Quotulatiousness

April 16, 2020

Canada’s temporary foreign workers

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley points out some of the weirdness of Canada’s claimed dependence on temporary foreign workers because “Canadians still need to eat.”:

Temporary foreign workers picking fruit in a Canadian orchard.
Image from http://www.yorkfeed.com/apple-picking-urgently-canada/

If all goes as it should at Canada’s airports, temporary foreign workers will be informed of their responsibilities. They should be made aware of their employers’ responsibilities as well. And there’s no particular epidemiological reason to worry about them more than anyone else landing on a Canadian runway from abroad — or domestically, for that matter. The vast majority of temporary foreign workers are from Mexico, Jamaica or Guatemala, which have reported 39, 25 and nine COVID-19 cases per million residents. Canada’s tally works out to 713 per million.

But the official advice to employers provides little comfort. It doesn’t prohibit putting people up in shared accommodations; it merely says residents must be able to keep two metres from each other at all times. We know the limitations of such measures from experience in seniors’ homes and homeless shelters. It’s not necessarily “the state’s duty” to quarantine arriving temporary foreign workers, as Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet argued this week. But the state could certainly do far more than it is.

For one thing, the cities in which workers typically first arrive are much better suited to proper self-isolation — i.e., in a hotel or motel room — compared to the farm country they are eventually headed for. Sourcing 45,000 hotel rooms is a huge job even in cities — that’s roughly how many rooms there are in the entire Greater Toronto Area — but it will never be easier than right now. It would prevent any bad-actor employers from breaking the rules. It would be much more reassuring than a government cheque for what works out to less than $80 per worker per day of isolation.

The whole situation is completely bizarre, though — one of several longstanding, bizarre and sometimes embarrassing Canadian situations that COVID-19 has highlighted. Economically speaking, the idea of temporary foreign workers essentially amounts to cheating. It reaches peak absurdity when businesses like Tim Hortons outlets claim to need them — that is, when they’re being brought in to do work that Canadians are demonstrably willing to do. It’s just a skeevy way to artificially depress wages and the price of fast food. People seemed to sense that back in 2014, when the government tightened the rules.

In agriculture, however, the idea seems thoroughly entrenched. Perhaps it’s a case of out of sight, out of mind. But it’s the same absurdity: If you can identify a group of 45,000 people without whose labour we literally wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves — or so we are told — then on what possible grounds are we denying them a path to Canadian citizenship? In 2017, the Toronto Star profiled a 66-year-old Saint Lucian man who had busted his hump on Canadian farms for 37 years in a row, with his paycheques deducted for income tax, EI and CPP, but who had no claim to stay. The highly skilled and educated immigrants we compete to attract bring many important things to Canada’s table; they don’t bring anything more important than food. And food is something COVID-19 has very much taught us not to take for granted. Who would have thought supermarket checkout clerks would achieve hero status?

April 14, 2020

Socialism and the environment

Filed under: Environment, History, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Luke Warren on the vast gulf between the “environmental consciousness” of fans of the socialist worldview and the real-world environmental impact of socialist policies:

Modern environmentalists often identify as socialists. Members of Extinction Rebellion, for example, often advocate tearing down capitalism and supplanting it with “eco-socialism”. Go to any “climate strike” or similar type of event, and you will see more hammer and sickle flags, raised fist symbols and Socialist Workers party posters than you can count.

Indeed, socialism and environmentalism are perceived by many as two sides of the same coin, and the idea that climate change is a “crisis of capitalism” has become conventional wisdom. It is now seemingly a contradiction to be both a capitalist and an environmentalist. This is not just a matter of rhetoric, but it is also reflected in the policy prescriptions of both environmentalists and socialists. Look at proposals for a “green new deal”, calls for large-scale nationalisation in the name of the environment.

Animated map of the shrinking of the Aral Sea between 1960 and 2008 (via Wikipedia)

But what is the story of socialism and environmentalism?

One only has to look back at the failed experiments of socialism to see just how environmentally catastrophic it has been. As the Soviet Union collapsed and the iron curtain was torn down, the rest of the world finally saw the environmental damage caused by socialist command economies. Economist Jeffrey Sachs stated that the socialist states had “some of the worst environmental problems on the entire globe” All of this, it is worth noting, occurred against a backdrop of a wide array of environmental laws and regulations that supposedly protected the public interest.

Air pollution provides an excellent example. Total greenhouse gas emissions in the USSR in 1988 equated to 79 per cent of the US total. However, the Soviet Union’s gross national product (GNP) was only 54 per cent of the USA’s, according to one very generous estimate (it was, in all likelihood, far less than that). This means that the USSR generated at least one and a half times as much pollution as the USA per unit of GNP (and again, in all likelihood, far more than that).

Accounts of those who travelled across the Soviet Union post-collapse recall swathes of the country where smog clung to the air. An article from Multinational Monitor in 1990 highlighted that 40 per cent of the Soviet people lived in areas where air pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and nickel dioxide, were three to four times the maximum allowable levels.

The destruction of the Aral Sea, perhaps one of the worst environmental disasters, can be directly blamed on the process of socialist planning. In an attempt to make the USSR self-sufficient in cotton production, vast amounts of water were diverted to arid areas for irrigation. Much of the Aral Sea dried up, leaving port cities, Muynak for example, and fishing villages marooned miles from the shore. Worse, the exposure of the salty sea bed and extensive use of pesticides had catastrophic impacts on the health of the local population. Respiratory problems and lung diseases became widespread as people inhaled pollutants.

The Aral Sea in 2000 on the left and 2014 on the right. Photograph: Atlas Photo Archive/NASA

The role of disease and climate change in the fall of the western Roman Empire

Filed under: Books, Environment, Europe, Health, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Jaspreet Singh Boparai reviews a new book by Kyle Harper that tries to incorporate what we have learned about epidemics and climate change into the narrative on the decline of Rome:

Why did the Roman Empire fall? The classic answer is given by Edward Gibbon (1737 — 1794), in chapter 38 of the third volume of The History of the Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire (1776 — 1789):

    The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

Kyle Harper, Senior Vice President and Provost of the University of Oklahoma, seeks to complement Gibbon’s account by emphasising the role of nature, and specifically climate change and infectious disease, in the fall of Rome in his provocative, exceptionally well-written book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire. Is Harper correct? Were plagues and climate events fatal for Rome?

Harper accepts the conventional view that Rome’s civilizational collapse began in the later second century AD, accelerated amidst chaos and bloodshed during the third century, and culminated in the humiliations of the fifth century, when Rome was famously sacked by barbarians, and the last, weak, insignificant Roman Emperor was pushed off the throne in AD 476.

[…]

Harper begins The Fate of Rome with a description of Rome as it advertised itself in AD 400. Contemporary inventories record: 28 libraries, 19 aqueducts, two circuses, 37 gates, 423 neighborhoods, 46,602 blocks of flats, 1,790 grand houses, 290 granaries, 856 public baths, 1,352 cisterns, 254 bakeries, 46 brothels, and 144 public latrines. The population is estimated at 700,000 or so. This figure diminished rapidly after August 24th, AD 410, when Rome was sacked by an army of Goths.

The traditional date of Rome’s fall is September 4th, AD 476, when the 16-year-old Emperor Romulus Augustus, the son of a former secretary to Attila the Hun, was forced to abdicate the throne by a barbarian warlord, and dismissed to spend the rest of his days at a seaside villa near Naples. His date of death is not recorded; he was too unimportant to fear assassination. At this point, the city of Rome’s population was still as high as 400,000.

Rome was invaded and sacked a few times over the centuries; more and more of it was abandoned; by the 10th century it was a suburb to nowhere surrounded by malarial swamps, and may have had only 9,000 inhabitants. Most of the economy was related to religious pilgrimages; the city was controlled by gangsters and petty warlords. What was left amidst the ruins was sacked again in AD 1084 by an army that outnumbered residents by as much as three to one.

“The Course of Empire – Desolation” by Thomas Cole, one of a series of five paintings created between 1833 and 1836.
Wikimedia Commons.

April 13, 2020

Prehistory Summarized: The Early Universe

Filed under: History, Humour, Science, Space — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 23 Sep 2015

Blue hits us with some physics! Hold onto your butts. That butt is made of star stuff, ya know. It’s very special. Be proud of that butt. It was forged in the heart of a supernova.

Anyway, yeah, physics.

Guest starring yours truly! Watch out for my extremely subtle and unobtrusive cameos.

The ninja thing is a reference to earlier videos. I think he shows up in the College video and the one about The Borgias.

QotD: Foucault’s “Ship of Fools”

Filed under: Books, Europe, Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

And so, Foucault tells us, in the fifteenth century there is a sudden emergence of a complex of artistic and philosophical themes linking madmen, the sea, and the terrible mysteries of the world. These culminate in the “Ship Of Fools”:

    Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then knew, had an affinity for each other. Thus, “Ships of Fools” crisscrossed the seas and canals of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors.

This was such a great piece of historical trivia that I was shocked I’d never heard it before. Some quick research revealed the reason: it is completely, 100% false. Apparently Foucault looked at an allegorical painting by Hieronymus Bosch, decided it definitely existed in real life, and concocted the rest from his imagination.

Foucault apologists try to rescue this, say that he was just being poetic in some way. He wasn’t. Page 8 in my copy: “Of all these romantic or satiric vessels, the Narrenschiff [Ship Of Fools] is the only one that had a real existence — for they did exist, these boats that conveyed their insane cargo from town to town.” He really, really doubled down on this point. As far as I can tell, this is just as bad a failing of scholarship as it sounds – and surprising, since everything else about the book gives the impression of Foucault as an incredibly knowledgeable and wide-ranging scholar.

Scott Alexander, “Book review: Madness and Civilization”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-01-04.

April 12, 2020

Minimum alcohol pricing – a policy so good you have to lie about it

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Health, Wine — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Scotland has had legal minimum prices for alcoholic beverages since mid-2018. If you read a random selection of mainstream media coverage, you’d know that it’s been a huge success, with vastly improved public health results at a price to consumers measured in mere pennies. As with all propaganda efforts, if you tell the lies often enough, people may believe you:

There has been all sorts of rubbish written about minimum pricing since it was introduced in Scotland in May 2018. Nicola Sturgeon has lied about in the Scottish Parliament. The BBC has gone to extraordinary lengths to spin the policy as a success. The public have been told that alcohol-related hospital admissions have gone down when they have gone up. We have seen the media fall for blatant cherry-picking. We have been told that rates of problem drinking have gone down when we don’t have any evidence either way.

One of the few solid facts — that there were more alcohol-related deaths recorded in Scotland in 2018 than in 2017 — has been sidelined. Instead, the media have focused on a disputed, and relatively small, decline in alcohol sales as if that were an end in itself. Any port in a storm (fortified wine sales have definitely benefited from minimum pricing).

Figures from the calendar year of 2018 are of limited use because minimum pricing didn’t begin until May 1st. Today, for the first time, I can reveal the monthly mortality figures for Scotland, England and Wales. They show that there was no difference between the change in annual death rates from alcohol-related causes, regardless of whether the country had minimum pricing in place. Both England/Wales and Scotland saw a decline between May and December of seven per cent (compared to the previous year).

This graph is published in a new briefing paper I have written for the IEA. It summarises all the evidence gathered to date on deaths, hospitalisations and sales, plus exclusive new data.

Importantly, it contains estimates of the costs to consumers. Among the more outlandish claims made by the Sheffield modellers was the idea that moderate and low income consumers would be barely affected by minimum pricing. They predicted that a low income moderate drinker would only pay an extra 4p a year! This was never realistic, not least because it was based on the minimum price being set at 45p and they defined a moderate drinker as someone consuming the equivalent of just two pints of lager a week, but it worked from a PR perspective because it quelled politicians’ fears about the policy being regressive.

April 11, 2020

Pandemics Economically Worse than War – The First Pandemic – Pandemic History 01

Filed under: Europe, Health, History, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 10 Apr 2020

There is much we can learn from past pandemics, like how Emperor Justinian ruined the Eastern Roman Empire’s economy and made the first plague pandemic even worse.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell and Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns

Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Spartacus Olsson

Archive by Reuters/Screenocean http://screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
3 minutes ago
As announced, here is the first instalment of our impromptu series on the history of pandemics. Now, as you will see in the video this is not just a reaction to the current COVID-19 pandemic, but very much back to the roots for us. Indy studied the pandemics extensively back in university times, and to study history in general requires a somewhat morbid fascination with human disaster in general. So we have spent many, many years looking intently at the worst disasters that have befallen humanity — and there is nothing worse than disease, especially on a pandemic scale. Hopefully this is the time when we can share a bit of that amassed knowledge to add a little timely understanding of the greater effects of pandemics, beyond the immediate tragic medical ones, like how they have impacted society, the economy, and human life in general throughout history. While we cannot give you fixed schedule for this series (we have the regular programming to take care of) we will try to come out with the next one very soon.

A note on a statement I make in the video: when I say COVID-19 might be the first time we successfully fight back a pandemic, I am saying that fully aware of the eradication of small pox and the near eradication of polio, the flu vaccine successes and so on — but that is avoidance of recurring pandemics of a specific kind and we have made more progress there than actually handling pandemics of a new disease when they break out for the first time. On that note, take care, stay safe, and may you be healthy despite these trying times.

Spartacus

April 9, 2020

You know you’re entering a police state when the police can just make up new “laws” to enforce

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was surprised to see the name of someone I used to work with pop up in a story about over-enthusiastic enforcement of imaginary “laws” in the Ottawa area:

On Tuesday, the City of Ottawa’s bylaw enforcement team tweeted out an important clarification to a recent news report: An Orléans man had not been and would not be issued a $700 ticket for “playing soccer with his son in an empty field.” Rather, the city maintains, he had only been issued a “verbal warning” for playing soccer with his son in an empty field.

One can understand the Orléans man’s confusion. As David Martinek told it to the Ottawa Citizen, he was kicking around a ball with his four-year-old son William, who has autism and “more energy than needed to power the City of Ottawa,” when a bylaw officer arrived, took note of his licence plate and mentioned the $700 figure. He quite logically expected a summons in the mail.

The good news, such as it is, is that Martinek is no poorer to the tune of $700 (though he could have crowdfunded that in about 90 seconds). The remarkable thing about the city’s clarification, however, is that it actually paints a more offensive picture. A ticket is something you can fight — and such a ticket would deserve to be fought unto its demise, because Martinek doesn’t seem to have been doing anything illegal. As such, the “verbal warning” serves only as intimidation against a harmless, indeed beneficial activity.

The City of Ottawa’s website lays out the “rules and restrictions” in force due to COVID-19. It notes that bylaw officers have been empowered to enforce Ontario’s Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act. Regulation 104/20, made under said act, orders the closure of “outdoor recreational amenities that are intended for use by more than one family.”

It defines “outdoor recreational amenities” as off-leash dog parks, community and allotment gardens, “all portions of park and recreational areas containing outdoor fitness equipment,” “all outdoor playgrounds, play structures and equipment,” “all outdoor picnic sites, benches and shelters in park and recreational areas,” and “all outdoor sports facilities and multi-use fields, including baseball diamonds; soccer fields; frisbee golf locations; tennis, platform tennis, table tennis and pickleball courts; basketball courts; BMX parks; and skate parks.”

Considerable thought went into those very thorough prohibitions, you will agree. Yet they conspicuously do not prohibit two members of the same household kicking a ball around. Martinek says he questioned the bylaw officer as to whether they were on city parkland, but there’s nothing in the act prohibiting intra-household kick-arounds in parks or anywhere else. “Nothing in this order precludes individuals from walking through or using portions of park and recreational areas that are not otherwise closed and that do not contain an outdoor recreational amenity described,” the regulation reads.

QotD: Collective narcissism

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[P]eople who score high on the collective narcissism scale are particularly sensitive to even the smallest offences to their group’s image. As opposed to individuals with narcissistic personality, who maintain inflated views of themselves, collective narcissists exaggerate offences to their group‘s image, and respond to them aggressively. Collective narcissists believe that their group’s importance and worth are not sufficiently recognised by others. They feel that their group merits special treatment, and insist that it gets the recognition and respect it deserves. In other words, collective narcissism amounts to a belief in the exaggerated greatness of one’s group, and demands external validation.

Collective narcissists are not simply content to be members of a valuable group. They don’t devote their energy to contributing to the group’s betterment and value. Rather, they engage in monitoring whether everybody around, particularly other groups, recognise and acknowledge the great value and special worth of their group. To be sure, collective narcissists demand privileged treatment, not equal rights. And the need for continuous external validation of the group’s inflated image (a negative attribute) is what differentiates collective narcissists from those who simply hold positive feelings about their group.

[…]

When their own group is involved, collective narcissists have no sense of humour. They are disproportionately punitive in responding to what they perceive as an insult to their group, even when the insult is debatable, not perceived by others, or not intended by the other group. Unlike individual narcissists, collective narcissists cannot dissociate themselves from an unpopular or criticised group. Once their self-worth is invested in the greatness of their group, collective narcissists are motivated by enhancing their group rather than themselves.

My team researched collective narcissism as a characteristic that pertains to an individual. We believe that there will always be a proportion of people in any given population who meet the criteria. But collective narcissism can also seize an entire group, resulting in seemingly sudden and unprovoked outbursts of intergroup rage or prejudiced reactions towards minority groups. We believe that collective narcissism is most dangerous as a group syndrome – when the belief that the righteous group is not given its due acknowledgement becomes shared by the majority of group members and becomes a dominant narrative about the group’s past and present.

Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, “Why collective narcissists are so politically volatile”, Aeon, 2018-01-18.

April 8, 2020

If the Wuhan Coronavirus panic feels oddly familiar … there’s a good reason for it

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Warren Meyer explains why his skepticism about the dangers of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic kicked in quickly because it followed a very familiar pattern:

I have been skeptical about extreme global warming and climate change forecasts, but those were informed by my knowledge of physics and dynamic systems (e.g. feedback mechanics). I have been immensely skeptical of Elon Musk, but again that skepticism has been informed by domain knowledge (e.g. engineering in the case of the hyperloop and business strategy in the case of SolarCity and Tesla). But I have no domain knowledge that is at all relevant to disease transfer and pathology. So why was I immediately skeptical when, for example, the governor of Texas was told by “experts” that a million persons would die in Texas if a lock-down order was not issued?

I think the reason for my skepticism was pattern recognition — I saw a lot of elements in COVID-19 modelling and responses that appeared really similar to what I thought were the most questionable aspects of climate science. For example:

  • We seem to have a sorting process of “experts” that selects for only the most extreme. We start any such question, such as forecasting disease death rates or global temperature increases, with a wide range of opinion among people with domain knowledge. When presented with a range of possible outcomes, the media’s incentives generally push it to present the most extreme. So if five folks say 100,000 might die and one person says a million, the media will feature the latter person as their “expert” and tell the public “up to a million expected to die.” After this new “expert” is repetitively featured in the media, that person becomes the go-to expert for politicians, as politicians want to be seen by the public to be using “experts” the public recognizes as “experts.”
  • Computer models are converted from tools to project out the implications of a certain set of starting hypotheses and assumptions into “facts” in and of themselves. They are treated as having a reality, and a certainty, that actually exceeds that of their inputs (a scientific absurdity but a media reality I have observed so many times I gave it the name “data-washing”). Never are the key assumptions that drive the model’s behavior ever disclosed along with the model results. Rather than go on forever on this topic, I will refer you to my earlier article.
  • Defenders of alarmist projections cloak themselves in a mantle of being pro-science. Their discussions of the topic tend to by science-y without being scientific. They tend to understand one aspect of the science — exponential growth in viruses or tipping points in systems dominated by positive feedback. But they don’t really understand it — for example, what is interesting about exponential growth is not the math of its growth, but what stops the growth from being infinite. Why doesn’t a bacteria culture grow to the mass of the Earth, or nuclear fission continue until all the fuel is used up? We are going to have a lot of problem with this after COVID-19. People will want to attribute the end of the exponential growth to lock-downs and distancing, but it’s hard to really make this analysis without understanding at what point — and there is a point — the virus’s growth would have turned down anyway.
  • Alarmists who claim to be anti-science have a tendency to insist on “solutions” that have absolutely no basis in science, or even ones that science has proven to be utterly bankrupt. Ethanol and wind power likely do little to reduce CO2 emissions and may make them worse, yet we spend billions on them as taxpayers. And don’t get me started on plastic bag and straw bans. I am willing to cut COVID-19 responses a little more slack because we don’t have the time to do elaborate studies. But just don’t tell me lockdown orders are science — they are guesses as to the correct response. I live in Phoenix where it was sunny and 80F this weekend. We are on lockdown in our houses. I could argue that ordering everyone out into the natural disinfectant of heat and sunlight for 2 hours a day is as effective a response as forcing families into their houses (initial data, though it is sketchy, of limited transfer of the virus in summertime Australia is interesting — only a small portion of cases are from community transfer. By comparison less than a half percent of US cases from travel).

Debunking the claim that “80% of America’s drugs come from China”

Filed under: Business, China, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Eric Boehm tries to sort out where the startling claim came from … because it’s not true:

While reading about the COVID-19 outbreak, you’ve probably encountered this particularly shocking statistic at one time or another: 80 percent of America’s pharmaceutical drug supply comes from China.

It’s a statistic that has made the rounds in right-wing publications for a while — offered as proof that China-heavy global supply chains are putting Americans at risk — but it has also popped up in mainstream outlets, including in pieces published in Politico and The Atlantic. Wherever it is deployed, the stat carries an unstated implication: What if China decides to cut us off in the middle of a pandemic? Could America face a dramatic shortage of key pharmaceutical drugs at the moment when we are most in need? And that distorted claim that says America has been too reliant on China has been seized by politicians like Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) as evidence that globalization has undermined America’s pandemic response.

[…]

How much is a lot? “In all, 80 percent of the U.S. supply of antibiotics are made in China,” [Politico contributors Doug Palmer and Finbarr Bermingham] wrote, linking back to a press release from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa).

But that’s not what the press release says.

Grassley’s statement was publicizing a letter Grassley sent on August 9 to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the FDA, asking them to conduct more inspections of foreign drug manufacturing facilities to make sure they meet American standards.

“Unbeknownst to many consumers … 80 percent of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients are produced abroad, the majority in China and India,” Grassley wrote.

There’s the first bit of context collapse: the authors of the Politico piece merged Grassley’s “80 percent … are produced abroad” into “80 percent … are made in China.”

All of this also raises another question: Where is Grassley getting that information? His letter sources that claim to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report which itself cited FDA data on pharmaceutical manufacturers around the world. And that report makes it clear that the U.S. has a diverse supply chain for drugs that goes well beyond India and China.

“Nearly 40 percent of finished drugs and approximately 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) are manufactured in registered establishments in more than 150 countries,” is how the GAO summed up America’s pharmaceutical supply chain.

In two jumps, we’ve gone from “80 percent of American drugs are manufactured in more than 150 countries around the world” to “80 percent of drugs come from two countries” to “80 percent of drugs come from China.”

Now, a further complication. The FDA only tracks drug manufacturing facilities — not the supply chains of specific drugs.

That “lack of structural transparency and available supply chain data about drugs,” researchers at the University of Minnesota researchers wrote last month, is one of the reasons why making accurate assessments about potential drug shortages is difficult. Indeed, it was this same bit of missing information that Grassley was encouraging the FDA to address back in August.

Source: FDA; Safeguarding Pharmaceutical Supply Chains in a Global Economy, October 2019.

April 7, 2020

If you don’t have an [N95-equivalent mask] … dress up as a ninja

Filed under: Health, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I first saw this years ago and thought it was amusing but probably useless. However, according to data at this site (which may or may not be authoritative), a cotton T-shirt is far better than nothing as far as DIY masks are concerned:

Britain AD: The Invasion That Never Was – The Anglo-Saxon Invasion (BBC Documentary)

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Johnny66
Published 21 Jun 2015

A well-considered documentary by the noted scholar, Dr Francis Pryor. The names Cerdic, Ceawlin, Cedda and Caedwalla are not exactly Germanic in origin? Cerdic’s father, Elesa, has been identified by some scholars with the Romano-Briton Elasius, the “chief of the region,” met by Germanus of Auxerre.

Cultural factors in the spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus

Filed under: Europe, Health, Italy, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt explains why any computer model involving actual human beings might as well begin with “Assume a Spherical Cow of Uniform Density in a Frictionless Vacuum“:

Image from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96644/plausibility-of-floating-whales

What I do know is that — are you ready? — human societies, involving multiple nations or even our own culturally diverse, geographically spread out nation, are not now nor will they ever be a spherical cow of uniform density in friction-less vacuum.

So … why is it that even now that they admit the scary Imperial model is insane, our authorities, from federal on down are treating the US as though it were just that mythical cow, and on top of that exactly the same as the cow in Italy, Spain or France.

[…] but here’s the thing: Italy has a completely different culture. Yes, it also has a sclerotic, understaffed and just impoverished healthcare system. (Yes, every time I post that I have to spam a million comments telling me how well the WHO ranked Italy — which is great, except the WHO ranks a single payer system above everything else, including outcomes — and how Lombardy is the envy of Italy or something, which leads me to say “Sucks to be you.”)

However, that’s just a factor in the debacle. The other factor is culture and no one is taking it into account. Multi-generational families live together (I should throw stones, yes) or in the same house which becomes a sort of compound. (This is common to all Mediterranean cultures. I grew up in such a compound until the age of six.) which means that while Grandma isn’t abandoned to the tender mercies of Haitian health workers, it’s also really hard to isolate her when little Guido gets the never-get-well at school and cheerfully brings it home. Even when they don’t live together, extended families have a level of closeness that freaks out even the closest American families. If you and your relatives live within driving distance of each other and don’t see each other every other day, there’s something wrong.

Every house is a continuous cacophony of visiting relatives and friends. In safer times, we just left the back door unlocked because it was easier than answering the doorbell every five minutes. When I first got married, I had the TV on all day, because otherwise the house was so silent, it freaked me out. (I left Disney channel on all day, because it was less likely to startle me with explosions or evil laughter. This led my inlaws to believe I only understood “English for children” (rolls eyes.) I wasn’t even in the room with it. I just needed that noise, or I freaked out, because of the habit of a lifetime.

The freakiest thing in my exchange student years was that my family never had people drop by, several times a week, just because.

On top of that, of course, a lot of the younger people live in stack-a-prole apartments with shared air, and most people commute by train or bus or something.

Now, in Portugal at least most trains and buses aren’t as full as they were in my youth. You are rarely packed in like sardines. But it’s still public transport, and at rush hour every seat is taken and there are people standing.

As much as I get sick here, I got sick way more often there, and had a few really close calls, starting at about thirteen. Because you live in each other’s pockets.

And I understand that in Italy, as in Portugal, as in, for instance, France, people kiss a lot more. Adult men might not, unless they’re close(ish) relatives, but women and children get kissed by everyone from close kin to total strangers.

All of those create conditions for the virus to explode. In Italy, in France, in Spain. I understand it’s not exploded nearly as much in Portugal, but I also wonder how much of that is Portuguese reluctance to go to the doctor or the hospital. Because “the hospital is where you die.” (Yes, sue me. Some cultural assumptions remain. Which is why my husband is the one who normally drags me to the hospital.) Because, you see, we DO know for at least one of the clusters, the hospital was making it worse. Go to the hospital for any other reason, catch Winnie the Flu.

QotD: The universal plight of women in pre-modern times

Filed under: Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Because giving birth was such a high-risk enterprise, and because so many of the products of that enterprise died before payback of the [pun intended, I think] labor involved in bringing them to the world, it was THE most important work of society. Those members able to do it had to be kept in such a situation that it allowed them to maximize that one thing they could do.

As for “the property of their husbands, etc, etc, blah blah blah” work was so brutal and hard, and providing for a family so difficult, that yes, a man wanted to make sure the children he supported were his own.

Also, because of very early (many women married before even 18) death in childbirth, etc, most women skewed younger than men as a population, which would encourage a certain degree of paternalism. On top of that, hate to tell you, but women while hormonal are often not fully rational. We can sort of compensate for it, but one of the pregnancy hormones is SUPPOSED to make you fat, dumb and happy.

I don’t know if most women need a minder while pregnant, but from both personal experience and watching friends go through it, I imagine many women do.

It is therefore only natural that in a society where most women are pregnant most of the time, men would view it was their duty to look after the puir confused things.

When feminists assume that back in a time with no contraceptive, high child mortality and an horrendous death toll of pregnancy, women should have been recognized as the equals of men, and that men were being evil villains for not doing that, they are demonstrating an astonishingly blind and ideological view of history.

In fact, even back in the middle ages and before SOME women were considered the intellectual equals of men. (And sometimes the military equals.) There are very few of them, again, not because The Man was keeping them down, but because the women attracted to intellectual or military pursuits are (like men) a minority and on top of that they tended to be either unmarried, childless, or the percentage of women not much affected by pregnancy. I.e. a minority of minorities.

Women started making advances in what was considered, traditionally, male realms, like science or scholarship, (the others … well … there is a problem with upper body strength. Sure. Some women. Again a minority of a minority) or being able to vote when two twin advances occurred: the first was the curbing of infant mortality. When it became obvious (after a generation or so) that most of your babies would survive, it was possible for women to spend only a tiny minority of their lives pregnant.

The second was contraception that was cheap, easily available, and safe. Yeah, okay, I have certain issues with the pill, because the medical issues of using it long term are only now showing up in the population at large. That’s fine.

It remains that even the early “horse-dose” pill was safer than anything else anyone else had ever come up with for women to avoid getting pregnant all the time.

Sarah Hoyt, “Wrong Battle, Insane Tactics”, According to Hoyt, 2018-01-15.

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