Over the past few years a series of American agencies have lost their reputation and world standing. The FAA with the 737 max, the CDC with the test, the FDA with testing regulation and hydroxychloroquine. Its important to have institutions that work, but we've spent years deliberately gutting them and undervaluing them. All that money spent on the military and homeland security, and in the end we were caught utterly unprepared for the greatest national security threat of the past few decades. Even though we have more aircraft carriers than makes sense to have, we'd rather build another one than invest in crucial infrastructure such as strong regulatory agencies and science infrastructure. And we get to pay the price of those misplaced priorities as we barrel towards 200,000 dead. Hopefully this serves as a sort of wakeup call.
I think you'd make a stronger argument by instead of making a military or other things argument, and just make a 'fund other things more' argument.
The reason I think you should stay away from pointing fingers, especially at a relatively divisive issue like military or especially aircraft carrier funding is because then you shift a question of "should American be world leading in commercial air travel regulation, pandemic prevention and control, and medical development" to a far more complex one of what America's role in the world should be.
The combined CDC, FDA and FAA budget is something like 35 billion dollars a year. Overall DOD budget is is nearly 700 billion, making up nearly half of annual discretionary spending (roughly 1.5 trillion). You could literally double the funding of those three agencies and barely budge the overall calculus of the budget.
Edit/Add-on: I think the whole sub-thread under my comment (my bad =/ - I get the irony...) is an example of the types of distractions that might be avoidable if you don't scope military spending into discussions.
There is a huge disparity here that needs to be addressed.
The Pentagon can’t pass an audit for decades, $7 Trillion just in the last 10 years unaccounted for. Yet we increased the annual military budget by $100B a year in 2018 alone.
Meanwhile we say we can’t afford these other programs.
If national security is a priority then why this mentality? Given such a mentality, the military should probably just subsume the CDC or something, just so the politicians can fund CDC as part of “the military”.
The root cause though is this obsession with growing the largest fighting force and largest employer on the planet. We have 30x more bases than the rest of the world combined! The same people who say they want to see smaller government and hate central planning tell us to open our pocketbooks to keep giving more, more, more to continuously operate in 80 other countries.
Then when we ask why can’t we have money for better education and healthcare to cover all our own citizens like European countries, they turn around and tell us the reason those countries can afford it is that we protect them. Well if that’s true, how is that America first, I wonder?
People are divided on what the US military‘s role in the world should be and how much money it should take to uphold that role.
Sitting atop the longest stretch of global stability (largely enforced/maintained by the US military), it’s very hard to think clearly about what variables we can or should fiddle with.
The globe might feel stable while sitting inside the US and reading domestic media sources, but it sure hasn’t been easy for the dozens of countries we’ve been invading/occupying for the past decades.
If we're making sweeping generalizations, then countries with stable benevolent governments who don't threaten their neighbors / the US and fund terrorism don't get invaded or occupied either. To be clear, I'm not saying every foreign policy action the US has undertaken in the last few decades has been superb.
If we're making sweeping generalizations, then countries that don't project military power to prop up dodgy regimes and enforce their currency on major commodities don't get targetted by terrorist action. To be clear, I'm not saying every action that resistance organisations and foreign governments have taken in the last few decades has been superb.
> Sitting atop the longest stretch of global stability (largely enforced/maintained by the US military), it’s very hard to think clearly about what variables we can or should fiddle with.
Yes, if you only count the 20th century. Apparently the human race is only 100 years old. It’s time you read some history.
I’d be very keen to learn about a particular period, or multiple, of an earth without large scale armed conflict (obviously controlling for difference in scale over time).
That's a though one to argue. 90% of people in a peaceful country take peace for granted, so their opinion on what should the military do is honestly nonsense.
Anticipating the downvotes: if you think peace is "easy" and are no aware of how much a strong military power is required to hold it you are delusional.
I don't think spending more on military than the next 10 countries combined can be described as "only" in any way.
The highest spender are the US, with $732.0 billion, followed by China with $261.0 billion, then India and Russia with $71.1 and $65.1 billion respectively.
Militaries are reliant on domestic production and labor. (Paying Chinese solider costs the government a fraction as much as an American soldier.) So instead of an exchange rate conversion, you should be doing a purchasing-power conversion. For these three countries, that means multiplying by 2x to 4x.
Also, the US is particularly inefficient at capital spending. It costs us a billion dollars to build a mile of subway, and costs countries like France a fraction of that. So that weighs further in favor of discounting our spending in that comparison.
The majority of DoD's budget is not salaries. Only the salaries should be scaled in this way.
E.g. many other countries are buying our F-35s at the same price we are. Other countries simply can't get equally effective jet fighters, aircraft carriers, etc., at a third to a quarter of the price.
Also, one needs to take into account Black Budgets - as they are totally opaque and we have no idea what amount of the budget they consume, assuming they are even accounted for in the 700 billion dollar number the budget claims to be.
Why would only salaries be scaled that way? It costs China a fraction as much as the U.S. to build a train line. Do you think it costs them the same amount in nominal dollars to build a landmine?
>So instead of an exchange rate conversion, you should be doing a purchasing-power conversion. For these three countries, that means multiplying by 3x or 4x.
Where did you get those numbers from? According to the OECD the renminbi PPP rate is 4.198 whereas the the current exchange rate is 7. That's 1.67x not 3x.
No matter which way you slice it, America has a very capable blue water navy while China's barely qualifies. They're on tier with India, Italy, and Russia; only capable of force-projection in their neighborhood. Besides the US, France and the UK are capable of global power projection; that's it. And both of those are in NATO too.
France was a member of NATO from the very beginning. In the 60s France had some manner of dispute with the rest of NATO and disassociated themselves in some capacity, but technically remained a member. Since 2009, French/NATO relations have been largely normalized, I think with the exception of how the French government chooses to control France's nukes.
> Edit: ok they are. But they did attempt to withdraw and were only stopped by the 20 year rule. And they still don't have unified nuclear command.
Be that as it may, I don't think Americans need an expensive navy to protect themselves from the French.
They're not, and that's the point. If a software company in the U.S. was spending 5x as much as one in India (where are experienced developer might make 1/5 as much or less), would you say the U.S. company was spending to much?
My brother was a Colonel in the airforce, Commander of the 10th Medical Wing. He is a really successful doctor who then led the VA for the state of alaska...
He is now CEO for a hospital in Idaho.
The point is that his life path was truly successful for him through the military and he has added great value to the nation through that experience.
Had he been a minion in a more oppressive style regime, such as China - or North Korea, or even Russia, then I would expect he would have been less effective at being such a positive value to those nations as he is to the US.
And this is due only in a small part as to his ability to have a happy, successful material life here in the US and also raise an amazing family.
I can only applaud your brother's accomplishments!
That said, why do you believe that he succeeded because of the military and not in spite of it? Is his story in any way typical for veterans? From my understanding, not at all.
Also, why do you assume that Russian or Chinese military service is less valued or constructive for their service members than US service? Are you basing this on something, or just the general image created by US media about the Chinese and Russian armed forces?
Thanks for your reply -- Ill be honest - I evaluated my statement based on your response, and the only thing I can come up with WRT what I am basing it on is actually a bias to my understanding of how corrupt those regimes are.... now, thats not to say that the US doesnt have a problem with corruption (its getting worse, here in the US, whereby politicians are enriching themselves at the expense of others -- see "politicians made millions from stock trade before the pandemic information was released" type stories)
The US is filling the role of the Roman Empire, securing trade routes to allow efficient scales of tech expertise and production. If that military is scaled back or shown to be obsolete/ineffectual, then globalism itself will come into question.
The dark ages were caused by the localizing of production, with local feifdoms losing access to specialized technical expertise. To some extent, this is what we see now with companies moving produuction back to North America.
In fact, its entirely apt cautionary tale because due to taxes and an ever increasing cost of living in Rome proper citizen-soldiers (during the Republic) often went bankrupt and fell into destitute while fighting campaigns from Rome's conquest and returned to see the oligarchy take their fields/land and displaced them further and further out of Rome.
This is the story of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, direct descendants of Scipio Africanus (the illustrious Soldier and Savior of the Roman Republic) and the Land/Ag Plebeian reforms they achieved that cost them both their lives after several stints in Politics.
It got to a point that due to land consolidation that it was less expensive to buy the wheat from Egypt, have it transported by boat, and used (often slave labour) to bake the bread then it was to buy a loaf locally. My old History professor went on an amazing rant about this for an hour in one of my Roman History courses when we were discussing the true costs of Imperial Expansion and what is often swept under the rug as a footnote in History, she was old but still pissed because they didn't let her include it in her book.
The World now is ever more interconnected than ever, and one could argue why that is a horrible trade-off both for national security purposes but also for self-reliance reasons as we saw with the PPE shortage and the faulty equipment that came from China. But I fail to see how the West at least would abandon the critical supply chains they have developed in order for Society to function unless we have something like an asteroid collision. Even now the EU as well as Australia, and New Zealand are siding with the US' stance on punishing the CCP's Security Law in Hong Kong that is going to undo the relationship that served as an access point into China via a neutral party.
Are you seriously suggesting that if the US empire scaled back its efforts in those regions then we'd return to the dark ages? Because when I was in Europe Somali pirates were hi-jacking oil tankers and the US didn't intervene, it took the European companies and military to put an end to that entirely by themselves without the need of US involvement.
I think the US is headed for the same fate as Rome as it refuses to learn the same lessons, but if given the choice between China or the US as the Global Superpower I think its the latter that must retain its position as the former is hellbent on a suicidal mission that destroys everything in its path and will commit horrible acts of barbarism and won't hesitate to take the whole World down with it in its folly (see recent cases: Xianjing, Wuhan, Hong Kong and Beijing).
I just hope we can attain a position where the World doesn't need superpowers and can return to at least a mutually beneficial city-state model as COVID has proven we cannot really overcome such huge issues like pandemics (or likely wide scale famines or global catastrophes) at such a scale. I mean governing 300+ million People is hard to conceptualize, but with Nation-States like China and India where it goes into the billions is just unfathomable and failure is the only real outcome in that.
> Are you seriously suggesting that if the US empire scaled back its efforts in those regions then we'd return to the dark ages?
No, we’d probably return to the era of world wars.
> Because when I was in Europe Somali pirates were hi-jacking oil tankers and the US didn't intervene, it took the European companies and military to put an end to that entirely by themselves without the need of US involvement.
> In the late 2000s, anti-piracy coalition known as Combined Task Force 150, including 33 different nations, established a Maritime Security Patrol Area in the Gulf of Aden. By 2010, these patrols were paying off, with a steady drop in the number of incidents.
> Countries presently contributing to CTF-150 include Australia, Canada, Denmark,[1] France, Pakistan, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Other nations who have participated include Italy, India, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Thailand and Turkey. The command of the task force rotates among the different participating navies, with commands usually lasting between four and six months. The task force usually comprises 14 or 15 ships.[2] CTF-150 is coordinated by the Combined Maritime Forces (CMF), a 33-nation coalition operating from the US Navy base in Manama, Bahrain.
> On 8 January 2009, at the United States Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain, Vice Admiral William E. Gortney, USN, announced the formation of CTF-151 to combat the piracy threat off Somalia, with Rear Admiral Terence E. McKnight in command.
> I just hope we can attain a position where the World doesn't need superpowers and can return to at least a mutually beneficial city-state model
That will mean war.
Within a single country, government serves the purpose of providing a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. This monopoly is an impediment for the otherwise random violence people would live under. Internationally, the same is true for superpowers.
> No, we’d probably return to the era of world wars.
As opposed to the constant and just as deadly porxy wars fought in placed like Georgia, India, Hong Kong, Syria, Yemen, Somlaia, Tunsia, Libya, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan... That seems like a World War situation to me in that it spans 2 or more continents and some conflicts/occupations have lasted longer than the World wars combined.
> > In the late 2000s, anti-piracy coalition known as Combined Task Force 150, including 33 different nations, established a Maritime Security Patrol Area in the Gulf of Aden. By 2010, these patrols were paying off, with a steady drop in the number of incidents.
The existence of a collation and the presence of the US doesn't invalidate my statement, seeing as how most of these hijacking were happening in the Mediterranean Sea the EU Naval Force had a vested interest in protecting its shores and the influx of refugees coming in from Northern Africa was also happening simultaneously so a joint effort only make sense. But here are a list of hijackings and see how many of them bein released were a result of US involvement, its not as many you are making out to be [1].
> That will mean war.
Why, because you say it does? We are seeing the massive revamping of Civil Rights and the systemic Police Brutality in the US without a Civil war after the protests, why can't that amount of civility exist in this process? Riots did occur, but as the blueleaks is revealing a lot of it was external criminal enterprises taking advantage of the situation to foment unrest for its own ends.
As did looting from opportunistic people, but I heard it best when someone said 'Those were the people who otherwise cannot participate in Consumerist Society, that is afforded to everyone else.'
Jura, a canton with strong Anarchist Intellectual History on top of its reputation for perfecting the art of superior Rolex watch making while the rest of the World was in the midst of World War, separated from Bern/Switzerland for a period of time with nothing more than a simple vote.
Jura was technically its own Nation for a while and no blood was shed. California gained Independence and declared itself a Republic (hence the flag) in the Bear Flag Revolution of 1846 without bloodshed. Many former Soviet Satellites nations gained independence after the USSR dissolved without having to take up arms, as did Slovenia after the collapse of Yugoslavia--by contrast Croatia and Serbia went to war and ruined their economies and have created deep wounds in their society as a result that and are still felt to this day, where as Slovenia is a member of the core EU member nations, which has many negative implications but the point stands.
> Within a single country, government serves the purpose of providing a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
Agreed, which is why the State is inherently an evil institution, one we've been warned by the creators of the US who detested War and Empire and put in certain vanguards to ensure it didn't occur. And exercising these in the modern World will now make you an extremist, terrorist and Enemy of the State.
> This monopoly is an impediment for the otherwise random violence people would live under. Internationally, the same is true for superpowers.
You base your (flawed) argument on the basis that Humanity cannot conduct itself without abject violence and wanton barbarism, when in reality those predictable outcomes are a direct byproduct of Imperial decree: importing slaves from Africa and generational disfranchisement, isolating conquered aboriginal People into small, remotely located and undeserved areas of the US (reservations) and expecting them to have any opportunities all while promoting things that lead to vice and violence (gambling and alcohol are huge problems in Native People) as their only way to succeed.
I will go on record so say that I'm not an apologist for these things, its sad, but I didn't do it and to be fair my startup's parent company had Native American outreach programs to help them grow hemp on reservation land for subsidized costs in seed, so I don't have what is often regarded as 'white guilt' as my family was also exploited when they came to the US as did just about every race/creed that came in search of a better Life in the New World. Its just what happened.
I argue that because of the abundance afforded to us by automation and technology we can already start from a much better position and can make this a more inclusive system, that does not limit based on fictional borders or race and instead can see and find value that is inherit in all of Human Capital. Its an incentive and distribution issue, not one of scarcity. We can already feed the entire World many times over with the food produced now. That was thought to be unfathomable when the Nation-State model was created, so why are we still using this archaic framework to model our Society?
Taiwan and the UK just opened up its borders to Hong Kong refugees, and Taiwan has made a form of UBI available to those that decide to come as they value the highly skilled labour that comes from HK, whereas the UK is limiting it to BN passport holders born before the handover in 97. And still, Ivan Ko a property tycoon, is thinking about settling a new Hong Kong in Ireland [2]. The World is shifting and I'm super excited to see it happening as it seems they will have to compete for its citizens.
The Nation-State model is being challenged before your very eyes if you want to pay attention to it, I'm saying its best to embrace it and benefit from the disruption rather than go to war to try and needlessly try to keep pretend it can remain intact in the 21st Century.
Its not like this notion is anything new, it was just limited to the rich and powerful: Venice, London, Vatican, Monaco, Gibraltar, Macau etc...
> As opposed to the constant and just as deadly porxy wars fought in placed like Georgia, India, Hong Kong, Syria, Yemen, Somlaia, Tunsia, Libya, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan... That seems like a World War situation to me in that it spans 2 or more continents and some conflicts/occupations have lasted longer than the World wars combined.
England and France famously fought a "Hundred Years' War" in the 14th and 15th centuries over the claim of the English king to the French throne. From that time onwards, neither country ever experienced a Hundred Years' Peace even on their own soil. The longest stretch of peace for either country started in 1945 and extends to the present day.
> The existence of a collation and the presence of the US doesn't invalidate my statement
Your statement was:
"Somali pirates were hi-jacking oil tankers and the US didn't intervene, it took the European companies and military to put an end to that entirely by themselves without the need of US involvement"
In other words, you made the very strong statement that European powers addressed the issue of Somali piracy "entirely by themselves" and that "the US didn't intervene". In reality, the US did intervene and the European intervention was not entirely by themselves--countries including Pakistan and Japan even helped!
> But here are a list of hijackings and see how many of them bein released were a result of US involvement, its not as many you are making out to be
It's more than zero, which is what you made it out to be.
> You base your (flawed) argument on the basis that Humanity cannot conduct itself without abject violence and wanton barbarism
Yes, and I think it takes a completely willful or perhaps tendentious ignorance of history to claim otherwise.
> when in reality those predictable outcomes are a direct byproduct of Imperial decree: importing slaves from Africa and generational disfranchisement, isolating conquered aboriginal People into small, remotely located and undeserved areas of the US (reservations)...
That's beside the point. Every part of the world had centuries of war before Americans ever did these things. Those slaves were exported by West African slavers. Indians also practiced slavery and warfare.
It also applies across cultures. If you look at the history of China, there are periods where China is a unified empire and then there are periods where China is divided into multiple warring states (one of which is literally called the "Warring States Period"). European history between the fall of the Roman Empire and the end of WWII can be seen as a single long Western warring states period.
> Its not like this notion is anything new, it was just limited to the rich and powerful: Venice, London, Vatican, Monaco, Gibraltar, Macau etc...
The Venetians sacked Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. London was the seat of a global empire won through centuries of warfare and more of an example of my model than of yours. The Vatican's relative inability to maintain the loyalty of continental Europe was a direct contributing factor to the Thirty Years' War, which is one of the most brutal and bloody conflicts in history.
> England and France famously fought a "Hundred Years' War" in the 14th and 15th centuries over the claim of the English king to the French throne. From that time onwards, neither country ever experienced a Hundred Years' Peace even on their own soil. The longest stretch of peace for either country started in 1945 and extends to the present day.
And Spain fought for independence/Reconquista for 780 years against Moorish occupation of Iberia, the Sengoku Jidai lasted 148 years of internal civil war. I'm really not sure what else you're trying to achieve other than deflecting from the point that we don't have to abide by this mode of operation moving forward and trying to one-up your understanding of Imperial conflicts form the past isn't proving as effective as you think it is.
That fact that it occurred is not being denied, no one is disputing this took place. It just isn't in the US' People's interest to do this given the alternative that exist today. I'm come for a military family, I lived near the biggest Marine Base camp in the US: I've seen first hand the consequences of these campaigns, there is no glory in it just a long list of sad casualties and injured people on the US side.
> It's more than zero, which is what you made it out to be.
Only because your initial argument was based on the notion that the dark ages awaited us if the US pulled out of trade route protection in its attempts to fill the vacumm left behind Rome, when in reality that it's clearly not true... But if you wish me to clarify: yes, US joint coalitions helped, in conjunction with other Global partners participation, re-commandeer sea vessels lost to pirates.
> Yes, and I think it takes a completely willful or perhaps tendentious ignorance of history to claim otherwise.
You seem entirely fixed on the idea that it must continue this way so much you refuse for it to be any other way. Do you really think having this mindset is correct during a pandemic, mass economic crisis and global civil unrest while China is trying to expand its territory and illegally annex Hong Kong and eying up Taiwan, while playing bully in the South China Sea? This doesn't end well for Humanity if it does and could ensure we really do go extinct, Nuclear leaks have been detected in N. Europe from possible failures in Russia this week, do you really think Warfare is in any way a viable choice given all the problems we have going on? We still have Fukushima pouring nuclear contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean for what will soon be a decade in 9 months from now.
I'm afraid there really is no getting to people this belligerent and jingoistic about the matter, I just wonder how long you'd hold that point of view if it was you and those you care about on the front lines fighting these needless banker wars.
I think that if you would describe the other party here as jingoistic, you're not understanding what they mean.
Their argument is essentially that war is inevitable, and US imperialism is a good way to prevent it. This is a consequentialist anti-war position. Consequentialists often believe that a bad thing is okay if it decreases the net number of bad things. This does not mean they are in favor of bad things happening.
Short of reaching post-scarcity, I don't see a path forward that ends violence without inflicting more. The conservative in me wants to carry on as is, because it's working better than anything else ever has. The liberal in me wants to push for economic measures to take the place of as much of the military as possible, and introduce transparency and oversight to prevent things like the war in Iraq.
You're saying a path exists that would awaken the radical in me. But you haven't explained how it works. You've just suggested that Europe can do what the US is doing instead, which seems net zero. And you've suggested that perhaps we can all just agree to stop, which seems impossible. I genuinely would love to hear more options, it is hard to escape a false dichotomy.
Essentially what I was going for, except I would use the term “hegemony” rather than “imperialism” since, at its best, the US does not seek to actually control the rest of the world so much as establish conditions for peace and constrain aggression in the international sphere. Some examples of this include American diplomatic intervention in the Suez Crisis, the Marshall Plan, the rebuilding of Japan, the Korean War, the Persian Gulf War, intervention in the 1990’s Yugoslav wars, and suppression of ISIS over the past decade.
I don’t think everything the US has done served this purpose or even had this motive, and I think it’s counterproductive at the very least for the US to abuse its hegemonic power. But it’s also essential, and basically good, for the US to exercise that power responsibly when it’s beneficial to do so.
> I think that if you would describe the other party here as jingoistic, you're not understanding what they mean.
> Their argument is essentially that war is inevitable, and US imperialism is a good way to prevent it.
How is that not jingoistic? State worship is bad, dare I say 'Anti-American' in the Founder's understanding of the term but going so far as to suggest that US imperialism is a net 'good' in the World?! The US being the biggest most expansive empire the World has ever seen, is the very definition of jingoism as the US can't seem to think in terms outside of war tactics to solve issues; I still remember talking to my physics professor in a somewhat somber yet joking manner about how that spy satellite that was falling back into Earth was blown up using a missile was using also using the same military tactic they used on the moon to see if it had water.
> Consequentialists often believe that a bad thing is okay if it decreases the net number of bad things. This does not mean they are in favor of bad things happening.
That seem more like a rationalization than it does a valid argument, as its premise is not in seeking the most good but in accepting that evil is a constant occurrence and detracting its source is not an option.
Suffice it to say: as a Hedonist at my core I don't accept this argument nor it's flawed premise. Moreover, I come from a lineage of people who are often used as the cannon fodder to achieve that end, and its a cycle I intend to break, if only with my own Life.
> Short of reaching post-scarcity, I don't see a path forward that ends violence without inflicting more.
That is exactly the aim I pursued and abandoned my career for and focused instead on food and agriculture, something I have now in my mid 30s have dedicated the largest part of my Life toward, and we've already achieved post-scarcity not just caloric terms but also in real abundance terms due to technology, mechanization, and automation. Much is left to be done, but that requires more engineering than it does Life Scientists like myself. I just hope we have the right incentives to direct them towards that instead of a Lockheed Martin or Dow Chemicals.
I've since left my work as farmer and chef after achieving all of my goals because I think the next target is to focus on the broken Supply Chains to ensure this occurs in masse in order for it to be replicated elsewhere, as I honestly think that is the only thing left to achieve other than the adoption of more sustainable practices and models. Which COVID is already doing that more effectively than anything I've seen to date as the factory farm model and its immensely complicated supply chains have faltered and failed to deliver on their promises under scrutiny leaving small, local (often organic) farms with more customers and demand then they can meet and their CSA programs are selling out seasons in advance! Community gardens plots were sold out well in advance of planting season where I live, and are getting people to take an active role in community based solutions towards food security.
> I genuinely would love to hear more options, it is hard to escape a false dichotomy.
Honestly, I'd enjoy exploring that too, but this conversation is beyond the scope of this format and requires more in depth discussion and further reading than I think this medium allows.
I'd start with the works of Murray Bookchin, and the ecological centered efforts and works of Alexander Grothendieck and take it from there once you understand the ecological damage and unnecessary destruction we see in a World to maintain the State model that serves the few and the expense of the many in a system that ultimately puts us all at greater risk despite having the means to works toward a more desirable society in our Lifetime.
Consider that we are seriously going to be colonizing Mars in our Lifetime, mainly through the efforts of a Private company not a Nation-State, and the amount of potential economic growth that entails to achieve that could literately usher in a period of Global prosperity unlike anything else we've ever seen as it won't stop with just a colony but also asteroid mining and resource gathering.
We live in the best time in Human History, and yet we walk around as though we're resolved to endless perpetual warfare and reckless ecological death as an absolute. I refuse to accept that and would rather die trying to break that cycle than live comfortably waiting for this perilous and harrowing inevitability.
> I'm really not sure what else you're trying to achieve other than deflecting from the point that we don't have to abide by this mode of operation moving forward and trying to one-up your understanding of Imperial conflicts form the past isn't proving as effective as you think it is.
I'm pointing out that perpetual warfare is the human condition and that the world we're living in today is the most peaceful we've known in all of human history. That provides very strong and direct evidence that whatever we've been doing between 1945 and 2020 is helping.
> I'm afraid there really is no getting to people this belligerent and jingoistic about the matter, I just wonder how long you'd hold that point of view if it was you and those you care about on the front lines fighting these needless banker wars.
Don't presume to know anything about me. Leave the personal bullshit out of it. We both want the same thing. It's just that the historical record provides very direct evidence that hegemons--be they Roman, Chinese, Mongol, British, or American--can sustain longer periods of peace than any balance of power ever can.
> Only because your initial argument was based on the notion that the dark ages awaited us if the US pulled out of trade route protection in its attempts to fill the vacumm left behind Rome, when in reality that it's clearly not true
I entered this thread after your false claim that “the US didn't intervene” in Somali piracy. It’s not my fault you got that point of fact wrong. It’s also not my fault that you refuse to concede that point of fact and make inappropriate assumptions about my personal motivations. The only thing you are proving is your own inability or refusal to disagree in good faith.
If you're going to have a discussion about federal spending, it's important that you understand the difference between discretionary and non-discretionary spending and why both are relevant. As well as understand what spending expenses have revenue (ie taxes) tied to them and which ones don't.
I'm not going to be proscriptive here and argue for either. But simply leave it at make sure you understand the key factors / attributes of income and spending beyond just a pie chart.
At nearly three-quarters of a trillion, the DoD budget is difficult to ignore. It had bipartisan support. It has not made us any safer.
It's not fingerpointing. It's simply a perfect example of a system and priorities gone sideways. It's a 700 billion gorilla that continues to bloat because saying otherwise is considered to be unAmerican, etc.
The narrative of not talking openly about the DOD budget needs to change.
Chalmers Johnson and Robert Higgs were making the case as long ago as 2006 that the actual US defence budget was obfuscated and was over a trillion dollars.
They argue that if you add the budgets of the Department of Energy (nuclear research), the Department of Homeland Security, the defence-related programs of the the Department of State and international assistance programs (e.g. Israel, Egypt?), the Department of Veterans Affairs, NASA, the Department of the Treasury's military retirement costs (Military Retirement Fund) you can add 50% to the nominal defence budget.
It seems very relevant because the military was apparently completely unprepared for biological warfare. Like in all their talk of terrorism they hadn't even considered the possibility. Sure, this virus wasn't an intentional attack, but it easily could have been. How much good do all those weapons do when a virus can bring the country to a halt?
In context it should be very easy to see why I phrased things the way I did. I do not personally think there's anything EXTRAORDINARY about US population size OR the budget amounts in question.
The data we have on hydroxychloroquine is now convincingly negative-there's just a ton of misinformation and it's become a political issue. But when some institutions fail you get widespread mistrust of both institutions and experts, which maybe is part of the compounding problem.
The hydroxychloroquine study I'm referring to has less to do with the data and more to do with how the FDA behaves regarding the drug, where they gave the drug an emergency use authorization based off of what seemed like pretty blatant interference from the executive branch. If the drug had ended up working, maybe their reputation would have taken less of a hit, but that wouldn't have changed how inappropriate that authorization was, and how it demonstrated that you could get a drug approved if you had enough political power from the president behind you. That's not a message that's making me optimistic when we look at vaccine development right now - that core trust that the agency operates on science/public health instead of politics has been shaken.
There was some early evidence it could be effective. I’m actually supportive of the FDA’s move to do both the emergency approval and the retraction. Without the ability to take calculated risks in a situation where either approving or unapproving can cause harm, the agency could be a hindrance more than a help. And that means some emergency measures will prove wrong. If none prove wrong, the agency is being too cautious and allowing people to die because of it.
EDIT: I hate the politicization of HCQ by Trump, of course.
HCQ was authorized to be used as a treatment, not merely authorized to be used in trials or for compassionate use (as remdesivir was). That’s the scandal in the face of lack of evidence at that time.
It’s another in a very long line of mistakes over the past three years pointing towards one thing: process matters. It’s boring, it’s not dynamic, but it’s also the thing that prevents organizations from making some extremely bone headed mistakes.
Agree with the point, but the disregard for process has been going on for longer than 3 years. If we want our principles to be taken seriously we can't just call out the other side. Remember "I have a pen and a phone"? How well did that work out?
...and it wasn't our side that called in a drone strike on American citizens overseas, without even a nod to due process.
And who pushed for this drug? I don’t believe the CDC even cared to consider it that much. But the current administration and Trump were pushing way too hard on this. So they felt compelled to investigate. Look at all the damage Trump has corn to all of the organizations in the USA. He’s trying to take away any independent power and concentrate it into his office.
It seems that successive administrations have lost sight of the benefits of soft power and only go for the hard version instead. Having world-leading institutions with the ability to advise other goes a lot further, for a fraction of the cost.
Courtesy of Hollywood (more soft power, but with a more dubious pedigree) there is no situation where the CDC does not, absolutely, have it's shit together. For the price of a single aircraft carrier you could probably make that a reality.
It baffles me that you can complain about executive departments without mentioning the elephant in the room.
When the executive is a psychotic fascist who actively sought to be actively ignorant and contemptuous of the government he runs, why would you expect the civil servants to be able to effectively perform their duties?
It is a conscious effort. Any sort of independence has to be rooted out.CFPB is a good recent example. It was pretty independent from vagaries of poltics until Mnuchin got in. In fact, yesterday he was bemoaning the fact that those agencies staff career beaurocrats ( as opposed career politicians). It is sad to watch.
Or maybe instead of throwing more money at the problem we can face up to the fact that our democratic system is broken. That these institutions have been politicized over the years and are being run by people who are good at playing the game versus being good at their jobs.
Right. It's not a question of money, it's a question of competence and corruption. When you point out that government agencies are a revolving door of industry executives people think you're insane.
Just look at the FAA and letting Boeing 'self-certify.' That seems to be how the FDA does business as well.
Completely abolishing the FDA would have been an improvement in this case since the FDA became an impediment to testing, and would have saved money to boot. I’m not saying to abolish the FDA; I’m just saying that underfunding it wasn’t the problem.
Many would argue that these agencies, vested with limited lawmaking ability by congress yet under the control of the executive, were always doomed to failure and it was just a question of time. I think it's a little more nuanced than that but those people kind of have a point. These agencies are subject to doing stupid things at the whim of the executive and having effective lawmaking authority behind them makes the damage worse when they do.
It's pretty simple, politicians are paid by large corporations to gut, capture and deregulate these agencies to be able to increase profits and decrease costs.
Without distracting from you central point (which I very much agree with), please read the science around hydroxychloroquine, not the news. It works best taken with Zinc, and early when symptoms first present.
There are zero studies that disprove zinc + early has a strong effect. You are wrong. Also, the lancet study was retracted for flawed methodology, other studies show slight benefit of hydroxychloroquine. There are zero studies that show it has no effect.
You can’t show that it has zero effect without indefinite numbers of patients enrolled in the study. It hasn’t shown any dramatic improvements in the studies that are there. The rest is a tradeoff between enrolling even more patients into studies to prove small improvements (or not) or to move on and spend resources on finding things that do have a major impact.
There's no studies yet. But there aren't any preliminary results that look promising, and the only people who think it is promising also thought hydroxychloroquine was.
So it's pretty unlikely it's going to do anything.
> In univariate analyses, zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU. After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744). Conclusion: This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19.
"This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19."
"we hypothesize that CQ/HCQ plus zinc supplementation may be more effective in reducing COVID-19 morbidity and mortality than CQ or HCQ in monotherapy."
"We seek to draw the attention of the scientific community to the possibility of drastically reducing the effects of the vi-rus on the affected patients and improving clinical tri-als outcome through the synergistic action of zinc and chloroquine"
"Thirdly, hydroxychloroquine acts as an ionophoric agent for Zinc ions and thus increases the influx of Zinc ions into the cytoplasm of host target cells regardless whether the host target cells are infected or not [10]. Zinc ions adhere to the RNA dependent RNA polymerase enzyme of the virus and stops COVID-19 polymerization intracellularly."
We do need follow up and repeated clinical trials.
"Believing people without symptoms didn't spread the virus, the agency limited testing, discouraged masking..."
This is false by Fauci's own account (see below interview) in which he states mask wearing was discouraged in order to secure availability for health workers. This is no small distinction as it raises questions about the importance of public trust/credibility during a health crisis.
Which is crazy, because in March the U.S. was shipping more masks overseas than at any point in the past decade[1], masks started getting recommended while there still was a PPE shortage, and after masks were recommended it seems like very few were N95 masks. So why were leaders at the time discouraging Americans from even wearing homemade cloth masks?
It's hard to tell whether or not they were lying to us at the time in order to pursue a poorly thought out strategy or if they're lying to us now to defend their poor decisions (I'm guessing the latter).
It's difficult not to get cynical and conspiratorial when looking at the combination of political changes in the U.S., racial conflict, and the populations hit hardest by covid. Things like ventilators being confiscated and disinformation campaigns (hydroxychloroquine), preventing mail in voting, etc.. all seem very strange additions to the pandemic.
Then you have social media driven protests where large numbers of the populations hardest hit by covid are rightfully protesting police brutality. The flip side of this is that hopefully these protests were not less than organic with the intent to spread the virus among the protesters.
The total numbers of people dead are awful now, especially among the hardest hit populations.
What's it going to look like if this doesn't stop in another year or two?
Further in the article, this detail is mentioned (albeit without the reference to Fauci's own account):
> But following the CDC’s playbook on flu pandemics, Messonnier discouraged the public from using face masks, echoing similar advice from the WHO and US Surgeon General Jerome Adams. Since masks were thought to prevent the transmission of a virus from coughing, health officials feared a run on surgical masks would keep them from reaching vulnerable public health workers in hospitals, where most infectious patients driving a coronavirus outbreak would be located.
> In April, facing increasing pressure from public health experts, the CDC urged Americans to don cloth masks, citing the asymptomatic transmission risk first noted by Redfield and Fauci at the end of January. But the damage was done: Months later, the initial confusion over the utility of widespread use of face coverings has only made masks more of a political flashpoint.
There are a minimal number of excess deaths now associated with COVID, so what is the problem? Allowing the community to acquire immunity naturally during Summer is a good way to minimise the spread of the virus come Winter. COVID severity seems heavily linked with Vitamin D levels, so lockdown during Summer would possibly have been counter-productive for the general population.
Why should Governments force people into lockdown for a virus with a CFR of 0.26%, marginally more deadly than the Flu at 0.1%? In particular, COVID deaths are concentrated at those aged 70+ with existing health conditions, so broad-scale lockdown and enforced mask wearing doesn't make sense - when targeted support for the elderly and vulnerable would be effective and less disruptive.
> There are a minimal number of excess deaths now associated with COVID, so what is the problem?
I don't usually use such language on HN, but this is absolutely delusional. Covid19 has killed more people in 6 months, with lockdowns, than Malaria did all of last year. More than a third of those deaths are in the US.
How can you possibly in good conscience claim this is even remotely comparable to the Flu?
You're using ambiguous language, and you didn't at all refute the parent's argument.
If sars-cov-2 actually turns out to have overall IFR of around a quarter of a percent, then it most certainly is comparable to seasonal flu. I personally think that's unlikely, as most reputable estimates have continued to converge on the 0.5-1% range. But even that is "comparable" in the true sense of the word, in that reasonable and fruitful comparisons can be made between the two. Which is exactly what epidemiologists do for a living.
I rather think it's your comparison that's delusional. Two-thirds of of the people killed by malaria are children. Millions more children are afflicted with symptoms severe enough to lead to long-term health problems. Malaria literally robs countries of their future. And malaria's transmission is a much harder problem to solve, because we're fighting a resilient, ubiquitous, nearly invisible vector that can spread the disease miles from the nearest infected person.
To be sure sars-cov-2 is worser and scarier than seasonal flu in every way, but the hysteria isn't helpful.
You didn't even bother to try to refute the parent's assertion that more limited but better targeted restriction might work just as well with less economic damage. This is an area of active, legitimate debate.
The IFR for Covid-19 is still not known, but just based on deaths, it is obviously either much more virulent or much more deadly than a seasonal flu. There is no way to look at ~127k deaths in the US for half a year, with no sign of slowing down in summer, and say that it is similar to the flu (which killed ~34k people last year in the US).
The comparison to malaria is also interesting. You're absolutely right that the infection vector is completely different in almost all characteristics. The difference between a disease killing mostly children and a disease killing mostly old people is important, but I don't think "robbing a country of its future" is a meaningful way to look at it. For example, there are no demographic risks from malaria, like your metaphor would seem to imply. The majority of the economic impact is coming either from households having to pay for the care of their sick family, or from lost work due to the sickness. The long-term impairments that malaria may leave children with are also a factor.
Of these, the first and possibly the third apply to COVID-19 as well, except that the costs for COVID-19 care are much higher, and with the important caveat that we don't know the long-term impacts of COVID-19 (though it is very likely not to affect children significantly, fortunately).
And while malaria can be eradicated (with great effort and time), as has been done in the southern US and southern Europe at least, it remains much more likely that COVID-19 will remain an endemic burden that we will just live and die with. I don't think we have any examples of successfully eliminating a human-to-human transmitted respiratory disease, unless we get lucky with a vaccine. It may well end up as a new tuberculosis.
And the assertion that limited restrictions could work as well as lockdowns is an extraordinary claim without any form of evidence. The only countries that successfully stopped the disease used some combination of timely lockdowns, travel restrictions, ubiquitous mask wearing, large scale testing, and excellent universal healthcare. Limited protections for the elderly have not been shown to work anywhere in the world, so why bother discussing them?
Note: in the spirit of nitpicking about my use of "not comparable" when I meant "much worse than", I should also point out that SARS-CoV-2 is a virus, so it is literally not comparable to the Flu, which is a disease. You can compare SARS-CoV-2 with (one of) the Influenza virus(es), or compare COVID-19 with the Flu/Influenza.
> And the assertion that limited restrictions could work as well as lockdowns is an extraordinary claim without any form of evidence.
Japan, for example, has so far found success with very limited restrictions. There are other examples.
> The only countries that successfully stopped the disease used some combination of timely lockdowns, travel restrictions, ubiquitous mask wearing, large scale testing, and excellent universal healthcare.
This completely contradicts your previous sentence. Every intervention that you listed except for "lockdown" is... not a lockdown, and therefore by definition an alternative to a lockdown. Governments at all levels around the world are exploring alternatives, which will largely be judged to "work as well as lockdowns" if they can keep healthcare systems from being overwhelmed while significantly avoiding the economic devastation caused by the stricter interventions.
> Limited protections for the elderly have not been shown to work anywhere in the world, so why bother discussing them?
That's an extremely unhelpful way to approach any complicated subject, especially one of such enormous importance. Thankfully, most healthcare professionals don't indulge is such nonsense, and have in many places been successful in keeping infections out of care homes. As of this weekend, there are still nursing homes in the USA reporting zero deaths from COVID, and many others that have kept infections to a level similar to that of other respiratory diseases.
I didn't contradict myself, I was referring to 'limited restrictions for the elderly', the parent commenter's recommendation. The parent commenter was also explicitly against widespread mask wearing, and for allowing the disease to spread during summer. Japan has extremely widespread mask wearing, and while lockdown orders were not enforced, there were recommendations for the populace to work from home and avoid going out for the night which were respected on a wide scale, paired with travel restrictions both internally and internationally, and school closure in the cirtical period at the beginning of spring.
Related to targeted measures for the elderly and their success, of course care homes should take all precautions, who would oppose that?? I am saying that it can't be considered enough, and we have seen that it is not enough, for example in Sweden. The fact that there exist care homes in the US that have had few or no COVID-19 deaths is proof of nothing, except of a job well done by those people, and of good luck.
But the elderly don't live only in care homes, and it is not only the elderly who are getting sick and dying. And many more care homes have done a terrible job in keeping their wards safe, becoming hot beds of infection themselves.
> > Limited protections for the elderly have not been shown to work anywhere in the world, so why bother discussing them?
> That's an extremely unhelpful way to approach any complicated subject, especially one of such enormous importance. Thankfully, most healthcare professionals don't indulge is such nonsense
Limited restrictions <for the elderly> as the only measure taken against COVID-19 have not worked anywhere in the world, are against almost all medical professionals' recommendations, and aren't even worth discussing. It has been tried by madmen, and it leads to tragedy. This is what the parent was proposing, and this is what I am combating.
Less-than-lockdown restrictions for the entire populace can work, if they are respected on a wide scale. Unfortunately, most of the people who are against lockdowns are also against any such restrictions, imagining instead that they can shift all of the burden on the elderly and sick. Not only is that a heinous attitude, it has also been shown not to work.
Looking at the "Weekly number of deaths" plot in the page you linked, I think what it says is, that the number of all-cause /excess/ deaths throughout april and may is more than 100 thousand people.
This is without looking at the actual cause of death, but given the corona situation and lack of other factors explaining such an unusual rise in mortality, I'd assume that most of those excess deaths are in fact somehow related to COVID.
Note also that the same mortality "signal" is much stronger in highly populated areas, e.g. New York City [1] and I don't see how this can be explained away as a "minimal number of excess deaths" or something "marginally more deadly" than the Flu.
We don't fully understand the long term effects. Many people are experiencing prolonged sickness that may never go away. The disease can do permanent damage to basically any of your organs.
Seems crazy to adopt a policy of infecting the world with a dangerous disease that we don't really understand.
Regardless of your view on the necessity of mask wearing or lockdowns, the CDC should be releasing accurate information about the efficacy of treatments and prophylaxis, period. It is absolutely unacceptable to be lying to the public because it is politically convenient or because the government wants to steer the public in a certain direction. Whether masks fundamentally work or not has nothing to do with how many masks we happen to have at hand.
> Why should Governments force people into lockdown for a virus with a CFR of 0.26%
Do you have a source for that--not something like "The Dental Tribune," but a link to the CDC page, or scientific study. I haven't seen anything in studies below 0.4%. You're leaving out long term consequences in your calculation, which we're seeing but haven't quantified yet.
You're also leaving out the explosive speed of spread, which can overwhelm ICUs.
Mask wearing is cheap and easy and seems to be associated with a region bringing it under control, so perhaps you can make your case about lock down, but the "open up without masks" seems foolhardy given those other facts.
In a theoretical world this makes a ton of sense. In a world where people grow accustomed to life as usual, fail to make adjustments BEFORE flu season, and we end up with the virus having a kick-started boost to start flu season, we're heading full speed into a brick wall.
If we can slow down beforehand, yes, we probably make beneficial progress towards herd immunity (albeit minimal). But in a leadership vacuum with an election ahead, this doesn't look good to me.
Common sense dictates that the base belief should be “something that prevents my breath from going as far should be effective at reducing spread of an airborne illness.” The null hypothesis should be that masks help; alternatively, the prior should favor masks.
At the moment we're well beyond the CDC. We have a President and his various acolyte governors who have so utterly botched and politicized our COVID-19 response that many people won't take the most basic steps to protect themselves and those around them. It's maddening and leaves those of us who are trying to do the right thing feel totally unprotected and unsupported, especially in states like Texas and Florida.
The CDC may have made missteps, but there's no way it can possibly operate as well as it should in this political climate.
Of course there'll be politics on an issue of great social importance. That's supposed to be the point of having a CDC, that they can offer respected, apolitical advice on what we need to do. When they fail catastrophically, we inevitably fall back to the normal strategy for resolving disputes about what our society should do, which is politics.
Looking at the HN comments apparently nobody wants to believe that civil servants can fail unless hindered by the political bosses, and that Presidents are personally responsible for what 2.8 million federal employees do all day.
You should watch “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” for reasons why you shouldn’t believe the elected politicians have anything to do with what the UK government actually does.
Just watching the House of Commons debate finer points about covid-19 is hilarious seems like they're more clueless than the public because they're scared blind over losing their positions
The CDC is an executive agency and therefore under the ultimate control of the presidency. There is no way that this was not orchestrated from the top by an ignorant president. This isn't stupidity. It's malice. Even if the CDC wanted to do better, they can't. They can't provide messaging or testing or anything against the wishes of the white house. Want to force everyone to wear masks? Can't because it'll embarrass the president. What is the point of even having such an institution when all of its actions can be overridden by a mad man determined to only advance his selfish agenda, an agenda that clearly does not include dealing with this virus in any way? The failure of the CDC has been catastrophic, but there's no way things would have turned out this way had they had free reign to implement proper policies based on science.
> Frieden, the former CDC chief, argued that the agency failed largely because it has been shackled to an inept administration. “The overarching problem has been the failure to have a clear national strategy, a national plan, and consistent communication. Everything really stems from that,” he said.
That's a common refrain and the gist of the article. But it's helpful to zoom out.
At the end of WWII, the US stood as the only intact industrial producer. It parleyed this win into a decades-long economic/military/political advantage. Through a collection of unsavory attitudes, the country began to think of itself as different in some magical way. The reverence toward WWII as the last "good" war has kept the focus on winning WWIII for over 70 years. The belief that somehow we're special has made it impossible to look at actually solving domestic problems or even act internationally.
This mix fed directly into a world view in which problems come from abroad. You see it with The Wall and immigration policy. You see it with the focus on foreign election interference. When there's a problem, its source more likely than not falls outside US borders.
The marginalization we see with CDC can be found in a wide range of American institutions: the military; the space program; regulatory agencies including FDA, FAA, and EPA; the educational system; Congress; the White House; even recently agriculture.
The failure of these institutions, combined with exceptionalism borne of a military victory 75 years ago, has led to a broad abdication of responsibility.
You can see this in how the US spends money. Consider the US Federal budget. Over 85% of expenditures fall into three categories: benefits/entitlements; military; and interest payments, in that order.
We live in a very different world today where someone can get on a plane and spread a virus across the planet in a matter of days. The only hope in containment was that the virus didn't spread easily.
The best solution that I can think of that may have stopped the spread of the virus would've been giving everyone as many N95 masks as needed and make wearing them mandatory. Unfortunately it was far easier to spend 5 trillion $$$ on everything but that. These masks should have been free and available at every street corner of the USA, Subways, Buses, Airports, Supermarkets, etc.
This isn't over and I don't know how it ends, but hopefully we'll come out the other side a little smarter and more prepared for the next one.
I did some work with the CDC in 2014. They were organised and sensible and fantastic to work with, especially in comparison to local equivalents here in Australia.
The project I was on was on Dengue Fever and Zika and they had their shit together on that. The data was clean, well organised, delivered quickly.
Somehow between then and now that data collection side has fallen to bits to the point where efforts like the John Hopkins tracking project had to rely on the NYT open source collection on GitHub.
I don't know who is responsible for pandemic response in the US, but back then everyone at CDC seemed competent and dedicated.
One of my pet peeves is the way nobody in the Government is caring about safety on air travel.
I had to fly recently and someone near me was using a CPAP.
Study after study shows that CPAP aerosolizes and spreads virus particles much more rapidly than normal respiration. Various Government agencies warn about this.
I've written (FedEx) to the CEOs of United and American. American didn't answer. United says they're required by law to allow people to use CPAP in-flight.
There's no excuse for this. A person who needs a CPAP is already a high-risk for dying if they contract COVID. Do they want to take down everyone else with them?
Americans with Disabilities Act may require the airlines to permit CPAP users to travel with the machine. It’s a tough call, but I don’t think “CPAP users are grounded indefinitely” is a fair and equitable position.
Where did "indefinitely" come from? That's a rather big jump, isn't it?
It's the middle of a pandemic! Surely this is not the time to have a big germ-spraying machine in the middle of an airplane?
CPAP users can wait until after the epidemic has stabilized to travel. I mean, everyone should avoid travelling.
Given that the last two days in a row had record new cases and that three states today already had record numbers by midday, I'm... disconcerted at the lack of urgency that seems to be so common.
Given that it's the literal definition and common usage of “indefinitely” (without fixed or specified limit, not precise or exact), I don't think it's a big jump at all.
I think ppl are starting to realize that running a country is hard work and not something that should be left to someone in their armchair behind a computer screen...
I'm not going to be at risk. There's a difference between "someone in their armchair behind a computer screen" and looking at reports issued by the Government saying "CPAP is dangerous for people in the area" and raising a question about why it's allowed in areas that are regulated by the Government, like commercial airline cabins.
People don't use CPAP on trains and buses. Just when they're sleeping on airplanes.
And the answer is "yes".
I have been told on United flights that I can't eat the nut snack I've brought on board because there's some kid 20 seats behind me in the coach cabin with a nut allergy. If 1 person with a nut allergy is allowed to dictate what particles the rest of the plane can emit, then surely the "rest of the plane" should be able to dictate what one person who wants to use an in-flight CPAP will emit.
Plus there are other treatments for sleep apnea, such as weight loss. See these _medical school_ web sites.
> For those who can't tolerate the CPAP machine, there are other options for treating sleep apnea. Losing weight is one: a majority of sleep apnea patients are overweight or obese. That extra weight causes their airway to collapse and their breathing to be interrupted.
We have some government agencies (presumably the DOT and whoever enforces the ADA) saying one thing, and other agencies giving other advice about exposing other people to CPAP machines in close quarters.
The United States doesn't have effective federal pandemic laws. The federal government looks to the states to manage their own health arenas and in those states many allow county level health departments to run with the ball. This is how you end up with one state doing x and another state next door doing y. It even gets to the county level with a county in a state doing x and the county next to it doing y during a pandemic. The CDC lost the battle before it began.
It was heartening to see everyone sort of pull together to flatten the curve, but with what has happened during the phased reopenings, you'll never have American citizens do it again voluntarily.
I wonder if that title is the best one to suit te reality. From an outsider it would look like control was 'taken' from, or never 'given to' the CDC, rather than lost.
The pandemic has done a great job of highlighting weaknesses inherit to democratic governments. Populism and demagoguery, combined with rewarding loyalty and punishing dissidents. A dysfunctional democratic republic isn’t very different from an autocracy. I suspect during times like this it might even weaker, since you end up with no national unity. You can’t deal with a pandemic effectively in this kind of political environment.
This is classic starve the beast. There is one party that continuously tries to gut government institutions - like putting Betsy Devos to head education, Wheeler to head EPA etc etc and then has the gall to say that government institutions don’t work
Which was handled before it made its way to the US in any significant capacity. Imagine Trump had taken clear and decisive action against COVID in January.
Of course hindsight is easy. Does that mean we shouldn't make use of it?
And yes, like the travel ban, which clearly was the wrong solution for the problem.
I don't blame the Trump administration for failing to predict the future, but I do see that they willfully ignored bad news over and over again and in fact continue to do so even today, which is completely unconscionable.
The CDC’s budget is $1.2 billion. Can you explain why that’s not enough money to provide good advice on managing respiratory viruses? Why it isn’t enough to manage domestic stockpiles? Why it isn’t enough to monitor domestic production of PPE?
Civil servants failed. It had nothing to do with Trump, they failed at the things that their agency was paid to do.
I haven’t seen any mention in the article about political interference. Consider Trumps policies and you’ll see why all these organizations are failing. He’s destroying them.
Clearly it was the CDC at fault here, not a few hand picked bureaucrats, not the chain of command, not a president with a penchant for firing people who challenge his authority.
What a poorly concocted article. The least the author could do so remind people of the “starve the beast” approach to public utilities that the Republicans have been pursuing for decades.
Nope, we’ll just throw the entire CDC under a bus.
There's this strange phenomenon on HN sometimes -- or at least I've noticed it here several times -- where people will somehow manage to condemn the article while arguing for exactly the thesis of the article. That's what you're doing here.
Given that a lot of people dont read articles and go straight to comments, comments that challenge title are valuable if the title is at odds with article content.
Some of those "turn off your adblock" barriers are just CSS and can be removed. When the browser gets physically redirected, (like Forbes did (or does?)) I've found using plain old wget will get the page in question (in most cases).
That doesn’t give a perspective on why they feel compelled to comment though. This is a discussion of the article not a guess-what-the-article-might’ve-said contest.
You’ll need to enlighten me as to how the article raises the issue of starving the beast when the only attempt at suggesting Whitehouse pressure being involved was a suggestion of why the CDC would continue trying to develop its own COVID-19 test when the process of development was fraught with errors and missteps.
Failing that, can you tell me how many paragraphs you read in the “starve the beast” version of the article you read?
I read the whole article and it is consistent with the parent comment, not yours, in my opinion.
It does mention stupid things done by the Trump administration, but at the end, it describes the CDC failures as "baffling" and presents the blame of an "inept administration" i.e. Trump, as an excuse.
Overall, it seems to be an article about the inexplicable failures of the CDC, with an effort to be "fair and balanced" in covering other factors.
I've found the Buzzfeed content that makes it on here to be pretty good. Which is weird, it is Buzzfeed after all. I don't think it's just the HN selection effect, as P(liked|Buzzfeed) > P(liked|HN).
BuzzfeedNews in particular makes a regular appearance because it is a world-class journalism organization. It does not seem to share much with Buzzfeed.
It’s a culture problem throughout fedgov, not so much a funding problem. The DoD is also a huge mess, despite having plenty (most people would argue too much) funding. Take a look at something like the Afghanistan papers. Decision-making at every level and internal politics impacting competency are massive problems. Changing Presidents can’t fix this, because it’s a slow-motion problem going on for decades, and Presidents actually have very little power over what actually goes on in these agencies internally - that’s what the contemporary complaints about the so-called “deep state” are about: most agencies are in practice virtually independent from the White House, and will simply sandbag or defy any direction from the White House or appointees they aren’t interested in following. These people are experts in exploiting bureaucracy to achieve their aims, which are dominated by personal politics and career advancement.
I used to say exactly what you’re saying, but now having seen how it all works firsthand, I am afraid the problem is intractable without major Congressional overhaul of the entire executive branch, including mass layoffs to get out the problems, before we increase funding to any agency. And I don’t think Congress is ever going to do this.
Additionally, at least according to Forbes, the CDC employs more people now than ever, having increased headcount by 25% since 2007, when it was already at an all-time high. (The article also complains about comp, but I personally don’t think it’s too high.)
Agreed, we’ve all watched the president say all the wrong things at the wrong times during this episode. I don’t doubt he is pulling the wrong strings behind the scenes too.
This CDC piece by Vergano & Hirji is more of an opinion and perception article than 'news reporting. I worry that click bait sites like 'Buzzfeed'(ridiculous name) are taken too seriously, especially when there is so much great well researched and argued material online that is often dismissed as 'conspiracy theories' etc etc
The article started off convincingly "On January 17th...", but i gave up after "....the world’s most trusted public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,...".
If the sentence had've been "...the world’s most trusted public health agency, [in The United States (well, maybe)]", I would have perhaps considered reading more.
I hope we do a serious review of the cdc when this is all over. For all the money we give them, they totally failed to "control" the outbreak. It feels like it's devolved into an academic institution and we have enough of those.
IDK the US that well, but if you don't have coercitive power over politicians what can you do. I'm aware that CDC has been criticized for other stuff as well, but in the end they seem to not have that much power.
In my country (Spain) it has been a shitshow. Everyone who warned about the upcoming situation was ridiculed and/or insulted in a coordinated effort between government and media. Now the same people is being called captain after the fact. It's pretty sad to see, and I've been subject to this myself despite not being a public figure.
Everything has turned into a political shitshow. When you have medical professionals in TV insisting that the government is right, and that this is just a flu, when you have your lead epidemiologist in TV with absurd claims, when you have your OSHA-spanish-equivalent in National Police fired for buying masks (and the list goes on and on), then how can anyone trust the institutions.
I mean, my regional government which is corrupt, and sometimes hilariously inept has done a better job. What the *@^- man.
If I can offer a piece of advice in that direction, it is to remember that the US is in fact a union of 50 states, and those states actually have a fair amount of power. The federal government, as powerful as it appears to be, really does lack authority in many areas. While they could absolutely have done a 1000% better job leading the response to the coronavirus, it was always going to fall mostly on the states to do the actual heavy lifting. It's the nature of our political system.
Speaking from the Netherlands, it seems clear that about 40% of Americans lost their marbles in this grand collective paranoid fantasy starting around Nixon, growing through Reagan, and then really taking off around the end of the W. Bush administration.
They started to believe these terrible and terribly false things about their fellow citizens, about science, about pretty well everything.
And they purchase hundreds of millions of weapons.
> And yet America managed two world wars just fine.
Sure, defense is one of those things that is definitely the purview of the federal government.
But for many things that the feds haven't managed to figure out how to control yet, the tenth amendment is very much in play. For pandemic response this is definitely true. It was true in 1918, remains true today. The states are in charge.
Given recent history (in particular, as it relates to your 40%), I expect that the states may actually start asserting more authority, instead of continuing to cede it bit-by-bit to the federal government. Which perhaps does lead to your final comment ;-).
> By media? Does it mean the Spanish government owns the majority of newspapers and TV stations? That's not the idea I had from Spain.
Well, that's what happend, IDK if that has anything to do with ownership or not, but I mean, the message of the government was followed by media to the inch, with very few exceptions here and there.
> I wonder how a regional government with no power, as the central government took it from them, could have done a better job at anything.
Because before the central government took control they already buyed masks, gloves, respirators and put some protocols in place. In fact later on some of this stuff was sent to Madrid.
Not to mention that there was a lot of arguments between the central government and some regions on how to manage the situation, and some disobedience too.
No, it's worse. It devolved into a political institution. Any academic institution would have trivially been able to get the PCR test right (and academic institutions did). Bur our agencies gave into political pressures, were defunded and declared in critical moments, etc, leading to the failure of the federal government we see now
People don't like getting fired, blame the politicians for threatening and firing anyone who disagrees with them, don't blame the people whose jobs were in jeopardy.
This same thing happened here in the UK (with similar results). Scientists scared of being ostracised if they spoke against the government. So they just went along with all the dumb decisions. We also have an group of scientists ‘Sage’ who are meant to be our best minds, who gave similarly useless and inconsistent advice because it was politicised.
There was an interview with one of the scientists who laid it all out. He has terminal cancer himself and therefore said he doesn’t care about future access.
While I think that politicians are primary people to blame, I dont think the "I was afraid for my job" is good enough answer from high level leadership figures. That answer is acceptable from janitor or low level worker.
I think that culturally, both in business and in politics, we are locked in set of values that makes opposition or disagreement against someone higher in hierarchy or with power as inappropriate and subservience as virtue. It then amounts to massive system of enablers who feel good about themselves and even criticize non-enablers wherever narcissist appears.
We praise people who manage to climb the ladder no matter how they got there and what they do there. We devalue people who make ethical decisions when said decision hurts their career.
