April 12th Links

• After it became clear that there was a full-blown epidemic spreading from Wuhan to the rest of Hubei province, why did you cut off travel from Hubei to the rest of China – on January 23 – but not from Hubei to the rest of the world? [Niall Ferguson]
• The book on winding motors was literally written in 1920, by which time there were people with 30 to 40 years experience. There are motors dating back from the turn of the 20th century still in revenue service. I occasionally visit a 1912 building whose freight elevator has its original DC motor. It has new brushes and bearings but was never rewound. The mercury arc rectifier was replaced in the seventies and microprocessor control replaced the octal based relays in the 1990s. It runs smoother than a supermodel's ass. It will probably outlast the building, which still has the mounts for the EMD standby generator in the basement floor from when it was a WWII telegraph nexus. [Sailer]
• In the U.S., bickering about an appropriate official name for Covid-19, along with a sequence of bureaucratic blunders that led to dire shortages of diagnostic testing and medical gear, highlight the core competencies of today's media and governmental elites: administrative turf wars and verbal jousting to burnish status in positional games. Even in this high-stakes moment, they cannot abandon unproductive old reflexes. In a strange turn of events, twenty-first-century American elites turn out to resemble the Chinese mandarins of yore, absorbed in intricate intrigues at court to advance their careers while European gunboats prowl the waterways. [link]
• This process went on for weeks as dozens of people passed through. A handful of folks did present some paperwork, but the numbers didn't add up. I actually sat down with a few applicants and asked them to do a budget. What's your car payment? Truck payment? Vehicle insurance? Student loan(s)? Credit card payments? Child support from a previous relationship? I could see how they never actually did the math on what they could or couldn't afford. I didn't have to reject them. They saw for themselves how this would end in tears. [Granola Shotgun]
• In Italy, the anticipated "apex"—a discrete high point for infections and deaths, with a sharp slope on either side—turned out to be a *20-day plateau* with infection/death figures going slightly up or down day by day but staying above 4,000 daily infections and 700 daily deaths. In the U.S., the White House has primed us for a single, clear, unambiguous apex, so when infection and death figures went down for one day this weekend, many assumed we were on the post-apex downward slope, and even some officials encouraged that foolhardy view of the situation. Now we're right back up to our highest infection levels—33,000 to 34,500 daily—and the number of fatalities wasn't just higher today than ever before but is projected to continue rising for at least another 9 days. But why do we assume the downward slope thereafter will be steep? We keep getting told that the IHME is using Italy in its modeling now, not just China. Okay, so why does that model not imagine the possibility of an "apex plateau," where our highest rate of infection and death—or in that ballpark—stays with us for 20 days, as happened in Italy? [Seth Abramson]
• To even propose that there is some kind of "choice" to save the economy at the price of a few old people dying (and its not like the victims are even as clear as you'd like it to be) is a dangerous false dichotomy. There is no way the economy is exiting the lockdown until the disease is under control. The "lockdown" just gives the authorities the ability to go after egregious malcontents that are so socially degenerate they can't obey basic behavioral norms at a time like this. Your workplace would not be open right now even if the government allowed it. Either get the disease under control, or there is no economy. You aren't a clever heartless individual, you're an idiot that wants to seem "tough". [Hsu]
• Consider one project to make N95 masks — not even a strictly medical product — domestically. The proper agency, a bunch of beautiful humans who call themselves "NIOSH," told the team it would take 45 to 90 days to approve the factory — making the same product, with the same machines, that are already deployed. Meanwhile, ER docs are making their own masks out of bandanas. This is utterly mental and not even slightly surprising. The law is clear. Everything is illegal unless it's perfect. DC slow-rolled testing for two and a half months because it wasn't sure the tests were perfect. It had to make its own perfect tests — which did not work, adding another month. Imagine fighting World War II this way. It is unethical to send American boys to die in an unproven fighter plane. The new F-6 Hellcat cannot be deployed until it never crashes, no one can shoot it down, its engines never wear out, and it is tested against the F-4 Wildcat, the approved standard of war, in a randomized, controlled, double-blinded trial. If even the enemy pilots can tell the difference — your "evidence" is tainted — the study must be rejected. The same applies to antivirals. Remdesivir probably works, and chloroquine might. A foolish person, ignorant of ethics, might think it would be okay to make as much as possible of both, right now, and let doctors make their own decisions as to what they think works. [Moldbug]
• During a recent conversation in the twenty-sixth-floor apartment that Yujia shares with her husband in Chengdu, in southwestern China, she explained that political pressures are often not stated openly. "The editor doesn't tell me anything about why they are holding out the CIP numbers," Yujia said, referring to the Cataloging in Publication number that the Chinese government requires for any book that is to be published. For the past year, the numbers have not been approved for many American books. Chen Liang, Yujia's editor at Beijing Xiron Books, responded politely but with tactical vagueness to an e-mail inquiry about the delay. The phrase he used was "some accidental factors." [Peter Hessler]
• I occasionally send survey questions to the people I taught, and in 2017 I asked if China should become a multiparty democracy. Out of thirty respondents, twenty-two said no. "China is going well this way," one former student wrote. Others were more cynical. "We already have one corrupt party, it will be much worse if we have more," one man wrote.[Peter Hessler]
• For Bob, farms were the "heart of Frenchness." His grandfather had been a farmer. Every one of the friends he would eventually introduce me to were also the grandchildren of farmers. They felt connected to the rhythm of plows and seasons, and were beneficiaries of a knowledge that had been in their families for generations. When Bob described it, he used the word transmettre, with its sense of "to hand over"—something passed between eras. [Bill Buford]