Pun Salad

The fact is, I would have gotten a haircut and my teeth cleaned if I had more trust in my Grand Junction neighbors. I don’t. On a trip to Home Depot a couple weeks ago, I saw less than half the customers wearing masks. I guess it’s a “live free or die” thing, I don’t know. But my point is this: In making your statement by not wearing a mask, you are hurting your neighbors; making it harder for them to feed their families. You need to understand this. Ignorance is an unforgivable sin.

Of all the edicts issued during the Covid-19 pandemic, perhaps the least cruel is the request by European Union regulators that Netflix and YouTube stream their videos a bit slower. The reduced data flow helps relieve network congestion. Movie-reception clarity drops, but kids may get faster access to their homework, while doctors practicing telehealth are better able to connect with patients.

The U.S. has not introduced similar policies, though stay-at-home orders saw Internet usage rates surge about one-third—in the U.S. and abroad—by late March. While greater demand for data slows transmission speeds, the information infrastructure has proven robust in the U.S., where neither regulators nor Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have had to ask content suppliers not to “break the Internet.” Indeed, American broadband networks have responded to this extraordinary period by relaxing data caps and extending free Internet access to households with schoolchildren quarantined at home.

Those of us outside of the New York area have done exactly what we were told we had to do. We “flattened the curve," and now we’re being told that this flattened curve is a sign of our failure and a reason we need to stay in lockdown.

Unless you want to demolish all faith in public health authorities, don’t make them into liars by moving the goalposts and declaring that a flattened curve is a sign of failure. It would be even worse to poison this with partisan politics by asserting that the government leaders who totally failed to flatten the curve, and then who spread the virus to the rest of the country, are success stories.

Many people believe that it is quite moral not to pay rent. Hardly anyone believes that it is moral not to pay taxes. I think that the intuition is that taxes are fair, but rent is not fair. If I owned rental property, I would not think it fair to pay taxes to a government that tells people they do not have to pay rent.

In 2009, when we had the stimulus, the models forecast that unemployment would rise to 8 percent without the stimulus. The stimulus passed, and unemployment hit 10 percent. But the conventional wisdom is that the stimulus worked, and unemployment would have been worse without it. How do we know this? Model simulations.

In 2020, suppose that, contrary to model forecasts, the death rate drifts down after lockdowns are lifted. We will be told that there would have been many fewer deaths had the lockdowns stayed in place. How will we know this? Model simulations.