 5:31 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

The lesson might be if you are willing to lose the old people who are somewhat poor and already warehoused in overcrowded care facilities you don't have to lock down.

On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you don't have to lock down.  As an old person I have my doubts about that approach.  In the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of covid related causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no known covid involvement.

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz,

Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the elderly who primarily live together in retirement).

As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, Anders Tegnell, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the world.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do? 

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands. 

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.

President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy

emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]

mobile:  [phone]

skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

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[thompnickson2]

…and being on a ventilator. 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Monday, May 4, 2020 8:25 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

Frank,

 

When looking for a facility for my mother, I found a lot of the 200K / 6K per month facilities, but more than 3/4 of the facilities that exist are subsidized and they simply take between 40 and 80% of the patient's social security and retirement income.

 

I am pretty certain that the ones with intense outbreaks were the latter type.

 

When all the shouting is over and all the data is available, I would bet a significant amount of money that the single largest comorbidity factor will be poverty / lower economic status.

 

davew

 

On Mon, May 4, 2020, at 6:12 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Dave

 

Maybe I lack adequate knowledge of the variety of care centers but the ones I know charge something like $200,000 admission and $6000 per month.  Maybe you mean "somewhat poor OR already warehoused..."

 

Frank

 

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz,

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 4, 2020, 5:31 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

The lesson might be if you are willing to lose the old people who are somewhat poor and already warehoused in overcrowded care facilities you don't have to lock down.

 

 

 

On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you don't have to lock down.  As an old person I have my doubts about that approach.  In the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of covid related causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no known covid involvement.

 

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz,

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

 

On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the elderly who primarily live together in retirement).

 

As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, Anders Tegnell, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the world.

 

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do? 

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands. 

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

 

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.

President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy

emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

 

[hidden email]

mobile:  [phone]

skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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[Edward Angel]

Most elder facilities do not require the huge buy in. In NM there are a large number of smaller facilities that can house up to ten people and are much less expensive. There are also larger ones that are pretty good that don’t have a buy in and charge less than 6K/month although are still out of reach for most New Mexicans.

The largest outbreak in ABQ is at La Vida Llena which has the big buy in and high monthly charge. It is generally regarded as the best facility in ABQ. It is run as a nonprofit by some the large mainstream churches. I have three friends there. The outbreak there that affected over 50 residents and staff was in the skilled nursing part of the facility and thus far has not affected independent living residents like my friends who are however under a pretty strict quarantine. I think the main point here is that wherever people put together in a small space there is grave danger. 

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On May 4, 2020, at 8:25 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

When looking for a facility for my mother, I found a lot of the 200K / 6K per month facilities, but more than 3/4 of the facilities that exist are subsidized and they simply take between 40 and 80% of the patient's social security and retirement income.

I am pretty certain that the ones with intense outbreaks were the latter type.

When all the shouting is over and all the data is available, I would bet a significant amount of money that the single largest comorbidity factor will be poverty / lower economic status.

davew

On Mon, May 4, 2020, at 6:12 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Dave

Maybe I lack adequate knowledge of the variety of care centers but the ones I know charge something like $200,000 admission and $6000 per month.  Maybe you mean "somewhat poor OR already warehoused..."

Frank

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 

Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, May 4, 2020, 5:31 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

The lesson might be if you are willing to lose the old people who are somewhat poor and already warehoused in overcrowded care facilities you don't have to lock down.

On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you don't have to lock down.  As an old person I have my doubts about that approach.  In the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of covid related causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no known covid involvement.

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 

Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the elderly who primarily live together in retirement).

As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, Anders Tegnell, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the world.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues, 

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?  

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.  

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand? 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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-- 

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.

President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy

emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]

mobile:  [phone]

skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Dave and Ed

Thanks for making me aware of the options. My plan is to stay in my present house until the end.  This should be possible if I don't have a contagious final illness.  

Frank

On Mon, May 4, 2020, 10:26 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

Most elder facilities do not require the huge buy in. In NM there are a large number of smaller facilities that can house up to ten people and are much less expensive. There are also larger ones that are pretty good that don’t have a buy in and charge less than 6K/month although are still out of reach for most New Mexicans.

The largest outbreak in ABQ is at La Vida Llena which has the big buy in and high monthly charge. It is generally regarded as the best facility in ABQ. It is run as a nonprofit by some the large mainstream churches. I have three friends there. The outbreak there that affected over 50 residents and staff was in the skilled nursing part of the facility and thus far has not affected independent living residents like my friends who are however under a pretty strict quarantine. I think the main point here is that wherever people put together in a small space there is grave danger. 

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On May 4, 2020, at 8:25 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

When looking for a facility for my mother, I found a lot of the 200K / 6K per month facilities, but more than 3/4 of the facilities that exist are subsidized and they simply take between 40 and 80% of the patient's social security and retirement income.

I am pretty certain that the ones with intense outbreaks were the latter type.

When all the shouting is over and all the data is available, I would bet a significant amount of money that the single largest comorbidity factor will be poverty / lower economic status.

davew

On Mon, May 4, 2020, at 6:12 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Dave

Maybe I lack adequate knowledge of the variety of care centers but the ones I know charge something like $200,000 admission and $6000 per month.  Maybe you mean "somewhat poor OR already warehoused..."

Frank

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 

Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, May 4, 2020, 5:31 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

The lesson might be if you are willing to lose the old people who are somewhat poor and already warehoused in overcrowded care facilities you don't have to lock down.

On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you don't have to lock down.  As an old person I have my doubts about that approach.  In the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of covid related causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no known covid involvement.

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 

Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the elderly who primarily live together in retirement).

As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, Anders Tegnell, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the world.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues, 

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?  

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.  

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand? 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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-- 

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.

President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy

emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]

mobile:  [phone]

skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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