I had one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic, on the Reds-Rockies trade and Atlanta’s two free agent signings, as well as a piece last week on what we can learn from the various pro leagues’ approaches to the pandemic. I held a Periscope video chat on Thanksgiving day while I spatchcocked the turkey.
Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best deduction board games, including Coup and this year’s The Search for Planet X.
I held off on sending the next issue of my free email newsletter until after the holiday so I could write up the trade and signings, but I’ll get one out in the next 48 hours. You can sign up for free here.
My first book, Smart Baseball, got a glowing review from SIAM News, a publication of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. You can buy Smart Baseball and my second book, The Inside Game, at any bookstore, including bookshop.org via those links, although Smart Baseball has been backordered there for a while. You can check your local indie bookstore or buy it on amazon.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: This GQ article, about the author’s parents and a promise each made to never put the other spouse in a nursing home, is just heartbreaking.
- The New Yorker details the underground network (with many Korean-Americans) trying to topple the North Korean government.
- NiemanLab details the moral and business cases for increasing diversity in the newsroom, although with newspapers dying it may be a bit of a lost cause.
- The Justice Department is now looking into the questionable stock trades by Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) that I mentioned in a link last week. If you’re still voting for this crook – who still refuses to debate Jon Ossoff, his Democrat opponent – I really don’t know what to tell you.
- The logic of COVID-19 restrictions is falling apart, because they’re determined by economic factors, not by science.
- SCOTUS’ decision last week on COVID-19 restrictions, written by “scientifically illiterate judges,” will cost Americans’ lives, writes economist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs.
- YouTube finally suspended the feed of the nationalist One American News Network for spreading bogus information on the pandemic – not for spreading bullshit about the election.
- A coffee brand that had capitalized on its conservative political leanings ran into trouble when it (rightfully) declined to support accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse.
- Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, discussed how to make higher education less overtly racist in an online talk with Radcliffe and Harvard College Everywhere.
- From 2010, Ed Yong, who has written some essential pieces on the COVID-19 pandemic for The Atlantic this year, wrote about a woman whose amygdala was so damaged that she can no longer experience fear.
- The Wall Street Journal profiled the conservative social media network Parler, but the real revelation here is that it’s backed by the Mercer family, whose views are about as neo-Nazi and white nationalist as it gets.
- Anti-lockdown twits like to point to Sweden as some sort of success story, but so far there’s no evidence herd immunity is working there – and they’re faring much worse than their Nordic neighbors.
- Greg Burton writes for the Arizona Republic about how the modern environment has made it more dangerous for journalists to do the most routine tasks for their jobs.
- On Tuesday, December 1st, the Welsh Rugby Union is hosting a free community talk on autism and the autism community in Wales. (I’m friends with one of the scheduled speakers.)
- Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff locked students out of remote class sessions if they failed to get required COVID-19 tests. Getting tested isn’t just about you, but it’s a responsibility to your community.
- Several board game publishers have Black Friday sales going on right now, including Renegade, Capstone, Floodgate, and Japanime.
A key theme of The Atlantic article seems to be we should pay people to stay home: Position folks — both employers and employees — to pay their bills without having to physically goto work and we’ll cut down on the spread. As logical as that may seem, I’m not sure observed behavior bears it out. Because many, many people HAVE been paid to stay home. And they aren’t. Offices and schools are shuttered in so many places while people get paid to WFH and so many of them are still out and about. I see it with my own two eyes, both where I live (suburban NJ) and where I work (downtown Manhattan as a school teacher in-person).
Now, not everyone is so situated. And, as is so often the case, the folks least likely to get paid to stay home are the ones least able to stay home unpaid. And perhaps if we did pay those folks to stay home — thereby (re)shuttering restaurants and bars and gyms and non-essential retail — those privileged folks who have been paid to stay home but haven’t been would have no where to go and thus would be forced to stay home. But I’m not sure. Too mang folks just don’t want to, and therefore won’t, abide by such restrictions. Whether it’s Covid fatigue, misinformation, stupidity, selfishness.. they just won’t. Which doesn’t mean paying folks to stay home won’t help — maybe we just let the selfish wander the country getting only themselves and each other sick — but I just fear the ship has sailed on that as an effective response to the pandemic. Maybe it’d have worked earlier, but I think the anecdotal/observed evidence of how Americans are responding to being paid to stay home shows that they’ll take the pay and not stay home.
This doesn’t have anything to do with a specific topic discussed here, but I feel like it’s something worth saying. So I found out back on 11/19 that my boss’ daughter and wife tested positive for COVID. As I was in close proximity to my boss the prior two days, I went for a test at a drive-thru facility that same day. I didn’t get the results until yesterday. By that time I was fairly certain I was negative as I wasn’t showing symptoms, and because my boss get a negative result for a test he had that took place after mine.
So…anyone else have an experience like this? It’s really hard for me to not think that this is likely a big reason we’re still having such issues with cases exploding. If even a small portion of people who get tested have to wait that long for results that turn out to be positive, imagine how many people they could be infecting in the meantime?
From what I’ve been told, positive results get reported more quickly than negative ones. If you are negative, they run the result through the patient portal which has its own processing times. If it is positive, they notify you directly and trigger the contact tracing protocol. This would presumably reduce (though not eliminate) the time between taking a test and knowing for certain one needs to quarantine. However, I believe it is also an expectation that someone being tested due to known exposure ought to be quarantining anyway.
So, theoretically, they shouldn’t be a big issue. But… there ARE delays between when a test is administered and when a positive result is known/reported AND not everyone is quarantining while they wait. So, yea, it is almost certainly a contributing factor.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what can be done about it. From what I understand, the rapid (e.g., 15-minute) tests aren’t very reliable. And an inherent consequence of increased testing is a slowing down of the test processing. I also read that because there are so many more positives, they can’t do “batch testing”, further slowing down the process.
The best solution would be to improve our capacity to quickly process the most accurate tests. I don’t know what that would entail.
Theoretically, you’re supposed to self-isolate until you get the results of the test. But that’s sadly unlikely to happen.
Here’s a link for next week, perhaps.
Your Local Bookstore Wants You to Know That It’s Struggling
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/books/independent-bookstores-economy.html/??
Punishing students by prohibiting access to remote education would seem a poor way to communicate what is actually valued but is on brand for higher education, which I work in. Should be noted that college football coaches are not being punished for failures to adhere to protocols.
One of those parties is paying the school, while the other is being paid by the school. Just so easy to punch down on students and make their lives more difficult. And who will be given the responsibility of helping those students catch up? In many cases, lowly-paid adjuncts themselves living precariously.
Great links this week! That GQ piece re: one couple’s resistance to nursing homes is indeed heartbreaking. It raises difficult questions about elder care, medication and familial duty that must be hard for anyone to take on. Better tighten up my end-of-life care instructions…
And fascinating piece re: the underground movement to take down Kim Jong Un’s regime. With North Korea no longer propped up by the Soviet Union, and with China its only real (but grudging) ally, I’ve long wondered why the US hasn’t deployed a Jason Bourne-type solution to shatter the dear leader’s hold on the country and create a power vacuum.