Also their policy ideas are weird. A significant cost they list is that a lot of small businesses will fail in a shut-down. Too bad there's nothing a government could do about that.

You have to make assumptions to model and it's at least arguable that "assume the U.S. government hates everybody but rich people" is a defensible one.

if somebody chooses to not buy a loaf of bread that's counted as $5 in lost value

You're paying a lot for bread.

Good bread costs about that here.

Wow. I suppose I could probably find bread somewhere around here that would cost almost that much.

Try Waitrose. I've heard things.

I made my first sourdough this weekend. It was worth more than $5 to me. It was delicious, too.

Bread is so expensive here that Americans are carrying assault rifles when they go to Subway to buy a sandwich.

Even at Waitrose you wouldn't have to pay £4 for a standard size loaf of bread. https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/shop/browse/groceries/bakery/bread?sortBy=PRICE_HIGH_2_LOW

There's a posh bakery near me that maxes out at £3.80, I think.

8: because it's a one-for-one swap?

To stop Bill Gates from stealing the bread.

I'm thinking that $4.70 is close enough to $5 when making an example.

Is "disinfecting" something that works? Whenever someone working for the transit authority gets COVID, they report that they are disinfecting the bus and the garage and the like. I can't figure out if that works or if it's just doing something because they can't not run the bus and they can't disinfect the people.

But to heebie's first point, there's probably lots of other ways to let people die that would save even more money.

Only it's not called Death Panels when Republicans do it.

Further to 14 and 15, the Iraq War involved spending trillions of dollars for a gain of approximately, ooh, a negative bazillion lives.

WE get sourdough from an extremely Cambridge woman -- a former scientist -- who bakes it in her house, to order, and even she charges at most £4.60 for

"Raisin and coriander bread
600g @ £4.60
Wholemeal flour (70%), white flour (30%), water, flame raisins (14%), toasted coriander seeds, sea salt
A moist wholemeal loaf with a combination of big juicy flame raisins and freshly ground toasted coriander seeds, delicious just with butter or for cheese on toast."

and most of it is a lot less than that.

But now I'm hungry.

13: My sense is that's all theater. Touching something shortly after an infected person might spread it, but I don't think anyone's catching this from a bus a day later. The virus probably lost virulence overnight regardless of disinfection.

That analysis has an awful lot of "this bad thing might happen without a shutdown but we can't measure it so we'll ignore it":
how American consumers and restaurant goers would have acted is unknowable. In our estimates, we assume no consumer reaction to the pandemic.
Any hospitalizations avoided due to the shutdown should be subtracted from the net cost. This number is unknown and unlikely to be on a meaningful order of magnitude.

Let's just repeat that one more time for the folks in the back:

"Any hospitalizations avoided due to the shutdown [are] unlikely to be on a meaningful order of magnitude."

The only respectable version of the argument against lockdown that I have heard came from Swedish epidemiologists. It goes something like this:

Poverty kills, in all sorts of ways. [I don't think anyone disagrees]
A huge drop in GDP will increase poverty and hence death [Yup]
Shutting down the economy will result in a huge drop in GDP [looks like that is happening]
Over a period of five or ten years the deaths from increased poverty as a consequence of an economic shutdown would be larger than those from Covid-19. [This is clearly possible in theory but very difficult to model in practice]
Therefore, the health implications of a lockdown should be measured against the health implications of less drastic measures and this should be done on a timescale of more than a year -- five years, perhaps.

I can't fault this argument in principle. It seems to me obvious that we ought to make plans on the basis that no vaccine will turn up to save us, simply because the consequences of betting the other way are disastrous.

But there are two snags with it. The first is that it is morally disgusting when it's deployed by people who have no worries about the health effects of poverty in normal times. I'll take it from conscientious Swedish bureaucrats but not from people whose entire economic policy has been devoted to grinding the faces of the poor.

Secondly, the economic effects are not going to be determined or even much influenced by medium-sized countries with export-dependent economies. If the rest of the world goes into recession, Sweden will too. It is quite possible that the country will end up taking the hit from the virus and the hit from poverty, and won't in practice have any real influence over the outcomes.

If you think about it, legalizing drunk driving would keep more people employed (auto repair, medical personnel, alcoholics who deliver food, morticians) and only cause a few tens of thousands of deaths annually. Probably.

21.last is a very good point - it's kind of a prisoners' dilemma!

22: well, legalising sober driving keeps a lot of people employed and only causes a few tens of thousands of deaths a year.

Right, but why try so hard to keep the numbers down if we can just let evolution work to give humans a better resistance to collisions?

But that won't work with all these safety standards for cars.

Not to mention the EMTs, trauma surgeons, etc.

Poverty kills, in all sorts of ways. [I don't think anyone disagrees]

I wonder what the Swedish epidemiologists would say to these claims about death rates and the Great Depression. (Which don't imply that depressions aren't worth avoiding, of course.)

Destroying things and rebuilding them is great for boosting GDP. I look forward to economists suggesting Trump nuke a city. The QALY value loss from deaths will be a small order of magnitude relative to the spending on new construction.

It's not an analogy ban violation if Trump has thought about it and you know he has.

Americans pay less for food, as a percentage of income, than any other country on earth. Much of which is due to our subsidizing our native food megabusinesses. I know about the pathetic credit card and check situation and the health care bankruptcies and how the government can never accomplish anything and all that but I didn't think I'd be hearing about how one of our foods was too expensive.

Cheapo bread is well under $2 but yeah, it'll be at least $5 if it's in any way artisanal.

Maybe not WELL under $2.

Hand stretched.

Kneaded?

It seems a lot. I mean, yes, 12 is true of course, but I was startled that $5 is apparently the benchmark "what does an illustrative loaf of bread cost?" in the US when it's pretty much the maximum you could possibly pay over here if you get it baked to order by a Fellow of Christ's College who uses a 450-year-old sourdough starter endowed by Archbishop Laud.

21.last, 23: I think that's the point of the public protests. Because a minority that is very much not social distancing can make it so that the benefits of everybody else distancing are much lower. So fewer people will distance and the benefits will be even less.

35: Saturday, I paid $22 for a dozen bagels. They were really great.

Edible supermarket bread here is ~US$1.20.

It's probably not even organic.

In our estimates, we assume no consumer reaction to the pandemic.

Also: Spherical cows.

A little bit OT, for the scientists: correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAICT no-one has solid predictions for infections or illness or mortality, absent shutdowns, despite more than 4 months' data across scores of countries. Should that be surprising? Why so difficult? Will it get better?

The big bread companies (with preservatives in the bread so it lasts forever) seem to have two price points, around $2 for soft white bread and around $4 for "healthy" bread with seeds in it. Then the artisanal bread makers whose bread doesn't last forever, I guess just don't have a big enough market so it's always expensive.

Much more importantly, for NW: how does that raisin-coriander combination work?

I think our food prices are weird in that bottom-tier supermarket food is super cheap, but anything luxurious gets expensive fast. When I've traveled in Europe, I've been startled by the cheapness and wide availability of what I think of as, e.g., 'good cheese.' It's just cheese, there is less of a sharp distinction between the good stuff and the grocery-store commodity cheese. Same with bread. Squishy plastic-wrapped supermarket bread is cheap, but if you want to go up a notch it's expensive immediately.

21.last is a very good point - it's kind of a prisoners' dilemma!

It's all prisoners dilemma all the way down. Sure, a bad US economy drags down the rest of the world, but a bad US pandemic response does the same.

International coordination on decision-making would be a good idea. If only there were some indispensable nation that could coordinate such a response.

Lost in the discussion of international prices is the exchange rate. The dollar has been strong in recent years.

It seems a lot. I mean, yes, 12 is true of course, but I was startled that $5 is apparently the benchmark "what does an illustrative loaf of bread cost?" in the US when it's pretty much the maximum you could possibly pay over here if you get it baked to order by a Fellow of Christ's College who uses a 450-year-old sourdough starter endowed by Archbishop Laud.

Here's a regional artisanal bread shop -- they make great bread, but I don't buy it very often because it is expensive (and what I get most often is the 1/4 miche which is hearty and a solid amount of bread for $4).

The link in the OP annoyed me (which is why I sent it in), but I do think it's worth figuring out how to do that sort of analysis well -- for reasons that are somewhat captured in NW's points above.

1) There's a default tendency for policy to under-react to diffuse harms and overreact to highly visible harms and cost-benefit analysis can be a way to push back against that.

2) I admit, if there was an option (and there isn't) for the US to take a "let it rip" approach to COVID-19 and spend $4T on preventing global warming I'd bet that would be a better outcome.

That's not an argument in favor of "let it rip" but it is an argument if favor of noticing that the scale of money being spent (appropriately) on mitigating the harms of the lock-down is much greater than what's normally available even for issues of global importance.

44 is right, and is IMO a consequence of monopoly. Cheapest-to-produce mass market food suppliers in the US work at huge scale, with captured regulators, and with heavy farm subsidies. I've been enjoying a lot of what Sarah Taber writes on twitter about food and farming in the US.

I'm pretty unhappy about how the shortcomings of factory farmed meat are being reported-- one of the big clusters of covid relatively nearby is among poultry workers on the Delmarva peninsula. Not only no meaningful intervention to help the underpaid people who fucking feed the rest of us, but describing the practical consequence of the extant shitty system that exists for Tysons' convenience (whoops, need to kill and discard millions of chickens) is euphemistic fine print. Any suggestion that some reorganization would lead to better food less susceptible to salmonella, better work conditions at the cost of 10c/lb wholesale is complicated inside baseball that nobody will print.

Lost in the discussion of international prices is the exchange rate. The dollar has been strong in recent years.

That makes it even worse. $4 for a loaf of bread is £5 but it used to be £7!

In Spain fresh bread is suuuuuper cheap. Una barra de pan, a baguette, is 35 eurocents. The equivalent here is $2-$3. Packaged bread isn't that much cheaper than the US version.

48: Also, some people are ideologically committed to making things suck.

There was that Addams Family episode where Gomez was jumping out of airplanes with ever smaller parachutes, with the plan of eventually being able to jump out of a plane with no parachute at all.

Related: the "stop the lockdown now, it's hurting me" crowd in England published a thing criticising the quality of the code used by Imperial College (which is now on github) by an anonymous software engineer who claims to have worked at Google.

My very uninformed impression is that any sufficiently large and old body of code like this is going to have all kinds of warts. "If people knew how software was built, they'd never get on an airplane again" as Ellen Ullman almost said.

But there are real software engineers on here. Does that piece strike you as a grumpy old man yelling "Get of my lawn" or is there something there?

49: I get confused easily on this stuff. But I'm thinking that if ajay is contemplating buying a loaf of bread in dollar-equivalents in the UK, then he's going to pay less for bread than an American would in dollars in the US.

I think.

Here's the Delaware government coronavirus page. See the zip code map on the right. This is cases adjusted to be per capita, but still you might expect the dense and impoverished urban areas near Philly to be doing poorly. Not even close, compared to the sparsely populated area where the chicken processing plants are.

Link that may work

LB's point about food prices in the US vs Yurp makes a lot of sense to me. I am always struck by how shittily battery Americans are fed, on battery chickens and hideously tortured pigs and cows. But it is cheap, for very discreditable reasons (see 48). The good stuff, on the other hand, is much more expensive than here. Whole Foods is a great deal pricier than any comparable British supermarket chain. When we were last in Vienna it was really noticeable how good the ordinary supermarket cheese and ham was.

So we thought to stop in at a locally re-opened brewery for beer and burgers on the way home from a wildlife refuge last night. Walked in, masks on, only to see that no one at all -- not patrons or wait-staff -- was masked. Walked right out. That's a $40 dollar loss to the economy with no "shutdown." Anyone planning on taking a cruise?

If a person wanted to do a good faith accounting for the relative costs of the zillion different flavors of shutdown, they'd obviously have to drop the ridiculous assumptions made here. When someone refuses to do so, my interest in reading further, or in any way engaging with their analysis, just evaporates. So much of what passes for conservatism or libertarianism is so thoroughly marinated in bad faith motivated reasoning: I think we have long done a disservice by clicking, reading, taking seriously what amounts to shitposting. These are garbage people making up arguments to justify their garbage movement. Like the people seizing on the video of the young man walking around the construction site to claim that he's no angel. Or even just that the Narrative is marginally incorrect, which is beyond laughable coming from the same people who think the President was a successful businessman.

Nebraska is in the same situation. Packing plants are driving the whole state's caseload.

Speaking of using bad assumptions, the idea that Americans would have not changed behavior without the shutdown is pretty easy to disprove.

Hey, we may be shittily fed but "battery Americans" is a bit rude.

The truth hurts.

I know it was another thread, but it was also last week, so:

Hey Mossy, here I am to address any and all of your architecture-related inquiries.

Not coincidentally, poultry costs U.S. consumers 62% less in inflation-adjusted terms than it did in 1935, which is how far back the Bureau of Labor Statistics' price data go and was also just a few years after Delaware farmer Cecile Steele pioneered raising chickens by the thousands for their meat. (Before then, farmers kept chickens primarily for the eggs.) Pork, now also raised mostly at factory scale indoors, is 12% cheaper. Beef, which isn't, costs 63% more.

Suppose, hypothetically, k-12 teachers received the following line in an email about wrapping up the school year:

"If you are not aware that you are not returning next year, let your administrator know."

Does this mean:

- If you don't know yet whether you've been fired, let your administrator know

or

- If you are intending to return, let your administrator know

?

We had 1 new case yesterday, on 865 tests. So, we're at 20 active cases, 4 active hospitalizations, statewide. We don't have any of those big meat processing plants.* It's easy to see why folks wouldn't feel like masks are necessary, especially now, before the tourists have arrived.

* Two year old article about this.

Ned, sorry -- I was once in the crowded basement restaurant bit of a business hotel outside Boston somewhere, picking at streaky bacon apparently woven from salted string and then deep fried. I marvelled at the disjunct between the menu and the meal when the phrase popped into my mind to describe me and my fellow customers. I've not been able to shake it since.

43: that bread is great - and as I type this I realise I've missed the deadline for ordering this week. I don't know I'd try making it myself. The baker has extraordinary skills.

58: Yeah, stuff like this seems unserious:

The high end of predicted deaths due to COVID-19, based on CDC scenario analysis (1.7m deaths without an intervention), in retrospect seems unrealistic.

Why is this unrealistic as a high-end estimate for a scenario in which no mitigation is attempted? This is just an assertion based on nothing.

I want to be tolerant of different people gaming out different scenarios that maybe don't take into account every factor. That can be useful, as long as you're clear on what you're not including. But the author's discussion of consumer reaction absent counter-measures is really into spherical cow territory: If I can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

I would propose that after the first several hundred thousand people die in the US in the space of a month or so, consumer reaction changes no matter what the policy prescription is -- and it changes in a predictable direction, even if not at a predictable magnitude.

Hi JRoth! Drop me a mail?

Welcome to America. You can drink the water, but don't eat the food.

I thought the water gave you hookworm. Or CNS poisoning.

Just bought very large artisan sourdough loaf for £3.20, = $3.94 at today's rate. Probably the most I could spend on a loaf of bread without going to Welbeck Abbey farm shop or moving to London, and still not close to $5.00.

53:

I don't know about that particular code, but I know that those of us in academic science routinely write code that would drive professional software developers into conniptions. That doesn't really to speak to whether the programs actually do what they're supposed to do. Developers generally hate academic code because it ignores industry best practices, but those practices are largely designed with industry needs in mind.

58:

Isn't it difficult to drink beer or eat burgers with a mask on?

That's why Batman always looks grim.

Also, wouldn't it be open only for carry out?

72: Only lead poisoning, but that requires time.

Good thing water consumption is only a short-term requirement.

58, 66 - I really don't see how masks are supposed to work for eat-in restaurants. The customers surely can't keep them on while eating, right? So lotsa droplets spraying all over the place regardless.

Right -- mask off for 20 minutes of a 45 minute stay. To be honest, I was a little surprised at myself for having such a visceral reaction, having resisted calls to deplore this that or the other fleeting SD violation.

Hey, the bigger deal is the large bear that was in the yard last night, drawn by the neighbor's trash. They keep their can outside, in violation of city ordinance. My dog had strong opinions about the bear, expressed strongly as it came and went repeatedly between 1 and 4 am.

The big bread companies (with preservatives in the bread so it lasts forever)

Artisanal bread makers need to figure out this technology. I don't care how fancy bread is, if it gets moldy in a few days, I don't want it.

This is a problem that particularly frustrates me because you can't get proper preservative-having bread at my local co-op. Its all the fancy local quasi-artisanal stuff, and its not particularly cheap, and there are all sorts of crunchy groovy grain options that hippies like, but if you buy a loaf you better use it super quick because that stuff does not last.

I suppose if you poured the beer slowly enough it would seep through the mask. Sounds like a less than optimal drinking experience, though.

You can freeze bread.

We like this brewery for the ambiance and the food, but since it's like 20 minutes away, we really only go there on the way home from points south or west. I think 20 minutes is too long for taking warm food out, and anyway we have food at home if that's where we're going to eat.

81. Refrigeration followed by 40 seconds in a toaster? My nice wholegrain bread lasts a week or so that way. Good white bread doesn't last, no way around that I think.

53:

It's mostly standard software engineer reaction to research code. Most research code is a bit of a mess, and software engineers will point out ways it can be improved. Which researchers will promptly ignore, because it requires a bunch of work and learning things that aren't really getting them any closer to their actual goals, at least in the long term.

Most people who write research code would benefit from being better programmers, but it's a long term investment.

Some of the comments in the linked issue show that this particular software engineer doesn't quite understand the depths of concurrency issues in numerical modeling. Not surprising as very few people do; but their repeated underlining of the lack of determinism is a bit off. They are also a bit over the top on the quality issues. But they are on base about some of the issues, and the imperial college code does need a good going over.

A lot of the points they make are good, but could be made in more constructive ways. Some of the conclusions they are drawing are a bit strong, jumping from "this could be a problem" (clearly true) to "this is a problem" (not really demonstrated).

It would be good to see an in depth analysis by someone more qualified to do it that this particular anonymous software engineer, but it's real work so who knows if it will happen.

81: Artisanal bread makers need to figure out this technology

Problem is it makes bread taste worse. Nobody has solved this.

Masking the customers is futile for reasons given, but masking the staff isn't. Anyway I'm thinking nowhere's getting its ambience back this year. And with that, to bed. Keep your distance, reprobates.

You can freeze bears too, but it takes forever if they aren't dead first.

44 is really true in my experience. Like there has been this super effective race-to-the-bottom on cost for nearly everything that can be optimized, so you can buy super cheap but usually pretty mediocre (if not worse) versions of everything. But sometimes the next "tier" of quality is a huge jump, if it exists at all. And people doing smaller scale things are, unlike sometimes in Europe, pretty solidly targeting a UMC buying "artisanal" goods market with high margins.

89: Rookie error. We drop right off in freezing temperatures, but only if we've been properly fattened up in the summer. Which is where you and your neighbor come in.

Do not refrigerate bread, people! It causes the starches to crystallize, permanently damaging the texture.

By contrast, frozen bread suffers minimal damage, especially if wrapped properly (plastic, ideally double-layer, and foil). But a crusty, uncut loaf, indifferently wrapped, thaws/reheats in the oven almost literally as good as new.

73: At June 30, 2014 (a short-term peak, but in line with long-term rates) that loaf of bread costs you around $5.40, holding everything constant besides the exchange rate. (I think that as a general principle, it's reasonably valid to hold everything else constant, but I admit I may be assuming spherical cows here.)

44 is really true in my experience. Like there has been this super effective race-to-the-bottom on cost for nearly everything that can be optimized, so you can buy super cheap but usually pretty mediocre (if not worse) versions of everything. But sometimes the next "tier" of quality is a huge jump, if it exists at all. And people doing smaller scale things are, unlike sometimes in Europe, pretty solidly targeting a UMC buying "artisanal" goods market with high margins.

True far beyond food, as well. Like curtain rods. If you aren't looking for a whole fixture, you can get ones that look horrible and are always on the verge of falling apart for like $3 at the Home Depot and then the next option up is I don't even know, ten times that amount? I swear I have lived in houses where there are tension rods that have a thing where you turn a knob and it gets gradually longer or shorter. These seem to have left the consumer marketplace and you can only get ones that are a set length and you have to force them in at the risk of bending.

I tried to get a tool at the Tractor Supply Co. and the only one available was one that I later found reviews of online, basically all agreeing that it doesn't work at all. To get one that does work I think you have to start pretending to be a professional and buy a set of 20 attachments, 1 of which you need.

My wife won't let me refrigerate the bread for reasons noted in 92.

Freezing bread is a crap solution because then you have to chip it apart and defrost every time you want a piece. If I wanted to go through that kind of trouble, I'd be eating something more interesting than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Thinking a bit more on the software review thing - I think that software engineer is telling on themselves a little when they state the belief that all epidemiological study should be done by insurance companies.

It is concerning when governments lack the capability to either produce themselves, or independently vet, models used for significant policy decisions. On the other hand it's not hard to see why this happens. Absent incentives to do things differently, what do people expect (e.g., ever tried to hire a real programmer on an academic grant? Or get the budget for a significant analytics program from a government entity? Both of these are at best uphill battles).

I feel like 65 has been gravely ignored. What does this mean??

95: You can freeze small amounts or individual slices easily enough, if that's your bag. And it self defrosts in a few minutes, so a modest amount of planning ahead will see you sorted.

If you think about it, legalizing drunk driving would keep more people employed (auto repair, medical personnel, alcoholics who deliver food, morticians) and only cause a few tens of thousands of deaths annually. Probably.

97: I couldn't figure it out either.

I mean, it's unclear enough in a way that would worry me enough to ask for clarification.

nowhere's getting its ambience back this year

I really wonder what the future is for sit down restaurants until we (hopefully) get a vaccine.

People go out to restaurants, bars, cafes & etc. to socialize and relax, not just to eat. Carefully keeping your distance from the other patrons and wearing a mask when not actually eating, while wondering the whole time whether you might or might not be inhaling a virus that might or might not kill you doesn't sound very relaxing.

I would fear that seeking clarification would remind the administrator that they hadn't yet fired you, at which point they would do so.

I think outside the virus crisis scenario, "If you are not aware that you are not returning next year, let your administrator know." would just look like a nonsensical typo. "If you are aware that you are not returning next year, let your administrator know." makes sense, it is telling you to let them know if you are moving or taking a new job.

Hypothetically, one's spouse found out that many contracts went out last week, in the same email with that ominous sentence.

And it self defrosts in a few minutes, so a modest amount of planning ahead will see you sorted.

Again, level of effort here. All of this is not necessary if one buys bread with sufficient preservatives.

97: My guess was that it meant, "Did we forget to tell you that you're fired? If so, get in touch, so that we can fire you."

I feel like 65 has been gravely ignored. What does this mean??

As you know, it's gibberish, so the questions is: How does one respond?

Given the ambiguity, there are two possible correct responses, depending on circumstances: If you know what your intent is for next fall, let your administrator know. If you don't know, then you ask: What the fuck do you want from me, dumbass?

Is there any higher authority than this? https://twitter.com/MHA_Montana/status/1259855989827928078

> All of this is not necessary if one buys bread with sufficient preservatives.

right, it just tastes worse. So trade off unavoidable.

92, 95: Sure, when applied to warm crusty baguettes made with protein-deficient bleached flour. These are delicious, get eaten the same day they have been baked. mmm-mmm, yummy.

Are either of you familiar with dense bread made from whole grains? Filling, tasty, different from white bread loaves. Try a blind taste test comparing toast slices treated and untreated by a fridge, say five days after baking. Possibly there's a way for this to be free of interralionship confrontation. If not, maybe the frustration in 81 doesn't attach to the loaf? Perhaps this could be a branch point for a discussion of supervenience.

102 I guess I really wasn't sure what I was expecting.

We haven't ordered take out or been to a restaurant in two months.

107 sounds right. Is there any admin contact who could give a straight answer to "I found the request really unclear, I don't want to respond in a way that's confusing due to misreading. What's the intent of the sentence?"

105: I think that it's a typo; even if it's not, "letting your administrator know" sounds like an invitation to ask if the email included "not aware" by mistake instead of "aware". That'd open the door for a conversation about what the proper form or pink slip should look like.

In CA, during difficult budget years, K-12 schools will often lay off many of the lowest seniority teachers, with a "and we'll probably rehire you in August, but we can't officially until the budgets are set". It's possible that Jammies is so competent that they don't remember that he hasn't seen whatever the Texas equivalent of that dance is.

Easy. Just reply "thank you for your email. This is just to let you know that I am not aware that I am not returning. Best regards, Prof. Professorson."

That makes it their problem to work out, not yours.

19: how American consumers and restaurant goers would have acted is unknowable. In our estimates, we assume no consumer reaction to the pandemic.

TOO UNSERIOUS FOR NUMBERS

right, it just tastes worse. So trade off unavoidable.

It all tastes fine if you are spreading JIF on it. And I get there is a market for hippie snobs who don't like preservatives, I'm just annoyed that it squeezes the bread for those of us who do want preservatives off the shelf.

Have you considered living in a state with more battery Americans?

Maybe it should be like the yellow dye for margarine in the old days. You can stir in the preservatives if you want them after you bring the bread home.

Huh. Battery chicken is a new vocabulary phrase for me. I was thinking it was something like this.

I was thinking of The Matrix.

They're doing a ratio instead of a comparison. They're trying to compare "Let 'er rip" vs "mass shutdown". Why would a ratio be meaningful or insightful?

I wasn't quite sure what you mean but it got me thinking that they're calculating two values: (1) "deaths [prevented] by the shutdown" and (2) "The total cost of both forgone productivity and business failure would be $1.5T for the first month and rises to $3.4T after two months. Add two months of $900B loss of economic activity for a total loss of $5.2T." But it would make more sense to have three categories:

1) "deaths [prevented] by the shutdown"
2) Economic costs associated with the pandemic (but not specific to the shutdown).
3) Economic costs associated specifically with the shutdown.

This leads to an important, but difficult to measure element of the calculation. Many of the business failures are going to be determined by the projection of what's going to happen in the coming months. In theory, given the same economic environment, businesses are less likely to close if there is less uncertainty -- if the response by the government provides a clear roadmap forward (separate from direct economic support).

Other people have made the point, but I think putting it that way makes clear that the analysis isn't comparing apples to oranges.

Have you considered living in a state with more battery Americans?

No, those are too crowded. I don't care for traffic.

122: Right. I watch enough commercials to know what a battery bunny is.

121 thanks! I mean that recipe was new for me and will be explored.

But what do you call battery chickens? Chickens?

Pre-tenders.

118: huh, I've never seen that squeeze in action. Grocery stores seem mostly full of the preservative-laden stuff.

agree for Jif it probably doesn't matter. or you have bigger problems, or something.

126: Yup. Chickens.

I think I learned of this thought-provoking exploration of cookery reasoning here, but it's relevant today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKwL5G5HbGA

I'll say factory chicken or grocery chicken, but I don't think either's common. Lack of a common term (and more prominently a common alternative outside the big cities) is a deficiency.

I thought battery chickens mostly referred to egg production, not meat production?

Those are batter-y chickens.

65 makes no sense at all. Possibly just a mistake because someone forgot to proofread and didn't notice the extra not?

If you are aware that you are not returning next year, let your administrator know: i.e., if you are not planning to return next year, let your administrator know.

132 excels.

I'm having not-battered chicken for dinner.

My guess is that the confusing language in 65 stems from the fact that the admin is desperately trying to plan for various fall scenarios, under conditions of great uncertainty. Will they return to full-time, face-to-face teaching in the fall? Will they have to continue online-only teaching, due to an extension of lockdown? Will they attempt some sort of complex, partially face-to-face, partially online, probably wholly unworkable, solution (e.g., students with surnames A-L attend school on Days A and C, students with surnames M-Z attend schools on Days B and D, and so on).

Depending on how this all plays out, they may be anticipating layoffs, sure, but they also may be anticipating possible teacher shortages. They must have many teachers with school-aged children of their own. And if those children have to stay home this fall, some of their parents who are teachers might also have to stay home this fall. So the admin may be asking, If your child's school has already told you that it's online-only this fall, and if you therefore already know that you won't be available for face-to-face teaching this fall [because you won't have childcare, and will therefore be available for online-teaching only]), could you please let us know?

Which would make my 133.2 make sense, but which admittedly doesn't necessarily make much sense at all.

Grocery stores seem mostly full of the preservative-laden stuff.

Yeah, most are. By my closest grocery store happens to be a coop. Its a great place - its kind of a better, socialist version of Trader Joes.

They have a lot of locally produced, high quality stuff. Their beef, if you can afford it, is from local cows. All the eggs are cage-free. They sell delicious unhomoginized milk in a glass bottle. There is a tank of kombucha. You can get Paul Newman-branded Oreos instead of regular Oreos. That kind of place.

Unfortunately, they do miss on some of the basics, like bread with proper preservatives, Diet Coke, and Jif. You can get peanut butter there, but its that awful "natural" stuff with the separated oil and not enough sugar. Gross.

Peanut butter tastes so much better after you've put in the effort of stirring the oil back in yourself, the way your ancestors did on the veld.

my closest grocery store happens to be a coop.

It's a trap.

Paul Newman's oreos are really good.

I bet that if you know Paul Newman, you can get the world's best partially-hydrogenated oil.

It's sort of like those hand-cooked, ye olde timey, kettle-style potato chips that your great-grandmother never used to make, she was too busy making mashed potatoes...

the way your ancestors did on the veld.

My ancestors came off the veld so they didn't have to stir peanut butter. Its called progress.

You don't have to stir the peanuts, you choose to, and that makes all the difference. It's like Tom Sawyer and the fence.

Planet Money had an episode on the topic of the OP, and it honestly doesn't strike me as psychopathic that someone has to calculate how much preventing a death/morbidities from COVID-19 costs and then determine where to draw the line. What's frustrating me about the whole discussion is the fantasy that "let 'er rip" is an option, like we're just going to roll the tape back to Feb 24, instead of recognizing that we're taking a massive economic hit anyway.

Today we had an HVAC guy come by to do an estimate. HVAC starts off by doing the unfortunately common Utah ignore-the-woman thing*, then when he does speak to me, it's not about the HVAC issue, but about how this virus is just such a hassle and we don't shut down the economy even though four times as many die from car crashes. New York is only having people die because people recovered from COVID were sent to nursing homes.

Anyhow, shiv takes over, the guy leaves, probably never realizing he's lost any chance on the bid, because the fuck I'm going to let a virus-denier send a crew to my house right now. Live by the free market, die, etc.

*like Mormon Ferengi.

Planet Money had an episode on the topic of the OP, and it honestly doesn't strike me as psychopathic that someone has to calculate how much preventing a death/morbidities from COVID-19 costs and then determine where to draw the line. What's frustrating me about the whole discussion is the fantasy that "let 'er rip" is an option, like we're just going to roll the tape back to Feb 24, instead of recognizing that we're taking a massive economic hit anyway.

Today we had an HVAC guy come by to do an estimate. HVAC starts off by doing the unfortunately common Utah ignore-the-woman thing*, then when he does speak to me, it's not about the HVAC issue, but about how this virus is just such a hassle and we don't shut down the economy even though four times as many die from car crashes. New York is only having people die because people recovered from COVID were sent to nursing homes.

Anyhow, shiv takes over, the guy leaves, probably never realizing he's lost any chance on the bid, because the fuck I'm going to let a virus-denier send a crew to my house right now. Live by the free market, die, etc.

*like Mormon Ferengi.

Planet Money had an episode on the topic of the OP, and it honestly doesn't strike me as psychopathic that someone has to calculate how much preventing a death/morbidities from COVID-19 costs and then determine where to draw the line. What's frustrating me about the whole discussion is the fantasy that "let 'er rip" is an option, like we're just going to roll the tape back to Feb 24, instead of recognizing that we're taking a massive economic hit anyway.

Today we had an HVAC guy come by to do an estimate. HVAC starts off by doing the unfortunately common Utah ignore-the-woman thing*, then when he does speak to me, it's not about the HVAC issue, but about how this virus is just such a hassle and we don't shut down the economy even though four times as many die from car crashes. New York is only having people die because people recovered from COVID were sent to nursing homes.

Anyhow, shiv takes over, the guy leaves, probably never realizing he's lost any chance on the bid, because the fuck I'm going to let a virus-denier send a crew to my house right now. Live by the free market, die, etc.

*like Mormon Ferengi.

like Mormon Ferengi
I will treasure this image the rest of my life. Mormons will earnestly accost me and never know why I'm laughing.

If they have big ears, they might guess partially correctly.

Any time a Mormon (or, for that matter, a Jehovah's Witness) comes to my doorstep, trying to load me up with pamphlets, I am always unfailingly polite. "Oh, I'm sorry," I'll say, "but I am a Roman Catholic." I say "Roman" because I'm expecting it to do a lot of work. I may be a witch, I may be a concubine of Rome, I probably just want you to get the hell off my lawn.

I honestly don't get why the anti-lockdown folks don't understand that the damage to the economy is driven by individual behavior. They seem to be bothered by what they perceive as "naive" liberal views about government, but then lean in to a ridiculously simplistic view in which individuals have no agency and are only sheep who blindly follow government decrees. It's so stupid.

WE ASSUME THAT MEMBERS OF THE FACELESS MASS OF THE UNWASHED AND UNMASKED WILL STEP OVER THE BODIES OF THE FALLEN WITHOUT MISSING MORE THAN 0.01% OF THE DAILY QUOTA ON THE CONVEYOR BELT

I grew up in "social housing;" I grew up as a "lower-income" Canadian. A very small, mean dwelling, but I didn't even know the difference: because my upbringing was just grand, truly great: my parents loved me, and they made me feel loved, and my dad used to tell me that I could be anything that I wanted to be ("You've got a case of the smarts, darling," my dad used to say to me).

I'm so glad my parents died before COVID-19. I'm just glad that they missed this.

I totally married up into America's UMC, btw, So: no violins for anyone like me. But I do recall that social housing from my childhood...

152 is also Elon Musk, apparently.

151 When they finally twig to this cue the exhortations that you have a sacred duty to get out there and risk your lives for the 'economy'

152 Like Mosin-Nagants at the Battle of Stalingrad workers without PPE shall take them off the bodies of the fallen.

Good white bread doesn't last, no way around that I think.

No, and most European countries have a range of delicious recipes featuring left over bread for this reason.

143: And yet you want unhomogenized milk. Wouldn't you just prefer to have the fat dispersed through out so that you didn't have to shake it?

Also sugar in peanut butter is gross. I did recently have peanut butter with honey mixed in, and I think the peanuts were dry roasted like Teddy's is.

I enjoy both Jif and "natural" peanut butter as their own distinct experiences. For that matter, I like both bread with preservatives and fancy bread without. This is also the only way to appreciate carob.

In other news, I've gained five pounds in the last two months.

("You've got a case of the smarts, darling," my dad used to say to me).

This is so charming.

Fancy chocolate and mass-produced American chocolates are both good, but every time I eat a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup I wish that the peanut butter part were a little lower sugar and the chocolate/peanut butter ratio was higher and it drives me batty that so many fancy pants peanut butter cups sprang up and no one addressed the real issues.

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are one of the things where my childhood taste buds and adult taste buds differ most acutely. I always think they're going to be just pure bliss - I remember them just elevating me to another planet. And then the peanut butter is oily, the chocolate a little plastic-y, and they're just not what I hoped for.

(But also the fancy ones don't scratch that itch for me, either. Caramel + chocolate, toffee + chocolate, coffee + chocolate: those things can still achieve the childhood bliss for me. But not peanut butter anymore.)

Maybe Tia's diagnostic is the problem, however.

Amending 158 to say that Justin's peanut butter with honey is quite tasty.

They make fancy peanut and almond butter cups in chocolate that are not as sweet as Reese's. As does Trader Joe's.

I have totes diagnosed the problem! If you take a nice square of chocolate and a jar of peanut butter (have I done this as recently as yesterday? a lady never tells) it will be trivial to construct a blissful chocolate peanut butter experience but I predict you'll notice that you use a way higher chocolate to peanut butter ratio. And my experience of rpbc is not that the peanut butter is oily, but rather that it is dry and crumbly, another problem (in addition to excessive sweetness) from too much sugar.

It's dry and crumbly, but there's sometimes a separation of the oils, and having tasted that once, I'll hallucinate it for the rest of time, solely for RPBC.

But yes, on the ratio, I'm sure you're right. Their mini-cups are better than the maxi-cups for that reason, and the massive pumpkins and easter eggs and such are the worst of all.

You know what really holds up, as far as vending machine candy goes? A Skor bar. Yum.

156.1 Some horrible person writer for First Things is going on about how wearing masks is a sign of cowardice and that you are immoral if you don't visit your elderly mother during the pandemic.

I'm so glad we put in that video phone for mom last fall.

161, 162: Boyer candies, in Altoona PA, makes peanut butter cups that are not at all fancy, but better than Reese's, with creamier, less sweet peanut butter and, well, probably not great chocolate, but no worse anyway.

They also recently revived the Clark bar, which was a casualty of the Necco bankruptcy.

As the official Buckeye of Unfogged, it seems like my duty to bring up the official candy of Ohio, the buckeye. I don't know what to say about it though.

Chocolate and peanut butter are two of my very favorite foods, and they are pretty good together, but still all in all, I would usually choose to keep them separated.

Buckeyes are really good. I've never made them, but when people know how, it's better than the commercial version.

171 Oh wow, I've never even heard of those. I thought a buckeye was a kind of cow or something.

That too.

No visit to Ohio is complete without going to a farm to watch them milk the Buckeyes.

It should come as no surprise that free-range all-natural Buckeyes are superior to the battery-raised artificially-inseminated kind.

I didn't know about the candy, either, just the real ones, which apparently aren't found east of Pittsburgh. I have memories of some tree with similar fruit growing up, but I'm not sure what that could be.

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