[conspire] Numbers racket

Mon Apr 27 18:13:06 PDT 2020

On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 04:17:39PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):
> 
> > about 4.2 in our model, which we sort of knew before it got here.  Eh -
> > it is a very fugable number.
> 
> Deirdre and I were trying to figure out what you meant to say when you
> wrote 'fugable'.  I'll admit I'm not certain.  (Please note that I'm
> not mocking your typos; I really sometimes have parsing problems, and
> this is one such occasion.)
> 

You start out with data and you hypothesis a model.  It is an
expodential growth model.  And in theory, the R0 constant makes it fit
the data.  But, like most of these models, there are a lot of unknowns
and perspectives.  And the closer you look, the more problems there are.

One thing, for example, is that we are going to have more hard data in
this disease than in any other previously, because they are going to do
heavy serological testing.  You didn't have that for the Spanish Flu.

And then they data has been distorted by the lock down.  The question is
how much.  You can run models and try to hypothesis under varying 
conditions.  I wanted to do this kind of work for my PhD and it was
pulled out from under me.  It is closely related to other kind of
modeling, like phylogentics, and protein folding.  Facinating stuff/

And then other things effect data.  Validating data is a big problem.
For example what do you do with data that was genertated my MORONS who
insisted on infecting skilled and unskilled nursing homes with knonw
infected patients?  That fucks up your whole R0 velocity right there.

You have to attack the data from many points of views and prespectives,
in order to understand it.  It makes it hard to say we have a single
number that represents contagion.  In theory, we want an invitro
model and we don't have it.  Everything I see says it is a very
contagious disease.  And all the data I've seen makes me believe that
all of NYC, for practicle purposes, has WUHAN SARS2 (covid-19) 19
already.  They are saying 20% yesterday and 25% today.  That is not
right.  Everyone has been sick.  It is not unheard of.  It just usually
doesn't cause so many deaths.  How deadly is it, is the question.  Well,
for aging populations with serious co-morbities, it is seriously deadly.
We can see this in the data and in the results from the old age homes.
A number of close people to me have died.  Rabbi Perlow, Noach Dear..
not personal friends, but people I have had associations with.  For
others, it seems to be the luck of the draw.

My sister, OTOH, is in Seatle and does OT.   A lot of her debilitated
patients in homes are dieing.  If you are older than 60 and in a hot
spot, I would quarantine myself.  But, IMO, no matter what you do, you
can slow this down, but you can't stop it.  Herd immunity is the only
way this is going to end.  It doesn't mutate quickly, as I understand
things.

Both Italy and Gemrany have similar number of presumed cases, 199,414
and 158,434 ... yet Germany has a much lower death rate.  People are
saying Merkel is a genious.  Maybe not.  The main this Germany is doing 
differently is it has hospital beds, younger patients, and it uses tests
by epidemilogist, not on TV blowing smoke up our ass and locking us
down, but on the street testing potential patients before symptoms, and
responds.

QUOTE from the NY Times (a paper you can not trust )

In most countries, including the United States, testing is largely
limited to the sickest patients, so the man probably would have been
refused a test.

Not in Germany. As soon as the test results were in, the school was
shut, and all children and staff were ordered to stay at home with their
families for two weeks. Some 235 people were tested.

“Testing and tracking is the strategy that was successful in South Korea
and we have tried to learn from that,” Professor Streeck said.

Germany also learned from getting it wrong early on: The strategy of
contact tracing should have been used even more aggressively, he said

ENDQUOTE

The last paragraph about trust in the government is BS.  I won't even
entertain it.

Germany is using its powerful indstrial and economic might to
agressively attack the virus.  It is using test equiptment in a novel
way and its healthcare system has been racheted up, and not stripped
bare.  Its research was full steam ahead on tests and if I understand
correctly, they make there own ventolators... and masks.

I'm afraid that in the end, NY specifically is going to go down hard,
and it hasn't already.  It had stripped down its healtcare system to
the rock bottom, and had no room to manuever.  Then, when the virus was
in full bloom, it responded beauracratically, and now the state is
nearly backrupt.

I think it is way past time to contain it.  If Deidre is right about
Immunity, well, half the city will be dead in 6 months as wave after
wave attacks us and the State is fisically broke.

:(

But the reality is that the vast majority of people get this it shrug it
off like a cold.  There is no reason to believe that this is a 1 in a
zillion virus that can hid itself from our immunity, like HIV.  That
would be atypical to the class.  People gain immunity to this thing and
fight it off, and the Killer T-Cells win.  Comp mediated immunity
protects you afterwards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os0qdddXrMs&ytbChannel=MIT%20OpenCourseWare

I thought Berkey had a great number of lectures on this that I used to
watch to keep up with what was my former healthcare career.  They seem
to be gone.

> > I refuse to be locked im my little NYC apartment for a year and a
> > half because of Matilda.
> 
> You absolutely have my sympathy, as on other occasions when we've
> discussed this and you've said 'I refuse to live like this', etc.  
> It's got to be hellish being stuck in a cramped situation like that, and 
> by comparison the Moen household has nothing to complain about.
> 
> At the same time, I have to wonder what statements like 'I refuse to
> live like this' and the other quoted above mean in _operational_ toerms.

It means I refuse to live like this.  I am getting out of here one way
or another.  I've been working so I stayed here, but I'm sorry about it
now.  I should have been in Lake Placd, or with my kids in Israel.

As of now, I can still hop on Amtrak and go to Montana.  I'm considering
that.  Over all, this is not the world I want to live it.

While it is all nice to look at the numbers and project our death rate,
I will fight with everything I have to not live in a city and country
that is afraid to get beers at the pub an is in a constant state of
terror.  I can't control who lives and who dies.  I have a little more
control if I am going to dragged to the gas chamber or go there
cooperatively.  I am not going cooperatively.

> What I mean is, if *I* say 'I refuse to [X]', then I'll either imply or 
> elaborate on what I will be insisting will occur instead of [X].  
> Because otherwise I'd just be speaking rhetoric without a realistic
> plan.
> 
> Given that you 'refuse' [sundry things for very understandable reasons],
> are you willing to elaborate and state how you intend to proceed, and
> how that's going to work?

Right now I am still talking.  But I alreay have a mayor who is using
this emergency as an excuse to reshape my entire city.

for one thing

https://gothamist.com/news/reversal-de-blasio-announces-plan-open-100-miles-streets-pedestrians-cyclists

If it is one thing we have all learned is that in an emergency,
depending on the government for transportation can mean your death.
Cars are criticle.

https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/290-20/mayor-de-blasio-fair-recovery-taskforce

"“This crisis is not only about a virus; it’s about the fallout from
hundreds of thousands of our neighbors losing their jobs and struggling
to provide for their families. It’s about the outsized devastation
communities of color are facing across the country. I am not only
calling on New Yorkers from all walks of life to help us get our city
back on its feet – I am calling on them to join me in the fight ahead
for a fair recovery, ” said Mayor Bill de Blasio."

And Cuomo is saying he can't reopen the state because he needs money.  I
didn't know it takes so much money to put pen to paper and rescind the
useless emergency edicts that has now bankrpted the state.

The bottom line is what the Wall Street Journal has said:  Everyone who
can is leaving NYC and NYS.

http://www.mrbrklyn.com/resources/slow_death_of_nyc_before_virus.pdf
http://www.mrbrklyn.com/resources/slow_death_of_nyc.pdf

The press keeps dropping the term on us, "The New Normal".  The only
failure we had was to trust China as trading partner and stripped bare
our healthcare system.  There is nothing normal about what is being
proposed and for sure hell, there is nothing new about totalarianism.

> 
> Again, I'm not trying to mock in any way.  If what you meant was merely
> that you don't _like_ being stuck in your little Brooklyn apartment and
> are venting frustration, fair enough.  But if you were trying to
> communicate what your plans are, I'll confess that I'm not clear on what
> you said.
> 
> On the _third_ hand, it's possible that expressions like 'I refuse to
> live like this' are intended to motivate everyone you hear to adopt the
> same opinion, and that you imagine that you are successfully lobbying
> others.  In which case, I'll ask you to please not use Conspire as a
> public petition site.  Places like http://change.org/ are available if
> you want to wave that sort of rhetoric around.
> 
> 
> > The best weapon we have to fight this is a srong economy and a huge
> > investement in vaccinations, and we are failing at both.
> 
> I'm sure you are familiar with the constraints that make quick public
> deployment of new vaccines not a reality -- because we've spoken about
> some of the obstacles by telephone.  No informed party I'm aware of
> seems to think it's feasible to shorten the usual deployment time
> -much-, without risking a lot bigger problems.
> 
> For the rest, presumably, you're fully aware that getting back to a
> 'strong economy' is fraught with pitfalls, such that, if done in a
> half-assical ideology-driven way, just results in _truly_ destroying the
> economy in a far worse fashion within 1-2 months, when vast amounts of
> society start getting overwhelmed with mass-illness and mass-deaths. 
> 
> Before you succumb to the urge to argue with that, let's just agree to
> suspend that discussion, and observe whether the state of Georgia turns
> itself into a disease-ridden charnel house by June.
> 
> (I'm definitely _not_ interested in arguing that.  Let's wait, and see.)
> 
> _______________________________________________
> conspire mailing list
> conspire at linuxmafia.com
> http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire

-- 
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com 

DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive 
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com 

Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps, 
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013