I only made it far enough into the first one to see that it concerned an extramarital affair on the parts of both parties to the tryst and then I knew that I had to post it.

Do you have any salacious stories?????

(Apologies if it's been linked already!)

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while.

Episode 16.

We are going to spend the summer watching numbers creep upwards, and debating whether or not we're complacent to the increasing deaths, and agonizing over masks and protesters. Then in the fall, we'll send 50 million kids to public school, and 15 million students to colleges. The k-12 kids will cement transmission within a community, and the college students will cause transmissions to leapfrog between communities.

The spike headed for us in the fall makes me suspect that we're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic for the next three months.

1. This Lord of the Flies IRL story is kind of fun and sweet.

2. Who wants to tell me what happened in the oral arguments with the Supreme Court yesterday? Have any of you actually listened in yet to these things live?

3. So many articles about peeping inside people's homes via zoom, but I particularly like this one about El Paso news anchors, because they're less polished (but not embarrassing or cringey) than what the NYT would select for your voyeurism pleasures..

A silver lining of all this tedious zooming is seeing into other people's houses. Especially my students,because they're less likely to have set up little cleared out corners, and more likely to just be at the kitchen table. (Or in their bedroom, but I like the kitchen table view better. Oh, your mother likes oak hutches and family photos! I love to stare.)

My most common zoom background is just closet doors and a bit of green wall, because I'm usually in our make-shift guest-room-turned-office. Occasionally I'm at the dining room, which I prefer.

4. Mossy sends in without commentary: Sudan makes female genital cutting a crime in 'new era' for women's rights. Apparently they have one of the highest rates in the world - I hope this is meaningfully enforced.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while.

Episode 15.

1. I haven't yet been in a situation where I've had to wear a mask, where I would normally rely on facial expression to communicate. So far, I've only gone to the grocery store, so the only thing is that my apologetic smiles are hidden and I look even more nondescript than usual.

What I'm specifically wondering about is teaching, especially with new students where I don't yet have a rapport - what's it like for a student to try to get to know a new instructor who is wearing a mask? The closest I can think of is getting to know a podcaster versus a TV personality. Will my charm be inhibited? Will I learn to waggle my eyebrows more emphatically?

(I do know about those plastic-hood versions of masks that I've seen in photos.)

I'm not especially troubled by these thoughts, for the record, just musing.

2. The kids' teachers often do this thing, which took me by surprise, where the online version of a worksheet is Google Slides. Then the kid edits the slide in order to write their answer in the worksheet.

It makes sense - it's easy for everyone to use, etc. It just seemed funny to me, because it seemed to violate the sanctity of the performance curtain of being a teacher. Letting them see the version with all the dotted lines around the text boxes. Giving the kids full access to manipulate the worksheet itself.

A minor example of this from Before Times is when people give Power Point presentations, and they start projecting before they enter Presenter Mode, and so the audience sees the screen with the toolbar, the thumbnails of the slides down the left hand side, the little ruler across the top and sides, etc.

It's in no way a problem, but I still found it odd that people didn't find that mildly too informal. Like walking on stage and then putting on a tie and running a comb through your hair.

Nick S. writes: I was reading this assessment of the costs and benefits of lockdown which seems wrong to me, and I was hoping to enlist the hive-mind to help pick it apart.

In our first post, we concluded that the shutdown would meet conventional standards of cost effectiveness only if the deaths avoided was on the high end of the possible range and the costs on the low end -- an outcome that seemed unlikely. Revisiting the issue, it is now clear that the cost per QALY gained from the shutdown will be outside the conventional range of acceptability even at the high end of deaths avoided. How far outside the range the shutdown policy will ultimately prove to be is unknown.

That sounds like it implies that it might be better to ignore the "pile of bodies") and focus on the economic costs.

There's some care taken with the analysis, but I feel like it's posing the problem incorrectly, and I figure out what is a better way to construct the question.

The obvious challenges that I see are:

1) By looking only at deaths it ignores the costs of illness and hospitalization (and, potentially, long-term injuries.
2) GDP isn't everything. If people are working on their own projects rather than engaging in the economy there's still value to that (in other words, if somebody chooses to not buy a loaf of bread that's counted as $5 in lost value, but if they bake their own bread that isn't counted as value gained).

Also, neither the costs or benefits of the lockdown include any estimate of the emotional toll of living through a pandemic, but I'm not sure how to estimate that (and it's an interesting question of whether the feeling of threat (separate from the actual pain and suffering) is influenced by the existing cultural familiarity with death and disease). Going down that road goes very far from a standard cost/benefit analysis.

But that's the question, is a cost/benefit analysis helpful and, if it is, where does that one go wrong?

Heebie's take: These guys are the worst. I spent a few days trying to figure out exactly why they're the worst, and here's what I think it is:

1. 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? They're not comparing this to other public health campaigns, in general. They're implicitly comparing it to their psychopath fantasy of mass devastation, but they don't compute any numbers on that side. Because that would not be serious.

2. On the "benefits" side, they're being stingy and detailed with the human toll averted. But on the "costs" side, they're not translating the dollars lost into any sort of human toll. They're just taking it as a fact that spending a trillion dollars on a stimulus package is an upsetting loss of money, or GDP, or whatever devastating wonky econ measure. Why not put the stimulus in the "benefits" column, balancing out the loss of jobs? Why not do a straight comparison, and assess costs in terms of the human toll? "Here's how long the lines at the food bank have grown." "Here's how much personal savings have been wiped out, for people with less than $250K." Etc.

3. If you really have your heart set on a ratio, you could compare the cost-benefit ratio of different interventions. You could compute your magical ratio for our existing shutdown, and then compare it to what might have been if we'd ramped up PPE production in February and had a robust mask program in place for the past three months.

This is just the tip of the ice berg. You will find so many more things that are bizarre, like how they are deducting two months unemployment from the "benefits" column - they translate two months unemployment into a human toll of 0.1 loss of QALY. Why not put the unemployment in the "costs" side? Isn't it sort of there already?

Also It seems to bother them that they can't quantify the emotional toll of the lockdown (even though they tried to account for unemployment) but it hasn't occurred to them whatsoever that there could be an emotional toll of letting it rip through.

Bottom line: this cost-benefit ratio of our shutdown against your fantasy of "let er rip!" just kind of makes you a psychopath.