This week, trying Thursday night instead of Friday morning. And shorter, bullet point like notes.

We were prepping all along

When it became clear to me in February that Covid was likely real, I started stockpiling shelf stable food and first aid equipment. Turns out I didn't need to.

I've been very grateful to have an awesome home gym, a great home office, and a job no one can fire me from. Bonus points that our business is up significantly in a WFH world.

In some ways, this is luck. I didn't build a home gym thinking a virus would make it necessary.

But it's also working hard to prioritize what's actually important. Even when it was safe to go to a gym, I am sure I worked out quite a bit more because mine was just steps away.

This is worth thinking about as our society is likely to continue to move to bigger houses that we spend more time in.

Slack is Safety

I haven't needed all that stockpiled food. I'd argue better safe than sorry. And it has been nice tapping into our freezer full of meat instead of paying increasing prices at the store.

Being over-prepared is not efficient. But it is an extra buffer that might save your life or make it more convenient as conditions change.

I've long thought about muscle mass this way - it's a buffer.

More muscle mass means you can eat more "fun food" without gaining weight, because your muscle glycogen capacity is higher and so is your basal metabolic rate. And just the weight of the muscle might keep fat off! (1,2)

More muscle mass (and corresponding bone size / density) means you can take harder hits/falls/crashes without breaking.

More muscle mass means you can stay stronger, longer, in a situation where eating or exercise aren't possible.

Other useful forms of slack - multiple income streams, extra cash, high micronutrient status, extra sleep. Debt is the anti-slack.

Diversity is Slack and The End of Experts

Another way to buffer yourself against oncoming shocks - have a diversity of skills.

You don't want to be a commercial pilot right now. But if you're also good at teaching remote fitness classes, you're in a much better spot.

And diversity of skills doesn't just make you more robust, it makes you smarter too.

Professor Philip Tetlock runs the Good Judgement Open, a competition to discern the best forecasters in the world. And the latest open competition shows "generalists are winning by hefty margins--on average, 70% across all 5 closed questions."

And those aren't just any questions. The generalists are DESTROYING contagious disease experts on questions about contagious disease.

Maybe a good model is this - if you want to know about the past, ask an expert. If you want to know about the future, ask a generalist.

Experts, Again

Much digital ink has been spilled about the end of experts, but two things have really caught my mind lately. First, this:

I mean, come on. It's almost like they are trying to destroy the credibility of experts.

It does appear that there is a large political divide when it comes to our relationship with experts. I think this is good advice:

Schools Out for the... Ever

Here are a few highlights from the CDC guidelines for reopening schools, a 9 page PDF.

• Masks for all over 2 years old
• No sharing of physical items, store them in individually labeled cubbies or containers
• Desks minimum of 6 feet apart
• On buses, one child per seat, skip rows
• One way routes in hallways with indicators on floors
• No cafeterias, meals in classrooms
• One room all day, no switching rooms or teachers.
• Disinfect all surfaces daily

I can't imagine the average elementary school being able to do anything approaching that. And I don't think many parents will want to send their kids there.

This accelerates the trend of increased homeschooling and online learning. You'll get less virus and better teachers. And there's a ton of room to make it cheaper:

So that's K-12. What about colleges?

Noah Smith lays out the college apocalypse in full (twitter thread, Bloomberg article).

States will slash funding, which was already down after failing to rebound from the '08 crisis. Then a reduction in the cash-cow foreign and out of state students will cripple budgets further. And finally, a depressed economy will further reduce already declining in-state demand.

I've long argued that college doesn't make sense. And their management makes that worse every year. This will be the straw to break the camel's back.

Your Rhetoric Endangers Me

After months of telling us that masks are worse than useless, the Surgeon General is now telling us this:

"No, we said *masks* are bad. Face coverings, on the other hand, are mandatory."

This concept, that "my mask is for you" is... really fucking stupid.

It seems tailor-made to reduce social cohesion, increase animosity, and cause scenes like this.

This notion is also only weakly supported by the science, at best, and is flat out untrue for any mask with a valve (like the oft-recommended N95s).

What are they thinking?

Fact Checking Trump

Earlier this week, Twitter engaged in some light censorship on the President's tweets.

Right away, I was saying this is bad.

Making some reviewer at Twitter the ultimate Arbiter of Truth for western society is not smart (or moral). Turns out Zuck agrees with me.

Then I read the tweet. And the fact check.

And I am in disbelief.

Twitter's first ever fact check is false. Here's what they said:

As reporter (Ars,Vox,WaPo) Timothy Lee points out, you only have to go back TWO YEARS to find an election that had to be tossed out due to mail-in ballot fraud.

And furthermore, "until recently, the view that mail-in ballots are more susceptible to fraud was fairly common among election experts", as shown in this quote from a 2012 article on the topic:

Hopefully, this is Twitter's last foray into publisher territory. Otherwise, they will embarrass themselves, harm the discourse, and face myriad lawsuits they currently enjoy protection from.

I love Twitter. I don't like Trump threatening private citizens or companies in any way. I also don't like executive orders. And I think his intentions are *at best* a petty waste of taxpayer dollars.

But I think (hope) this might result in the increasingly publisher-like social media companies retreating to their Baileys platform status. Which would mean less censorship, and that's a win for ideas everywhere.

Quick Bites

• In a move seemingly designed to kill all the old people, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer renewed her policy mandating that Nursing Homes take Covid positive patients.
• WaPo says us millennials are the unluckiest generation in history, apparently forgetting about when children got polio, life expectancy was 40 years, world wars were fought in muddy trenches, or when even the extremely wealthy didn't have cars or electricity.
• Top cities for population growth last year: Phoenix; San Antonio; Austin; Ft. Worth; Charlotte; Frisco, TX; Seattle; Denver; Henderson, NV; Mesa, AZ. These were the only cities in the country to add more than 10,000 people.
• Failing us for apparently political reasons yet again, the CDC dropped warnings about choirs and "congregant singing, chanting and reciting" from its guidelines for communities of faith. This is very stupid, because that type of vocal projection is thought to be a substantial vector for transmission, and church singing in particular was implicated in a super spreader event where 45 people were infected.
• The decentralized knowledge network is getting faster. "The avg. time elapsed from official journal publication to getting cited in @Wikipedia has gone negative in 2020 for #COVIDー19 research, largely thanks to early access and pre-prints."
• Our regulatory state continues to fail us, as evidenced by these excerpts outlining the incredible FAA hoops American Airlines had to jump through to offer free hand sanitizer to passengers.
• Protests are mounting in Minnesota, and increasingly, elsewhere. Started by yet another extreme example of police brutality. I think this will be a huge story by next week (going to get much worse), and I'll write about it then.

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Kit