05-27-2020, 08:45 PM
(05-27-2020, 02:54 PM)Mikebert Wrote: Warren Dew
(05-26-2020, 04:32 PM)Mikebert Wrote: Are you talking about Massachusetts only?
Yes. If your 75% reduction was for your whole "hot zone", I'll trust you on that, though I think that's dominated by New York.
I think Illinois is different because cases are actually increasing there; Chicago might be on its way to becoming another New York, perhaps in slow motion.
I do think that R hovering so close to 1.0 in so many states seems strange. How can it be so easy to cut it down from, say, 2 or 3 to 0.9, but then so difficult to cut it from 0.9 to 0.5 or something?
Well of course it is dominated by New York. The whole country is dominated by New York, it has 29% of the total deaths nationwide. The question I was asking when I first put this sort of plot together a few weeks ago is what does the country look like if you take (then) top three out (NY, NJ and MI). And the answer is the trend was different. Since then, MA passed us by so it goes in and PA and IL are just under us, so I was up to 6, I had seen plots of similar analyses where to excluded NY, NJ, and CT, so I tossed in CT. The shape differences remain the same. The hot zone has a peak, because NY has one, but also because NJ, MA, MI and CT have them too, so its not just a NY artifact.
The giant cities got hit first. Then come the rural areas -- wherever there is local crowding, as in prisons, food-processing plants (where conditions again resemble Upton Sinclair's The Jungle because such is good for keeping costs down), and perhaps the housing of farm laborers. Let us remember that we have been doing much on the cheap over the 3T and have continued doing so as long as we could get away with it. One can blame Donald Trump for gross incompetence all that we want, but we have set ourselves up for that. Some people are vulnerable in a "Christian and Corporate State" just for being the expendable poor. The cities in which the opportunities gravitated because national politicians chose to ignore have the highest population densities and of course property rents.
So COVID-19 ravages New York City. What says that it will remain there? New York City has been shipping off its homeless people to cities such as Binghamton -- so guess what one can expect in Binghamton.
If you think America is bad -- wait till you see Brazil. Its President shows an unusual level of contempt for the vulnerable poor by recent standards.
...Things will be different in the upcoming 1T. For one thing, we will be less able to neglect places left behind by the recent right-wing idea of progress (as much as possible going to people already filthy-rich with hardships for people who must suffer for those elites)... and we will have to give up the bad habit of doing things on the cheap because poor people will be the victims.
Capitalism fares best when the capitalists do not fit a Marxist stereotype of self-indulgent, rapacious, corrupt, and vicious people who expect the economic order to serve them at the expense of everyone else.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.